Resurrecting Fred Singer and the MWP at WUWT

As if anyone needed more proof that WUWT is just another outlet for anti-science disinformation propaganda.  Today Anthony's put up a pack of lies by Fred Singer (archived here), who's made it his business to invent disinformation.  The article is another "hockey stick is a fraud" article.  Wouldn't it be nice if Fred Singer and Anthony Watts were added to one of the cases currently being heard in the US courts.

Fred Singer Manufactures Lies and Dispenses them at WUWT

Here is some of what Fred wrote in today's WUWT article:

...the Hockeystick is a manufactured item and does not correspond to well-established historic reality. It does not show the generally beneficial Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at around 1000AD, or the calamitous Little Ice Age (LIA) between about 1400 and 1800. In the absence of any thermometers during most of this period, the Hockeystick is based on an analysis of so-called proxy data, mostly tree rings, from before 1000AD to 1980, at which point the proxy temperature suddenly stops and a rapidly rising thermometer record is joined on.

Talk about "manufactured items".  Here are a few "hockey sticks" from the IPCC AR5 report.  I've indicated the times that are usually referred to as the MWP.  There's no fixed period.  I've also indicated the Little Ice Age - and you can see that in the case of the Little Ice Age there was cooling overall.  In the Medieval period most reconstructions in the Northern Hemisphere show a slight warming particularly starting around 950, but not so much in the southern hemisphere.  Globally there's a slight bump around 950.  So Fred's wrong on that score.  Nothing been "disappeared".  It's just that with more and more data the record is becoming more refined, but there are still differences in the different reconstructions - that aren't being hidden by anyone.  Click for larger image as always.

Figure 5.7 IPCC AR5 WG1 Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extra-tropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (HadCRUT4 land and sea, and CRUTEM4 land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on timescales less than ~50 years.

Fred bemoans the "good old days" when knowledge was scarce

Fred puts up a couple of drawings in a single image.  At the top of the drawing below is one of the images Fred included and at the bottom I've included a diagram from the first IPCC assessment report, published 24 years ago in 1990. This was before there were any global temperature reconstructions of the type we have today.  Fred is still living in the dim distant past.  He's getting on a bit (he's 89 years old) and can't hack this modern society or cope with new knowledge.

I don't know why Fred shifted the timescale to the left in his diagram above.  He could have left it as it was in the FAR report.  Anyway, about the Medieval Warm Anomaly, this is from FAR:

The late tenth to early thirteenth centuries (about AD 950-1250) appear to have been exceptionally warm in western Europe, Iceland and Greenland (Alexandre 1987, Lamb, 1988) This period is known as the Medieval Climatic Optimum China was, however, cold at this time (mainly in winter) but South Japan was warm (Yoshino, 1978) This period of widespread warmth is notable in that there is no evidence that it was accompanied by an increase of greenhouse gases.

In FAR (WG1), the word "medieval" appears only four times, once in the above diagram and three times in the text - and not once in the title of any reference.  In the AR5 report the word "medieval" appears 45 times including in the title of numerous references.

If you look at the top chart above and then the one below, you can see the difference between what was known in 1990 with what is known from scientific research conducted since that time. You can also tell from the text.  Compare the extract from FAR above with the following from the IPCC AR5 report (my bold italics):

For average annual Northern Hemisphere temperatures, the period 1983–2012 was very likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 800 years (high confidence) and likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years (medium confidence). This is supported by comparison of instrumental temperatures with multiple reconstructions from a variety of proxy data and statistical methods, and is consistent with AR4. Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the mid-20th century and in others as warm as in the late 20th century. With high confidence, these intervals were not as synchronous across seasons and regions as the warming since the mid-20th century

You may have noticed Fred's references above were to work done in 1978, 1987 and 1988.  Fred did manage to move into the 21st century further on in his article, bypassing all the other temperature reconstructions and singling out  two authors whose work he seems to have approved from a science denying perspective.  After maligning Michael Mann and misrepresenting his early work while ignoring his later work, Fred wrote:

In actuality, we now have adequate proxy data from other sources, most particularly from Fredrick (sic) Ljungqvist and David Anderson. Their separate publications agree that there has been little if any temperature rise since about 1940! However, there was a real temperature increase between 1920 and 1940, which can be seen also in all the various proxy as well as thermometer data.

I guess Fred's not too familiar with the work of  Fredrik Ljungqvist because he misspelt his name.  Thing is, he also is not too familiar with the work of Fredrik Ljungqvist because he misrepresented it.  The following is from Ljungqvist et al (2012):

Our results show, in a comparative manner, the degree to which the various proxy types can be used to assess regional temperature variability on centennial time-scales. We conclude that during the 9th to 11th centuries there was widespread NH warmth comparable in both geographic extent and level to that of the 20th century mean. Our study also reveals that the 17th century was dominated by widespread and coherently cold anomalies representing the culmination of the LIA. Understandably, the centennial resolution of this study precludes direct comparison of past warmth to that of the last few decades. However, our results show the rate of warming from the 19th to the 20th century is clearly the largest between any two consecutive centuries in the past 1200 yr.

And does Fredrik Ljungqvist dispute the global surface temperature record in the instrumental era as Fred claimed?  I'd say not.  Here's another section of that same paper:

Analyses of instrumental data (Brohan et al., 2006) shows that the last decade of the 20th century was much warmer than the 20th century mean nearly everywhere over NH land areas with sufficient data (Fig. C1). Moreover, the first decade of the 21st century was even warmer in most locations, thus, providing evidence that the long-term, largescale, NH warming that began in the 17th century and accelerated in the 20th century has continued unabated (see Appendix C for more details).

What about David Anderson? I couldn't find any global temperature reconstructions (or hemispherical ones either) by any David Anderson - but I probably missed it.  Anyway, if it's this David Anderson he's talking about, then Fred's barking up the wrong tree.  This from a 2002 paper:

Climate reconstructions reveal unprecedented warming in the past century; however, little is known about trends in aspects such as the monsoon. 

 Incidentally, the work of Fredrik Ljungqvist is cited several times in the AR5 report.


Below is a reference to a Ljungqvist paper plus just a sample of all the published work of Michael Mann and his various co-authors, to give you some idea of just how selective is Fred Singer.  Notice his paper on the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Anomaly.  I'd say he knows a lot more about this than does professional denier Fred Singer.

Notice too all the different authors and how Fred Singer singles out Michael Mann?  That's the Serengeti Strategy in action.

(Copies of Michael Mann's papers are usually available at his website.)

Ljungqvist, F. C., Paul J. Krusic, Gudrun Brattström, and Hanna S. Sundqvist. "Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries." Climate of the Past 8, no. 1 (2012): 227-249.. doi:10.5194/cp-8-227-2012 (open access).
Mann, Michael E., and Jeffrey Park. "Global‐scale modes of surface temperature variability on interannual to century timescales." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 99, no. D12 (1994): 25819-25833.

Mann, Michael E., Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes. "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries." Nature 392, no. 6678 (1998): 779-787.

Mann, Michael E., and Philip D. Jones. "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia." Geophysical Research Letters 30, no. 15 (2003).

Jones, Philip D., and Michael E. Mann. "Climate over past millennia." Reviews of Geophysics 42, no. 2 (2004): RG2002.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni. "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 36 (2008): 13252-13257.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, and Fenbiao Ni. "Global signatures and dynamical origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly." Science 326, no. 5957 (2009): 1256-1260.

From the WUWT comments

It's mostly a lot of people raging at Michael Mann, not suitable for HotWhopper. The Serengeti Strategy works for WUWT dismissives but it no longer works with the general public, from what I can see.  There are a couple of choice comments that I can print though.

Steve from Rockwood says the recent warming "doesn't look natural".  Well, duh!

January 21, 2014 at 3:25 pm
Just looking at Mann’s reconstruction – it doesn’t look natural. The Earth has been cooling for 1,000 years and suddenly warms out of control? It can’t be real. If he had left in the LIA and MWP maybe I would have believed him.

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale must have a soft spot for Fred, because he accepts Fred's lies - though he couldn't swallow some of Don Easterbrook's lies yesterday. He says:

January 21, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Thanks, Fred. Nicely done.