From C.R. Dickson: A retired chemist's view of global warming

There's a retired chemist and physicist called C.R. Dickson who has a Ph.D. from Columbia University and who has graced WUWT with an article (archived here, cached here). He wants to put global warming into perspective. What he did was post some charts using the Fahrenheit scale. (Has he ever used SI units when he did science, I wonder? Maybe he knows that most of Anthony Watts' audience is from the USA.)

He expanded the axis so that his charts were merely a flat line. This is a trick sometimes used by the dumber deniers at WUWT, like Smokey aka DBStealey aka dbs aka D Boehm. They do this when they want to seem very uneducated. Or maybe they think they are being clever, who knows.

Anyway, since deniers prefer flat line charts to ones that show just how much it's warmed in the last few decades I figured I'd show some more. It's about time I wrote an article that science deniers could relate to, don't you think?

Searching for the dragons - with Richard Alley at AGU14

Professor Richard Alley gave one of the first lectures at AGU14. (Click here for how to view AGU14 videos.)

Richard talks in his usual lively manner, with an early reference to the possibility that some things may happen very quickly, much faster than economic discounting allows. He talks about how faster, less-expected changes would be very damaging to economies and ecosystems. He says that "in some sense, we are searching for the dragons that are out there" - in a reference to a fifteenth century map showing where "here be dragons".


He points out that when we discover a possible dragon part we examine it further - and often find that it's "not likely to eat us" - or we may find that it is indeed really dangerous.

Denier weirdness: Is Steve McIntyre calling the instrumental record an "artifact"?

Saw this comment by that poor old obsessive climate science denying crusader Steve McIntyre at WUWT today. Steve McIntyre says:

June 25, 2014 at 10:34 am
Anthony, it looks to me like Goddard’s artifact is almost exactly equivalent in methodology to Marcott’s artifact spike – this is a much more exact comparison than Mann. Marcott’s artifact also arose from data drop-out.

However, rather than conceding the criticism, Marcott et al have failed to issue a corrigendum and their result has been widely cited.

Is Steve mistaking the instrumental record for an "artifact"? Or is he talking about that little blip in the most recent bit of the Marcott data. If the latter then it just goes to show that, even after all this time, Steve has still not bothered to read Marcott et al. Or if he did he missed the bit where they wrote (my bold italics):

Without filling data gaps, our Standard 5×5 reconstruction (Fig. 1A) exhibits 0.6°C greater warming over the past ~60 yr B.P. (1890 to 1950 CE) than our equivalent infilled 5° × 5° area-weighted mean stack (Fig. 1, C and D). However, considering the temporal resolution of our data set and the small number of records that cover this interval (Fig. 1G), this difference is probably not robust. Before this interval, the gap-filled and unfilled methods of calculating the stacks are nearly identical (Fig. 1D).

I've got to say that I'm a bit surprised Steve's continues to beat this drum.  It makes him look very foolish. Normally he likes to make believe he's clever. He usually wants people to think he knows more than all the climate scientists in the world. Yet, as his comment shows, the doddery dogsbody still hasn't got the point of the research or understood it's findings. I'd have thought by now he'd at least have read the paper and if not that, he could have read the FAQ, where they explain the above passage again, writing (my blue, bold italics):

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval (Anderson, D.M. et al., 2013, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 40, p. 189-193; http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2012GL054271-pip.pdf).

You'll notice that as Shaun Marcott points out, there is plenty of data around for the recent past. Marcott13 is about the entire Holocene record. Steve McIntyre doesn't "get it". Still, Steve's got to deny I guess. It's all he's good for. And Marcott13 was an important paper, especially for deniers, because it really showed up the fact that humans are entering very new territory as far as climate goes.

The chart below shows where we've been and where we're heading. The green bit is from Shakun12 showing when earth was cold and humans struggled for survival. The blue bit is the surface temperature over the period since human civilisation. The red bit is where we're heading this century.

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

Incidentally, Anthony Watts in that article was doing something positive for a change. He was explaining why Steve Goddard is making a fool of himself over US surface temperatures (archived here).  Peter Sinclair talks about this in his latest "Climate Crocks" episode. So did Media Matters, because Fox News made some fuss about it all. Fox News really does know how to add to its reputation as the place to avoid if you are after facts. Dana Nuccitelli is on the ball at the Guardian, too.

It looks as if Anthony is going to spoil his good efforts in this regard in the upcoming Part 2 of his two-part take-down of Steve Goddard. Anthony Watts says, in reply to Steve McIntyre:

June 25, 2014 at 10:55 am
Steve McIntyre: good point, I’ll address that in part 2. Thank you.

From the WUWT comments

This comment is about Steve Goddard and I thought it was interesting because the person who made it usually comes across as being just as much of an "utter nutter".  NikFromNYC says:

June 25, 2014 at 10:47 am
Goddard willfully sponsors a hostile and utterly reason averse and pure tribal culture on his very high traffic skeptical blog where about a dozen political fanatics are cheerled on by a half dozen tag along crackpots who all pile on anybody who offers constructive criticism. His blog alone is responsible for the continuing and very successful negative stereotyping of mainstream skepticism by a highly funded alarmist PR machine. His overpolitization of climate model skepticism results in a great inertia by harshly alienating mostly liberal academic scientists and big city professionals who also lean left but who might otherwise be open to reason. I live two blocks from NASA GISS above Tom’s Diner, just above the extremely liberal Upper West Side and my main hassle in stating facts and showing official data plots is online extremism being pointed out by Al Gore’s activist crowd along with John Cook’s more sophisticated obfuscation crowd. Goddard’s regular conspiracy theory about CIA drug use to brainwash school kids into shooting incidents in order to disarm conservatives in preparation for concentration camps for conservatives is something skeptics should stop ignoring and start actively shunning. His blog is the crack house of skepticism.

---

Marcott, Shaun A., Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, and Alan C. Mix. "A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years." science 339, no. 6124 (2013): 1198-1201. DOI: 10.1126/science.1228026

Shakun, Jeremy D., Peter U. Clark, Feng He, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Zhengyu Liu, Bette Otto-Bliesner, Andreas Schmittner, and Edouard Bard. "Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation." Nature 484, no. 7392 (2012): 49-54. doi:10.1038/nature10915

Nancy's Spikes of Fancy (and Anthony's gone and done it again!)

Anthony Watts has posted an 'article' by WUWT reader Nancy Green and added some notes of his own.

Watts: you "really aren’t comparing similar data sets"

First - what has Anthony done again?

He just can't help himself.  Anthony decided to ignore the caution from the scientists and has gone ahead once again comparing local with global temperatures.  This time he used the Vostok ice core from Antarctica, which is only one of the proxies used by Marcott et al in their Holocene reconstruction.  And this time he put in a disclaimer: but this image is solely for entertainment purposes in the context of this article, then blew it by adding: and does make the point visually.

Looks like Anthony decided to ignore the scientists' jibe as well as his very own own caution.

Nancy's Spikes of Fancy

Now let's see what Nancy's flight of fancy is.  She's grabbed hold of the idea that because the Marcott et al's Holocene reconstruction resolves only to a couple of hundred years, it could be missing temperature 'spikes' of shorter duration.

So far so good.  Indeed it could.  The question is, how likely is that?

Nancy bounced off this idea into a real flight of fancy.  First she tried it out with informed readers at RealClimate.org, who were able to help her out - though she ignored their efforts.  Here is an excerpt from one of her excursions into the domain of climate scientists.  

Nancy Green says: 1 Apr 2013 at 10:09 AM

...it must be concluded that what Marcott is showing is only the natural variability in temperature and if any weight is to be given to the uptick, it shows that at higher resolutions there may be significant temperature spikes due to natural causes.

Gavin Schmidt helps her out with an inline comment:

[Response: Of the size and magnitude of the 20th Century - unlikely. Even the 8.2kyr event which is the biggest thing in the Holocene records in the North Atlantic is small comparatively. It would definitely be good to get more high resolution well-dated data included though, and Marcott's work is good basis for that to be built from. - gavin]

What about the Younger Dryas?

Nancy continues on this theme, this time referring to the Younger Dryas (which preceded the Holocene):

Nancy Green says:
1 Apr 2013 at 10:47 AM
...When one looks at long duration events we have the Younger Dryas event, with a temperature change of approximately 15C as compared to 2oth century warming of less than 0.7C....

Now that's a mistake any non-scientist and beginner climate science amateur could make, confusing local temperature fluctuations (Nancy's 15ºC) with global temperature fluctuations.  Gavin Schmidt helped set her straight, with an inline comment:

[Response: This is becoming a habit - the YD change of '15ºC' is a Greenland signal. It is not in phase with (much smaller) changes in the high Southern Latitudes, and in ocean cores, even in the N. Atlantic, it is much smaller. An estimate of the impact of the YD on global mean temperatures is found in the Shakun et al (2012) paper, and is likely less than a degree. Note that the whole glacial to interglacial change is only about 5ºC in total! - gavin]

The Younger Dryas is largely a northern hemisphere phenomenon as any reader of WUWT should know by now (they refer to Richard Alley's work describing the Younger Dryas in Central Greenland often, but no-one at WUWT seems to have read it or understood it).  It had particular effect in parts of the arctic. Nancy pushes the point, again confusing local temperature fluctuations with global temperatures:

Nancy Green says:
1 Apr 2013 at 11:03 AM.....Once cannot conclude from Marcott that there have been no short term events of similar magnitude to the Younger Dryas (approx 15C) within the period covered by Marcott. Such events would be hidden by the lack of resolution so long as they were shorter than 1/2 the sampling rate as per Nyquist.

And once more Gavin Schmidt helps her out, trying again to get the message through another way.  He didn't repeat himself that the global temperature didn't change by 15ºC (he's already told her that but she's ignored it.)  This time he reminds her that the reason we know about the Younger Dryas is because of ice cores.  If there had been a similar event it would show up in the ice cores - and it doesn't:

[Response: These are the same core that show the YD! You can't claim that a YD like event wouldn't be shown in the same cores. Please, you can do better than this. - gavin]

Spiking to the Stars

Nancy meanders off hither and thither pursuing her fantasy. The tone and content of this contribution, plus the fact that she hasn't learnt anything from the expert help she's been offered, is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  Her post was long and even travelled through the galaxy.  This post of Nancy's is pretty much the same as what she wrote at WUWT. I'll just give an excerpt where she tells climate scientists what they 'should' consider:

Nancy Green says:1 Apr 2013 at 10:53 PM

Thus, what Marcott is telling us is that we should expect to find a 20th century type spike in many high resolution paleo series. Rather than being an anomaly, the 20th century spike should appear in many places as we improve the resolution of the paleo temperature series. This is the message of Marcott and it is an important message that the researchers need to consider.

Nancy elicits responses from a few other people.

The_J says: 2 Apr 2013 at 6:40 AM 

You claimed that the Younger Dryas was a 15C swing in temperatures, and that the Younger Dryas isn’t detectable in the proxies. But both of those claims are wildly, absurdly wrong. I think you may have been confused by a statement on Wikipedia that the summit area on Greenland was 15C colder during YD than it is today. But that’s not a global-scale change of 15C! As discussed here, the entirety of the change from last glacial maximum to the Holocene was approximately 5C, and the Younger Dryas was approximately 0.6C. And of course the Younger Dryas is readily detectable in climate proxies … that’s how we know about it.

Ray Ladbury made some points relevant to Nancy's notions, and says: 3 Apr 2013 at 8:57 AM
...Dude, the planet is really, really big. It isn’t easy to pump that much energy in in a decade or two. We’ve only managed to do so by liberating most of the carbon sequestered since the Jurassic! The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum failed to achieve such rates of growth despite (probably) burning up the Deccan coal field!

dhogaza says: 2 Apr 2013 at 11:10 PM
:”PhysicsGuy @102 — Follow the links from comment #100 to discover why no such global spikes exist. There are plenty of other proxies in which such spikes would show up; none found.:’

And, of course, arguing that the paper’s analysis can’t capture such excursions is proof that they exist is just …
kinky.
Even without the fact that other proxies don’t show such spikes.

And here are two substantive comments from real climate scientists. I've broken raypierre's response into paragraphs for easier reading, and bolded what I believe to be the crucial points:

[Response: What a lot of this discussion of "spikes" is missing is that the point isn't whether the Holocene had any sudden rises with a cause analogous to the present. As many people have pointed out, that couldn't be, because the present rise is due to CO2, and is hence "durable," as many people have pointed out; it would show up in a record like Marcott's. But also, as others have pointed out, we already know from ice cores that CO2 fluctuated very little in the pre-industrial Holocene, so that isn't in the cards anyway.

What is at issue is whether there are any other mechanisms of centennial-scale variability that could cause a 1C or even a .5C spike. We know that the AMO can go a smallish fraction of that distance, and it's hard to rule out on first principles that some kind of ocean variability might not be able to do something bigger in amplitude if you wait long enough. There's no evidence that it can, and I myself find it hard to see how you could make the ocean do a centenniel scale uptick (a centennial scale downtick is easier, since there's all that cold water you could conceivably bring to the surface). 

But the Marcott analysis has no bearing on that question. I don't think the paper ever claimed it did, but the comparision with the instrumental era rise may have confused some people into thinking so. 

To repeat my earlier comment, it is useful to compare the instrumental era rise and the forecast of further rise to the Marcott record because we know the rise is durable and will last millennia. Thus, we know we are bringing about a durable increase that is huge compared to any long-duration variation over the Holocene. That's a big, big deal. --raypierre ]

[Response: To add to Raypierre: it would have to be ocean variability causing a spike in global-mean temperature without causing a spike in the high-resolution proxies from the ice cores. That is exceedingly unlikely; the ocean's deep-water formation sites near Greenland and Antarctica would surely experience major change during such a spike. 
Think of the 8k-event: the biggest in the Greenland ice cores over the entire Holocene, yet minor impact on global-mean temperature. -Stefan]

From a statistical viewpoint

This has turned out to be quite a long article already. But it would be very remiss of me to leave out an excellent piece of analysis by Tamino on this very topic.  Tamino shows that if a rise in global temperature anything like that of the past century had occurred  it would have shown up in the data.

You can read his analysis in his article "Smearing Climate Data".

A final word

So there you have it.  This current rise in temperature is 'durable' and caused by CO2 and is a big, big deal. It is well known from various sources that throughout the Holocene there has never been a rise in CO2 anything like the magnitude we've seen over the past century.  It is also virtually certain that during the Holocene, since human civilisation, there has never been a short term 'spike' in global surface temperature of the magnitude we are now facing with certainty (2ºC or more).

Nancy's post on WUWT brings up the number of Marcott Protest articles there to at least twenty four. The deniers have tried to argue from lots of different angles: from Nancy's invisible spikes to upticks to dating of core-tops to comparisons with temperatures on a summit high in Central Greenland and in Antarctica and even tacking centuries of temperatures in one single ocean location to a land-based modern instrumental record in another single location, with a gap of about a century from the tail of one to the beginning of the other.

Not one of their 'arguments' has come anywhere close to finding the slightest flaw in the Marcott Holocene reconstruction.  In fact, despite looking for impossible 'spikes' and obviously not understanding the paper itself, Nancy appears to largely support the paper, which will likely cause pandemonium among the DuKE (TM) of deniers.

One Big Scary Hot Whopper to Come - More from Marcott et al 2013

I wanted to put this figure into my previous post on Marcott et al (2013), but the article was already too long.  I think it's the best of the lot.  It was probably a bit too complex for mainstream media so hasn't been given much attention.

Take your time to digest it.  The authors have tried to fit a lot into the one diagram and there are lots of stories in it.  See how the distribution has now shifted to the right, for example.  Look how far it's shifted between 1900 to 2000 - in just 100 years!

It's not the "once upon a time long, long ago" part that is a concern.  That's fascinating in its own right.  It's the future story that is truly worrisome.

Look at the scenarios to see what could happen if we don't begin to sharply cut CO2 emissions this decade. Heck, its bad enough even if we could get CO2 back to the 2000 level. (Click on the diagram for larger version.)

The emissions scenarios (B1...A1F1) are taken from the IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 report (same scenarios as for TAR), and are described in this IPCC Special Report.

We've been promised a discussion of Markott et al on RealClimate.org.  Worth watching out for.

Watts is Whopping Mad (Crazy) after Marcott et al - Must be the Heat!

NOTE: The Marcott et al (2013) paper and supplementary material is available at Science and an FAQ is now available on RealClimate.


Comment: 1 April 2013: 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).

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!

They obviously do not understand the connect between the modern record and the paleo record, even after years of nit-picking climate research.  And I wonder will the 8% Dismissives 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...

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).

Click here for an expanded version of this comment.


Update 2+  So far there are now three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight WUWT protest articles not counting the sleazeball's (approaching this might even beat the number of protests against the Lewandowsky et al paper).  The first few are touched on in this article.

(Comment 20 March 2013: I have looked through the WUWT articles and a lot of the comments.  Anthony Watts, his guest posters and commenters provide an excellent illustration of warped mental models, ignorance, illogical thinking, dogmatism, conspiracy ideation, a preference for coloured pictures and avoidance of text, and the Dunning Kruger effect as well as the lynch mob mentality.  It is also apparent that he has successfully rid his blog of all but maybe one person who is willing to consider scientific research.  Watts' blog is aimed squarely at the bottom 8%.)

Of the rest, as with all the early protests, none of the protesters has indicated they understand the paper.  Neither are the protesters interested in the overall reconstruction.  It's the early part of the reconstruction that has filled in the gaps.  There are already several reconstructions of the last several centuries, some even going back 1500 to 2000 years.  In fact the protesters seem to be focusing not on the main substance of the paper but on the past 100 years or so.  Odd, don't you think?

Now they are focusing entirely on this century rather than the entirety of the Holocene.  If I understand Watts/McIntyre correctly, they are saying that there is an "error" in Marcott et al, which means earth hasn't been warming after all and we are actually still in the Little Ice Age.

• Protest 6 is almost identical to Protest Number 4. 
• In Protest Number 7, Willis Eschenbach wants the raw data in the published paper, not satisfied with it being provided as a supplement.  Steve McIntyre is, as usual, "baffled".  
• In Protest Number 8, Fred Singer misquotes Marcott so he can shoot him down.  Singer 'suspects what they did was' without appearing to be in the least interested in looking at the paper to see if what he 'suspects' was fact. 
• Watts returns with Protest Number 9. Watts cannot figure out how anyone could know that the world has got a lot hotter over the past few decades, forgetting about the thermometers that were giving him so much grief only a few weeks ago, the melting arctic and all the other signals of our warming world.  Neither can he understand how a paper jointly authored by four people and published in 2013 could differ in the slightest degree (sic) from the lead author's PhD thesis published two years earlier.
• Watts' Protest Number 10 is based on The Auditor's obsessive 'speculation' despite his being 'unable to replicate some of the recent features of the Marcott zonal reconstructions', though he admits it 'may be a difference in methodology'.
• In Watts' Protest Number 11, Anthony shows that The Auditor has been fiddling with numbers (ignoring the substance of the paper) and posits he has found a 'statistical processing error (selection bias)'.  Makes me think of the saying: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'!
• In Watts' Protest Number 12, Anthony proclaims that The Auditor has found an 'error'.  In fact he seems to be saying we have not yet emerged from the Little Ice Age!!!  (Fools rush in!)  Prof Peter Clark, co-author of the Marcott et al paper, has said they will prepare and provide an FAQ (a Marcott et al for dummies) which may (or may not) help McIntyre's 'bafflement'.

Near enough is good enough if it fools enough! (see below)

---

A paper published in the current issue of Science is getting some publicity.  According to this recent research, in just a few decades we have managed to extricate ourselves from one of the coldest periods since civilisation began to begin the hottest period.  And who knows when it will stop getting hotter.

The authors, Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark and Alan C. Mix have done a reconstruction of Holocene temperatures in a paper titled "A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years".  You can get the paper and supplementary data here (subs required).

Here are two diagrams from the paper, showing one of their analyses.  A shows the past 2,000 years compared with Mann et al (2008). B shows the same but going back 11,500 years before present (1950). (Click on any of the images in this article to see a larger version.)

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).

The findings are not earth-shattering in that the research accords with what is already known.  It is a very valuable contribution because it adds to and greatly refines existing knowledge.  The beauty of the research is that it uses proxies from 73 sites around the globe, whereas previously much of what was known about temperatures in the early Holocene was based on ice cores or other more limited data.

What the Papers Say

Justin Gillis of the New York Times has a written short article on their findings.  Other articles can be found Dot Earth (NY Times), Mother Jones, New Scientist, CNN and the LA Times, among other places.

.

What Science says

From the Editor's Summary in Science:

Exceptional Now
The climate has been warming since the industrial revolution, but how warm is climate now compared with the rest of the Holocene? Marcott et al. (p. 1198) constructed a record of global mean surface temperature for more than the last 11,000 years, using a variety of land- and marine-based proxy data from all around the world. The pattern of temperatures shows a rise as the world emerged from the last deglaciation, warm conditions until the middle of the Holocene, and a cooling trend over the next 5000 years that culminated around 200 years ago in the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have risen steadily since then, leaving us now with a global temperature higher than those during 90% of the entire Holocene.

The paper's abstract:

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

What Deniers Say

Deniers really don't like the Marcott et al paper.  Already Anthony Watts has posted five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight articles in protest. (See update below).

Article 1: Watts is Wrong, Wrong and Wrong again!

Watts Wrong !

In Anthony's first article he scoffed at the Mother Jones headline then demonstrated he hadn't read either Mother Jones or the paper itself, writing:

Yes, be afraid, very afraid, of that “unprecedented” (there’s that word again in the abstract) 0.7C temperature rise is the message I suppose.

No Anthony, you suppose wrong.  The take away message of most people is two-fold.

1. The bigger message (for the general public) is the current rate of change is unprecedented in the Holocene (and probably in millions of years).  
2. The second message is that if it isn't already, the world will soon be hotter than at any time since the beginning of civilisation.

Watts Wrong 2

Then Anthony adds to his errors, writing:

...One potential problem is that the pollen data median sampling of 120 years, which is 4x the 30 year climate normals periods used today. That’s pretty low resolution for a study that is focusing on 2000 years and leaves lots of opportunity to miss data.

Wrong again, Anthony.  The study does not just focus on 2000 years, it looks at the entire Holocene.  It looks at 11,500 years.  (And what is he on about 'missing data'?  The data is what the data is and is discussed at length in the paper and supplementary materials.)

Watts Wrong 3

Anthony compounds his errors by getting it wrong once again (all these quotes are from a single paragraph, incidentally.)

Further, when they say the last 100 years was the warmest (with higher resolution data) they really aren’t comparing similar data sets when the other data has a 120 year median sampling.

No Anthony.  "they" didn't say the last 100 years was the warmest.  Marcott et al's research suggests that we may only now be approaching the highest temperatures, which according to their research occurred during the Holocene Optimum (between about 9,000 and 5,000 years ago).

Article 2: JustNotTheFactsWUWT

In his second article, guest poster (?) "justthefactswuwt" complains about something in the CNN report of the paper.  I was not able to work out the passage that justthefactswuwt was complaining about.  He said that CNN attributed warming pre-1950 to human causes, but didn't post any passage that actually said that. (In any case, there was undoubtedly some human influence on the temperature rise before 1950, given that CO2 rose from 280 prior to industrialisation to 316 in 1959.)

Article 3: Watts third strike - and he's out (with the fairies)!

Watts reverts to form in his third article.  Do you recall the comment he made in his first article?

...they really aren’t comparing similar data sets...

Not heeding his own "advice", Watts proceeds to tack Marcott's chart onto a denialist's clumsy (and faulty) drawing of past temperatures on Central Greenland's ice sheet:

Too wrong for words

• Is Watts really that ignorant, even after blogging on climate for several years? Does he really think that global temperatures fluctuated by more than 3 degrees Celsius in the past 9,000 years?  Does he really not know that he was trying to compare temperature trends on Central Greenland's ice sheet with a global reconstruction?
• How does he justify chopping off 9,500 years of the Marcott et al reconstruction of global surface temperature and superimposing what's left of it onto some denier's drawing of temperatures in Central Greenland?

Not only that, but he claims his drawing is from Alley (2000), which it most certainly is not.  The chart may be derived from GISP2 data, but is incorrectly labelled (before present = before 1950 not before 2000).  The data used is based on this - the temperature in Central Greenland - not global temperature.  

Here is a chart of the Central Greenland (GISP2) temperature for the full period covered by Watts' denialist drawing, based on this data accessed from this site, with the rectangle showing Watt's cutout period above:

For comparison, here is a chart of the full data set of Central Greenland temperatures from the same source as referred to by Alley (2000), with a rectangle showing the above time period:

Neither of the above can be used to indicate global temperatures.  They represent temperatures on the ice sheet in Central Greenland.

It must be the heat

Anthony Watts seems to be getting more and more erratic and silly as time goes by.  Must be the heat.

Update: Two more protest articles on WUWT

You could hear fake skeptic screeches zooming around cyberspace when Marcott et al compared their global reconstruction to the Mann et al global reconstruction.  So what do the fake skeptics do in "protest"?  At WUWT they turn around and say "we'll show you!" and proceed to:

• tack a single site arctic temperature series onto a global reconstruction and
• tack a single site modern land based record onto sea surface temperatures of a 15,000+ year paleo proxy series (single site).

Here are the gory details:

1. Don Easterbrook has effectively repeated Watts' third post, comparing a global reconstruction with a single location in the Arctic (using the same flawed drawing of the latter). (Update) Don is persisting with this silliness in yet another post, apparently arguing the average global surface temperature of earth is around minus 30 degrees Celsius /s.

2. David Middleton has selected a single proxy set, Marcott No.2 from Barron et al. 2003 N. Coastal California High Res. Holocene/Pleistocene Oceanographic Data - 41.682 N, 124.930 W, 980 m water depth.

David plots the published sea surface temperature (SST) for Marcott No. 2 (which starts about 210 years ago and goes back 15,000 years or so) and tacks on a temperature series from a land-based location, Grants Pass (42.4 N,123.3 W) which goes back to around 1890 (approx 120 years).  

Then David reduces the nearby land surface temperature record to a single data point for some reason (how/why he selected that temperature data point he didn't say - maybe he took the mid-point of the fast rising series). 

Near enough is good enough if it fools enough! 

David Middleton hasn't clarified why he did what he did, tacking on a single modern land-based surface temperature series to a single paleo series of sea surface temperatures. It could be the same reason that Don Easterbrook and Anthony Watts tacked the Marcott et al global reconstruction onto a reconstruction of temperatures in Central Greenland. A "near enough is good enough if it fools enough" philosophy not uncommon with fake skeptics.

The commenters seem to be concluding that Don and David have discovered 'flaws', but no-one has identified just what those supposed 'flaws' are. (Going by past WUWT performance, the mere fact of having an article on WUWT is enough for the throng to decide the author has proved "all the models are wrong"! Said article doesn't have to make any sense.)

Quick - We've Got to Hide the Incline

The WUWT folk are bending over backward trying to find a flaw in Marcott et al.  Why this study?  They don't like the fact that it's warming rapidly and are looking for ways to hide the incline.