Medieval Anthony Watts reveals a disinformation "trick" in Five Easy Steps plus assumptions

Updated: see below for Bernard J's chart, which puts medieval climate in perspective with that projected for this century and the global surface temperatures of past eons.

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Deniers at WUWT have gone back to regurgitating old worn out denier memes.

I've frequently come across deniers saying silly stuff like "warmists deny the MWP".   What they mean is that "warmists" are aware it was real but not global.

Why do some fake sceptics hang onto their MWP meme and why are they so hung up on "MWP denial". Why are they are so convinced, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the medieval warm period was whatever they variously think it was.  How do they know anything at all about it if not for science?  A lot of them seem to get their "science" from Nordic myths and legends.

Deniers and their sources of disinformation rarely if ever quote the science of that period.  Instead they quote snippets from stolen emails that they've spent hours digging through to find quotes they can twist and misuse.  If that fails they revert to statements made by climate disinformers at US Senate Committee hearings.

Anthony Watts reveals a tactic of climate disinformers

In a rare moment of openness about the disinformation tactics of the "leading darks" in the disinformation business, Anthony explains to the world one tactic used by disinformers.  He did it in a comment he elevated to an article (archived here) that he called:

The truth about ‘We have to get rid of the medieval warm period’

Six basic assumptions made by disinformers about fake sceptics

First, some basic assumptions about the denialati that are made by the disinformers:

1. Most people who reject science never read scientific literature.
2. Most people who reject science never do any fact checking at all.
3. Most people who spread what the disinformers write are fake sceptics or are themselves disinformers. 
4. Fake sceptics refer to themselves as "skeptics" but never do any fact checking, particularly of things they want to believe.
5. Most fake sceptics will "believe" what disinformers say, even when they make contradictory statements.
6. Most people who believe disinformers reject climate science.

The basic assumptions made by disinformers like Anthony Watts and others are quite reasonable, from what I read from fake sceptics.  They don't hold in all cases but in sufficient numbers of cases to make the disinformation tactics work (with fake sceptics). They are a reasonable set of assumptions for people engaged in disinformation campaigns (eg Anthony Watts) to work from.

A Disinformation "Trick" in Five Easy Steps

Today Anthony Watts explains one of the disinformers' magic tricks.  It's quite simple.  Here are the steps.

1. Pick a private email stolen from a scientific research unit
2. Pluck part of a sentence from the email
3. Write something quite different and say it's a "paraphrase" of that plucked clause
4. Repeat the false paraphrase a few times on your blog and claim "so and so scientist said this"
5. Voilà - you now have a denier meme that will be broadcast forever and a day by the denialati all around the world!

Anthony Watts describes the "trick" in detail

Anthony Watts describes the trick in more detail, using a stolen email and his own false paraphrase.  He makes an article out of an inline comment to a comment by Robert.  Here is the comment  (archived here):

Robert says:

December 8, 2013 at 9:50 am
The quote is a fabrication. Jonathan Overpeck’s exact words are:

“I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature.”

Christopher Monckton, like Andrew Montford before him, alters the text to instead read:

“We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”

Here is Anthony Watts inline reply to Robert (my bold italics):

REPLY: I checked for a citation, and the quote you state is correct:
http://di2.nu/foia/1105670738.txt

From: Jonathan Overpeck
To: Keith Briffa , t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Subject: the new “warm period myths” box
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:45:38 -0700
Cc: Eystein Jansen , Valerie Masson-Delmotte

Hi Keith and Tim – since you’re off the 6.2.2 hook until Eystein hangs you back up on it, you have more time to focus on that new Box. In reading Valerie’s Holocene section, I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature. The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

So, pls DO try hard to follow up on my advice provided in previous email. No need to go into details on any but the MWP, but good to mention the others in the same dismissive effort.

“Holocene Thermal Maximum” is another one that should only be used with care, and with the explicit knowledge that it was a time-transgressive event totally
unlike the recent global warming.

Thanks for doing this on – if you have a cool figure idea, include it.
Best, peck
–
Jonathan T. Overpeck
Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
Professor, Department of Geosciences
Professor, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Mail and Fedex Address:
Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
715 N. Park Ave. 2nd Floor
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

As to this being a fabrication, no, it’s a summation or a paraphrase of a long quote, something that happens a lot in history. Monckton and Montford aren’t specifically at fault in this, as the summed up quote has been around for a long, long time and it appears to have originated with Dr. David Deming’s statement to the Senate.

The conversion to a paraphrase maintains the meaning. “Mortal blow” certainly equates to “get rid of” (as it is often said) or “abolish” as you state it, and “we” equates to “I’m not the only one”.

The most important point is that Overpeck thinks it should be gotten rid of so that people that don’t agree with his view can’t use it.

And that, is the real travesty. – Anthony

Yes, you read that correctly.  Anthony Watts tries to claim that: “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.” means the same as "would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature."

Johnathon Overpeck quite reasonably wants to hit on the head misuse of "supposed warm period terms and myths".   Anthony Watts claims that is the same thing as "abolishing the medieval warm period". Note also the context in the email for the "mortal blow to the misuse" sentence: "The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish." That they do!

Anthony isn't the only one.  He also quotes the disinformer Steve McIntyre as morphing " deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths" into "“deal a mortal blow” to the MWP".  Click here for an archived copy of Steve McIntyre's article here.  Steve writes:

To a third party, it’s hard to understand why someone who wants to “deal a mortal blow” to the “myth” of the MWP would take exception to being labeled as someone who wanted to “get rid of” MWP. The objective in each case seems pretty much the same.

The only way you could argue that the objective of "dealing a mortal blow to the misuse" seems pretty much the same" as "getting rid of the MWP" is if you are a disinformer wanting to spread disinformation.
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What surprises me is how Anthony Watts is so open about the process behind the dishonest tactics he and other disinformers use.  It's like seeing a magician reveal his tricks.  One can hear the disinformers saying among themselves, trying to justify their lies to each other and themselves:

"Well, it's almost the same thing, isn't it? No?  Okay then it's not quite but it's nearly the same thing. No?  Okay it's nothing like the same thing, but if we say it's the same thing, that's all we need to do. Our readers will process it as meaning exactly the same thing.  And even though it means nothing like the same thing, with the mob that read what we write, they'll believe us when we argue it means the same thing."

David Deming started the meme back in 2006

It turns out that the 2005 email from Jonathon Overpeck wasn't the original source of the meme after all. According to Steve McIntyre, the denier myth began before the CRU emails were stolen.  He attributes it to a climate disinformer called David Deming in a statement to the US Senate Committee back in 2006.  (I read his statement.  Full of misdirection and half truths.  Isn't it illegal to make dishonest statements to the US government?)   You might recall me writing about how David Deming defended the nonsense put out by Denier Don Easterbrook, with his silly claims and misleading charts.

In his statement, climate disinformer David Deming said that he got an email "around the time" his paper was published in Science, which was back in 1995. His statement reads in part:

I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

That statement of Deming's has never been verified to my knowledge.  The "major researcher" has not been publicly identified nor has the email been unearthed as far as I know.  And over time science has taken great strides in working out what climates around the world were like going back 2000 years or so - particularly through the work of the PAGES 2k network.  (I'll bet a lot of the scientists working on PAGES 2k have never even heard of David Deming or Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts or Christopher Monckton!)

How fake sceptics misuse the medieval warm anomaly

I've written about the medieval warm anomaly before. Fake sceptics misuse it in the following fashion, complete with logical fallacies.

1. Disinformers and fake sceptics try to argue it was a globally synchronous event. It wasn't. 
2. They then try to argue that because it was a globally synchronous event (which it wasn't), the current warming isn't "unusual". It is. 
3. They then feel they can argue that because the medieval warm anomaly happened without a concurrent rise in CO2, then the current warming isn't because of CO2. But it is!

What science tells us about the medieval warm anomaly

I reckon most fake sceptics wouldn't know that scientists like Michael Mann have papers and book chapters on the subject. Here's an excerpt from my article for fake sceptics (who don't follow links, but then they don't read HotWhopper either - so this is really to save the time of Hotwhopper readers :)):

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Here are a couple of charts of temperature reconstructions, which span the medieval period. The first on is from Mann et al (2008) which shows the warmer period in the Northern Hemisphere during Medieval times. It wasn't as warm as now, however.

Figure 3. Composite NH temperature reconstructions & published NH reconstructions from Mann ME et al (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, pp. 13252-13257, September 9, 2008. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105

At the request of Phil Clarke in the comments, here is a chart from Mann et al 2009, showing the likely global surface temperature anomalies from the 1961-1990 mean during the medieval warm anomaly. You can see where it was warm and where it was cold.  However, as urged further down in the section on the Little Ice Age, I recommend you read the paper before trying to interpret the chart.

Source: Mann et al (2009)

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My original article also shows a chart of Marcott et al, with the Holocene Optimum.

Addendum

The article discussed above derived from a statement by Christopher Monckton in a previous and equally silly WUWT article, in which he wrote (archived here):

However, in 1995 Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, an IPCC scientist, wrote an email to Dr. David Deming to say, “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”

You can see there the disinformation tactic in action with a bit of a dog-leg to the David Deming statement.  No 1995 email from Jonathon Overpeck has ever been produced.  Whether he wrote that phrase or if anyone did, the context is not provided.  Deniers want to twist it into "scientists are re-writing the facts".  Instead what happens is that "scientists are researching the facts".

What is clear from the science is that there never was a period of global warming in medieval times that is anything like the global warming we are seeing now.  In medieval times there was regional warming and regional cooling. The way the deniers and disinformers like Christopher Monckton portray a medieval warm period is nonsense!   As Jonathon Overpeck did write very accurately:

The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

Update

Bernard J left a comment in another thread to say that he has prepared a chart based on this Wikipedia chart.  He has added in the likely rise in surface temperature if we choose to follow the RCP8.5 pathway.  Here it is - click on the chart to see the larger version:

Credit: Bernard J and Robert Rohde
Source: as listed in Wikipedia and IPCC AR5

Note that the time scale is not an arithmetic progression.  On a geological time scale, the temperature jump we could be choosing for ourselves this coming century would be viewed as a vertical line.

The above chart puts the much-fêted medieval climate anomaly into perspective, as well as the entire Holocene.  It also shows the unknown territory we are facing, especially if we choose not to rein in carbon emissions.

From the WUWT comments

You'll see that the "basic assumptions" don't hold in all cases. Even some of the fake sceptics aren't buying Anthony's line, now that he's revealed the magic disinformation trick.  However, they hold often enough to make this disinformation "trick" work quite well.  Here is a smorgasbord of comments (from the archived article here).

jeff says says he doesn't agree with Anthony's stance, but Anthony Watts digs in his heels and tries to claim that scientists "disappeared it in literature" (sic), implying that scientists have falsifed facts - utter nonsense:

December 8, 2013 at 10:41 am
seriously? i’m on your side and think many of them are crooks, but he SPECIFICALLY SAYS get ride of the “MISUSE” , not the actual MWP. learn to read

REPLY: I view it differently, as do many others, but I’ll edit for clarity. It is about the disappearing it in literature – Anthony

Michael in Sydney weakly sticks up for Anthony and says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
One mans use is another’s misuse – what exactly is the context of the misuse he complains about? The fact that he uses the term ‘ supposed’ suggests he doesn’t believe there were historical warm periods even on a regional level.

Paul just knows that "they" mean something other than what "they" said and says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
to jeff:
But any use of the MWP would be a misuse in their opinion.

GaryM finds a way to turn what was written into something completely different to suit the denier meme and  urges people to "learn to read" in the way fake sceptics are supposed to read.  In other words through a thick lens coated with confirmation bias.  He says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:56 am
Seriously? The “misuse” he is referring to is any “use” of the term.
“misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths”

He wants the MWP to disappear because he claims it doesn’t exist, hence “supposed warm periods”. To him the MWP is a “myth”, so ANY use of the term is a misuse.
learn to read – with comprehension.

Rod Chilton read something in a book somewhere and says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:15 am
I cannot believe these guys!!!!!. They will do almost anything to make sure the spin continues as to man as cause for the recent warming. There is some very interesting material presented in a book I read recently, that indicates within the Medieval Warm Period the Chinese actually sailed around Greenland. You cannot to my knowledge to that today…

Steven Mosher says something that upsets Anthony so he censors it:

December 8, 2013 at 11:16 am
[snip - Mosh, you are welcome to resubmit this comment sans the childish name calling - Anthony]

Jquip tells us what Steven Mosher wrote that so upset Anthony and then adds his own lie by implication and says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:30 am
Mosher: “That claim needs to
1. Verified Or
2. retracted.”

Indeed, if climate science held itself to the same standard we’d be rid of this pestilence at once.

Paul Matthews says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:36 am
Careful. There’s no link between the Deming quote and that CG email.

Monckton of Brenchley says it's okay to extend and expand an unverified claim made by another climate disinformer and turn it into a false denier meme that "the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present". Christopher Monckton says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:58 am
I am most grateful to Anthony and others here for verifying the word-for-word quotation from Dr. Deming that I used. I took certain steps to verify the quote some years ago. It is genuine. It dates from 1995. In 1998/9 Nature printed the Mann/Bradley/Hughes hockey stick and the IPCC picked it up in 2001. That nonsensical graph has represented the “official” position ever since, even though hundreds of papers in the reviewed literature, using measurement rather than modeling, provide evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present.

John Greenfraud is a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate science is a socialist plot and says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:06 pm
A distinction without a difference, the meaning of the ‘quote’ from these so-called climate scientists is clear. Whether it gets hot, cold, or stays the same, their solution is always the identical, socialism masquerading as environmentalism. Kick these dishonest hacks, and their lackeys, out of the national policy decision loop. Go down with the ship climate comrades, we’ll be laughing at you all the way down, just take some temperature readings when you reach bottom, so we can pull you back up and start laughing at you again. You’ve earned it.

Felix says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Watts writes: “As to this being a fabrication (as Robert claims), no, it’s a summation or a paraphrase of a long quote, something that happens a lot in history.”

When someone puts quotation marks around a paraphrase they have created a fabrication. In this case the “summation” alters the meaning as other have noted. The key word “misuse” of ignored in the “summary”. Some here may think the paraphrase is what Overpeck really meant in his heart, and they may or may not be right, but the shortened paraphrase does not have the same literal meaning of the actual quote. Fabrications happen a lot in history, that does not make then true.

John piccirilli either doesn't know when the medieval period was or he is not aware that the Medieval warm anomaly was not global or he's not familiar with Mann temperature reconstructions (see charts above) and says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Tell me felix..where on mann’s hockey stick [graph] does he show
The mwp? The meaning is clear by what peck says and by the actions
Of ipcc.

The bulk of the rest of the comments are from fake sceptics wanting to hang onto their myths about the medieval climate anomaly, for varying reasons of their own, but in the main for the reasons I described above.  If you have some time you're prepared to waste, you  can read more comments archived here.