Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Dozens of media outlets such as ABC News, The BBC, The New York Times, and many more, hyped a study that claims summer temperatures in 2023 were unprecedented over the past 2000 years. This claim, in fact, can’t be verified by tree ring data, which isn’t that precise. Researchers are falsely assuming tree rings are reliable temperature indicators when in fact tree rings can indicate a multitude of different conditions, not just temperature.
Further, the study, Esper, J. et al., Nature, 2024, is using an old trick, pioneered by Michael Mann, Ph.D. in his controversial hockey stick graph, where estimated temperatures from select tree rings and other proxies far into the past are grafted onto more reliable temperatures, measured in the present, and presented as one unified dataset, when in fact they are radically different.
For example, the BBC’s article about the study presented this graph, which is highly reminiscent of Mann’s original “hockey stick” graph.
That graph is highly misleading, if not a flat-out fabrication. It suffers from the same sort of issues in Mann’s original “hockey stick” graph, such as the fact that tree ring data from other trees show no such trend. We know from other studies that the Roman Warm Period (from 1–250 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (950 to c. 1250 AD) existed, but they have been erased from this graph presented to the public as accurately representing past temperatures, when it is actually dishonest fiction based on a biased analysis of selected proxy data.
The fact that these well-known, documented, and scientifically certified climate events have been removed from the graph touted by the media indicate that this is more likely propaganda in pursuit of a political goal, rather than a scientific search for understanding based on honest use of the scientific method.
Another issue with the study is the well-known fact that annual tree ring growth is not tied solely to temperatures, much less the made up metric of “global average temperature,” as Liebig’s law of the minimum explains. Often simply called Liebig’s law, or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1840) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor).
In other words, plant growth factors from year to year such as sunlight, available water as rainfall, available nutrients in the soil, and temperatures, among other factors, combine to determine growth of a tree, not just temperature alone. It is impossible to distinguish and disentangle the various factors that contribute to tree growth in any given year, much less thousands of years in the past. As a result, one can’t honestly claim that tree growth rings necessarily reflect temperatures alone at a particular time or location, much less that tree rings from one or a few sampled areas show anything about global temperatures or conditions. Making such claims is simply dishonest.
Also, that present temperatures may or may not be warmer than any in the last 2000 years says nothing about whether that is necessarily a bad thing. Historical evidence, in fact, strongly indicates that warmer periods are better for life and human civilization than cooler periods. The authors of this study, assume, without evidence, that just the opposite is the case.
The lead author, Jan Esper, confirms in the interview he gave the BBC that he is, in fact, using this study as a vehicle to elicit policy action:
The authors say the key conclusion from their work is the need for rapid reductions in emissions of planet-warming gases.
“The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be and the more difficult it will be to mitigate or even stop that process and reverse it,” said lead author, Prof Jan Esper from Johannes Gutenberg University, in Germany.
“That is just so obvious,” he said. “We should do as much as possible, as soon as possible.
This admission strongly suggests that the study is more about climate advocacy than science, and the media fell for it. This sort of journalistic malfeasance has become increasingly more common. The study’s authors are acting as advocates not scientists, a path the editors and fact checkers that media outlets employ followed as well in publicizing the report’s unverifiable claims and its authors’ calls for action. If they were actually doing their jobs as journalists to report the truth, the findings of this study never would have been promoted so widely, or if it had been, the writers would have balanced the story with the views of analysts critical of the study, citing scientific evidence.
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They are desperate.
But they are winning.
They are winning because they are running a very successful propaganda machine. Public schools, media, academia, and the democratic party are all playing the same tune, and they have the volume turned up to eleven. Not to mention “Climate Science”
Nobody is winning anything.
In case no one else has noticed, polite society disappeared decades ago.
In a polite society, people are left to experience their own desires and imaginations in the way they wish without being told how to think or live their lives by “experts”.
Now that chart is FANTASTIC NEWS!!! We’ve topped 2°C and Guam didn’t tip over…nor did the Climate.
I disagree. Judging by comments on YT and other websites, more and more people are waking up to the lies the MSM and Academia have been feeding them.
True, but unfortunately, there not yet having much impact on policies.
Let’s hope so!
climapsychotic science
If they were winning (whoever “they” are) then surely CO2 levels would be falling or at least levelling off. Instead in 2023 more CO2 was emitted than in any previous year. Just as was the case in 2022. Similarly the US is on track to produce more fossil fuels in 2024 than in any previous year.
CO2 level increases are mostly driven by natural causes, and China and India.
Nothing the anti-CO2 climate scammers do to gain/hold political control will affect atmospheric CO2 levels in any way whatsoever.
But the leftist climate scammers don’t care about that…
But it is not about CO2… or climate… that is just the crutch the far-left are using for their totalitarian control agenda.
The scammers will lose as more and more people wake up to that fact.
Maybe even low-level-brain-functionals, like you, might eventually wake up..
… but I doubt it. !
Izaak, If we all wish harder Tinkerbell will come back too.
That would only be true if reducing CO2 levels was the actual goal.
As most of your leaders have admitted, the goal is replacing capitalism with socialism and democracy with rule by them.
Good. More CO2 is better. Warmer climate is better too, not that more CO2 is the cause of it.
Was there a point?
Well put, AW. The hockey stick was never so much about the fabricated blade (Mike’s Nature trick) as about the shaft erasing past natural variability—having nothing to do with CO2.
Well put, AW. The hockey stick was never so much about the fabricated blade (Mike’s Nature trick) as about the shafting of
erasingpast natural variability—FIFY 🙂
“having nothing to do with CO2.”
Not necessarily.
Until around 1900+, CO2 has been in deficit for tree growth, hence growth has been quite restricted.
One of the main ingredients for tree growth is CO2.
If you treat these tree rings as a proxy for “available CO2 above basic survival levels”, the flat shaft could actually make sense.
But temperatures.. nope.!!
And splicing Berkeley’s totally corrupted, agenda-driven, urban data on the end is of course anti-science at its very worst.
The flat shaft is entirely due to Mann’s use of wrongly de-centered principal component analysis, that emphasized the tree rings of strip-bark White Mt CA bristle cone pines. It has no temperature significance whatever.
See The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate Index: Update and Implications
For a run-down on the pseudo-science that is the use of tree rings as temperature proxies, see Negligence, Non-Science, and Consensus Climatology
Correct. Tree rings are relatively precise measures of the age of the tree by simply counting the rings, and can tell generally whether the conditions were favorable for growth or not, as well anything that is found in the same location or depositional layer as the tree, archaeologically speaking. But tree rings are not affected solely by temperatures as stated here.
If an animal died right next to a tree, that tree got more fertilizer.
If a tree was a wolf’s favorite “fire plug”, that tree got more fertilizer.
If running water had eroded a “grove” in the ground near a tree, that tree got more water.
If a tornado took down nearby trees but not it, that tree got more Sun.
Bottom line, if temperature was the main driver, it would effect the whole area and not just one tree.
Yes – which is why you can’t take a single sample from a location and call it representative of a year. A range of samples from the same area is necessary so that individual variability does not bias the result. At least as far as measuring conditions of growth.
But aside from trying to measure conditions of growth, tree rings along with C14 testing can pin down the timeframe in which, for instance, a given archaeological site occupation occurred (the carbon testing gets the era down to within a hundred years or so, and then the tree ring can nail it down to a single year if there are corroborating tree ring data.
This sounds a bit like “baffle them with BS”.
Where did Mann mention C14 in Yamal?
Maybe C14 can nail the time down to a single year (really?) but that has zero to do with Mann’s bogus “Hockey Stick” and him changing the past.
What about the tree stumps I mentioned that show Mann’s “Hockey Stick” was full of it just by being there?
Your response bore no relationship to what Duane wrote. First off, Duance never said anything about Man or the hockey stick.
Nor did he ever claim that C14 is accurate down to a year.
He first said that you can’t use a single sample to define growing conditions for an area, because of the limitations that you and others noted. He does claim that if you take a large enough sample from a given area, you can determine growing conditions, for that region. I don’t know if that is true or not, but it sounds like a defensible claim.
He then said that C14 can be used to set a time period, he then mentioned 100 years or so. The then said that tree rings can then be used to pin down the exact year, assuming enough corroborating tree ring data is available. Which is completely true.
Your response prompted me to reread my comment.
WOW!
Was I unclear!!
The “This” I was referring to was the Article and Mann and Hockey Sticks in general. But it sure sounded like I was talking about Duane’s comment.
My bad and apologizes.
Yes Duane, but what you are describing is dendrochronology, not tree ring environmental temperature measured from tree rings.
Yup
In order for sampling to reduce variability the samples all need to be homogenous. There is no way to tell from long dead trees if conditions were homogenous or not. Not all trees in an area are equally affected by disease or pests for instance. Much like finding an “average temperature”, the variance is so high that any average has a huge uncertainty no matter how “precisely” you calculate it from the “samples”.
We know one of the main drivers of tree growth, is available CO2, which they tell us has been very low until the last 100 years or so.
Careful now, you might get sued as Simberg and Steyn did. Remember; “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”Quote by Ron Paul.
Good article Anthony, and not to give any more credence to the treemometer scientists than they deserve (which is none), but didn’t they “sort of” address Liebig’s Law by choosing trees where the temperature is (at least at the present time) the limiting factor? i.e. at the far northern end of their ranges? Not to say that this makes their conclusions any more robust, but we should probably steelman their arguments, rather than strawmanning them, whenever we can.
(I should disclaim that I’m not a biologist either, but I do know enough about plants to know that they require a wide variety of factors for optimal growth, temperature being one, CO2 being possibly an even more important one, along with of course sunlight, nutrients, water, absence of pests and herbivores and diseases, the phase of the moon, etc.)
Something like 34 total proxies selected from over 200 collected used in the reconstruction.
6 were pine trees from California. 1 or 2 proxies from eastern Canada. Balance of proxies reportedly came from Siberia.
Nothing from the southern hemisphere.
And no error bands. I saw many years ago the data allegedly used and the error bands swamped the temperature signature. Sort of like the average is 15 C but the uncertainty is +/- 10 C (made up numbers) but only reporting the 15 C.
It also makes a difference which side of the tree the ring is measured. The rings are not uniform through the full circumference.
Now to cue W.B. with his B.S. about how it is perfect and everyone and their grandfather has checked it and given it a thumbs up.
Right… I knew they hadn’t chosen all of the proxies from the far north, but I do remember seeing that this was the reason they picked as many from that region as they did. (Along with selectively discarding the ones that didn’t fit the narrative, ignoring error bands, etc)
Plants are range bound at both maxima and minima. Who’s to say if a “bad year” was too cold or too hot?
I can’t wait for Anthony to publish his analysis in a top scientific journal. In fact, we’ve all been waiting a very long time for Anthony to live up to his own chest thumping about publishing something ‘soon’. Still waiting, Anthony.
Want did he get wrong in what he said?
PS How do you define “a top scientific journal”?
One that the Climategate Crowd were successful in changing “Peer Review”?
It is pretty certain anything Watts would submit for publication would be rejected without review merely because of the author’s name.
Things Anthony gets wrong:
Claims the tree ring reconstruction is “grafted” to the thermometer record and presented as a single cohesive dataset, when it fact as he shows himself, the thermometer data are clearly distinguished from the reconstruction.
Claims that the 2024 Esper study suffers from the same sorts of “issues” as MBH98 (never mind that the things being claimed as issues aren’t issues), which is not true. The paper uses an independent methodology.
Claims the 2024 study “erased” the MWP and LIA from the reconstruction, implying fraud, which is not evidenced anywhere. As the two studies Anthony cites show, the MWP was mostly restricted to mid-to-high northern latitudes. It was not a spatially or temporally coherent event across the entire hemisphere. Thus these periods shouldn’t be expected to show a strong hemispheric expression.
Implies that climate scientists studying tree rings are unaware of the multiple factors affecting tree growth, and suggests that it is impossible to deconvolve the various signals in tree rings and isolate those related to temperature, a proclamation which directly contradicts peer reviewed research, and is completely without substantiation.
These glaring issues jumped out at me on a quick scan, but I’m sure we could dive into the details ever further and untangle the little web of mistruths Anthony has woven here.
Alanj starts with
Here’s what anthony said
Not grafted but presented. And that’s what the graph is. It plots the reconstruction data and measurement data together. It’s colour coded, sure. But the average BBC watchers won’t have the faintest clue why it matters and what it means. Most so called scientists don’t either.
The other stuff you claim is just wrong but perhaps most importantly Jan Esper is an advocate unwilling to justify his science according to McIntyre from 2006 as an example.
https://climateaudit.org/2006/09/20/emulating-esper-et-al-2002/
Go sell it somewhere else.
The paper is from 2024, so this is irrelevant unless you’re suggesting McIntyre can time travel.
Grafted can very easy refer to the data being put onto the graph which is how I read it. You’re just making an argument for the sake of it. It is indeed important to note the temperature series are not being misrepresented and AW doesn’t do that he says exactly what’s been done in the paper.
The comment is about Esper. Are you really so obtuse?
Plotting the two series on the same graph is completely unobjectionable. The implication from Anthony is that something untoward has occurred, and that is false. The paper makes it abundantly clear which is the instrumental series and which is the reconstruction.
Esper published a paper in 2002 that McIntyre beefed with in 2006, but the paper Anthony references is a new reconstruction from Esper published in 2024. Whatever beef McIntyre had with Esper 2002 does not apply. This is how the concept of time works.
It’s misleading. It implies the two series can be compared and they can’t. Anthony says
What if I plotted a graph of GDP against temperature and claimed there was no climate emergency because GDP increased because temperature was increasing. Would you have issue with comparing those two measures in that way?
Why? Is there any evidence Esper changed?
They aren’t radically different. They are both temperature estimates. The reconstruction is calibrated and validated against the thermometer record. Anthony claiming they are “radically” different is hot air. No one in this thread could even begin to say what that even means.
They are both total fabrications.
Neither tree rings nor Berkeley fabrications even remotely represent any real global temperatures.
It is all FAKERY.. which is what we expect you to condone.
So, we have two totally FAKED data series based on totally different things. (one isolated CO2 deprived trees, and one a load heavily urban and agenda contaminated junk.)
Only a completely moronic and brain-dead AGW cultist could possibly put any credence to that mess. !
One is a measure of tree ring width and density, the other is a measure of temperature. Calibrating them irrelevant if the proxies aren’t temperature sensitive and who knows.
Proxy selection also plays a part. Select for hockey sticks and guess what you’ll end up with.
Choose proxies that happen to correlate to todays temperatures and they reinforce during that recent times but random ups and downs cancel out otherwise leaving a flat handle
That series looks a lot like poor proxy selection to me.
But at any rate, they are radically different. I support AW on that call. YMMV.
There is zero question that tree growth is temperature sensitive, and the proxies would not correlate with the instrumental record over the validation period after calibration if they were not.
Suggesting there is zero question about a tree’s growth being temperature sensitive shows complete ignorance of tree growth factors.
Correlation with recent temperatures is their selection criteria and they’ll desperately try to justify their choices but its unjustifiable.
You cant just correlate recent years’ ring widths and densities to current temperatures or you’ll create a hockey stick. Its been proven and the reason (again) is that the correlating part reinforces the increase (by chance) but the uncorrelated parts cancel out leaving a flat average (ie flat blade)
Who has proven this? Tree rings are consistent with other proxies – in fact multiproxy reconstructions show the same “hockey stick” pattern of temperature change over the past 2kyr. And how could correlation with modern temperature change possibly be unjustifiable? How else could you validate the proxy calibration?
Many people. Generate series of random sequences to represent tree ring data, say 2k years worth. Select the sequences that correlate with modern increasing temperature and plot them. Voila hockey stick.
You can’t select based on correlation to modern temperature and yet that’s what they do although they’ll pretend to have techniques to overcome the problem but it won’t. It can’t because they simply can’t tell whether the tree rings are proxies for temperature outside their calibration periods.
There is zero question that tree growth is temperature sensitive,
Is it sensitive to anything else?
They are not temperature estimates. They are temperature growth rate estimates. Those are two different things.
They are temperature estimates, as you can see by the fact that the y-axis on the graph Anthony posts is temperature, not temperature growth rate.
So you are saying that the NH average land summer temperature was 0C outside the tropics? Give me a break!
To climate scientists. I would have been failed in any geology, chemistry or geostatistics course i took if I had plastered two completely different time series on one graph and pretended they were the same. And no you don’t get to play nit-picky, dishonest strawman games by saying everything is hunky dory because he changed colors.
100% AJ is worse than I thought. And that was pretty low.
AlanJ,
No, you are quite wrong. Maybe you have not read the McIntyre analyses.
McIntyre found errors by Esper. The recent Esper paper needs to address these errors and to show they have not been carried forward. Only then could you advise that the McIntyre work should be disregarded.
But, disregarding McIntyre work is an aspiration among people of lesser ability, with the smell of the methods of TDS.
Read it and learn. Geoff S
Did McIntyre submit a letter to the journal? Was that letter peer reviewed and published? Or did McIntyre submit his own peer reviewed study pointing out these alleged errors? Then Esper has nothing to respond to, since the scientific process is carried out in the literature.
But you present a contradiction to begin with. It is incumbent on Anthony and Steve McIntyre to show that their claimed errors are present in the new work if they want us to dismiss it, which has passed peer review.
AlanJ,
So you did not read the McIntyre studies.
Geoff S
Tacking direct measurement to proxy is unobjectionable is it?
Is that what you are saying? Wow. A lost cause.
He is clearly a dumb propagandist who doesn’t understand resolution differences.
It is profoundly unobjectionable. No one in this thread can even articulate why they object.
I can articulate an objection. You have idea if the anomalies shown are based on similar absolute temperatures. Even a 1 degree difference in absolute temperatures should shift the graphs to different points.
The proxies are calibrated against the instrumental record, so they are unquestionably set to the same baseline. You’ve actually articulated an objection, and I commend your pluck, but perhaps should have kept that one to yourself.
Proxies from 1000 years ago are not validated against the current instrumental record of absolute temperatures. There is no absolute temperature instrumental record from 1000 years ago to do so.
You keep talking like anomalies are temperatures, they are not!
No one in this thread can even articulate why they object.
We’ve already done it. You dont understand the objection.
One is measuring tree ring widths and densities. That ALL. The other is measuring temperature.
You believe those tree ring widths and densities are measures of temperature but they’re not. You believe because they correlate in some part of their growth that they are valid temperature proxies but they’re not.
They might be. It’s possible, but as a scientific measure, they’re just not.
It’s not a measure of temperature, it’s measure of a a thing that responds in a known way to temperature change – a proxy. All temperature proxies possess this quality, from tree rings to the oxygen isotope ratios of the calcite shells of benthic forams in ocean sediments. What we measure is the temperature sensitive attribute of the proxy archive, then we convert that into temperature using the known response of the attribute to temperature, and then we are perfectly justified in plotting the temperature reconstruction next to the instrumental temperature data. No one besides the WUWT elite are confused by scientists doing this.
So tree rings all respond the same way to temperature.
Trees are basically flora. In general flora respond to a number of inputs. Can you show a study that decisively shows the attribution to each factor affecting tree ring growth and that shows temperature as the predominate factor?
I never said that all trees respond to temperature in the same way, nor did I say that temperature is always the predominate factor affecting growth, certainly not in all cases. My point is that the existence of confounding factors or complexity does not preclude tree rings for use as climate proxies, and the fact that they are proxies does not preclude comparison with the instrumental temperature record. These are two falsehoods Anthony has presented in this post.
They are not climate proxies because you don’t have a common baseline absolute temperature to evaluate.
ΔT’s DO NOT inform you of the absolute temperatures from which they were derived.
Climate depends on absolute temperature (among other things) to describe it. You don’t find savannahs in the Arctic but their ΔT’s can be the same. You don’t find ice floes in the Caribbean but it can have the same ΔT as Antarctica.
ΔT’s should have a time associated with them also. That is where the Δ is derived (change in temperature over a period of time). If the Δ times do not match, it is not legitimate to compare them.
My point is that the existence of confounding factors or complexity does not preclude tree rings for use as climate proxies
The number of “confounding factors” suggests that they are unfit for use as proxies for anything.
This is just naive and ignorant. Proxies don’t respond in a “known way” to temperature. It’d be great if they did but they basically respond in an unknown way to temperature from year to year ranging from temperature having no bearing on growth to temperature being the primary signal.
It is objectionable because you have no idea of the absolute temperatures at which the anomaly occurred. Have you ever read any of these papers. They never mention that the “growth” rates in degrees could have occurred at vastly different absolute atmospheric temperature.
“Go sell it somewhere else.”
Poor AJ.. you are worse than a low-grade 2nd hand car salesman.
Trying to sell a rusted out POC as a drivable vehicle…
Shonky Bros have nothing on you…
You aren’t even fooling yourself, just regurgitating meaningless nonsense.
Berkeley temps should never have been grafted, even in a different colour.
They are a meaningless manically adjusted, agenda-driven, fabrication from mostly massively corrupted urban sites, and not remotely related to isolated tree data.
The whole graph is a total FARCE.. so it is no wonder you try so desperately to support it.
Esper has a past history of this sort of Mannian mathematical and graphical malfeaces.
malfeaces. I like that. looks like a portmanteau of malfeasance and feces.
It is the correct description for the sort of crap pushed by the likes of Mann and Esper.
When a study starts off with a pre-determined conclusion, and proceeds to select and construct “data” to flesh it out, such as MBH98 did, it’s not a “scientific” study.
It’s just a banner to be draped in support of “The Cause”, as M. Mann himself described his research activities in the Climategate emails.
Berkeley surface data is a manically mal-adjusted load of really bad urban data.
It is trite and absolutely meaningless in the context of tree rings from isolated areas.
Ever issue brought up by Anthony is a reason to totally reject the whole study as totally bogus and desperate load of cobblers…
Just like your comment.
Denial of the MWP , which has massive evidence from around the globe, is the sort of thing a very desperate and deliberate LIAR and SCAMMER does.
But apparently a few tree ring sites are enough to establish the entire hemisphere. You can’t have it both ways.
Of course you can have it both ways. The studies Anthony cites use climate models to reconstruct temperature variability during the MWP at regional scales, the paleoclimate reconstructions extract the common signals in the proxy records around the hemisphere, quite literally yielding an estimate of hemispheric level temperature change.
Total rubbish.
The tree ring fabrications are agenda-based garbage.
I suspect you are well aware of that fact..
And how do they do that when they use local proxied measurements? Its worse than not being regional, tree growth is VERY regional. ie a shaded tree grows less and how would you know it was shaded a thousand years ago?
Tree rings respond to local conditions as well as broader scale changes in the regional/global climate. Scientists try to extract the common signal from the tree ring datasets – this represents those broad scale changes.
Tree rings respond to local conditions
Tree rings *might* respond to local conditions but they dont respond to broader scale changes. That’s an absolutely nonsense idea that is pushed around as if it were self evident.
The assumption they can correlate across areas to extract a signal is unsubstantiated. Its an assumption and when the science relies on those kinds of fundamental assumptions, they’re in the realms of pseudo science.
If a region becomes hotter then all of the trees in the region that are temperature sensitive will respond to that. It is the very definition of self evident.
Which means all the tree rings will be the same so the uncertainty is small, correct?
Funny you point to a region becoming warmer. That normally means other regions don’t become warmer. Yet, somehow this is translated into a global rise in temperature?
This is your assumption but its false. Trees, individually, respond to many growth factors.
I should also point out to you that climate models are designed to not produce climate change without a forcing. That’s what their control runs do…nothing in terms of climate change.
So what forcing were they using during the MWP to reproduce the warmer temperatures.
But here is where you simply say the models prove the MWP never existed. Because archaeological evidence means nothing in your world. If you cant attach a number to it or make it hemispheric you can ignore it.
I never said the models fail to produce a MWP, in the contrary they seem to model its major features well. Anthony cited the studies, so if you object to them you’ll want to bring that to AW’s attention, not mine.
No they didn’t. They modelled a small variability and their assumption was decreased volcanic activity as their forcing.
Any “study” which uses climate models as evidence is worthless.
Please cite some of those “peer-reviewed research” papers.
Hey AlanJ,
Don’t put words in my mouth while at the same time bitching about how wrong I was to say what I never said. Sheesh. Jerk.
Anthony, point out where I’ve mischaracterized your words. If I’ve misunderstood you I’m happy to acknowledge that. But I don’t think I have.
Every point the Anthony made was totally and absolutely correct.
The fact that you disagree, proves that.
Read the thread of comments. I never said grafted. YOU did.
Are you just stupid, or purposely mendacious?
Are you saying you did not write those words? If not, why is your name attached to the climateREALISM article?
Graft definition…
insert (a shoot or twig) as a graft.
“it was common to graft different varieties on to a single tree trunk”
Two different things grafted into one… regardless of what AW said, it is not what he meant, you are inferring that it means two totally different graphs mixed together is acceptable, which as you would well know, it isn’t… boy, the lengths some trolls go to try and pontificate something.
A clue for those that didn’t pay attention in basic high school science lessons:
If temperature were the primary driver of plant growth it would be called “thermosynthesis”.
Lol. They are spoken of as a unit continuously.
Lol. Twonk!
Congratulations! I do believe you have broken the record for quantity of bullshit in one post!
One of the things here is that using anomalies means there is no basis of comparison of the anomaly values. You have no idea what absolute temperatures were in order to even present them as connected.
The past growths have an uncertainty of several degrees. For instance, if a 1 degree anomaly occurred at a temperature of 15C and a 2 degree anomaly currently at 14C are the effects the same?
Even the graph is labeled temperature. It should be labeled as ΔT. It should be noted in the text that the values could have occurred at vastly different atmospheric temperatures.
Another point that Anthony didn’t bring up, is that there was no need to splice the thermometer data onto the end of the the tree ring data.
This is because the tree ring data continued for many years past that date.
The problem was that the tree ring data did not show an increase in temperature.
That’s why the data had to be truncated and a different data set spliced in.
If the recent tree ring data is not reliable, why should anyone assume that the data from hundreds of years ago, is?
Ding!Ding!Ding!
We have the winner!
Absolute pedant.
Anthony doesn’t agree with the people that WB has decided are the experts. Therefor Anthony is wrong. No argument needed.
You’re here Warren and feel free to peer review any points. It’s not like pal review.
WB apparently believes that peer review actually reviews every factor of a paper, and a paper that has passed peer review is perfect and incapable of error.
This site provides better peer review than does any of the so called journals, most of whom have been captured by the activists.
BTW, I just love the way you go so far out of your way to provide cogent arguments and actual facts to back up your whines.
He has just published it on one of the most widely read science sites in world.
Now.. where is his analysis incorrect??
You do know that journal publication is absolutely nothing to do with science , don’t you !!
Oh look, a troll.
If they want to talk about trees and tree rings, what about the ancient stumps exposed by “only recently” retreating ice due to Man caused Global Warming/Climate Change?
A side note: Has anyone studied those stumps tree rings?
(Maybe there two “Hockey Sticks”!)
And the tree lines that show trees growing far higher up mountains and far further north.
And peat beds, that are now permafrost.
One photo which punctures the lies promulgated by AnalJ and Mrs Beeton about past warm periods.
I see what you did there. One point of contention though, Mrs. Beeton could cook up something palatable from left-overs, scraps and off cuts.
I prefer “Beetroot”
The mind of a turnip, but deep red inside.
I had to look up Mrs. Beeton.
She wrote “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management” over a hundred years ago.
Now we have Beeton writing his book of ““Warren Beeton’s Book of People Management via Climate Management”.
Mrs. Beeton was British and I’m American. No offense, but British food doesn’t always sound that appealing to me. “Kidney” pie? Even if I was of that persuasion, I think I’d avoid something called “Spotted Dick”.
But I’m sure I’d prefer anything Mrs. Beeton cooked up to what Warren would try to shove down our throats.
(I’m sure some Brits would have similar reservations about eating a “Snickers Bar”) 😎
More…
Treemometers are testable via hind casting. Let’s pull some cores from locations with a long temperature history and challenge climate scientists to reconstruct the record. R-Square above 0.3 would surprise me.
One of the things done was to replace what recent tree rings indicated (The assumed past tree rings indicated temperature.) with thermometer records because the recent tree rings showed a decline.
Problem is, hindcasting as performed by the IPCC gamesters is nothing more than curve fitting.
They turn the knobs and rerun the software until they get the desired results.
Dendroclimatology…
or dendroastrology?
No. We can hind cast where the stars and planets were with certainty. Not so with plant pokes.
(Apologizes in advance.)
What is a Pokémon?
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A Jamaican proctologist!
(Again, sorry!)
Decrocolonoscopy would produce the same thing in regards to climate. Cr*p!
(On second thought, a colonoscopy is a check to see if there is something wrong in the colon. Maybe the “Hockey Stick” needs such an examination?)
Dendromancy?
One feature I have always found most curious is how cleanly the proxy reconstruction connects to the satellite data. No bump. No step up/down. Just a seemless and seemingly perfect connection.
The odds of the proxies perfectly matching the satellite data is lower than the CH4 ppm in the atmosphere.
The trees? There’s trouble with the trees
https://youtu.be/JnC88xBPkkc?si=8lWcN8m1fWHDHBLE
Liebig’s law dictates we mush have more CO2. More food results.
Apology for the typo. “mush” s/b “must.”
Three more points
1) CO2 is an important plant fertilizer. The more CO2 in the air, the faster plants grow.
2) Plants have an optimum temperature at which the grow best. Temperatures both above and below this point will cause plant growth to slow. Without knowing the best temperature for the plant you are looking at, and without knowing the actual air temperature, it’s not possible to say if the increased growth comes from warming or cooling temperatures.
3) Plants only grow during the “growing” season. Tree rings tell you absolutely nothing about growing conditions outside the growing season.
I forget which species, but the California tree rings came from pine trees, which are reportedly much less reliable regardless of how the data is processed.
How?
Easy. We have written historical records for both. As just one example, wine grapes were cultivated in England during the MWP, but not during the LIA.
Perhaps you meant how/s? If not, oh dear you aren’t very knowledgable.
Rud, for your example:
Wine in England during MWP, wineries in Scotland today. What would the conclusion be?
I read up on that last time someone mentioned wineries in Scotland. One of them makes wine from grapes imported from Spain, the other 2 struggle along with low production, presumably from some modern strains specifically chosen, then cultivated to handle the low temps, aided by the fact that one winery is on an island and the other is near the coast, thus situated in warmer areas of Scotland. There’s one more that makes fruit wines and meads (and one uses vegetables of some sort – I’m not including that one in the definition of wineries…)
Modern techniques and strains make it just barely possible, but nothing like the past when grapes apparently flourished.
That a flat handle is an artifact of a bad procedure applied to a poor proxy by an advocate?
Advocate is a good choice. Activist is better. Incompetent applies also.
Many of the wineries in Scotland focus on the production of fruit wines as grapes are more difficult to grow on a commercial scale. The climate is colder in Scotland and therefore the grapes do not ripen enough to produce a high enough alcohol content.
Yes, there is at least one vineyard in Scotland. Dalrossach vineyard is a research vineyard that is experimenting with grape varieties from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. The vineyard has had some success growing grapes by protecting the vines against the elements. The vineyard uses greenhouses, polytunnels and trenches to grow the grapes.
From: https://www.englishwineproducers.co.uk/vineyards/scotland/
My conclusion is that you’re an ill-informed clown.
The types of grapes being grown today in Scotland are not the ones that were grown during the MWP. Today’s grapes have been bred to be frost tolerant.
Today’s grapes have been bred to be Phylloxera resistant, it was that parasite that wiped out European grapes in the nineteenth century including those in England.
Actually, it was grafting the traditional varieties from Europe to the Phylloxera resistant vines from America where Phylloxera, an aphid-like insect, is native to North America. Rootstocks are now commonly used throughout the world to combat Phylloxera and is now not an issue.
Why do you assume that only one improvement is possible?
I would conclude that you are easily led and read the grauniad.
Elephants crossing the alps. Large cathedral churches built in medieval times. Evidence of human activity found under glaciers.
Spread of human activity, e.g. Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Muslims, Normans.
Hannibal lost a lot of troops and elephants crossing the Alps.
So “written records” said in 1250AD that ‘it’s warmer now than it will be in the 2020’s all over the world’?
What tangible evidence is there that, globally, these warm periods existed and what is it derived from?
No, but I can spell ‘knowledgeable’.
A few hundred studies from locations all over the world.
If you open your eyes, perhaps you will find the evidence that you don’t want to see.
But apparently you can’t follow the links I provided to peer reviewed papers before asking a dumb question.
What a tool.
At last – a consensus we can all support.
I spewed coffee over your post. Well met!
Again the links you supply all reference tree rings. For example in regards the Medieval warm period the 2nd link states that
“A precise dendrochronological time scale has been developed for the Holocene, for instance helping constrain a Medieval Climatic Anomaly from CE 900 to 1200,” From Geologic Time Scale 2020. But you have stated clearly that “Making such claims is simply dishonest”. So why refer us to papers that you think are dishonest?
It really is amazing how you manage to see things that were never there.
Medieval Viking burials in Greenland, today in permafrost.
Lots more physical evidence for both the warmth and global extent if you need it.
When you’re being a dick, just to be a dick, you lose.
Next you’ll be asking –
“what have the Romans ever done for us?”
I was just thinking of that. As I do several times a week.
No, it’s a simple enough question.
How can we dismiss paleoclimate evidence derived from tree rings but eagerly accept paleoclimate data from other sources that none of you seem to be capable of naming?
Because archaeological evidence trumps tree ring temperature proxy “evidence”.
Viking artefacts buried in the permafrost are clear evidence it was warm enough in the past for there to be no permafrost and be habitable in that region. A few tree ring sites give no guarantees whatsoever of that region let alone hemisphere.
And the proxies are just NH. Nothing from SH in the tree ring record. So how can it represent a global termperature?
For the simple fact that tree rings don’t tell us anything about temperature. It’s impossible for them to do so.
For all the reasons laid out above and by dozens of actual botanists.
I’ll repeat my reply given to alanj above:
A clue for those that didn’t pay attention in basic high school science lessons:
If temperature were the primary driver of plant growth it would be called “thermosynthesis”.
Because tree rings are NOT reliable temperature proxies.. period. !
Informative? Yes. Definitive? No.
Such are sometimes called anecdotal evidence, well below the standard or clear and convincing or beyond reasonable doubt.
Because tree rings are not a reliable temperature proxy.
Evidence of tree growth above the current tree line IS evidence of higher temperatures in the past, because the current tree line is determined by the minimum temperature that trees will grow at.
Evidence of the production of food crops in regions that they no longer grow due to it being too cold is also evidence that it was warmer in the past.
Evidence of human habitation being uncovered by retreating glaciers is evidence that it was warmer in the past, unless you posit that these ancient people burrowed under the ice to build villages and roads?
It is, indeed, a simple question. We can dismiss tree ring data as a proxy for temperature because tree rings are not solely controlled by temperature. There are several independent variables and some correlated variables that effect tree ring growth that cannot be corrected for. Their specific data parameters are highly dependent on extremely localized variables, such as how much light, water, fertilizer, disease load, infestation, fire, etc. each individual tree was subjected to. Temperature is only one of many parameters. It is not a valid proxy and never should have been used as one. That is was is an indictment on the climate scientists who proposed it and the “peers” who reviewed their work and failed to point out their obvious error. This error has been subsequently pointed out ad nauseum, but the “climate scientists” who proposed it had already fallen in love with their theories and do not have the epistemic humility to let it go.
One you omitted is the species of tree is one of the several variables.
Another is the density of the forest. Denser forests have greater shading from the canopy and that reduces the temperature of the trunk, lower branches, ground, and roots.
I won’t quibble on a point about how much sunlight reaches the lower branches and how that affects growth. That science is still under investigation, but it is probable it is also one of the significant variables.
All temperature reconstructions from tree rings are probably spurious.
Actual 300 year old tree stumps dated from around 1000 and 2000 years ago appearing from under glaciers are not. They are not proxies but direct evidence which cannot be hand waved away. However, they do agree with hundreds of studies which suggested MWP and RWP. They do not agree with the hockey stick. Conclusion – the hockey stick is wrong.
What part of that don’t you understand?
If you want to argue that all proxies are equally accurate, then please do so.
Trying to hide behind euphemisms just makes you look stupid.
Because we aren’t as deliberately ignorant like you have shown yourself to be.
Massive evidence, from all around the globe, of the MWP has been posted for you several times in the past.
People have tried to educate you… and you have failed to learn anything.
ToeFungalNail would deny the evidence of his own eyes if it conflicted with his beliefs.
He does strike me as a devoted Outer Party member.
Right, so what is the evidence based on?
what was posted for you several times in the past?
On the studies that you and the other activists refuse to look at because they aren’t being produced by people who already agree with you.
Try putting MWP in the search box at the top of the page.
You have totally ignored the evidence posted many times in the past.
Stop wasting everybody’s time, and stop being a mindless ignorant troll.
We know from other studies that the Roman Warm Period (from 1–250 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (950 to c. 1250 AD) existed…
Did you not even follow the links provided in the copy and paste you provided??
Dumb and dumber….
And once again, the science denier tries to pretend that all proxies are equally accurate and valuable.
Once again, TFN goes out of his way to prove how he never bothers to think for himself.
He said so, in the line that you quoted. “other studies”.
Perhaps you should engage your brain before posting next time.
And Many of these trees lived and grew there for 3 centuries.
I always ask this same question when these nice folks here talk about all these warm periods. They usually talk about the Minoan and Egyptian WPs as well, I wonder why they leave out the Mongolian and Czechoslovakian, not to mention the Soviet one. Our knowledge about these WPs can only come from good reconstructions, and one of the first modern, high quality reconstructions was the dreaded MBH98. Before that, reconstructions had been very coarse, very rudimentary. Even the local/hemispheric/global thingie is outside their comprehension. By the way, the Minoan WP would also be an Egyptian one, whatever.
Perhaps you should look for yourself. The answers are out there if you can overcome your blinkered bias and look.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/05/27/melting-ice-ancient-trade-route/
See “local/hemispherical/global”. How on Earth you deniers cannot comprehend that in the past some locations some time might’ve been warmer than today all the while global climate was colder. The North Atlantic was such a place during the MWP etc.
And is there archaeological evidence that another location was particularly cold for an extended period during the time of the Vikings?
It’s OK for you alarmists to pick a few sites for proxies, pick a few proxies that correlate with whatever measure is believed to be temperature dependent and claim global knowledge.
I don’t buy that level of certainty because I’ve looked into the issues surrounding proxies and they’re far from convincing. The field is rife with assumption, frequently unreproducible and is best described as pseudo science.
Actually there is. It is called “temperature reconstruction”, we have multiple modern, independent, high quality reconstructions that all agree on these points. What you deniers always come up with, like these Viking things does not contradict these.
Neither of us are alarmists, furthermore, most of us are just ordinary people. However, we just follow science.
My brother has a PhD in geology and taught Geology courses at university.
The geological record is clear those periods existed along with other high and low temperature periods.
The arguments against the use of tree rings for measures of temperature seem so obvious that there must be some credible and reputable papers evaluating “dentrothermometry,” or whatever it is called, as a measure of temperature. No? Anyone?
There is a hilarious climategate email in which Michael Mann’s colleagues try to explain it is a mistake to use tree rings as a proxy for temperature.
Climategate email 0682.txt:
At 10:03 PM 6/5/2003 -0600, Tom Wigley wrote:
Mike,
Well put! By chance SB03 may have got some of these precip things right, but we don’t
want to give them any way to claim credit.
Also, stationarity is the key. Let me tell you a story. A few years back, my son Eirik
did a tree ring science fair project using trees behind NCAR. He found that widths
correlated with both temp and precip. However, temp and precip also correlate. There is
much other evidence that it is precip that is the driver, and that the temp/width
correlation arises via the temp/precip correlation. Interestingly, the temp correlations
are much more ephemeral, so the complexities conspire to make this linkage
nonstationary.
I have not seen any papers in the literature demonstrating this — but, as you point out
Mike, it is a crucial issue.
Tom.
Mann’s tree ring hypothesis was invalidated by a high school science fair experiment performed by Tom Wigley’s son.
IMO anyone who uses tree rings as a temperature proxy deserves to be laughed out of the science community.
Aren’t those Climategate emails such a rich repository of how that cabal of “scientists” really went about their perfidy?
That’s the funny bit – Mann’s colleagues acted as if Michael Mann didn’t know. We can’t know for sure exactly what was going through Mann’s mind, but it’s a pretty poor showing for someone who claims to be a world expert on climate change.
Well, Mann was / is the smartest guy in the
roombroom closet.Anyone who has grown and observed trees and their response to water and heat will tell you that. It is HIGHLY possible to have wet years that average degrees cooler than warm drier ones (and the opposite of course). This renders relying on temp proxies from tree rings ridiculously stupid.
Distinguished Professor Michael Mann’s life work disproved – by a High School Science project!!
Unlike Mann, Tom Wrigley’s son was doing real Science.
Tom Wigley himself says in one of the Climategate emails
“I have just read the M&M stuff critisising MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work – an opinion I have held for some time”
‘Climategate The Crutape Letters’ page 9
There are dozens of factors effecting the growth of tree rings. If they happen to grow faster in one year than another- it means it was a better year for growing. It could be because it was a warmer year. But if it’s growing faster- that means it’s happier! Not that we should panic.
The statement that “We know from other studies that the Roman Warm Period (from 1–250 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (950 to c. 1250 AD) existed, but they have been erased from this graph ” is interesting given that the link to the Roman Warm Period refers to the paper “Roman Warm Period and Late Antique Little Ice Age in an Earth System Model Large Ensemble” by Shi and co-workers. Firstly they state that the temperature reconstructions were “confirmed by an integrated tree-ring record in the Northern Hemisphere ” and then compare that to models. So Antony Watts appears to be used a tree ring record despite the fact that he states “ Making such claims is simply dishonest” or is using tree rings only dishonest if they produce results that he doesn’t agree with.
Secondly the size of the Roman Warm period in the paper is tiny. Fig. 3a shows that the temperature change between the Roman Warm Period and the subsequent little ice age as being about 0.05 degrees C in the tree-ring records and 0.15 C in climate models. While the difference between the Roman Warm period and current temperatures in their Fig. 3b is about 0.8 degrees. So if anything the cited paper supports the conclusion that last summer was the warmest in 2000 years rather than providing evidence to the contrary.
About 5k years ago, Ötzi the Iceman was roaming around the Alps getting sunburned.
Then he got whacked.
Then his ass got frozen under a mile or so of ice.
Then he reappeared a few years ago.
How warm must it have gotten for “Ötzi on the rocks” to be served straight up again?
The lesson to be learned from these stories Izaak is that –
lotsa shit happened in nature before ICE vehicles were invented.
Buried under a maximum of ~5m of ice.
No. Discovered under the ~5m of ice. 5m does not define the initial conditions, only the ending conditions.
No it was discovered under zero ice, ~5m was the max.
First picture of Otzi:
Ok. Over 15 feet of ice.
Yes, not the “a mile or so of ice” referred to in the post I was responding to. A recent paper on the subject said that it was likely the body had been exposed previously.
Ian Plimmer in ‘heaven and earth’ (p51) notes
“In the summer of 2003 AD, the retreat of the ice at Schnidejoch (Switzerland) revealed a 4700 year old archer’s quiver. The Schnidejoch must have been a short unfrozen route across the Alps around 2700 BC. Subsequent work has shown that there were four periods in the last 5000 years when the Schnidejoch was warmer than the present.
Fascinating! I had not seen that.
There has been large amounts of evidence posted from many places around the world that shows the MWP was real and widespread and warmer than current.
We can’t help it if your deliberate ignorance doesn’t allow you to accept the facts.
Sorry if tree line proxies and similar are beyond your limited comprehension.
That is something for you to fix.. but I don’t think you are capable of learning.. .
.. way too much AGW-cult mantra nonsense and anti-science in the way.
Bnice, the paper referenced by Antony Watt to demonstrate the Roman Warm period has that period being 0.05 degrees C warmer than subsequent years and shows that it was at least 0.8 degrees colder than the current decade. I am simply describing the evidence that Antony used in his post above. If you don’t like it then you need to complain to him not me.
Using climate models to investigate the MWP or RWP is a fools errand.
AW should have used a better reference rather than giving you guys ammunition although it does play into more vibrant discussions so who knows.
There’s plenty of evidence for the warm periods.
It has long been accepted in proper science that certain criteria are satisfied in the experimental design, before it is allowed to start.
I have performed factorial experiments aiming to clarify those plant growth nutrients that most affect yield; and the optimum amounts of each applied as fertilizer for highest yield.
Up to 20 nutrients were applied at up to 5 weights of each. The customary “all other things being equal” principle was applied, with much effort to minimise the effects of other variables like shifting pots frequently for similar sunshine, careful, measured watering etc. For the purpose of these experiments, CO2 was not considered as growth effects were over only a few years.
However, our experimental design -including holding constant as many miscellaneous variables as possible – certainly would have considered CO2 fertilizer variability.
I simply cannot understand why this tree ring work is even remotely valid. One cannot experiment with fertilizers affecting growth without including CO2 variation. It is invalid to simply dismiss the CO2 divergence problem because it spoils a nice belief.
By my criteria, no past studies relating tree ring properties to past temperatures are valid. They are no more than pop-science fictions that with promotion can earn a few bucks. Science, they are not. As Steve McIntyre has done so often, you can drive a truck through the large deficiencies. Geoff S
Tree rings are perfectly reliable – when they (seem to) show what the climatistas want us to believe.
Remember when Mendacious Mann discarded recent tree ring data when he realized it didn’t show anything like a hockey stick?
Briffa’s tree ring data showed a distinct spike in the 1940s, then cooling to temperatures well below that of 1900.
Even 1990 was below the temperature of 1900
Of course Mickey Mann had to fake his way around this.
I swear what passes for climate science these days is truly pitiful.
That is becaus3e “climate science” is a definition with no basis.
Thermodynamics, electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, chemistry, physics, etc., etc., etc. are science and engineering disciplines uses to understand the vastly chaotic and complex system called weather. Climate is merely a 30 year average of weather.
Control the language, control the ideas. K. Marx
The Chinese temperature records do not support the tree ring method in any shape or form. Neither do foraminifera studies for that matter. Quite separately, the anecdotal European notes throughout this period confirm the Chinese records and the foram studies.
None of this climate change business is about winners or losers – it is about telling lies and how far you can get with them in popularity stakes provided you have no personal integrity.
History is packed with these evil people, their tales and how they eventually met their ends.
It’s one natural repeat that cannot be faulted.
Actually there are winners and losers. The losers outnumber the winners by some 8 billion.
The winners are those that accumulate vast wealth with this fraud. The winners are those that accumulate vast political power and control over the populations with this fraud.
This has never been about saving the planet. This has always been restructuring global economies to eliminate capitalism and to force One World Order socialism and everyone.
It is also about bringing down western liberal democracies. Americans united behind a common cause are formidable. At the end of WWII, the USA owned over 50% of the world’s economy. The USSR found it could not take on the USA toe to toe. Likewise China came to that same conclusion.
The way to take down the USA is to DIVIDE the society, get us busy infighting. The second phase is to eliminate critical thinking and lower the standards of education success. The third phase is to impoverish the nation.
He who controls the money controls. He who controls energy controls the money.
Anyone see signs of any of this happening today?
. . . and the MSM learned NOTHING from the fiasco of the Mann “hockey stick” graph that was based on cherry-picked tree ring data.