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Showing posts with label Marcott et al. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marcott et al. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Hockey by email ~ more vexatious lawsuits by political science deniers

Sou | 5:26 PM Go to the first of 6 comments. Add a comment

It's pretty obvious that the vexatious lawsuits by ATI are not to explore science, I'd say they are to try to flag the spirits of the dispirited science deniers like blogger Anthony Watts and his ragtag band of followers.

Anthony has a new post titled: ATI Files Suit to Compel the University of Arizona to Produce Records Related to So-Called “Hockey Stick” Global Warming Research

Why the ATI files a law suit instead of just reading the published research is obvious.  Scientific research holds no interest for them.  They want to trawl through personal emails looking for something, anything, the smallest phrase that they think they might have some chance of misrepresenting as "dirt".

According to WUWT (archived here), ATI has filed yet another frivolous lawsuit, this time trying to get emails from the University of Arizona, where meso-climatologist Professor Malcolm Hughes is Professor of Dendrochronology.  Professor Hughes was a co-author of the 1998 temperature reconstructions published in Nature and related work - for example:



If you can't tell what sort of lobby group the American Tradition Institute is by its name (it's nothing to do with what I understand as proud American tradition), it's an extremist lobby group aka "think tank".  You can tell why they target high profile distinguished scientists such as Professors Hughes and Mann.  They figure they might be able to isolate and discredit them for the "crime" of doing solid scientific research and making an enormously valued contribution to the understanding of the world around us.

Needless to say ATI is anti-science and one of the grubbier organisations in the USA.  The fact that it thinks science is done by email says it all.  It's looking for any snippet in any email that it can distort the meaning of to try to "prove" climate science is a giant hoax.  It doesn't have a good reputation in the courts either.


Too late, deniers - that horse has bolted


Guess what, Anthony Watts (his rationalwiki entry where someone - not me - has kindly listed yours truly!) and Christopher Booker (more on him here and he's King of Hearts in Monbiots list of top 10 deniers) and Chris Horner (who is the muck-raker in chief at ATI and unsurprisingly failed to dig up any dirt on Professor Mann after gaining access to documents) - you're too late.

I know you aren't aware of the fact because you don't keep up with science and even if you tried you wouldn't understand it.  Not only are there too many hockey sticks around - beat up on one and there are many more waiting in line behind - but there are much longer temperature reconstructions now.  This is what Chris Horner and his denier backers are chasing, not from the upcoming IPCC report, nor from the 2007 IPCC report but from way back in TAR - from twelve years ago (the first paper was published fifteen years ago):

Source: IPCC TAR

Too many and too hot to handle!


But it's no longer just 1,000 years of northern hemisphere reconstructions, or 2,000 years of northern hemisphere and global reconstructions, and lots of them, plus long term regional reconstructions - now there is a reconstruction of the entire Holocene, from 11,300 to the present.  Not only that but there is a reconstruction of the last deglaciation from 22,000 years ago to 11,300 years ago.

This is what ATI and other deniers will be faced with after they've tried and failed to smash all the other hockey sticks - the wheelchair!


Adapted from: Jos Hagelaars on Our Changing Climate

What is Chris Horner to do?  How can he keep the ATI donor degenerates happy enough to keep him employed? A weak attempt at getting some mileage on the biggest anti-science blog in the blogosphere, maintained by a chap who still, after years of protesting climate science, fails at simple arithmetic and can't grasp the concept of temperature anomalies.   Will it suffice or will Chris Horner eventually be told he's spent enough of ATI's funds on pointless lawsuits?

Even if ATI does get access to some emails, just like their attempt at the University of Virginia, they won't find anything worth shouting to the world. (Whatever happened to the 200,000 plus stolen emails that deniers couldn't wait to chomp? Nothing, nada, zilch!)

It looks to me that what ATI wants to do is shut down research. To tie researchers and universities up in knots responding to lawsuits.  To shut down houses of learning because they don't like the lesson. Or maybe they hope to "prove" to the 8% dismissives that the all levels of government across the USA and the world, including the judiciary is corrupt and part of the secret climate cult, together with all scientific bodies and most of the general public.  Everyone, that is, except for the 8% dismissives that flock to the echo chambers of science denying blogs like WUWT.

Good luck with that - not!


Some of the idiotic comments at WUWT

The comments are archived here with the main WUWT article.

Gerry Dorrian is deluded and still looking for straws:
September 9, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Hopefully this will be one of the last straws on the hockey-stick’s back!


dp is calling for someone to hack university computers again and steal personal emails says:
September 9, 2013 at 10:55 pm
Mr. FOIA – time to act (again).


Go Home wonders why nothing of consequence was found in the 200,000 plus emails that were already stolen and says:
September 9, 2013 at 11:02 pm
So what happen to climategate 3 email dump? Was it a hoax or was it real?

Steven Mosher, who tried to make money from the stolen emails replies:
September 9, 2013 at 11:07 pm
its real

Richard111 can't believe no-one uncovered the non-existent mischief in the stolen emails and decides that it's all a conspiracy - he says:
September 9, 2013 at 11:27 pm
So why was it stomped on and by who?


And that's about it - only nine comments (not all shown above) after three or more hours.  It looks as if the most of the deniers at WUWT have lost interest - or maybe they are fast asleep.  It's night time in the USA.

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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Climate Wars Linger: Anthony Rallies the Lynch Mob Again to Attack Michael Mann and Global Warming

Sou | 3:35 PM Go to the first of 9 comments. Add a comment

Update: Anthony advises that it wasn't him who took a swipe at creationists, it was an emailer called Robert Scheaffer.  Anthony just provided links to his Marcott protests etc (which I've improved upon by linking to better articles).  Anthony says he is off at a "conference" organised by the fake oregon petition crowd.  The meeting has a very mixed up line-up of speakers and topics, ranging from climate science denial to silicosis denial and lots in between - mostly the crank end of right wing ideology from the look of it.



Anthony Watts went away for a couple of days and all he left his audience was an open thread that fizzled out slowly along with one of their new/past heroes, ending up with a few posts about "energy can be made out of nothing" (aka the E-Cat hoax).  Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale wrote an article about current sea surface temperatures, in which he said nothing except the ocean warms by magic and there's a colder than normal patch somewhere.  WUWT was so slow that even Bob's article has earned him 43 45 comments.  Wondering Willis tried to do his bit with a third or is it his fourth post in as many days complaining about the carbon tax in British Columbia and showing that the 6.67 cents/litre carbon tax on petrol (around 5%) hasn't prevented British Columbians from driving their motor cars altogether.  Though it does seem to be helping reduce carbon emissions.

Bash the Mann


 Time to get the mob stirred up, thought Anthony.  There has only been one this week and few this month, so maybe I'll give the lynch mob a bit of a lift by having another Mann-bashing session.

He knew he didn't have to do any more than write the name "Mann", but probably because it had been such a fizzer of a week, he added this (I amended some of his hyperlinks to point to better information sources):
The Amazing Mann just told TAM (The Amazing Meeting of the Skeptics Society) that there has been no pause in Global Warming, and says claims that there has been are just ‘Cherry Picking’.
Also he used Marcott et al. as proof that his Hockey Stick is valid.
Surely he must know that the authors themselves disavow that conclusion!! Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.

Anthony is wrong, of course, as usual, as ever.  The hockey stick is valid and was further validated by numerous other reconstructions including Marcott et al, and the modern record - and every new reconstruction continues to confirm it.

Anthony manages to take a swipe at the intellectual capability of attendees at this year's The Amaz!ng Meeting as well as get in a thirty-something'th protest at Marcott et al, (along the way implying he also doesn't accept any of the modern datasets that use the instrumental record of global surface temperatures).

Marcott et al (2013) Globally stacked temperature anomalies for the 5° × 5° area-weighted mean calculation (purple line) with its 1σ uncertainty (blue band) and Mann et al.'s global CRU-EIV composite mean temperature (dark gray line) with their uncertainty (light gray band).

About that so-called "pause" in global warming, the evidence shows the world is still warming.  Here are some indicators in an animated gif:
Data sources: NASA GISTemp, NODC/NOAA Ocean Heat, U Colorado sea level, PIOMAS Arctic Ice 

And to put the recent warming in perspective, here is my adaptation of Jos Hagelaars' composite showing where we've been and where we are heading:

Source: Jos Hagelaars


However, back on WUWT the world's 8% Dismissives gather to deny all the signs of global warming. Anthony gets the reaction he's looking for, with words like "delusional", "lying", "fiction", "fantasy" and some rather ugly terms that are allowed on WUWT but only if you are a science denier.  His thread brings out the diversity of his followers - ranging from right-wing extremists, Christian fundamentalists, run-of-the-mill illiterati, "Ice Age Cometh"-ers through to "I don't understand it but I know what I (don't) like" ordinary old science deniers - who at least know how to toss out ad homs when Anthony tells them to.

Anthony in his own small way is proving what Professor Mann describes in his book:




The lynch mob rallies to the call


Eric Worrall says:
July 13, 2013 at 4:14 pm  Is he deliberately lying? Or is he delusional?... (blah blah blah)...


Eric Worrall was really worked up because he immediately follows up his first comment with this:
July 13, 2013 at 4:15 pm  What is going through his head when he says things like that? Does he think the pause is a temporary blip, that all he has to do is bluff it out until it ends?

Chuck L says:
July 13, 2013 at 4:35 pm  It is remarkable that he sticks to his fiction/fantasy in the face of facts and data. I guess he’ll be the last one left on AGW ship.

GlynnMhor uses a denier analogy, and impolitely writes:
July 13, 2013 at 4:36 pm If we don’t feed the monkey, won’t it just throw feces at us?

Mike Jowsey says:
July 13, 2013 at 4:49 pm  With fingers in ears, shouting “Nya nya nya, I can’t hear you”, he denies the reality. Would this classify him as an evildoer denier?

GeoLurking says:
July 13, 2013 at 4:30 pm  He’s a buffoon… nothing more, nothing less. He leaps and squeals for a banana. Don’t feed him, you’ll just encourage him.

DR objects to any entity that investigates facts:
July 13, 2013 at 8:23 pm The Randi Forum is anything but skeptics…..it is basically Media Matters for global warming fanatics.

Eliza has something wrong twixt the keyboard and brain and writes:
July 13, 2013 at 9:12 pm This can only ,eran that Mann universityinvented the Hockey Stick nThe guy is a looney how dare he be allowed withinnthe confines of a
Eliza says: July 13, 2013 at 9:12 pm a university my bad

Per Strandberg (@LittleIceAge) says:
July 14, 2013 at 6:20 am  Two famous makeup artists of fakery, Mann & Randi together on the same picture, Coo!

beng says:
July 14, 2013 at 7:48 am Funny how Randi loses his skepticism right when he needs it. Like Phil_dot, Carl Sagan & others.

beng says:
July 14, 2013 at 8:41 am  Is it just me? Every time I see that Mann-mug, I want to punch the crap out of it.

Reed Coray says:
July 14, 2013 at 9:46 am  beng: It’s not just you.


It's all a nefarious plot involving long-dead Hitler?  Who runs a hate group called the EPA? If anyone can make head or tail of what Chad Wozniak says:
July 13, 2013 at 5:58 pm  @Larry Hamlin - And don’t forget the land temps are all UHI-affected and therefore falsely ovewrstated. As for Mann being the last one on the sinking ship, let’s don’t forget that hatemonger der Fuehrer and his satraps at the hate-group EPA can do a lot of damage yet before they are brought down. And no matter who else deserts the ship, der Fuehrer can’t leave it because it is the entire basis for his campaign to destroy the economy and along with it civil liberties.

Mike Buzz-Senior Busby is oblivious to irony:
July 13, 2013 at 4:24 pm  Tap dancing waiting for proof which never comes. The sign of some one desperate to have his dogma accepted as proof which flies in the face of empirical evidence. Pretty sad that he continues to discount real world evidence and instead demands that his belief in a failed set of models is all that is needed to change the entire worlds opinion. – Sir Boab Tree.

as is sonicfrog1:
July 13, 2013 at 5:32 pm  Yep. I really enjoy some of the podcasts from many of the TAM’ers, including Brian Dunning and the Skeptics Guide To The Universe crew. But, yeah, when they turn to the subject of global warming…. Mann oh Mann…. That IS a huge blind spot. They were glowing over the Cook / Lewdowski (whatever his name is – if correct statistical methodologies are not important to him…. his name is not important to me) studies without really digging in to examine what the problems with the studies are. They bought the “Skeptical Science spiel hook, line, and stinker. It’s sad, because there used to be one guy on the Skeptics Guide panel, Perry, who was very skeptical of the alarmist side of AGW. But, unfortunately, he passed away several years ago. he is sorely missed.


A lone fact checker emerges, but it's a dismal attempt


Andres Valencia is the first commenter to attempt to back up what he says and links to an NOAA chart.  He manages to squeeze out a tiny downward sloping black line on the very top of a global surface temperature chart.  Needless to say he ignores all the other signs of ongoing global warming as illustrated in the gif animation above.  (Nor does he point out that 2010 was the hottest year on record or equal to 2005 as such.)
July 13, 2013 at 4:49 pm  Even the NCDC shows a -0.02°C/Decade trend since 2001 to 2012.  11 years of very slight cooling.

Put on your denier specs, squint really hard and you'll see the little black line
Source: NOAA

The creationists rally to defend their doctrine


Don objects to being compared to a climate scientist:
July 13, 2013 at 5:00 pm  “Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.” Anthony, I must protest. Any creationist in particular? Any argument in particular? This seems an overgeneralization and, well, a cheap shot.

Alvin says:
July 13, 2013 at 5:13 pm  Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.
Umm, people of faith can also believe in properly researched science. Many support your endeavors. Maybe a poor analogy.

GlennD objects:
July 13, 2013 at 5:20 pm  Um, Anthony, I find references to creationism in posts and comments inappropriate. Taking the ‘science’ side of Darwinism shows ignorance of that debate and opens a topic this website should not be concerned with. Those more familiar with the debate find the same groupthink, gatekeeping, arrogance, career railroading and denying of contrary evidence among Darwinism as is found in climate science (don’t forget whose side the NCSE is on in both cases). Those trying to debate Darwinists on scientific terms are dismissed as ‘creationists’ (whether they are or not).....

juan slayton says:
July 13, 2013 at 5:23 pm  Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.Painting with a broad brush, there, friend. : > )

D Caldwell says:
July 13, 2013 at 7:55 pm  Agree with Don and Alvin. Was your creationist jab really necessary?

Jeff C warns Anthony that he needs to hang onto whatever "friends" he can still get.  It's okay to set the lynch mob onto real scientists, but quite another thing to slag off creationists:
July 13, 2013 at 8:04 pm  I’m not a creationist but was taken aback by Anthony’s stereotype as it seemed so out of character. My first reaction was to recheck the byline to ensure the post was from Anthony and sure enough it was. What gives? Bad habit to fall into, my friend.

Sun Spot says:
July 13, 2013 at 7:56 pm  We all know “Climate Change” happens (the climate is always changing) and we all know “Creation” happened (we’re here aren’t we), we also know both were/are highly chaotic un-modelable events.  @Don says: July 13, 2013 at 5:00 pm, I’m a creationist like Don.

JimF says:
July 13, 2013 at 7:17 pm  I’m a geologist. I think Mann is a cheat and a fraud and a disgrace to the profession (he wears one or two geology degrees). And since no one else can explain it, I believe the Bible account of the formation of everything at the outset. No one will ever disprove it. The rocks don’t go back that far.


Don't worry - it's only the land that's warming?


Larry Hamlin explains the trick:
July 13, 2013 at 5:42 pm  Climate alarmists like Mann use only the land surface temperature record and ignore sea surface temperatures which when both are combined represent the global surface temperature record. The global surface temperature record shows the pause. The land surface record continues increase and that’s all the alarmists need. Alarmists also frequently site the Berkeley Earth project land temperature record as further proof there is no global temperature pause. This is how the ignore the pause game is played.

While another commenter is under the misapprehension that it hasn't warmed for 17 years.  Bruce Cobb says:
July 14, 2013 at 11:04 am  Mann’s “cherrypicking” claim regarding the warming pause (now 17+ years) is of course just another one of his multitude of lies he tells. But hey, he’s got to make a living somehow.

Neither Larry nor Bruce offer any evidence, so I will.  Here is a chart showing land only surface temperatures and land and ocean surface temperatures, with arrows indicating how much it's warmed since 17 years ago:

Data Source: NASA

As Willis once Wondered, the land surface warms faster than the sea surface.  Both are warming because of increasing atmospheric CO2.  Most of us live on the land and rely on it for our food, shelter and clothing among other things.  And there are many more signs that global warming progresses.


The "An Ice Age Cometh" brigade


Andres Valencia says:
July 13, 2013 at 6:27 pm  I think our planet is always warming or cooling, always seeking but never attaining equilibrium. This present stasis seems to indicate a lack of net input for the self-regulated planet to react against. I watch for next El Niño or La NIña to emerge with some push, one way or the other. Afterwards, around a new level, some overshoot followed by dampening oscillations. This until the next plunge into an ice age.

Bill H reckons it's going to get cold:
July 13, 2013 at 5:12 pm  This “pause” in upward trend can be one of two things…A real pause that just lasted to long or; It shows the fact we have peaked in the larger cycle (thus the longer period) and we are now headed in the reveres trend… the top of a large sign wave is always longer in time period.  The fact we have long since left the normal short cycle trend lines would lead me to believe we are going to get much cooler as we have begun the downward trend to the low part of the larger natural cycle.

One challenger to the WUWT groupthink remains


Ryan wonders if Anthony's relationship Roy Spencer will suffer (I don't know about Denning):
July 13, 2013 at 5:04 pm  “Surely he must know that the authors themselves disavow that conclusion!! Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.”
The authors of M. et al actually said that their reconstruction was indistinguishable from some of Mann’s, and there are many other modern-reaching reconstructions that have confirmed the hockey stick. If you want to throw out the relative uniqueness of the modern temperature spike, you have to do stupid things like assuming CET is representative of global temps.
I do appreciate your acknowledgment of creationists as the bottom-feeders of even the pseudoscientist community, but how do you think Denning and Spencer are going to take that?

Even the Central England Temperature wouldn't help very much, Ryan:

Data Source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre


The 8% Dismissives at WUWT


As we've seen from the above, Anthony Watts and his motley lynch mob linger on as a disparate rabble of creationists, "Ice Age Cometh"-ers, right wing extremists and scientific illiterati, continuing to deny and rail against global warming.


Is there such a person as a reasonable "fake skeptic"?


One lone "skeptic" goes against the mob but shows he is quite unfamiliar with the norm at WUWT.  Mike McMillan says:
July 14, 2013 at 10:21 am  A good bit more ad hominem than I’m used to seeing on this site. Unfortunate.
He was immediately admonished by members of the WUWT anti-science lynch mob, including Justthinkin:
July 14, 2013 at 10:57 am  Mike….calling a pathological liar and con man just that is not ad hominem.
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Saturday, June 8, 2013

Flashback to 1922 - World Growing Warmer

Sou | 1:57 AM Feel free to comment!


From The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957) Saturday 23 September 1922




WORLD GROWING WARMER.
 | 
Whilst many people have been bemoaning the cold weather of June and July it is rather questionable comfort to be told by a weather optimist in the London "Daily Mail" that the world, and particularly the Northern Hemisphere, is growing warmer. The process, he says, is rather a slow one but it is none the less steady, and of late it seems to have accelerated to some extent. If we possessed records of the weather since the beginning of the Christian era it is certain that the temperature over the whole of Europe and North America would show a startling rise. Unfortunately the thermometer is a comparatively modern invention while weather recording is a still more recent innovation. Yet for all that we can find plenty of proof, both in history and in other ways. For instance in Cesar's account of the Gallic Wars we find frequent mention of frosts so intense that whole armies were able to cross broad rivers on the ice. We know, too, that in those days Germany's winter was almost Arctic in its severity. These are conditions which have long since passed away, and it is not more than twice or thrice in a century that a river like the Seine freezes up. We are also aware that no farther back than the sixteenth century the winters in England were, on an average, much more than they are nowadays. Another interesting proof is obtained from the records of the Hudson Bay Company. We learn from them that within the last two centuries the average interval between the setting in of the winter frost and the coming of the spring thaw has decreased by no fewer than ten days. Again, European glaciers are everywhere receding. The ice fringes of both Poles are retreating. Even during the comparatively short space of time that the Antarctic has been visited by man the ice has retired some 40 miles. So let us cheer up. In process of time this country of ours will once more be growing palms and orange trees!


The Weather Optimist from London's Daily Mail


I'll let you be the judge of whether the Daily Mail weather optimist was prescient, whether he knew the eventual impact of the inventions of Somerset, Savery, Newcomen and Watt, or whether he was merely another Daily Mail weather optimist.  It does seem as if he was basing his speculation about past climates on very limited geographic locations and limited historical sources.  (Does that ring a bell?)  I was unable to find out who he was.  If anyone knows I'd be grateful if you'd tell me.

No-one in 1922 would have had access to a comprehensive set of instrumental temperature data for the northern hemisphere, but if they had, this is what they would have seen:

Source: HadCRUT4



Had they a record of global surface temperatures, this is what they would have seen:

Source: HadCRUT4



And if they'd only had access to land surface temperatures, this is what they would have seen:

Source: Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures


Whereas had they access to a comprehensive set of proxy data, they would have been able to see much farther back in time, even back to the Gallic Wars they mentioned:

Source: Marcott et al (2013)

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Saturday, June 1, 2013

TGIF on WUWT and what fake skeptics see...

Sou | 4:00 AM Go to the first of 3 comments. Add a comment


Deniers are truly weird...

Reading through the comments to Anthony Watts' Friday Funny (discussed here), which nobody on WUWT seemed to find very funny, here is what some fake skeptics see:

Gary Pearse is in deep denial and says:
May 31, 2013 at 7:41 am  Interesting that 1936 was hotter than 1998 and yet it hardly lifts off the abscissa of the IPCC graph. 

Maybe Gary hasn't looked at a temperature chart since 1936.  (As usual, you can click the image to enlarge it.)

Source: NASA GISTemp


Edohiguma hasn't a clue about temperatures of the past two millenia.  Referring to the SkepticalScience Escalator he says:
May 31, 2013 at 6:47 am  If you put this escalator over the past 2,000 years, you’ll see a very pretty up and down wave. With two times even warmer than today.

Source: Marcott et al (2013)


Anthony's having a bad week

Deniers don't find this Friday's Funny very funny.  Tommoriarty says (excerpts only):
May 31, 2013 at 8:01 am  I am a global warming skeptic, and as such I believe it is important to “play fair.”...It is possible that there is some alarmist claim that the temperature rose by 1.2 degrees C from 1970 to 2000 from some source unknown to me. If that claim is common among alarmists, and a reference can be provided, them I will retract my assertion that the red line in the second graph is a strawman that misrepresents the views of the alarmists....
C’mon – Lets play fair.

To which poor old Anthony replied, trying to get his readers in the hilarity mood:
REPLY: Dude, its humor/satire. Note the headline. Just laugh, its funny. – Anthony

Hardly anybody bought it.  As Tommoriarty later said:
May 31, 2013 at 9:30 am  re: “Dude, its humor/satire. Note the headline. Just laugh, its funny.”
The best humor comes from pointing out the irony in the truth. Where is the truth? Where is the humor?
REPLY: if you can do better, by all means, go for it – Anthony

TGIF

Anthony's probably saying to himself "TGIF and oh well, there's always next week".


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Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Anthony Watts Really Thinks Global Temperatures Rose and Fell by Sixty Degrees Celsius in the Holocene?

Sou | 12:37 AM Go to the first of 10 comments. Add a comment
Update: The UK Met Office has responded.  See below.

So  No, it would seem...

...he thinks it rose by up to fifteen degrees Celsius in the Holocene (Richard corrected his workings but Anthony hasn't corrected his), which is really silly.

Anthony Watts has made a new 'sticky' post, making false claims about the UK Met Office.  Apparently some chap in deep denial, Doug Keenan, has once again been harassing the UK Parliament again with dumb questions. (Why doesn't he ask a scientist, I wonder.)

Richard Telford has crunched Doug's numbers and this is what he found.

Is Anthony Watts as dumb as he looks?  We know he protested the Marcott study but does he really think this? This is what Doug Keenan and Anthony Watts seem to think happened to temperatures during the Holocene, putting Doug's 'statistics' to work.

A rise of  5 to 15° Celsius:


Anthony Watts very foolishly tries to preach to and put down Associate Professor Richard Telford, when richard telford says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:26 am  “Met Office has set the cat amongst the pigeons”
More of a red herring than a cat. Only Keenan cannot tell the difference.
REPLY: Mr. Telford, who is on the government climate science payroll, would do well to embrace this: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary  tip jar, speaker fees and Heartland Institute handouts depends upon his not understanding it!” 
- Upton Sinclair
-Anthony
Okay, I modified Anthony's quote slightly but don't you think it's a better fit?


When Richard points out:
If you have to stoop to using ad hominem arguments, you could at least ensure that the ad hominem is correct. The salary of academics is not dependent on their opinions – a concept known as academic freedom.
Anthony responds in typical illiterati fashion, showing he doesn't even know what an ad hom attack is, let alone what was the global temperature range of the Holocene:
REPLY: A famous quote is an “ad hom” LOL!. Yes no dependency, sure, no ‘publish or perish’ until such time you get that cushy deal known as tenure, where you can be free to be as loony as Paul Ehrlich without fear of losing your job. It doesn’t work that way in the real world outside academia my friend. – Anthony


For readers who might not be familiar with it, this is what Marcott et al (2013) found for the Holocene. Note the difference in the temperature scale:



And this is where we are heading:

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

UPDATE:


The UK Met Office has published their reply to the Parliamentary Question asked on behalf of Doug Keenan.  In short, their response is: "What a dumb question."

You can read their longer version here.
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Monday, April 1, 2013

Dismissives Still Furious with Marcott et al

MobyT | 3:53 PM Go to the first of 6 comments. Add a comment

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!
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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Still more denier weirdness from WUWT on Marcott et al 2013

Sou | 3:54 PM Feel free to comment!
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.)
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