Still more denier weirdness from WUWT on Marcott et al 2013

Anyone who's ever written a paper or used academic journals for research (any research, not just scientific research) will realise that Willis Eschenbach has done neither or he's deliberately targeting the Dunning Kruger set.  (Going by the rest of his article probably both.)

Courtesy Willis E in Protest No. 7 from WUWT re the Marcott et al Holocene temperature reconstruction, recently published in Science:

Nowhere in the paper do they show you the raw data...

... although it’s available in their Supplement. I hate it when people don’t show me their starting point.

Is it any wonder that, as Willis Anthony says:

Steve McIntyre is also quite baffled ... 

(Come on, who could resist that :D)

Another revelation about fake skeptics - many don't understand how earth managed to maintain a relatively stable global climate during the Holocene

A lack of familiarity with academic publications isn't sufficient to explain why Willis E (and most of those commenting on his article) thinks that every location on earth should warm and cool in synchrony.  Especially not during the Holocene, when the global average temperature changed very little.  Most people would deduce that in a relatively stable global climate like that of the past 10,000 years or so, when one part of the earth warmed another part must have cooled.  After all, the average global temperature for the past 10,000 years or so has probably only varied by less than one degree celsius (plus and minus approx 0.4 degrees Celsius around the zero line).

Even now when the world as a whole is warming up so quickly, there are places cooling or not getting hotter.  In fact WUWT, when it's not protesting the science, arguably focuses as much if not more on the (few) locations that are cooling or not getting as warm as it does on all the places that are warming.

A Lesson in the Art of Science

Since they can't follow the science, let's give Steve and Willis a hand by showing them the Art (of the Anthropocene), courtesy Tom Yulsman, Discover, Shaun Marcott and Jeremy Shakun.

Update: Option 3: Marcott et al for Dummies

The researchers are being a lot more courteous than The Auditor.  One of the authors, Prof Peter Clarke has written that they are preparing a "Marcott el al for Dummies" (like McIntyre) -

After further discussion, we’ve decided that the best tack to take now is to prepare a FAQ document that will explain, in some detail but at a level that should be understandable by most, how we derived our conclusions. Once we complete this, we will let you know where it can be accessed, and you (and others) can refer to this in any further discussion. We appreciate your taking the time and interest to try to clarify what has happened in our correspondence with McIntyre.

Looks as if the research team has come up with an option 3!

NOTE: The FAQ is now available on RealClimate.

The paper and supplementary material already elegantly describes in immense detail how the data was handled.  So it will be interesting to see if McIntyre will understand it better after he's read the FAQ.

(It's no surprise that McIntyre hops straight to mathturbating™ the data in the spreadsheet before digesting the description of data handling (or even reading it?). Nor is it any surprise that he isn't the least bit interested in the discussion of climate variations and possible influences, which to my mind give most food for thought.)