From the “anybody can make a hockey stick out of random numbers department” and Twitter comes this interesting exercise. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick demonstrated this two decades ago. Of course Mann still insists he’s right, mainly because his super-sized ego won’t allow him to admit his errors.
@andy on X writes:
Did my own try on the Mann/Marcott/PAGES2K proxy screening routine and created an ensemble of 103 pseudoproxies consisting of random numbers between -2 and +2 for the time 0-2025 AD. To find the “temperature sensitive” proxies (as prescribed for this process) I tested correlation of the random proxies with the NOAA global temperature data set 1850-2025. The chart below shows what I received as average after discarding the negatively and non-correlating proxies. I created global warming from a bunch of meaningless casino numbers, pure noise.
The average of the whole ensemble of pseudoproxies shows no real trend, of course.
Simply flipping (changing the sign) of the pseudoproxies that have the worst correlation has a similar effect (chart below). That is also allowed in their view, since correlation is correlation and can be used, be it negative or positive.
Steve McIntyre weighs in:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
He’s still lazy after all these years.
I see what you did there. Now that Paul Simon song is in my head. 🙂
Can’t hurt.
Ah, wonderful song, beings back so many memories…
That’s what the MANN says…
won’t you listen to what the MANN says,
he says “Blah Blah Blah..blah blah blah blah blah..
>> He’s still lazy after all these years.
I wold disagree! I think he is working tirelessly to defend his opinion and getting rich doing so, unfortunately somehow he (or his senior co-authors Bradley and Hughes) does not see or address valid scientific criticism.
As for the 1998 algorithm is has been criticized as have been most if not all of the later ones.
I keep pointing to a different problem, which McSahne and Wyner described (among others, McIntyre and McKitrick for example mentioned it before him)
“””
Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data in-
creases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.
“””
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23024822)
I am not aware that the proxy selection process is quantified for the overall uncertainty for any proxy study old or new making them all worthless independent of any flaw of the algorithm.
This is a very basic problem for these kind of studies!
A bunch of years ago a colleague gave me a little LabVIEW program that neatly illustrated how to generate hockey sticks from nothing, using only the LV built-in pseudorandom number generator, and then plotted your nice new hockey stick.
No, they didn’t, of course. The funniest thing is that they know that well, and I’m sure you know it, too.
Not just Mann. Science still insists he is right. His results have been reproduced with different methods and proxies since then at least a dozen times, so this is well in the “settled department”.
This is not what Mann did, of course.
You created global warming from a global warming signal, you genius. The NOAA 1850-2020 dataset shows global warming, so anything that has a tail that correlates with that will show a global warming signal for this tail period. Your data was otherwise zero centered random, so you got an essentially zero signal for the initial period. Mann’s proxies are not showing zero for the initial period because they are not random signals. They are showing global warming for the final period because there is global warming.
Where did the pre-1900 data for the Southern Hemisphere oceans come from?
Ask NOAA.
Oh, I see. You don’t know, and you don’t care.
Wrong and wrong. As always 😉
Finally,…..
The Magic 8-Ball would give a more accurate answer.
And they are not showing any correlation with reality because they are random numbers.
If random numbers give you proxies as good as your field research… you haven’t actually found anything in the real world.
Well done on reading a thermometer, though. Credit for your full achievement.
But real scientists look for explanations for the readings.
Mann just thinks of an explanation and then chooses readings that support his opinion.
That’s the opposite of science.
They are randomly generated and then filtered for correlation with reality, so they are definitely showing correlation with reality 😉 Am I right, @Watts?
Errrrrr…..No.
Ah see here’s the thing, and there’s no getting around this. I don’t give a shit what some random anonymous troll (you) thinks….every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Ah, deflection. Anyway, could you help @MCourtney? He doesn’t get how the random data was, well, less random 😉 after you filtered out those series that didn’t correlate with the instrumental record.
Well, thank you, nyolci, for educating me.
In my previous folly, I thought random numbers in no way reflected reality because they are not observations, they are random.
Now I realise that, if you only include those random numbers that match what you want to prove, then they will match what you want to prove. Such a wonderful insight. Thank you.
But, and please be so kind as to help my clearly inferior intellect with a clear answer, how does that differ from thinking of an explanation and then choosing readings that support his opinion?
I admit, without your guidance I’m spinning round like a circular argument.
You know what I mean? You know what a circular argument is, I’m sure.
As I am so obviously in need of your majestic intellectual prowess.
Ouch!
Oh, so then they weren’t just random numbers that magically showed a hockey stick? Because that was essentially your first claim.
BTW, this is not what Mann did. One hint is, that he didn’t use random numbers.
What was the “fudge factor” in the HarryReadMe file? What did it do?
What would it produce?
Maybe Mann didn’t use it but many of his supporters did.
And just for you, a recycle.
1. Gunga Din says:
May 9, 2012 at 5:35 pm
What tree this is, I think I know.
It grew in Yamal some time ago.
Yamal 06 I’m placing here
In hopes a hockey stick will grow.
But McIntyre did think it queer
No tree, the stick did disappear!
Desperate measures I did take
To make that stick reappear.
There were some corings from a lake.
And other data I could bake.
I’ll tweak my model more until
Another hockey stick I’ll make!
I changed a line into a hill!
I can’t say how I was thrilled!
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
What is this supposed to mean? Is this supposed to be a refutation of Mann?
The Climategate files include a fudged version of the smoothed residuals shown in Figure 1 of MBH99. Who knows why Mann did this.
Mann’s fudge factor.
Figure 1 of MBH99 for reference. The residuals were used in the witchcraft Mann performed on PC1.
Which is why he trunc(k)ated the treemometers.
Mann did not use random numbers. He used numbers that had the same significance as random numbers. Which is not a lot.
The point of the hockeystick is that random numbers (or anything as meaningless) cancel out. Some will be up. Some will be down. So if you average them, they give a flat line – the handle of the hockeystick.
That’s fine so long a you treat all the data the same.
But, and i thank you for making this so clear to me, he did not treat all the data the same. He picked the blade – the current day – and treated that differently. He added the meaning to that by picking those that met what he wanted it to meet.
Again, this seems a little inverted. Science should get meaning from the data and then support or oppose a hypothesis.
Mann gets meaning from his opinions and them adds it to the dataset.
You are right, the data does have meaning.
So does advertising.
You know, in science, you have to prove your assertions. You can’t just assert things like above ex cathedra. Back to science, there had been substantial research in this topic before Mann’s article, he used those results. No wonder McIntyre harassed Briffa, for example. He was one of the pioneers in this topic.
Except it’s not flat. And it matches later, independent reconstructions that use independent proxies.
This is a persistent claim in Denierland. And, of course, it is false.
Well that is a question I raised a bit earlier. The statisticians McShane and Wyner have published some insights. Mann’, Hughes and Bradley’s data filtering process changes the uncertainty of the outcome, which they need to quantity!
The uncertainty or Watt’s filtered results should be at least as high as his resulting trends!
A circular argument is what water does in the bowl after a flush.
Results are similar.
He did get it and his response went clear over your head.
Point of observation is that he chose to not dance to your tune.
OK, let me try generating some random data…
Random data being generated and correlated to reality…
There was no difference between the series. They were all random. Or, in the climate case, they were all equally plausible as proxies. When you picked one of them because it correlated with the other variable of interest, you committed the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
This is plainly false. Proxy is what you can prove to have at least a correlation with the investigated phenomenon. You have to establish this first. Mann here used the results of substantial previous research. That research was so advanced by that time that they could discover the so called “divergence problem” already, for example.
This is why you genuinely have no clue about use of proxies.
You absolutely cannot correlate part of the series and expect the rest of the series to also correlate. You cant validate either because thats just a second check and adds no additional value beyond reducing the number of series that correlate.
What you end up with is a series that correlates with the blade (by design) and averages over the shaft (randomly) with little to no historic signal.
Ah, a real expert 😉
Really? For that matter, how do you think the so called Fundamental Laws have been established? Essentially like this. Energy has been conserved so far in each and every reaction observed. So we postulate that it has to be always conserved.
By the way, correlation was just the first step here. The thing had gone much deeper. Again, there had been substantial research into this matter.
Enlighten us on the deeper aspects of tree ring proxies. Particularly those that applied in MBH98.
A good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendroclimatology and check the external links, too.
I’ve already read a lot on the subject, I’m looking for what you consider to be the “deeper” knowledge because quite frankly there is nothing in that link that applied to MBH98.
I’ve already read a lot on the subject,
Then you should know 😉
Start with the work of Briffa. Mann’s results are mostly but not exclusively based on his research.
??? It is a (not very good) summary of the relevant research that was used (at least that part that was available before 1998).
At this point I’m simply proving you don’t have an argument, you don’t understand proxies and don’t actually understand the issue.
Yeah, really 😉
I asked you how the “deeper” aspects of proxies were used in MBH98 and you responded with the Wiki entry for Dendrochronology as if it would be self evident. That’s not an argument.
And you are suddenly at that point where I started. (BTW what you say is not even true, later referred you to Briffa’s work, but anyway). From this point on, it’s up to you, I’m not a science educator, and I’m in no way obliged to give you references, and whether I can give you references that you are willing to accept is irrelevant to the case here. Mann’s work and its later reproductions are part of science, and that’s not something you can just dismiss. 😉
It’s a forum where we choose to discuss topics. You’re continually demonstrating you know nothing about this one by not discussing the actual issues.
Exactly. This is why I’m helping you with references. And whenever you run out of arguments, you resort to ad hominem. Remember the F=ma saga down, we were discussing exactly the same topic.
Hilarious. And it continues to be pointless interacting with you.
So again, you’re out of arguments. 😉
No. We can go back to here if you like
But I fully expect you to not be able to say anything about “deep understandings” of proxy reconstructions with respect to MBH98.
I know for an absolute fact that you wont engage on this.
I’m not an expert in this topic, I just read what I can, and I’m not a science educator either. But this doesn’t invalidate science. I wonder what your evidence is. So far, you only have assertions without evidence. You have to prove that tree rings cannot be used as proxies. I don’t have to prove anything, the proof has already been produced. So please step forward.
They are used as proxies. My claim is that they cant be relied upon and I’ve given a few reasons already. The main simple one is that the temperature signal, if it exists at all, cant be guaranteed to exist throughout the tree’s existence.
Its a very obvious result that the dendro’s need to downplay else they lose their grants.
The “proof” of the issues with proxies as per this article came from Tom Wigley’s own statement of the historic proxy reconstructions varying. If they all contained temperature signals, they’d be consistently representative of global temperatures but they weren’t.
And this is what you have to prove. Or even just disprove the already substantial research into this.
No, you haven’t. What you said was, at most, informal. In (natural) science, you have to quantify etc.
This isn’t a paper, this is a discussion. So to clarify, do you believe that tree ring proxies have a consistent temperature signal throughout their lives?
Or are you going to cop out and say you dont have proof and therefore you wont commit to anything?
You’re free to do that but in doing so you’re confirming your knowledge of tree rings as proxies, that is to say you dont know anything about them.
Yeah. But without the “paper”, this discussion can only boil down to what science says versus what some guys in the “comment section”.
The scientific answer is yes. BTW, for that matter, I haven’t seen any evidence that can be “sold” even remotely as “scientific” (ie. papers) to the contrary. Even the M+M bsing was about what you do with the signal, not with the existence of the signal.
And this is the beauty of it. Because I don’t have to, beyond the “popular scientific” level. Science has to.
You’re not engaging with science. You’ve posted generic links as if your argument was somehow self evident. Unless you can actually engage with an actual argument then you’re not using the science at all, you’re just claiming to.
This is hilarious. The scientific answer is no, it cant be guaranteed because it cant be proven. There is simply no way to do so and no reason to expect it either. Its not reproducible.
The proxy reconstructors assume they can extract a signal from enough proxies, particularly ones that tend to coincide. They have to because they have no choice.
They have definitely looked at the signal before but what they’ve usually done is looked at the assumptions, maths and statistics behind the reconstructions assuming a signal exists.
I should also probably give you a definitive scientific answer to your claim…
The scientific answer is “no” as evidenced by Divergence which is where the proxy temperature signals diverge from the measured temperatures in the latter part of the 20th century.
The Wiki entry summarises it like this
Exactly. Neither of us are a scientist. Generic links (essentially popular scientific accounts) help us have an overall view, and they provide references to actual research if you wanna have deeper understanding.
Sorry, but this is the point when I believe the experts and not a guy from the comment section.
Yes, and they knew immediately they couldn’t attack that. Not that they didn’t have a kinda try, McIntyre tried to induce Briffa for a rebuttal, but the whole thing later turned effectively into harassment. McIntyre’s multiple accounts (expressed in his blogs), if read carefully, tell you the story. The reconstruction was very robust, it wasn’t sensitive to discarding or including series, the answer didn’t change much (which, btw, means this proxy is pretty good). So they decided to attack the method with some bs, and declare “debunking”. Everyone knows outside denier circles that M+M is just fraud. You, deniers, have a religious faith in this, and in the few things you “own” like some Judith Curry articles.
Oh, you’ve just discovered the good old Divergence Problem, the last denier resort? As I mentioned that before somewhere above, this was known already in 1998, as part of the substantial research in the topic. Could you please read further about how that does not affect tree ring based reconstructions.
No I’ve used the divergence problem to prove you wrong on your idea proxies consistently reflect temperatures throughout their histories. You asked for evidence and I gave it to you. Instead of accepting it you deny it and pretend it’s a last resort argument.
The problem is that this is not what I claim 😉 (well, more precisely this is not the scientific claim I repeat here). It’s kinda hopeless to argue with deniers but I try it again. Certain data under certain conditions can be used to reconstruct the approximate value of past variables. A reconstruction is not necessarily a closed-form functional relationship. The Divergence Problem does not invalidate this at all. By the way, having recognized the phenomenon, we can reconstruct temperatures even with divergent series, because we know how they diverge, in a sense we can even claim that they consistently reflect temperatures, but this is not that important here. The actual problem is that there might’ve been periods in the past when there was divergence but there’s evidence that the divergence is recent and very likely anthropogenic (and this is reinforced by independent reconstructions using independent proxies). But this is the point where you really have to read the literature to get further understanding.
I asked
You answered
Now you say
And now I really am done with this conversation.
Okay, before this get out of hand, I have to point out that I don’t necessarily understand the same in your specific wording as you, furthermore, this is the point that we should ask the experts because I don’t know (and I don’t have to know) how this relationship had been established and what this relationship looks like (very likely something non trivial) (okay, I have some vague understanding, but you have to understand that I can’t answer your bs questions in an authoritative way).
Back to the wording, the proxies that were used in the reconstruction definitely had “consistent temperature signal” for the reconstruction period. But it doesn’t mean that “proxies consistently reflect temperatures throughout their histories”, or at least the relationship is more complicated and/or not yet discovered.
Yeah, and now you should try to read a few articles and papers about this at last, after spilling so many words about “invalid proxies” etc.
Yep. Interpolation vs extrapolation.
Mr. Watts, do not sugar coat it. Tell us how you really feel.
🙂
BTY, I fully concur.
Huh, you’re not just a snowflake but a brown nose, too. Yak…
Give it up….
Yes they did, of course.
Yes, they did, of course. Please keep up.
Novel. I didn’t know science was a stand alone entity. I though scientists had something to do with it.
How would anyone know? He still refuses to release his core data. That invalidates his claim to a reproducible scientific phenomenon.
Where did the data come from? The Stevenson screen wasn’t adopted by the Royal Meteorological Society until 1884 and wasn’t in common use in Europe and the US until early/mid 20th Century.
SST’s were taken by chucking a canvas bucket over the side of a ship, principally along defined trade routes, to no defined depth until as late as the 1960’s when the Cutty Sark was finally retired. Few ships ventured into the Southern Ocean at all.
Yeap. Like “The United States”.
And you’re right. That’s a rarity, you were a good boy, I’m proud of you.
This is, of course, a denier myth.
From NOAA.
That’s why they do adjustments. You know, those things you deniers drive yourself in a rage about.
Yeah, sure.
Silly response 1. – United States. I guess you have no argument.
Silly response 2. – And you’re right. That’s a rarity, you were a good boy, I’m proud of you. I guess you still have no argument.
Silly response 3. – This is, of course, a denier myth. The best response when you have no argument, it is very well recognised that Mann has refused to produce his underlying data.
Silly response 4. – From NOAA. Definitely no argument here.
Silly response 4. – That’s why they do adjustments. You know, those things you deniers drive yourself in a rage about. You can’t adjust what you can’t measure, e.g. Souther Ocean SST’s. You can’t adjust for unreliable data, e.g. buckets thrown over the sides of ships to ne definable depth. Furthermore, science is the art of observation, adjustments to data that doesn’t exist is guesswork.
??? You couldn’t imagine science as a “standalone entity”. Which it is, obviously. We treat things as “standalone entities”, that may “insist” on things, etc. The US is one of them. It was just a demonstration how wrong your silly response was. Maybe “The Law” would’ve been a better example.
No. Just a glimpse into this matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_requests_to_the_Climatic_Research_Unit#FOIA_requests_for_emails_discussing_IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report
Then why did you bs about measurements in a canvas bucket? 😉 And yeah, few ships ventured into the Southern Ocean, for sure. You write this with a straight face.
There is scientific method. There are scientists. There are scientific institutions. Where is this thing called “science” or, often, “Science”? A phrase like “the science says” is only somewhat reasonable when you’re talking about a long-established physical science but even then it’s a shortcut. In a field that is disputed and where conclusive testing is mostly not possible, it only obscures and shuts down rational discussion.
And here we are talking about that. This is well beyond the level you can just paper over.
Only paper you have produced so far, is used toilet paper. !
“Deniers” is a criminally offensive slur.
Oops, a snowflake is melting… Did you think WUWT was a “safe space”? You were wrong 😉
WUWT is certainly NOT a safe space for you, but your attempts to hide behind “the science ” and. “NOAA” are hilarious! Keep it up, we need a laugh.
What a hysteric reaction 😉
Don’t rise to the bait.
Before 2005 there was totally inadequate coverage of the southern oceans
Even Phil Jones from CRU said it was “mostly made up”
Adjustments to JUNK and non-existent data.. The “climate change” way !! 😉
For resident troll nyolci, random numbers and invented data are enough. Who needs actual measurements?
If he really did release his core data, it should be easy for you to provide a pointer to it.
Google is your friend, do it yourself, and this is the pointer I give you as a reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
do it yourself
The refuge of a bullshitter.
Thanks for confirming you can’t do it.
I met Science at a party once. I asked “Hey Science, do you really say all that stuff?” Science said “You are not worthy to ask questions of me.” Oh well. At least there were snacks.
How true 😉
Indeed, we are not, because you can’t answer them.
Dr. Fauci goes to parties?
Only if a fat fee is on offer.
Gotta feed the family, right?
(the ‘family’ in this case, involves a staunch commitment to omerta, never letting anyone outside of the family know what you’re thinking, and making agencies an offer they can’t refuse)
Who knew he was also a “Climate Scientist”?
“Dr. Fauci goes to parties?”
A++, 100%
I asked Science that at a party too, she said she was high at the time.
To “replicate” a study is to use the same (raw / input) data with the same methodology (/ computer algorithm) and check you get exactly the same results.
Hampus Soderqvist provided the last “reverse-engineering” work required to re-generate the “core data” that gives exactly the same numbers published in MBH98 (and/or its SI) back in November 2023.
The whole sorry saga is in this Climate Audit article.
As Stephen McIntyre summarised the situation in 2005 :
As Stephen put it after checking Hampus Soderqvist’s numbers 18 years after posting the above :
It “only” took 25 years, but the scientific process of “replication” was finally done for MBH98 back in November 2023.
Except this is false. Moreover, M and M consciously obfuscate the whole issue. Eg. they had the original data all along.
And showed the Mann fabrication was totally BOGUS !
I’m not sure if this qualifies as a full-blown “Strawman !” logical fallacy or if it’s just a mild form of “deflection”.
Yes they had the “full list” of (108 ?) proxies used in MBH98.
The problem was getting the specific lists of the “network” of proxies used in each individual “time step” calculation.
People with enough “childlike curiosity” to look into the details were continually frustrated with their” close, but no cigar” attempts at replication until Hampus Soderqvist finally managed to “reverse-engineer” the set of lists of proxies that were actually used for each “network / time step” in MBH98.
From the Climate Audit article :
.
The normal public perception of how “Science” works is that scientists do their best to help other researchers in their replication (and/or reproduction) efforts, “willingly and openly sharing data and methods (/ computer code)” as the saying goes.
This is most definitely not what happened with Michael Mann with regard to MBH98 (at least).
To interested onlookers, such as myself, that is not how “Real Scientists” are supposed to conduct themselves.
.
It is the attitude that is the problem, not the esoteric mathematical details of the differences between “standard” and “off-centred” PCA algorithms.
See also Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes back in 2004 :
“‘Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.”
Answer : “Because that is how ‘The Scientific Method’ works, you idiot !“
The McCretins and all the later guys did all this circus, did these FOI requests to obfuscate the issue. The McCretins particularly knew well the reconstruction was correct. A good secondary goal was to harass scientists. The FOI requests were especially malevolent. If they don’t give you the information, then cry “scandal!”. If they do, cry about how you haven’t received all. Or that what you received was wrong. Or there was something in the data. Or grab a sentence in an email out of context etc. These are usually plain lies, distortions, half truths. They knew well the intended audience, right winger politicians, would not understand these things. Neither the general public that are not well versed in scientific matters.
Mark: Thank you for this excellent summary, accurate as I recall it. This string establishes two possibilities: 1) nyolci does not have the math skills to get this, only skill is as a contrarian; or 2) he is paid not to get it. Assessing credibility at a distance is ordinarily too hard and easy to get wrong, but I could see that McIntyre was honest and Mann’s folks were not. This nyolci commenter decided that credibility is optional, lost me.
Well, there’s a third one. This is valid science, and whether you like the results or not, this fact is very strong, you can’t just dismiss it out of hand. Furthermore, even if I didn’t have the skills (I actually have), it wouldn’t change a thing. I don’t have to have these skills. We have the experts for that. In this case, climate scientists.
For someone who claims to “have the skills” it is more than a little surprising that you seem never to have heard of the “Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy.
[ Enter “extremely sarcastic” mode … ]
Oh my $DEITY ! Not just “a scientist” but “a climate scientist” ?!?
The only possible conclusion is that when they were awarded their PhD they were also supplied by their alma mater with the gifts of omniscience and infallibility ! ! !
[ Exit “extremely sarcastic” mode … as far as that is possible in my case …]
.
More seriously, here is a well-known counter-example.
In the early 1980s Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel prize for medicine.
Barry Marshall’s subsequent Nobel lecture included the following :
Sound familiar ?
.
PS : “When all experts agree, something else tends to happen.” — Bob Farrell
Wrong, as always. Anyway, climate scientists are the authority here, not some random guys from the “comment section”. This is the truth.
Should mankind dismiss science because there happened to be some scientists who failed in a certain topic? BTW the amount of bs that is sold as science here (and in denier forums in general) for the captive audience should make you exponentially more cautious.
Mr. 8-ball: So, your third one is, your big brothers can beat up my big brothers? It is invalid statistics, has been dismissed after thorough treatment by experts, M&M. The fact that’s strong is this- your failure to comprehend Mann’s abuse of stats indicates the lack of skill. Bigly.
More like you don’t have brothers at all, to carry on with bad analogies.
Exactly the opposite. Outside of denier circles, everyone knows these guys are charlatans. They themselves know that.
Mann promised Nature editor Heike Langenberg he would provide the full set of data used in MBH98.
https://sealevel.info/FOIA/2011/FOIA/mail/1619.txt
Needless to say, he only included two PCs in the “full” dataset. Maybe the corrigendum needs a corrigendum…
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02478
14 years after MBH98, Mann still hadn’t figured out which data he used. From his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars:
What a joke.
Science insists? Interesting turn of phrase.
He means propaganda insists, of course.
This is why you should read science. Only reading denier sites makes you dumber.
“Denier” is a criminally offensive slur.
Oops, a snowflake is melting… Did you think WUWT was a “safe space”? You were wrong 😉
Not surprising you can’t tell a statement from a meltdown.
“
ScienceThe Holy Mother Climate Emergency Church still insists he is right.I think I know how Mann created his original “Hockey” stink….did I misspell a word?
Let’s be very clear about this. Was the science behind the hockey stick good science or not, from what you know? I’m very specifically not asking about the recent increase in temperatures. I’m asking about the science behind MBH98.
Yes, it was. And you should at least try to understand it. And this is not trolling etc. Furthermore, the denier accounts are numerous but they are so extremely convoluted and obfuscated that no wonder anything and everything are said about Mann. And be careful, McIntyre is not an honest actor.
Mr. letter-salad for name: “And this is not trolling etc.” Funny that you feel the need to deny it in advance.
You are incapable of the math AND assessing credibility.
Mr. dumbaxx, you are soooo literate in these things… 😉
I’ve looked into it in detail. The fact you think a proxy correlated with the temperature record is a valid proxy speaks volumes on your own knowledge.
And no, MBH98 was not valid science for a number of reasons. You dont use non-standard processes with no discussion. Mann didn’t know what he was doing, it was a shambles.
See above. Anyway, it was not me, who thought this. This is a scientific thing, whether you like the results or not. And, by the way, it was more than just correlation.
You mean where you liken an understanding of Physics to an application of assumption of temperature signal to a thing known to be influenced by myriad factors unequally over time?
Please let us know from MBH98 what this mystical knowledge was?
Yes.
By the way, this is how science works. Climatic reconstructions have to get the signal from very noisy sources because we don’t have anything else. We can’t say anything about past climates without these proxy studies. The next time you see a denier fumbling about the Roman Warm Period or the Holocene Climatic Optimum, will you ask him these questions?
Good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendroclimatology
You’re going to have to explain that more clearly to me. You appear to be comparing a physics concept, let say F=ma with a proxy where the temperature signal, if it exists at all, isn’t guaranteed to persist over time.
Tell me why you believe that comparison is valid.
I always wonder how most people don’t understand these things.
F=ma, or Newton’s 2nd law, is an empirical law, a postulate in the Newtonian model of Physics. In other words, Newton postulated it based on observations. Roughly speaking, force have been, so far, in every observation, the product of mass and acceleration, so we postulate that this is always the case. How bold. The “guaranteed to persist over time” question is kinda valid here, right? 😉 Now the second law is an axiom in the Newtonian mathematical model of Physics (“model” here means something different from the “model” in modelling, so you don’t have to cross yourself). In these model, this is of course like an idea of Plato.
Now this is the interesting part, because the 2nd law is known to be “wrong”. The Newtonian model was falsified cc. 130 years ago. Physics has two valid models, quantum mechanics and relativity. Of course, the Newtonian is used in almost every practical setting because it’s still very accurate and mathematically substantially simpler than the other two. But specifically the second law is more like an approximation. How ironic. If you wanna know more, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_theorem
These are two completely different issues. F=ma isn’t wrong. m varies with v which isn’t part of the equation. But aside from that, your argument is just way off beam.
All proxies are known to not be thermometers and vary temperature signal over time due to other influences. Trees are especially vulnerable to change over time.
Some Proxies have signal that can only possibly reflect temperature averaging over decades and longer.
These limitations are well understood and mean proxies can’t be used to measure temperature except in the very broadest low frequency sense. But even knowing this, scientists go on to fool themselves into believing they can get great global accuracy comparable to today’s thermometer readings.
To me it seems that the “isn’t guaranteed to persist over time” part got a much lower priority. I think this is a result 😉
Yes. We didn’t have thermometers then. This is why we have to use proxies. Otherwise we can’t say anything about past temperatures. We can’t say anything about how warm the Holocene Climatic Optimum was. The good news is that nowadays we have independent reconstructions based on multiple, independent proxies. These reconstructions support each other, and all give the hockey stick. Now it’s possible that these are all bad. But kinda unlikely and it’s getting more and more unlikely as science is progressing. BTW It is possible that F is not ma. But unlikely. This latter is, of course, more unlikely than the previous. But the possibility for both are greater than zero. I hope you get the point.
Oh rly? Then why did Tom Wigley say the following in the climategate emails?
So we can conclude that the F=ma turned out to be the opposite what you had thought it would be, right?
Oh, at least something. For a long time… 😉 Have you read the whole email? Like this (among others):
You are grasping for straws here with out of context quotes from emails written in 2005. How a scientific refutation? BTW, Wigley said this after the “scandal”:
No? Why?
F=ma has predictable results because the formula just works under every condition once you account for mass changing with velocity. Its perfectly predictable.
By comparison proxy data temperature signal varies uncontrollably if it exists at all. You have no clue whether there is a signal there or not for any reading. What “scientists” do is correlate to known temperature data, select the samples based on that and assume data that applies before the tested correlation applied.
Now you tell me how the predictable physics relates to the unpredictable proxy data?
Unsurprisingly your response was a non response. Tom was explicit about the historic data from the proxy reconstructions varying. ie the hockey stick handles were all over the shop [and cancelled out as predicted] What is your response to the actual issue?
Oh, so you still don’t get it 😉
I haven’t seen anything in Physics that forbade nontrivial, statistical relationships. For a good reason. BTW, how can you be sure in the validity of this formula? This is just an observational law.
What is this supposed to mean? You mean the signal has a nontrivial and statistical dependence on observation? Again, this is, in itself, doesn’t invalidate a proxy. You have to prove that this is the case. And this part is missing, and no, a phised, out of context sentence from 20 years ago is not enough for that.
Interestingly, in the same email, Tom was explicit about the McCretins, too. How about that? 😉
Back to the validities of proxies, neither you nor I are experts, for obvious reasons, so we can’t say anything beyond quoting someone. I can only quote science, the actual experts. You only have that one single sentence.
Fundamentally incorrect. Proxies are invalid until proven correct and as it turns out, that can never happen so they’re assumed correct. What else are we supposed to do to understand historic temperatures?
Fine for a broad view of history…but when they’re compared to recent temperatures to the nearest fraction of a degree then I have a major problem.
And they have been proven correct already. From this point on, scientifically, they are (under very specific, well described circumstances) are proxies (something is either proxy or not, invalid proxy is not a proxy).
This is an extraordinary assertion, and, you know, it needs an extraordinary proof. Where’s that? Furthermore, if you talk about proxies in general, it means you can never have any information about past temperatures. Then how you can speak about the Holocene Climatic Optimum? Or you just talk about tree ring series specifically?
I honestly say that you should read at least some research in this (and other proxy studies) to see how they handle resolution. Otherwise you can’t say anything valid about these.
Just like you. Neither of us are an expert. I have the advantage that I have read at least some actual studies in that, and I have at least a “popular scientific understanding” of the process.
In other words, the signal (that we want to extract) has a nontrivial dependence on the observational data.
Why? 😉 If you give such a weight to a sentence in that email, why do you dismiss another sentence?
Orly? I didn’t need details, I needed an understanding from you as a simple statement. And not a statement like because scientists say so.
But here we end the conversation.
In scientific matters, this is the point if you’re not knowledgeable in the topic.
Brave Sir Robin ran away when he couldn’t justify why one sentence was utmost decisive in an email, and why he just papered over another one.
What other sentence? Surely you dont mean the one where Tom included “Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless.“?
Discussions around the hockey stick handle has nothing to do with distortion or faking. Its to do with lack of temperature signal which is very specifically neither of the things he claimed were baseless accusations.
Tell me what you think the “…the wide range of paleo results and the differences between them…” statement means in the context of the hockey stick handle?
Again. You wont do it. Guaranteed. Because you’re not an expert. So again, I ask myself why I’m here discussing this with you.
About M+M. In the same email. BTW, if you read the email as a whole, the sentence you quoted looks more like he was mentioning a technical hurdle, not a damning revelation.
For that matter, Tom didn’t speak about the “lack of signal”, or the impossibility of getting a signal. He was talking about the difference of certain reconstructions (at certain times). This is a far cry from a settled conclusion of the impossibility of signal extraction.
Doesn’t matter as long as I say what the actual experts say.
No it doesn’t. He’s very specific.
Tom said
A wide range of paleo results isn’t a “difference of certain reconstructions”. You’re desperately trying to minimise the issue.
Tom said later that it didn’t invalidate the reconstructions so I’m inclined to think that this was a technical hurdle what you are expected to have in science. BTW, 20 years later we have numerous independent reconstructions with the same results.
But you know what else Tom said? 😉
Re:
You’re so unknowledgeable, you cant engage. All you can do is claim the scientists know what they’re doing and provide generic references.
So again, this is just a pointless dialog from my point of view.
I’ll be specific about this, though.
The answer is no. The signal “has a nontrivial and statistical dependence on” many factors such as precipitation, fertilisation, sunlight, pests, disease to name a few. There may be no effective temperature signal at all because its swamped by other factors.
And most importantly of all is there is simply no way to know for sure.
Childish. And completely irrelevant.
He fed generated noise data with no upward trend into Mann’s plotting code and got a ‘hockey stick’ graph. That’s proof Mann’s plotting code is a fraud.
No, and it’s hilarious that you don’t understand what he (Watts) did ‘cos he described it in the second paragraph clearly.
The calculations were done by X user NewPositivism, not Anthony Watts.
It’s hilarious that you don’t understand this.
You caught me, you genius 😉
You need to spell out exactly what was done, and what was deduced from the results. Line by line. Just do it, it will be, if you are right, irrefutably correct and will end the argument..
Your first line is: select n proxies because they are [summary grounds]….
Go on from there.
What you have written so far is completely unclear. You say, for instance
The NOAA 1850-2020 dataset shows global warming, so anything that has a tail that correlates with that will show a global warming signal for this tail period.
No idea what you are saying here.or what the argument is. Spell it out line by line, if you can.
I don’t have to. It’s been done. This is the beauty of science. Just read the papers. And scientists have already given you a lot of easily digestible stuff, see eg. realclimate.org.
It means if you have a bunch of time series that represents the last 2000 years, and you pick among them those that closely match the last 150 years, and then you average them, then you get a signal that at the tail (the last 150 years) looks like the last 150 year. Pretty obviously. And it obviously does not prove that random signals give you a hockey stick.
BTW, as an illustration how bad the above is, the method Watts used produced an essentially zero first 1850 years, which is understandable, since his data was completely random there. Of course the “hockey stick” graph is not essentially zero there.
Sharpshooters fallacy.
Going to defend ‘short centered’ PCA next?
😉 I have the feeling that you get your talking points from denier bs, and you have no idea what PCA is.
Mr. michel: Looks like he’s paid to do precisely that.
“ Science still insists he is right.”
Would you be so kind as to forward an address, phone number for Science as you are so familiar with him (her?), I really would like to meet him… or her?
Why? You wouldn’t even understand the address.
If it’s convenient, could you post your code? I went through the exercise some years ago, and I, too, got a hockey stick from red noise, but unlike you and Mr. McIntyre I always got a significant dip just before the blade, so I think there’s something I’m missing.
Mr. Born: Isn’t that a roaring silence?
From the article: “Of course Mann still insists he’s right, mainly because his super-sized ego won’t allow him to admit his errors.”
I don’t think they were errors. Mann got what he intended to get: A distorted temperature record that promoted the CO2 warming narrative. And he’s sticking to his story.
Mann is like the prisoner who will never admit he committed a crime. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you have against him, he will never acknowledge any of it.
Mann has made his bed and now he has to lie in it. 🙂
“It’s not me in that video!”
“Mann has made his bed and now he has to lie in it.”
He seems to lie the rest of the time so he may as well lie in his bed too.
I see what you did there.
Mann is like the prisoner who will never admit he committed a crime. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you have against him, he will never acknowledge any of it.
Sounds exactly like nyolci.
The blade of the hockey stick is not the thing that was ever in question – McIntyre’s argument was never that MBH misrepresented the blade. The argument is that MBH misrepresented the handle. Of course if you select for series that correlate to the instrumental record, you will get a blade. McIntyre thought Mann’s handle was too flat.
I think both
I’ve not seen McIntyre dispute the modern instrumental record. His argument published in he and McKitrick’s 2005 GRL paper certainly did not (where the claim about red noise producing hockey sticks first arose), rather the argument focuses on the preindustrial portion of the reconstruction.
“the modern instrumental record”
LOL.
Everyone knows the modern surface data is total bovex.
Based on bad sites, urban warming, airport jet data, and data fabrication and malipulation.
The probity is non-existent.
Which is saying that the MBH has no skill in estimating temperatures prior to 1850 and therefor doesn’t give any useful information beyond the instrumental record.
MBH was claiming that the handle was an accurate representation of temperatures prior to 1850.
Mann’s series weren’t red noise. Andy’s analysis is basically demonstrating a way of filtering random series to find ones that upturn at the end, it doesn’t say anything about Mann’s reconstruction at all.
If you get essentially the same results with red noise as what you get a data series, that calls into question the validity of the data series. This is especially true considering “Mike’s Nature trick” of splicing instrumental data for the last 2-3 decades, which implies that the sets of data series as used correlates poorly with instrumental temperature.
Mann’s finding was essentially that there wasn’t a lot of global-scale or hemisphere-scale climate change happening in the preindustrial common era, so in a kind of abstract sense it is true that the series prior to the instrumental period look a bit like random noise. But Mann did not use random series, he used temperature sensitive proxies.
So again, I agree that taking a bunch of red noise series and filtering down to only ones showing an uptick at the end will make a hockey stick shaped thing in the aggregate, I disagree that this says anything about Mann’s methodology.
He “spliced” in instrumental data for the period in which there wasn’t no proxy data, so this “splicing” says nothing at all about proxy correlation to the instrumental record.
Used CO2 limited tree ring proxies, and a totally FAKE methodology.
But hey, that is what the whole climate scam is built on.
My argument is that Mann’s “finding” doesn’t prove anything about the climate prior is that his graph isn’t significantly different from using the same analysis on random numbers in the form of red noise.
It is significantly different because Mann used temperature-sensitive proxies in his reconstruction, which is much different than using random series. The fact that the reconstruction doesn’t look a lot different than random noise is because not much was happening in the preindustrial common era global climate. This finding has been replicated numerous times by other researchers employing independent analysis and different proxy networks.
Temperature sensitive proxies? Such as tree rings, which are much more indicative of precipitation than temperature?
There is a fair amount of historical record that implies weather in North America and Europe in AD 1000 was different than 1600 or even now. One example is Viking farmland in Greenland that is now permafrost.
Mann used a multiproxy network, most of which record multiple signals including temperature that must be carefully analyzed by scientists before being used in reconstructions.
it may well be that some areas experienced markedly different climates than present day during the preindustrial common era, what Mann’s reconstruction indicated is that those changes did not exhibit global coherence.
Mann’s finding was essentially that there wasn’t a lot of global-scale or hemisphere-scale climate change happening in the preindustrial common era, so in a kind of abstract sense it is true that the series prior to the instrumental period look a bit like random noise.
The assertion that there was little climate change in the pre-industrial era is absurd and contradicted by a veritable mountain of historical and physical evidence.
That isn’t the assertion.
That’s what MBH98’s handle shows.
The MBH98 hockey stick graph is a global reconstruction – it shows that there no climate changes with global coherence comparable to the modern day over the preindustrial common era, not that there was no climate change.
It shows that proxies that have been chosen to correlate with the modern temperature increases, largely dont have coherent temperature signals and tend to cancel out variability. Hence the flat handle.
Believing that MBH98 shows low temperature variability is nonsense and historians, if they knew, would laugh. There is a mountain of archaeological evidence that regions had great variability that isn’t borne out in the proxy data.
But that’s largely irrelevant to the likelihood that the proxies aren’t even close to being able to reproduce temperatures that could be compared to today’s relatively extensive thermometer networks.
Of course, the handle is not flat, it just doesn’t show any change with global coherence comparable to the modern era over the preindustrial common era, which numerous subsequent studies have confirmed. And the proxies were not selected based on correlation to the instrumental record – the proxies were drawn from existing archives of known paleoclimate indicators whose relationship to large scale climate patterns was already well established.
Again, to repeat, Andy’s exercise in the top level post has nothing whatever to do with the actual methodology employed in MBH98 or in any other paleoclimate reconstruction. It’s just a simplistic filtering procedure for identifying random series with an uptick at the end.
And how do you think they establish any relationship with “large scale climate patterns”?
Answers such as yours make it obvious you don’t understand proxies and consequently can’t understand the issue in the article.
Scientists establish the climate relationship by carefully studying the physical, chemical, and/or biological characteristics of the material being used as a proxy. Once the processes that influence the proxy’s characteristics are well understood, the proxy can be calibrated against a portion of the overlapping instrumental records where they exist, and the calibrated can then be validated against another portion.
You think that understanding a tree’s need for water helps unravel the temperature signal from the tree rings? And how do you think they do that?
Obviously understanding environmental factors driving growth helps scientists understand how trees respond to changes in those factors. It isn’t clear to me if you’re merely feigning ignorance in the service of contrarianism or are genuinely seeking understanding. If the latter I’m happy to help you learn.
I missed this claim until now. No. Mann truncated the series then spliced in the temperature record and then smoothed. He then removed the modern temperatures again leaving the proxy data with an uptick that didn’t exist.
This is Mike’s Nature trick and is the basis for the meme of hiding the decline which was really about hiding the decline in the proxy data.
This is a mischaracterization. Mann did not truncate any series. His “Nature Trick” was merely to plot the instrumental series alongside his reconstruction, which ended in 1981, to bring it up to present day (you can see this clearly in Fig. 5b from the paper). All of the proxy records used were fully represented. The truncation that “hide the decline” refers to was to omit the portion of a different reconstruction – Keith Briffa’s tree ring series – from 1961 onward, where it showed a sharp decline that Briffa cautioned was not a climatic signal. Mann’s reconstruction does not include these tree series and thus has no decline to hide.
Don’t be silly. Plotting two graphs in the same diagram is not a trick.
Obviously proxies extending past 1980 were truncated.
There were no proxies extending past 1981 in Mann’s study.
Because Mann truncated the data. Surely you don’t believe the most recent proxy data available in 1998 ended in 1980.
This isn’t a matter of personal belief, Mann published the list of proxy records used in the reconstruction.
And most records end after 1980. M&M highlighted one which declines after 1980.
That is fair enough. The point is that the reconstruction ends in 1980. Mann did not truncate series to “hide a decline.” He truncated any series that extended past 1980 because that is when the reconstruction ends. There were not enough records available post 1980 to produce a robust reconstruction. As listed in the manuscript: “11 from 1780–1980, 9 from 1760–1779, 8 from 1750 1759, 5 from 1700–1749, 4 from 1600–1699, 2 from 1450–1599, 1 from 1400–1449.” Further articulated thus: “the training interval is terminated at 1980 because many of the proxy series terminate at or shortly after 1980.”
The argument being made in this thread is that Mann produced a reconstruction extending beyond 1980, saw that it showed a sharp decline between 1980 and 1998, and then truncated the reconstruction in an attempt to cover it up, which is blatantly untrue.
You’re wrong about what Mann did and you even contradicted yourself.
and
McIntyre wrote on it in detail at ClimateAudit if you wanted to check for yourself.
You’re conflating actions by multiple different people in different contexts. Mann did not do any truncation. Mann did not use Briffa’s tree ring series showing a post-1961 decline in his 1998 reconstruction. Mann presented a plot of the entirety of his reconstruction up to the date of the most recent proxies in 1981, and he plotted the instrumental series alongside to show the most recent changes where no proxy records existed. That was his “Nature trick.” It’s clearly labeled in his Nature paper.
Keith Briffa did not truncate his own tree ring series; he published the reconstruction as-is and cautioned other researchers not to rely on the post-1961 portion, which showed a sharp decline that Briffa was certain did not reflect a climate signal.
The truncation was performed by Phil Jones, for a graphic he was preparing for the cover of a WMO report, in which he wanted to present Mann and Briffa’s reconstructions side by side in a spaghetti graph. He omitted the post-1960 portion of Briffa’s series and appended the instrumental series to it to “hide the decline.” This is rather clearly articulated in the hacked CRU emails.
I’ve read all of McIntyre’s writing on the subject. I’ve also read all of the relevant papers that McIntyre is writing about.
Well apparently you didn’t understand it. Here is the relevant post where Steve says
And comes with the following graphic
This is not truncation, and MBH98 includes the smoothed and unsmoothed reconstruction. The “divergence” McIntyre alludes to is not a divergence in the reconstruction itself, but an artifact of the smoothing process. McIntyre would have preferred that the smoothed series be truncated in the visual, and that is a fine personal preference.
No it didn’t. MBH98 included the purple line in the graphic above. That’s the smoothed and truncated line.
The “pre smoothing” in green wasn’t included and was annotated in the dialog as
Regarding
Seriously? McIntyre clearly spelt out the issue in my quote. The divergence is between the unsmoothed proxy data (ie actual reconstructions) and the temperature readings (ie instrumental series) as per.
He spells out the whole thing very clearly above and you’re just denying it. This is a new low for you.
MBH98 included the purple line and the black line in the image above. Here, I’ve plotted the MBH98 Fig 5 reconstruction alongside the instrumental data:
No smoothing.
There is nothing else to argue. There is no divergence in MBH98.
Good for you.
The post-1961 values were leaked in a Climategate email.
The post-1961 decline in the max latewood density of some species of high northern latitude trees has been discussed openly in the literature since 1995, and Briffa himself published a paper on the topic in 1998. There was nothing to leak.
The whole methodology was aimed at creating what he wanted to show.
The fact that red noise give the same results shows it is a totally JUNK methodology.
And tree rings when CO2 is low are a totally stupid proxy to use.
And tree rings when CO2 is low are a totally stupid proxy to use.
This cannot be overemphasised. The very foundation of Mann’s work is vacuous and worthless.
From your linked paper ….
”We are combining the conventionally used ice core and lake productivity data with palaeotemperature proxies from palynology (e.g. Flantua et al., 2016), tree rings, moraine age dating, marine cores as well as various other methodologies and palaeoclimatic archive types (e.g. McGregor et al., 2015; Moy et al., 2009).
So it’s OK in this study ?
or is it …
”a totally stupid proxy to use”.
“The blade of the hockey stick is not the thing that was ever in question”
The blade of the Hockey Stick (the instrument-era portion) IS in question. There is no historical data supporting such a “hotter and hotter” temperature trendline.
The original, historic temperature data from around the world does not show a “hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick temperature trendline, it shows that temperatures in the past were just as warm as today.
You can’t legitimately, honestly get a “hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick temperature profile out of data that has no such profile.
So what happened was Mann combined his bastardized portion of the Hockey Stick with the bastardized instrument-era portion. and that is the distortion of reality that is the Hockey Stick chart of today.
The Hockey Stick chart is the Big Lie of Alarmist Climate Science. It’s the only thing Alarmists can point to to try to show a correlation between CO2 and temperatures and its all made up out of whole cloth.
You can’t legitimately get a Hockey Stick chart out of data that does not resemble a Hockey Stick chart. It’s not possible without dishonestly fudging the data.
If you believe in the Hockey Stick chart, you believe in a lie, and you are living in a False Reality as a result.
When you remove the low-CO2 constrained tree ring junk, you get a much more realistic reconstruction..
Briffa’s tree ring data since 1900, is quite interesting
I’m perplexed. Is the tree ring data interesting, or is it junk? You present two contradictory positions.
When it CO2 start to get to a reasonable level for plant growth
Around 1900 as we fortunately came out of the LIA..
Don’t deny low CO2 levels before that, it destroys the whole scam you are trying to push.
Or is basic biology beyond you.
And Briffa’s data clearly shows the LIA and the cold period around 1979, with 1990’s much cooler than 1930s,40s
Yes. The end result is to attenuate the MWP and LIA.
Jolly hockey sticks; well, they were for a time. And now they are not.
Mannequin – is a large model of…
Regrettably it is missing one beautiful point. Mann did not match his “proxies” over the full 1850-2025 period, and then select the few that matched, instead he basically used just the warming in the first half of the 20th century as criterion. Positive or negative correlation did not matter either, in the latter case he just flipped the data.
If you do that, you will induce a downward trend beyond the reference period, just like this (multiple runs with random data)..
For the time after the reference period that produced a “decline”, that to be “hidden”. But there will also be a declining trend before, which was featured in all these kind of “reconstructions”. If is an artefact due to a non-working approach.
https://greenhousedefect.com/basic-greenhouse-defects/how-to-hockey-stick
Which leads to speculation as to whether Michael Mann is very good (and deliberately deceptive) or very bad (and unwilling to accept a result is a pure artifact) at writing algorithms. As parapsychology is at least as controversial as “climate change”, I believe there is no way to read his mind.
So is he the current version of Sir Cyril Burt, or the poster boy for Noble Cause Corruption?
East Angola gives a hint.
For “Noble Cause Corruption” you must first have a noble cause. I believe corruption is more than adequate.
Story tip:
UN Human Rights Council Demands Criminalisation of Climate Scepticism Worldwide
In order to protect human rights, human rights must be curtailed.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/07/11/un-human-rights-council-demands-criminalisation-of-climate-scepticism-worldwide/
Hail, fellow thought criminals…
They are not talking about you. You are just everyday idiots. They are talking about those who drive this.
I guess that makes you an everyday idiot, too.
And since you are reading this you obviously are becoming dumber by the minute.
Yep, people like Gore and the climate glitterati are basically pushing a criminal HOAX/FRAUD .. Both He and Mann have made a lot of money from it.
Hopefully, since Mann’s loss in court, we will be destitute, like his Hockey Stick.
“You are just everyday idiots”
How dare you; I’m not an everyday idiot !!
I’m only an idiot on Mondays, Wednesday & Fridays (:-))
You sound bitter. Must be the arse-kicking you received upthread.
does this mean we will all have to do the “perp walk” with our hands behind our backs, pretending to be handcuffed like Greta does?
“From the “anybody can make a hockey stick out of random numbers department” and Twitter”
There is no Twitter.
Call it x all you want, it is still just twitter.
No, it is not. And with this frivolous lawsuit the floodgates are going to open and he is going to be roasted all over the intrawebsthingy!!!!!!!!!
Mann may have created the hockey stick, but he can’t make it stick.
The mannifest destiny of Mann is to be hit between the eyes with a hockey puck
We first got a Digital Subscriber Line [DSL – broadband internet that uses phone lines] in the fall of 2008. One of the first papers I read was by Stephen McIntyre, The Ohio State Presentation; still available on Climate Audit.
It seems amazing that the phenomena of the “hockey stick” and the “97% of scientists” are still hanging around.
Chatgpt Summary:
The math error was in using a short-period mean for centering, which violated standard PCA assumptions and biased the results toward pre-determined features—a form of data mining or selection on the dependent variable.
lest we forget –
misplaced
Only your critical thinking skills.
My comment was misplaced. But you can edit, not remove, it seems.
You can remove a comment within the time limit by erasing your comment and then clicking the “reply” button again, and the reply box will disappear.
This works if done before you click “post comment”. I don’t know if it works after posting it, and then trying to delete it. I haven’t ever tried it that way.
Tom, that process surmises that the commenter reads his / her draft and concludes that they’re going to make a fool of themselves the moment they click on “Post Comment”.
So best they don’t know about the process of back-tracking idiotic drafted comments?
That’s what I did but the reply box didn’t disappear.
“comes this interesting exercise”
It is not interesting. It is pointless. The point of Mann’s analysis, replicated many times since, was to show that there was little temperature variation for many centuries, compared with the recent rapid rise measured instrumentally. All you are showing is that you can find other ways of simulating small variation (IOW nothing happening). The recent rise still happened.
Except….
Christiansen and Ljungqvist did, in fact, show significant temperature variation pre-1850.
It was similar to Mann. Didn’t change the hockey stick shape.
Changed the blade completely.. Showed MWP period was warmer than now.
Reality.
Adapted, it says. By rubbing out the instrumental CRUTEM, which Ljungqvist showed.
Well, I can adapt too. That graph stopped in 1999. CRUTEM has risen 0.84C since then. Here’s how it stands now:
Profoundly false!
You know very well the hockey stick shape is a load of made-up crap. You can not tack proxies to ACTUAL measurements and expect to be taken seriously. For Christ sake! What the hell is wrong with you?
The MWP was was warmer in the Arctic than it is at the moment (see actual emperical evidence) which means the rest of the globe was almost certainly warmer too.
“which means the rest of the globe was almost certainly warmer too”
Hand waving.
Another provable lie from Stokes. The MWP was global.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2018.10.041
And the point of this exercise is to show the result was inevitable.
What Mann found was that over many centuries, temperature variations were small, in contrast to the big recent rise measured by thermometer. The two made up the hockey stick.
So yes, it is inevitable that if you artificially, even randomly, generate an earlier period with small variations, you’ll get a hockey stick too.
What Mann found was that proxy series chosen to correlate with modern increasing temperatures has a flat handle due to the random nature of the proxies cancelling out. Maybe a little signal is present or maybe not but ether way, the average is mostly flat.
This is science, its been theorised and repeatedly shown to be true in experiment with red noise. There is no doubt of the effect.
The only thing in doubt at this time is whether any signal in any proxy has effectively been used to represent temperature.
As to MBH98, it was irreproducible, unexplainable trash “science”.
For whatever reason Mann got a flat handle.Iit is useless, as here, to construct another flat handle and say, “look, a hockey stick”.
If you want to disprove the HS, as shown by Mann and dozens of others, you have to either
_1 Show, with evidence, that the past was much more variable
or _2. Show that the modern warming measured by thousands of thermometers did not happen.
Or…
3. Show that the procedure used, produces a hockey stick from random data and that’s what was done.
This means the proxy data didn’t have to reflect temperatures at all to get the result.
Its not useless to show the flawed procedure. Its useless to deny that the procedure is flawed without coming up with at least some sort of plausible argument.
Still not convinced? Well explain divergence. Scientifically I mean, because divergence absolutely nullifies any argument you may have that the proxy data reflected temperatures.
“ produces a hockey stick from random data and that’s what was done“
No. Mann produced a specific history, which together with the modern rise, gave the imperssion of a HS. But HS is a very broad descriptor – it isn’t his result. Anyony who sets out to emulate a flattish blade with that modern rise will get a HS. It is just drawing – you can do it with a Sharpie. Nothing to do with Mann.
“Its not useless to show the flawed procedure.”
It says nothing about Mann’s procedure. The Procedure is all Anthony’s.
It does even if you wont accept it.
And I thought you had a bit of mathematical nouse…. Seems not.
If the methodology produces a hockey stick from red noise…
.. IT IS A BOGUS METHODOLOGY !!
And specifically with regards
I’m reminded of how science works in conjunction with human nature. Here, Richard Feynman describes the issue
So is MBH98 the right answer to variability? No. Are there later papers showing more variability? Yes. Is it likely that the past was even more variable than we’ve “found” so far? Who knows, but the way science and human nature works, I suggest it will be.
And done! Any other problems?
Mr. Mike: Your answer wins, in my book (other answers also win, because Mann lied in more than one way). I’m surprised Mr. Stokes didn’t run a few laps around the word “evidence” before introducing the word “regional”. It’s become that predictable.
Thank you.
One piece of hard physical evidence trumps a million computer simulations.
Of course, if Stokes objects, we can show him plenty of other examples.
What Mann found was that over many centuries, temperature variations were small, in contrast to the big recent rise measured by thermometer. The two made up the hockey stick.
A palpable and provable lie.
OK, prove it.
There are plenty of other papers showing both the global extent and the synchronicity of the MWP, but one should suffice here.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2018.10.041
My brother, PhD and university professor of Geology disagrees.
The temperature going back to the Roman Optimum and beyond was NOT flat and those variations were global. You can fool the people, but you cannot fool the rocks.
I didn’t say flat. I said small variation.
Much larger than the current small variation out of the LIA. !
There is proxy data showing much of the globe was at least 2-3C warmer in the RWP…
…and at least 5-6C warmer in the Holocene optimum.
We know that in Roman times the tree line in the western Alps was 400 meter higher than in 1950. That means at sea level the average temperature was 2.4 degrees higher than in 1950, that is about 1.5 degrees warmer than now. A variation in temperature over time of at least 2.5 degrees is not a ‘small variation’.
We await the response from the eminent Professor Stokes.
Nick was talking globally.
Not locally, as in the “western Alps”.
That is not a proxy for the globe.
Except that Mann’s analysis can not be relied on to show anything about temperatures before 1850. The flat line before 1850 is exactly what would be expected if the data series used did not correlate with temperature.
The only appropriate reaction to such a bare-faced lie.
It’s a pity that Willis couldn’t chime in on Stephen’s X post.
I think this nycloi fellow is Gavin Shmidt.
No.. Gavin would run away.
He is equally stupid and brain-washed.
Obviously paid to be DUMB.
” Nyolci” means “eighth” in Hungarian (Nyolc, pronounced “nyoltz” is eight).
The old eight-ball toy is more reliable and truthful than our friend nyolci.
Well, it has nothing to do with the eight-ball, that would be “(a) nyolcas” (“(the one) marked with 8”), but most people won’t understand that without proper context. “nyolci” is a non-existent and nonsensical diminutive of “nyolcadik utas” (“Eighth Passenger”), which is the Hungarian title of the original Alien movie.
nycloi seems to have serious issues, given the evidence.
He does can not tolerate arguments which are not from the left regardless of their accuarcy.
Correction. He destroys bs that has been presented as arguments. 😉
Richard P. Feynman
Presumptuous of me, I know, but I’d modify Dr. Feynman’s statement for this topic by replacing “experiment” with “real-world observations”.
“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” – Mark Twain
Mark Twain never met Nick Stokes or nyolci.
Mr. cat: And Mr. Stokes and 8-ball (thx for that, I thought it was just a letter jumble) never read Mark Twain.
Hungary has produced many great scientists (Edward Teller, Leó Szilárd, Albert Szent-Györgyi inter alia), but it has also given us the troll nyolci, who combines snide ad hominem attacks with profound scientific ignorance.
“Scientific ignorance” in this context is against evidence 😉 so we can confidently say your assertion is non-scientific.
Wrong, as always, mr dumbaxx, I’ve read Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and at least one collection of short stories, and a collection of essays.
Dunno what Mickey’s point was in doing convoluted constructs of what he imagined the temperatures were around the world in historical climate cycles vs what was happening in his own backyard during the 2 last climate cycles in his own lifetime –
Springfield Massachusetts ranged ~ -10C to ~ +30C in 1950
Springfield Massachusetts ranged ~ -10C to ~ +30C in 2024
Early, post graduation, Mann created a bogus “global warming” graph. And spent the remainder of his working life defending said bogus graph?
The Hockeystick is pure garbage.
https://app.screencast.com/nXfZcUyGR4QlR
The Hockeystick is the same as Russiagate. America can’t all a few corrupt and dishonest individuals make the rules for everyone else.
Name a single part of this analysis is wrong.
https://app.screencast.com/nXfZcUyGR4QlR
Even AI agrees that a reasonable person is justified in referring to Michael Mann as a faker, fraud, scofflaw and deadbeat – based on facts.
Many famous scientists have exhibited similar traits, being human.
However, Mann is also a fantasist, believing that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter – or even that he can discern historical air temperature by examining pieces of timber!
If people want to believe Michael Mann’s nonsensical outpourings, (which are totally unsupported by experiment, of course), they are free to do so. There are enough ignorant and gullible people around that any mad idea will attract supporters.
Especially in the US, if the phrase “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” is correct. There seems to be a never ending supply of public funds to waste on self appointed “climate scientists” who have convinced the public that they can look into the future, and possess the magical ability to prevent “the climate” from changing!
Are they all hucksters and charlatans – or just simply ignorant and gullible humans, unable to think for themselves? Who knows?
All part of the rich tapestry of life.