Monday
Dec072015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The same old story
Dec 7, 2015 Climate: MWP ;)
Update on Dec 8, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
In the comments ATTP says that the Christiansen reconstruction is a 2000 year one. I therefore provide this updated figure to give the comparison he wants.
;)
Reader Comments (92)
Presumably the second graph shows why "we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
Indeed yes, Roy.
I mean, how would you like to play hockey with a stick that shape?
You'd be laughed off the field.
As they should be.
The second image shows the same stick as the first after having rotated it about the axis passing along the handle and proves that the relationship between temperature and CO2 is multi-dimensional.
We are lucky that Mann had never heard of lacrosse.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/12037540/Is-this-a-circle-test-reveals-a-lot-about-your-personality.html
A relevant article, warmists see both a circle and the hockey stick.
Lol at matthu.
The first is net immigration in Germany, the second in the UK.
Both hockey sticks fail to show the exotic blend of breaks and splices, combined from carefully selected sites all over the northern hemisphere. Fusion Cookery has become part of the staple diet of climate scientists.
TinyCO2,
Re: the Telegraph article.
A circle being a locus of points, no physical thing can be a circle, but I suppose it's fair enough for them to use a daft question in a daft quest to map all the complexities of a person's views onto a nebulous line of more/less liberal.
Such ropey research goes well with the hockey stick, albeit a cut above Lewandowsky. The whole lot is more like numerology than science.
The MWP is an anomaly of the northern hemisphere, localized only on those sites inhabited by Vikings in Greenland.
If you look at Patagonia for example, glaciers are retreating at an unprecedent rate, some of them many km in only a few years.
Now imagine that in one of those glaciers that has retreated more than 15 km in the recent "Anthropocene" you find remnants of a forest, with tree stumps over a meter in diameter and carbon dating shows that they were alive 450 years before 1950. That is a fully grown forest underneath a present day glacier some 500 years ago. Obviously the Vikings were messing up the records in Patagonia too.
http://www.clim-past.net/8/403/2012/cp-8-403-2012.pdf
Patagon, those dastardly Vikings planted tree stumps in the Sahara aswell. They may have known a lot about looting, pillaging and boatbuilding, but they were clueless about arboriculture.
lol...that is
what Brandon showed
And most likely there are "papers" that show a W, a U, or a J shape. It makes no difference. Temperatures keep moving up and staying up. At best plateau (of late) and still requiring with some imagination. Were this not the case, none of you would be in this particular hot pickle.
Ah, you mean B. Christiansen and F. C. Ljungqvist: The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature, so the top one is global, and the bottom one is not.
Also note that B&L use HadCRUT3v from 2006 by reference for the instrumental data, which excludes high latitudes which are warming fastest so the instrumental part of the blade will be truncated and also the reconstructions end before 2000 so they do not capture the current SURGE!!
Sorry left off the link http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf
Aila, what hot pickle?
Eli, what surge?
"the top one is global"
Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley and M.K. Hughes (1999), Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations, Geophysics Research Letters, 26, 759-762.
Mann 1999, says 'Northern Hemisphere' in the title. Am I missing something?
Maybe. But the proper axis of rotation seems to have been overlooked. Viz: Turn it sideways, and then....
Heh, the top one is North Bristleconia.
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This was originally two perfect hockey sticks until a Viking used the bottom one to try and bash some sense into Mann; simple.
It is great to see Mann's Hockey Stick getting some publicity. The delegates in Paris seem wary of being seen in the same conference centre as Mann's famous fabrication, but none of them will admit it, for some strange reason.
Eli, the only surge in the Arctic is shown here:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current.png
inconvenient, isn't it?
Roy said: Presumably the second graph shows why "we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.
Maybe the big inverted "V"" represents the Medieval Warm Period (?). Hard to tell because there is no scale on the horizontal axis. Maybe the point of the post is to show the irony.
Many scientists now do reconstructions that would show both slow and rapid climate change in the past without making a point of the fact that in the pre-industrial past water vapour was the only greenhouse gas that could have been implicated in the observed climate variations.
If scientists were to make a point of this apparent paradox they would risk rejection during peer review. Which is why we have the situation that sceptical views of scientists are now well-concealed from the public.
A case in point is the paper I found on the Kulusuk Glacier in which the authors show the evidence and gently raise questions but do not pursue the questions they have raised.
https://geoscienceenvironment.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/glacier-response-to-north-atlantic-climate-variability-during-the-holocene/
Climate science is wrong because you don't like the analogy? Also, in addition to Eli's point, I think Christiansen & Ljungqvist reconstruction is for the past 2000 years, MBH99 was for the past 1000 years only.
For the slow among us, could you provide a little more explanation? Who cited those as being the same and where did they do so?
Eli - oh yes, the 'surge', and polar amplification. Except there hasn't been any at the South Pole:
Amundsen, RSS 1978-2011 graph.
Antactica, Hadcrut4 area weighted 70-90 S. Monthly averages, 1957-2013 graph.
I would say it is meant to be a joke but then I am a bit funny like that ^.^
Thieves wielding hockey sticks rob store
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/thieves-wielding-hockey-sticks-rob-store-20120715-224rv.html
Ironically, it is the straighter one of two that the UN-IPCC chose.
"climate science is wrong because you don't like the analogy". Analogies are for illustration and are best left to social sciences, where they do not prove anything but may cast light on qualititative aspects. In science all they can do is prompt lines of investigation.
I guess the 'surge' is the current el nino that appears more important in land/sea-adjusted recons than satellite data. This of course should be followed by a 'plunge' from a la nina just as in 1999/2000.
Exactly the same kind of rhetoric was used by Hansen in 1998. Then in 2002 he changed his mind because temperature clearly dropped. Then in 2005 he changed it back because temps rose again. Hansen eventually discovered the ENSO but Eli hasn't or, more likely, he knows that the holier-than-thou sheeple who implicitly believe in manmade despite the 'hiatus' that disproves it just don't have the mental capacity to understand the difference.
Gekko
Sorry, the link is here.
Apropos your update.
Does anyone really think that if Mann was able to create a longer proxy series it would be anything other than a continuation of his handle?
@ Robert Swan
[i]A circle being a locus of points[/i]
That's only one possible definition of many. Nothing in the question says to use the definition from geometry.
"climate science is wrong because you don't like the analogy". Analogies are for illustration and are best left to social sciences, where they do not prove anything but may cast light on qualititative aspects. In science all they can do is prompt lines of investigation.
Dec 8, 2015 at 9:14 AM | David S
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Quite so. But by 'social sciences', I assume you mean 'social "sciences"'?
ATTP should really read 'The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice' - a short essay by Peter Medawar.
In it he describes how scientists can become fixated on a theory and interpret all their experimental findings as support for that theory, even when further work show the evidence to be inconclusive, and then plain wrong. He recalls the case of Dr William Summerlin, who was so convinced in the 1970s that he had discovered the way to get incompatible skin grafts to become accepted that he started falsifying his evidence in an effort to obtain recognition of this breakthrough. His methods turned out not to work at all.
Medawar, and, famously, Feynman, point out that it's not good enough just to find correlations that match your hypothesis - you have to 'bend over backwards' to see if there are other explanations for the data you are getting. In the case of CO2-driven dangerous AGW, it is obvious to a growing number of people that the hypothesis is not proven, is not proceeding as expected, and has fundamental flaws. And it is also obvious to a growing number of people that, faced with this circumstance, many AGW supporters are emulating the actions of Dr William Summerlin....
Nice to see you have understood that MBH99 goes back 1000 years, ATTP, which was not the case a few months ago when you proffered your views on the matter.
Eli’s post demonstrates the continuing failure by adherents of the Mannian School to recognise that one cannot compare a directly measured series with an estimated-by-proxy series, since, inter alia, the two have distinctly different variances. Well, you can-n-n, but not probabilistically. You can compare today’s temperature with the confidence intervals of the historical proxy estimates, or you can compare the past central estimate series with the central estimates updated using recent proxies (the re-sampling in Linah Ababneh’s 2006 thesis would be a good starting point for the bristlecone pines). But you can’t legitimately make the sort of comparisons Eli is making.
Moreover, it should really go without saying that, to be valid, the confidence intervals should be (1) based on verification rather than calibration period residuals, (2) should take account of autocorrelation, and (3) should be independently reproducible. But neither (1) nor (3) is the case in MBH, and it is highly doubtful whether (2) is. So even comparing today’s temperatures to the Mannian confidence intervals in MBH is a purposeless exercise.
MBH98/99 really is just a complete car crash.
Does anyone really think that if Mann was able to create a longer proxy series it would be anything other than a continuation of his handle?
He did - Mann (2008)
This obsession with a 15 year old, long superceded reconstruction is amusing, not to say telling. Especially as L&C note in their paper:
The reconstructions of Mann et al. (2008, 2009) show a longer peak warming covering the whole period 950–1100 AD, and the reconstruction of Moberg et al. (2005) shows a somewhat later as well as longer peak MWP warming than in the present paper. The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions by Moberg et al. (2005), Mann et al. (2008, 2009), Ljungqvist (2010), and Ljungqvist et al. (2012).
Note also this: The geographical distribution of temperature anomalies in the MWP shows larger inhomogeneities than observed in the LIA. For the period 950–1049 AD the mean is 0.49 ◦C, but only 9 out of 16 local reconstructions show warm anomalies, although the cold anomalies are weak
Do try and keep up.
hmm I missed the MSM taking up the modified hockeysticks, and Mann humbly pointing to his previous errors??
odd.
Phil Clarke, so if L&C acknowledge the existence of the MWP, what does that say about Mann's Hockey Stick? That it was only a bit wrong, missing only a significant quarter of the refabricated 1000 year time period? Then the little Ice Age, and lack of recent warming, do not seem to accurate either.
So that we can all keep up, which bits are so accurate, that you are happy to defend them in the face of deafening silence from the global warming advocates?
Still obsessed. Here's the abstract of Mann et al 2008.
Following the suggestions of a recent National Research Council report [NRC (National Research Council) (2006) Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (Natl Acad Press, Washington, DC).], we reconstruct surface temperature at hemispheric and global scale for much of the last 2,000 years using a greatly expanded set of proxy data for decadal-to-centennial climate changes, recently updated instrumental data, and complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with model simulation experiments. Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used. If tree-ring data are used, the conclusion can be extended to at least the past 1,700 years, but with additional strong caveats. The reconstructed amplitude of change over past centuries is greater than hitherto reported, with somewhat greater Medieval warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, albeit still not reaching recent levels
Note that the Mann 2008 curve fits inside the error bars of Mann (1999). This is how science works, constantly refining and improving.
BH, suggest you add the link to the header post, it's astonishing.
So Carbon Brief have sent a transcript of a simple conversation with Matt Ridley to be peer reviewed (torn apart) by a whole host of climate "experts"! They've then then printed all their annotations together with an ad-hom hatchet job on MR (Northern Rock, coal mines, blah, blah). And it looks like most of the baying pack have responded (including our good pal Dr Betts) to join in the kicking.
Absolutely outrageous...but I love it.
Given that they normally refuse to engage at all this is a good step forward to see where views differ.
Now they've been flushed out from their lairs, suggest we now submit all their comments to a similar grilling and return it to them. We might get a useful debate going at last.
It shouldn't be hard to come to a definitive conclusion if the MWP was real and global and also if subsequent studies back up Mann's hockeystick (without using any of McIntyre's discredited techniques, bristlecones etc).
Let's get to it.
I guess Phil Clarke must be talking to Eli and ATTP and all the other SKS drones who keep saying the hockey stick is still valid because skeptics are indeed keeping up with the science as even demonstrated by the second graph. Alas the wilfully blind alarmists prefer old, discredited science which is why this 'pathetic' whack-a-mole of the zombie hockey stick continues long past it's sell-by date. However I rather think Phil is just projecting again!
Sure that's how science works;
1. Ignoring the bad stats of the first method and introducing slightly less bad stats none of which are mainstream or validated and all of which turn out to be simple, biased data-mining.
2. Using upside-down proxies and refusing point-blank to correct it, despite the original authors criticisms and other peoples corrections of derivative works.
3. Pretending to do a non-tree ring recon but leaving the upside-down proxy in.
4. Not updating the paper with the no-dendro, no-upside-down recon - instead leaving it in an obscure reference.
5. Ignoring that the no-dendro, no-upside-down recon entirely invalidates the conclusion that the MWP was not higher than today.
6. Still grafting high res and low-res series despite multiple criticisms of that unscientific approach.
7. Still treating proxy data that includes instrumental data as pure proxy data.
8. Still refusing to calibrate proxies to their local temperature which would have immediately rejected the bristlecones and Yamal hockey sticks as spurious.
9. Still belligerent to anyone who correctly points out these and many other egregious errors.
No wait - it's really just climate science that accepts and approves of this bad behaviour; they even hand out prizes to the worst-behaved.
SimonW, global warmists have continued to defend Mann's Hockey Stick. Why should anyone else bother to point out it's obvious flaws, when a small determined clique are so well funded to support it at any cost, even to their own credibility?
It shouldn't be hard to come to a definitive conclusion if the MWP was real and global and also if subsequent studies back up Mann's hockeystick (without using any of McIntyre's discredited techniques, bristlecones etc).
Well, that has been done, but you do understand that the warmer and more widespread the MWP (and the cooler the LIA) the higher climate sensitivity must be?
I'd also urge scepticism about anything written by Steve McIntyre. According to the head of the NAS panel, the problems with Bristlecones only apply to the last 150 years or so, irrelevant to the MWP.
Have you heard of the PAGES 2K project?
It shouldn't be hard to come to a definitive conclusion if the MWP was real and global and also if subsequent studies back up Mann's hockeystick (without using any of McIntyre's discredited techniques, bristlecones etc).
Well, that has been done, but you do understand that the warmer and more widespread the MWP (and the cooler the LIA) the higher climate sensitivity must be?
I'd also urge scepticism about anything written by Steve McIntyre. According to the head of the NAS panel, the problems with Bristlecones only apply to the last 150 years or so, irrelevant to the MWP.
Have you heard of the PAGES 2K project?
Con Fusion Cookery has been forced on the world. Climate scientists grow fat on the rich plunder, as everybody else is treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark, and fed bullshyte.
GC,
AIUI and as PhilC says, they no longer defend it as it has been superseded. Granted they don't outrightly condemn it, also outfits like the BBC continue to use it (certainly until fairly recently).
Handily JamesG has provided us with an excellent list of the supposed flaws with these later studies.
So can Phil or anyone (e.g. Ridleys' inquisitors) point to a later study that has none of these flaws (should be an easy checklist) or explain why it doesn't matter.
We can then put this one to bed (either way) and all move on. Then when anyone brings this up in future we can point to this agreed conclusion.
Same with the other issues raised now we have the "warmists" attention. Knock 'em down one by one.
Once we've sorted that we can see what's left and if there is any remaining need for alarm.
(OK tongue in cheek but why not?)
I think a highly trained climatologist would include error bars.
Phil Clarke
If we are all agreed that the best evidence is that there is nothing in the proxy record to suggest current temperatures are unprecedented then this thread may have run its course.
BTW, it was Dr Schmidt who felt it was necessary to defend the Hockey Stick. Ridley only mentioned it as the source of his interest in sceptical arguments about AGW.
"I think a highly trained climatologist would include error bars."
Since when do hockey sticks have error bars? I've never seen any. And what would they be - how accurate is a shot with the stick on the goal? And what is the goal? Convincing the public (and funders) of the looming catastrophe? How do you calculate error bars for this?