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

Hockey by email ~ more vexatious lawsuits by political science deniers

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:

• Mann ME, Bradley RS and Hughes MK Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, Nature, 392, 779-787 (1998)
• Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K., Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. Geophysical Research Letters , 26, 759-762 (1999)
• Bradley, R.S., K.R. Briffa, J. Cole, M.K. Hughes and T.J. Osborn, : The climate of the last millennium. In: Alverson, K., R.S. Bradley and T.F. Pedersen (eds.) Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 105-149 (2003)
• Mann, M.E., Rutherford, S., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Keimig, F.T., Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions using Terrestrial Borehole Data, Journal of Geophysical Research, 108 (D7), 4203, doi: 10.1029/2002JD002532 (2003) (with correction)
• Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D. Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere surface temperature reconstructions: sensitivity to methodology, predictor network, target season, and target domain. Journal of Climate. 18, 2308-2329 (2005).
• Mann, M.E., Zhihua Zhang, Hughes, M.K.Bradley, R.S., Miller, S., Rutherford, S. and Fenbiao Ni. Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 105:13252-13257 (2008).
• and many more.

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.

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.