Monday, April 1, 2013

Dismissives Still Furious with Marcott et al

Update: Admiration owed the Young Researchers

Good research brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people.  I applaud Drs Marcott and Shakun and their supervisors for impeccable behaviour in the face of the vicious onslaught of lies and defamation from the usual crowd of science deniers, including some science-denying scientists.

If climate science continues to attract people having such a high calibre of research and such wonderfully strong character as Drs Marcott and Shakun, there is still hope for the world.


Marcott for Dummies is out.  However, Anthony Watts (in his seventeenth protest article) and the Auditor demonstrate that even after all this time and all their protests they still haven't even read the paper, claiming that Marcott et al "finally concede" something that was stated at the outset in the paper itself (page 1198). (Update: Not so, McIntyre knew about the research paper's caution that the little uptick was "probably not robust" from the outset, as evidenced in the comment section of his first blog article on the subject.  Showing yet again how The Auditor is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill denier liar.)

Disinformation merchants lie to the 8% Dismissives, and pretend they don't know that the comparison of the Holocene temperature history was with the modern instrumental record and has nothing to do with the 'uptick'. The Auditor and his devious cronies pull out all stops to play the denier's nasty game. (I don't know why the disinformation merchants bother to lie - it's not as if the 8% Dismissives are ever going to accept reality.)

 Missing the core

The Auditor and his brigade are not at all grateful for the extra effort made by the researchers to explain their work to the layperson, and appear to be still trying to claim we are in the middle of the Little Ice Age and focusing on core tops instead of the core!  

 (Standardising the age of core tops is sensible science. The flailing Auditor can't find anything to support his unwarranted war on science so he picks this at random, safe in the knowledge that his target audience wouldn't know a core top from a speleotherm.)

 Deniers apparently refuse to understand the connect between the modern record and the paleo record, even after years of nit-picking climate research.  


Greenland anyone?

And I wonder will the 8% Dismissives repent their earlier ludicrous mistake and heed this part of the FAQ:
Just as it would not be reasonable to use the recent instrumental temperature history from Greenland (for example) as being representative of the planet as a whole...

Their fury knows no bounds

The Auditor's cronies continue to make wild unfounded accusations. Conspiracy ideation most definitely (no wonder they don't like Lewandowsky and others showing them up in their true colours).

Meanwhile, Roger Pielke Jr goes one step further into the most vicious (and arguably libellous) rant.  (I won't link to his blog article.)  Pielke Jr writes a long blog article where he makes false allegations and misrepresents the findings, deliberately or otherwise confusing the (not robust) uptick in the proxy data with the instrumental record.  It looks as if he, too, must think we are still stuck in the Little Ice Age.

In my view, the astounding and disgusting reaction from deniers like Pielke Jr and others is because they cannot fault the science so they set out to misrepresent it, either deliberately or because they don't have the wit or will to digest it.  The Marcott et al paper and the supplementary material is eloquently written and easy to read.  The FAQ is perhaps even clearer so that most laypeople should understand it easily.  

The fact deniers can't fault the science means they can do nothing but misrepresent the research or flop back to their fallback position - climate science  is a hoax being perpetrated by scientists all around the world, governments of all political persuasions everywhere, the mainstream media and the informed public - and can be traced back nearly two centuries, from modern climatology back through Plass and Reveille and Broecker and Callendar and Arrhenius all the way back to Fourier and Tyndall (if not to Aristotle).

Update: Despicable Curry

Judith Curry sits herself even more firmly in the denier bandwagon with arguably libellous insinuations.  No surprises there.  Because of her past abominable behaviour she'd have no friends left in science so has nowhere else to go but down. She has the hide to talk of ethics while her own behaviour is not just unethical, it's immoral IMO. I'm disgusted.

Update: Admiration owed the Young Researchers

One thing - good research brings out the best in good people and the worst in bad people.  I applaud Drs Marcott and Shakun and their supervisors for impeccable behaviour in the face of the vicious onslaught of lies and defamation from the usual crowd of science deniers, including some science-denying scientists.

 If climate science continues to attract people having such a high calibre of research and such wonderfully strong character as Drs Marcott and Shakun, there is still hope for the world.

Where to get it

The Marcott et al (2013) paper and supplementary material is available at Science and the FAQ is available on RealClimate.

Addendum

Above all the noise of denialists, there is this one small post on realclimate.org, which gives high praise to Shaun Marcott and Jeremy Shakun et al. (I took the liberty of adding a link to Wikipedia.)
  1. Susan Anderson says:
    1 Apr 2013 at 7:24 PM
    I was venting about this to my father (PW Anderson), and he mentioned that he had read the article in Science and I could quote him, and even found the issue for me. Since he will be 90 soon and prefers to stay out of this donnybrook, this is quite a compliment, and I hope Marcott will see it!

    He said he was impressed; the article was “very clean” and “well put together”.


 The above is an expanded version of my latest comment on Watts is Whopping Mad (Crazy) after Marcott et al - Must be the Heat!
at

6 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 1, 2013 at 10:33 PM

    I noted Pielke's post and was stunned by his claim.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SouApril 1, 2013 at 11:06 PM

      I know Pielke is a 'denier' using the RationalWiki definition (top right of this page), but I don't know if he's got worse lately or if he's always had a habit of shooting from the hip.

      Appalling behaviour for a professional who wants to present himself as working in the climate space (albeit from more of an economic perspective).

      I can see why he could be held in contempt by climate scientists. He's every bit as bad as Judith Curry in his efforts to deny the science.

      Delete
    2. NickApril 2, 2013 at 11:40 AM

      Oh,a judgement from Pielke Jr? Stop the world...

      "Let me make it perfectly clear I am accusing no one of scientific misconduct.." but he IS "..recommending steps to fix this mess,saving face for all involved,and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity."

      So there is apparently a 'mess', some people have done something shameful,hence the need to 'save face', and some part of the climate community lacks 'unambiguous' integrity. Lacks integrity IOW.

      Rather than bring this 'disquiet' up personally and privately with the authors and the journal, Pope Roger has to tell the eagerly awaiting world how bad it looks and if he does not get the response he deems perfect,so they condemn themselves!

      P Jr thinks that the authors and journal cannot link the paper's findings to observational knowledge in an overview discussion in a press release without the caveats he unilaterally declares must be inserted. Based on his contestable interpretation of said press release.

      Pielke's ill-will [expressed clearly in comments] is transparent,yet he is offering his fatuous honest-broker schtick without irony...


      Delete
    3. SouApril 2, 2013 at 12:16 PM

      He added the bit starting 'let me make it perfectly clear' at a later stage, maybe nervous he had gone just a mite too far. He still obviously hadn't read the paper and was shooting from the hip. It was enough to get deniers everywhere salivating.

      He's definitely picked his bed (WUWT - along with Curry and the rest of the 8 per cent wilfully ignorant dismissives). Pielke Jr won't get any respect from professionals in the field of climate science and climate policy these days, but maybe he no longer cares about that.

      Pielke Jr sees climate stuff through a warped mental model that stops him from being able to think rationally.

      I don't know if he's just started to lose it or if he's always been this way. Here's an illustration of how he confused climate science with economics (and probably with policy):
      Downside of the Conservative Brain

      Delete
  2. BBDApril 2, 2013 at 2:05 AM

    RPJ is being an idiot. Worse still, this is obvious from M13 itself and we need no help from the Idiots' Guide to M13 that the authors have been forced to spend time preparing because nobody could be bothered to RTFR properly in the first place.

    RPJ quotes the *wrong bit* of M13 - twice, for emphasis, which is unfortunate, to say the least. All his ire is (deliberately?) misdirected:

    the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes

    But M13 compares the *modern instrumental record* to the Holocene:

    Our results indicate that global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 (34) has not yet exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene (5000 to 10,000 yr B.P.). These temperatures are, however, warmer than 82% of the Holocene distribution as represented by the Standard5×5 stack, or 72% after making plausible corrections for inherent smoothing of the high frequencies in the stack (6) (Fig. 3).

    If we trouble to look at the references, we find this:

    34. P. Brohan, J. J. Kennedy, I. Harris, S. F. B. Tett, P. D. Jones, J. Geophys. Res. 111, D12106 (2006).

    Yes folks, that is HadCRUT3 (modern instrumental data!), not M13. In fact the M13 reconstruction ends at 1940, so the global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 rather obviously came from somewhere else. Clearly, M13 is not comparing its own uptick to the rest of the Holocene reconstruction it presents. It uses modern instrumental data instead and the paper states this explicitly.

    The Idiots' Guide states this explicitly too. It's high time the continued attack on M13 and its authors stopped. It has no serious scientific basis.

    ReplyDelete
  3. BBDApril 2, 2013 at 3:17 AM

    Sorry, Sou, there's a small, but important omission from what I wrote above.

    It should include the sentence:

    I absolutely agree with what Sou wrote in the OP.

    Probably right at the beginning ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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