Cobb: Are we moving toward a fact-free future?

[dorlomin]

the issue is not about the scientists in general but rather the personalities.

The whoe skeptical position in a sentance.

It is about the politicization of the work they do, the subsequent access to "rock star" importance that some of them can garner and the access to large amounts of gov't funding they also have at their disposal.

Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov are the two scientists who when working in Manchester Uni made a serious breakthrough in the study of graphene. Since then they have been awarded Nobel prizes, showered with money and been to meet and great the entire establishment of the UK.

Now using the logic of the climate skeptic I can declare graphene does not exist. The reason I can say this is the funding and 'rock star status' of the scientists.

Sir Isaac Newton achieved rock star status and was showered with money. Using climate skeptic logic I can declare gravity does not exist.


The point being that socially important discoveries or research will recieve a lot of attention. So claiming they do not exist or are invented to create attention is an argument for the ignorant.
Science stands on its scientific merits. Not the smears and insinuations of opponents of its conclusions.

[Lore]

Well put!

[rockdoc123]

The point being that socially important discoveries or research will recieve a lot of attention. So claiming they do not exist or are invented to create attention is an argument for the ignorant.
Science stands on its scientific merits. Not the smears and insinuations of opponents of its conclusions.

Slight of hand once more. The "rock star status" I mention was pointedly directed at Mann and his colleagues. They have published data shown to be patently incorrect, have omitted data but at the same time have attained a following that is somewhat bizzare. Mann attracted over $6 million in funding over a period of a few years for his research. His following are so convinced that he is "a rock star" that they completely ignore the use of inverted series, reliance on a single tree ring series, and more recently we become aware avoidance of incorporating the longest, most reliable ice core chronology (which shows an warmer MWP and no "hockey stick" in the twentieth century).

If what you were arguing were true then accredited scientists who have made important contributions should all be receiving such status. They do not. Richard Lindzen has more awards and publications that the lot of the Real Climate crew and he has a hard time even getting NRC grants. One of my thesis supervisors was instrumental in bringing the concept of pore fluid pressure to the oil and gas industry. He had been a colleague of Hubbert and Rubey at the Shell research centre when they published their groundbreaking research in pore fluid pressure effects in rock mechanics. That bit of work made it possible for the oil industry to understand the concept of "fracing" which is probably the most important advancement in the past decade or so. Peter was always challenged to get funding...NSERC claimed he wasn't doing "original research" but rather was using other experimental research to create his theories and applications, he died a poor but happy man, god rest his soul.

If you think that funding has anything to do with credibility then you need to start talking to actual scientists.

[rockdoc123]

What exactly are you sceptical of? Can you state a testable hypothesis, pro or con?

It is quite simple. CO2 is not the principle driver in climate. There is not a climate sensitivity of 3 or greater, there is not some crazy set of feedbacks going on that would cause CO2 to suddenly be the “death dealer”.
The test for this is quite simple. Plot temperature versus CO2. But don’t go to the websites that have already fiddled with the data by doing averages, plot it for yourself at woodfortrees.org which links to the actual datasets. What you will see is that CO2 has been continuing to rise since 2000, whereas temperature has not. You can come up with all sorts of arguments about aerosols etc but the fact is the models created with the 3.0 sensitivity predicted temperatures should be much, much higher at this point in time. Indeed temperatures are currently closer to the prediction that Hansen made a number of years ago of where we should be with no increase in CO2.
My point here is when your theory doesn’t fit the empirical/experimental evidence then you need to adjust your theory. This is standard scientific method as I learned several decades ago.
I find it interesting that scientists were quite comfortable trying to understand the way climate functioned by looking at all of the interactions of things like ENSO and AMO , Solar and GHG up until around 1998 when suddenly it became impossible that climate could be controlled by anything other than CO2.
I put back to you a testable hypothesis…show me some evidence that isn’t a model that illustrates CO2 is driving climate. I've been asking for this from the AGW crowd on this site for several years and no one has come forward yet.

You're just asking for a string of gish gallop.

You really are an ass. You make derogatory statements about people who post supported arguments here but you can’t seem to actually formulate a proper argument yourself and prefer to insult. I am not sure if your are a teenager with a high school education (your posts would suggest that) or just someone who is incapable of formulating a cogent argument. If you have something intelligent to offer please do.

[Lore]

You really are an ass. You make derogatory statements about people who post supported arguments here but you can’t seem to actually formulate a proper argument yourself and prefer to insult. I am not sure if your are a teenager with a high school education (your posts would suggest that) or just someone who is incapable of formulating a cogent argument. If you have something intelligent to offer please do.

Regardless of your childish usual ad hominem remarks, I'm in in all likelihood older then you and with obviously better social skills. I'll repeat, gish gallop remarks don't change the accepted science.

[dissident]

Climate science is too complicated for people without a high level of education, basically post-doctoral specialized in the field. Simple things like a new chemical compound or some physical effect do not saturate the brains of average media consumers. With climate science you need consider too many details at the same time and people just substitute whatever pops into their brains from intuition. This is why there is a fixation on variability. The weather is variable and everyone experiences the weather so they inject this experience into interpreting problems were it is irrelevant.

The energy of the atmosphere-ocean system is increasing systematically and the largest fraction of "variability" is internal dynamics of the nonlinear atmosphere-ocean system. It is not a change in the total energy of the system. The vast majority of people don't know anything about dynamical systems theory since they are never taught the subject. It should be mandatory in high school. Considering the crap taught in schools, teaching people to understand an important part of their realty should get priority. I have posted this before, but human intuition, the one we develop before we are taught the basics, is simply medieval. We can look back and laugh at people from the 1200s but they are what we would be without the accumulated scientific knowledge and education. It's our genetic wiring of the brain. So people should not think their brains are sufficient to understand climate science with some light reading on the internet and certainly not from the trash that the media coverage produces. You need to invest years of full time effort to develop the right intuition and knowledge base to say anything of consequence on the subject.

There is an interesting pattern in academic skepticism of climate change. Geologists, aka "rock scientists", have the largest proportion of skeptics. These specialists don't solve fluid mechanical systems and know basically nothing about radiative transfer. Rock morphology and evolution of the crust do not give insight into climate science. There is very little overlap between the fields which extends to the tools of the trade, so to speak. So here again you have the typical problem of non-specialists trying to use their uneducated intuition to pontificate on the subject.

[ralfy]

@dorlomin, @rockdock

With due respect, but you just demonstrated what is troubling me about the whole GW debate. When the issue came up my first reaction was to ignore this tread, however I do feel compelled to react.

Disclaimer I am by no means a specialist in GW.

My personal stance is that something is happening to the climate and that that is going in a direction and at a pace that warrants attention. And I am more than willing to admit that human activity must have an influence on the environment.

But what is troubling me that I find the current hypotheses all rather shallow, gut feeling is that we're still missing some important parts of the puzzle.

What is compounding to this problem is that on the different sides of this debate, people are dug so deep in their trenches that the debate reaches almost a religious intensity.

And to me it seems there is little incentive to providing real insights outside of the established positions. Moreover the scientific method and the basic principles of fact finding seem to have been abandoned in a lot of the research surrounding GW. Al Gore is a politician, he can be forgiven, but when a scientist shows a graph showing two lines moving in roughly the same direction (CO2, T) and claiming that is proof of causality, well it makes my stomach turn.

Same goes for the debate. People are throwing the same arguments at each other over and over again,until it starts to look like a slapstick boxing scene. And woe, to those who bring in a new viewpoint, they get hit from both sides.

So how do we get out of this?

Don't focus on Al Gore or one scientist or another. Instead, consider organizations that even some deniers or skeptics consider the "gold standard" of scientific review, such as the NAS:

http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatecho ... l-reports/

Second, assume that those who visit this forum assume that peak oil is a given. In which case, consider climate change skepticism or denialism a waste of time.

Finally, don't forget pollution and environmental damage.

[dorlomin]

Slight of hand once more.

Nope, you do start accusing me of that when I show up your attacks for what they are.

The "rock star status" I mention was pointedly directed at Mann and his colleagues. They have published data shown to be patently incorrect, have omitted data but at the same time have attained a following that is somewhat bizzare.

The so called skeptics always, always always go to 'the hockeystick is broken" at every opertunity.

But they never show a reconstruction that counters those of the mainstream (except very occasionally Lehoel).

Funny that. Its so obviously wrong, but they cant really show us what is right.

[Lore]

Funny that. Its so obviously wrong, but they cant really show us what is right.

What's funny too, is that the hockey stick shows up in numerous other independent reconstructions. If anyone is making scientists like Mann a focus of unnecessary attention, it's the deniers. After all, if you can't kill the message, the next best thing is to try and kill the messenger.

[rockdoc123]

The so called skeptics always, always always go to 'the hockeystick is broken" at every opertunity.

But they never show a reconstruction that counters those of the mainstream (except very occasionally Lehoel).

Funny that. Its so obviously wrong, but they cant really show us what is right.

Such a statement indicates how poorly informed you are in this particular aspect of climate science. You claim no one has shown anything different which is patently incorrect. Ignoring the “trick” by which modern instrumental record data was plotted on top of proxy data, what has been demonstrated first by Steve McIntyre and then by a number of other mathematically inclined bloggers is that the tree ring proxy hockey stick depends on either bristlecone pine data (which are not recommended to be used as proxies) or the Russian Yamal data which it turns out was a very small cheery picked subset of a much larger dataset that was not included and which would have eliminated the hockey stick appearance of the proxy plot.
The following diagram illustrates what happens when the larger dataset (from Schweingruber) is included with Yamal….voila no hockeystick

This next diagram addresses an additional set of tree ring proxies from Siberia (from the same area as Yamal) which was also a fairly large dataset compiled by Hantemirov who noted that it was appropriate to use live tree data (his datset) versus dead trees (the Yamal data that was selected by Phil Jones for inclusion in the CRU data archive). The divergence is quite obvious and when taken together with the Schweingruber dataset pretty much eliminates the hockey stick as far as tree ring proxies are concerned.

You mentioned Craig Loehle’s 2007 paper but not the Loehle and McCuloch 2008 revision in which they used no tree ring data to generate a temperature profile that showed a MWP and no hockey stick in the twentieth century. Mann in 2008 published a paper that attempted to generate the hockey stick chart using proxy data unrelated to tree rings. Under close scrutiny it was found that the proxy that created his hockey stick was the Tiljander sediment cores and irrespective of the fact the author of the Tiljander series stated the data was inappropriate as proxy data due to sediment disturbance, Mann not only used the data anyway, but actually inverted it. To this date the Tiljander data still sits in his proxy series and Mann refuses to acknowledge there is a problem.
McIntyre and McItrick published a short note in PNAS that addressed the problems in Mann’s analysis:
McIntyre, S and McKitrick, R, 2009. Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 10.1073/pnas.0812509106

Their non-dendro network uses some data with the axes upside down, e.g., Korttajarvi sediments, which are also compromised by agricultural impact (M. Tiljander, personal communication), and uses data not qualified as temperature proxies (e.g., speleothem δ13C).
Although Mann et al. purport to “follow the suggestions” of ref. 5, they employed “strip-bark” dendrochronologies despite the recommendation of ref. 5 that these chronologies be “avoided” and fail to observe the caveats of ref. 5 that negative CE statistics indicate unreliable results.

. If it isn’t obvious the ref.5 described in their note is the report from the National Academy of Sciences with respect to the 2000 year temperature reconstruction.

There are a lot of proxies that do not show a hockey stick. One that recently has come to light is that from ice cores at Law Dome.
Morgan, V and van Ommen, T, 1997. Seasonality in late-Holocene climate from ice-core records. The Holocene 7, 3, pp 351-354
Was the first time that Law Dome oxygen isotope proxy data was published. The authors at the time were most interested in looking at seasonal differences in temperatures and used this as a possible explaination as to why certain proxies don’t show LIA or MWP. It has been pointed out that the Law Dome series has accumulation much greater than the widely referenced Vostok data which means the resolution in the isotope data is much higher. Phil Jones had used the series in a couple of his papers but for some reason the series was not discussed in the IPCC AR4. McIntyre points out that in one of the climategate emails Phil Jones asked why the Law Dome series was omitted from the famous hockey stick diagram in AR4. Of course adding it in not only creates a MWP but also removes the twentieth century hockeystick. The O18 temperature proxy plot shown below:

As to there being an absence of technical discussion by the skeptical community about this matter you should probably read Andrew Montford’s book where he documents the history of the hockey stick plot and all the arguments against it.
Montford, A.W., 2010. The Hockey Stick Illusion. Stacey International, 482 pp, ISBN 978-1-906768-35-5
A very succinct discussion of the problem with Mann’s non tree ring proxy study from that book:

It turned out that the twentieth century uptick in Tiljander’s proxies was caused by artificial disturbance of the sediment caused by ditch digging rather than anything climatic. Mann had acknowledged this fact, but then, extraordinarily, rather than reject the series, he had purported to demonstrate that the disturbance didn’t matter. The way he had done this was to perform a sensitivity analysis, showing that you still got a hockey stick without the Tiljander proxies.
Great care is needed when reading scientific papers, particularly in the field of paleoclimate, and this was one of the occasions when one could have come away with an entirely wrong impression if the closest attention had not been paid. The big selling point of Mann’s new paper was that you could get a hockey stick shape without tree rings. However, this claim turned out to rest on a circular argument. Mann had shown that the Tiljander proxies were valid by removing them from the database and showing that you still got a hockey stick. However, when he did this test, the hockey stick shape of the final reconstruction came from the bristlecones. Then he argued that he could remove the tree ring proxies (including the bristlecones) and still get a hockey stick – and of course he could, because in this case the hockey stick shape came from the Tiljander proxies. His arguments therefore rested on having two sets of flawed proxies in the database, but only removing one at a time. He could then argue that he still got a hockey stick either way.

One final thing to add is that the reason the hockey stick shows up in other publications is because the group of authors publishing on this all use the same datasets, Yamal, bristlecone etc. You can’t expect a different answer. Several wrongs do not make a right.

[dorlomin]

Such a statement indicates how poorly informed you are in this particular aspect of climate science.

Deary me. You cannot lay a finger on the physics so you are reduced to pontificating about the hockey stick sideshow.

That’s it folks, the discussion is pretty much over in terms of anything of relevance to actual climate change and all we will get is efforts to drag the discussion to their pet topic.

Its their way of admitting defeat without acknowledging it.

Ignoring the “trick” by which modern instrumental record data was plotted on top of proxy data,

Oh the hypocrisy. Here is Watts pulling exactly the same "trick". Isn’t Watts is a sometime moderator at Climate Audit?

You mentioned Craig Loehle’s 2007 paper but not the Loehle and McCulloch 2008 revision in which they used no tree ring data to generate a temperature profile that showed a MWP and no hockey stick in the twentieth century.

You mean the correction because he made such a pigs ear of it even the skeptics were embarrassed. I guess I should have specified the correction to the cockup.
And the reconstruction only goes up to the mid 20th century (1935).

So the late 20th early 21st century is not obvious on a reconstruction that does not cover the period.

Thanks for letting us all know that.

There are a lot of proxies that do not show a hockey stick. One that recently has come to light is that from ice cores at Law Dome.

Who cares. Use them and do a reconstruction.

As to there being an absence of technical discussion by the skeptical community about this matter you should probably read

Or not bother boring myself with the blogger Bishops Hills meandering ranting and save myself the time.

There is only one skeptic who has tried to do a temperature reconstruction.

The rest hide behind innuendo and leaps of logic. Hence why you get all hissy when I post the basic physics. Skeptics know they cannot win on the science so they wander down the side alleys and wave their hands a lot about 'hockey sticks'. It bores most people and that is exactly what the skeptics want. The discussion mired in inconsequential boring minutia and ignoring the big picture.

If you have a good argument you would have used it by now instead of this well-rehearsed non-discussion.

But the most enjoyable thing about this post is that after trying to insinuate that all I ever do is read web pages, the whole post is a long tribute to the webpage Climate Audit.

[rockdoc123]

There is only one skeptic who has tried to do a temperature reconstruction.

McIntyre and several others in the bloggosphere have done reconstructions with the data that they have been able to gather, some are not being made available. There are more than one and all seem to replicate each others work.

The rest hide behind innuendo and leaps of logic. Hence why you get all hissy when I post the basic physics. Skeptics know they cannot win on the science so they wander down the side alleys and wave their hands a lot about 'hockey sticks'. It bores most people and that is exactly what the skeptics want. The discussion mired in inconsequential boring minutia and ignoring the big picture.

Look, perhaps you can tell us what "the basic physics" have to do with paleotemperature reconstructions? The answer is quite simple.....nothing whatsoever. It is you who is wandering down side alleys. If you think the hockey stick discussion has anything whatsoever to do with "basic physics" then either you haven't read anything about it or you are quite thick.
The importance of the hockey stick is that as published in AR4 and the previous version it suggested that proxy data supported a rapid rise in temperatures in the twentieth century and that there was no MWP or LIA. Why is that important? The MWP and LIA tell us that the planet was as warm if not warmer back in a time unaffected by CO2 emissions, hence something else was driving it, AO, solar etc. The lack of rapid warming showing up in the proxy data for the twentieth century further creates a problem in that it removes a source of verification for instrumental data and draws into question whether or not the heat island affect has been completely removed (the plant proxies are not taken from urban areas). That hockey stick chart was the corner stone of AR4 discussion for policy makers and it was used extensively in presentations by people such as Al Gore etc. Proving it to be incorrect seems pretty important to the arguments to my mind.

If you have a good argument you would have used it by now instead of this well-rehearsed non-discussion.

Amazing....so the argument that by taking out invalid data from the paleoreconstructions makes the hockey stick disappear and accentuates the MWP is not a good argument? I am stunned at such a statement. The data that makes the argument is invalid but you choose to say ....well that is a non-discussion. I think I have to go with thick based on that.

But the most enjoyable thing about this post is that after trying to insinuate that all I ever do is read web pages, the whole post is a long tribute to the webpage Climate Audit.

If you want to understand the issues around paleotemperature proxy reconstructions then yes that is the best source because it is McIntyre who not only identified the issues in the first place but also spent time retrieving raw data and reconstructing it. And you disparage Montford's book but it is a very good summary of the history and analysis that went into first the construction and then the distruction of the hockey stick. But, of course, neither Montford or McIntyre discuss the "basic physics" because to be perfectly frank with regards to arguments about paleo-reconstructions it is irrelevant. It is indeed relevant in other arguments but I'm afraid it is horses for courses when it comes to scientific debate.

[dorlomin]

McIntyre and several others in the bloggosphere have done reconstructions with the data that they have been able to gather, some are not being made available. There are more than one and all seem to replicate each others work.

The reader will notice no link being added. And nothing getting peer reviewed published.

Look, perhaps you can tell us what "the basic physics" have to do with paleotemperature reconstructions? The answer is quite simple.....nothing whatsoever.

As I said, they know they have lost and here admit they have lost.

Look, perhaps you can tell us what "the basic physics" have to do with paleotemperature reconstructions? The answer is quite simple.....nothing whatsoever.

Look, perhaps you can tell us what "the basic physics" have to do with paleotemperature reconstructions? The answer is quite simple.....nothing whatsoever.

If you think the hockey stick discussion has anything whatsoever to do with "basic physics" then either you haven't read anything about it or you are quite thick.

You double CO2 you get a 4 watts per square meter increase in returning energy to the surface.

You increase temperature you get more moisture in the atmosphere and a melt back of ice and snow.

As rockdoc says this is nothing to do with hockey sticks. As he admits you cannot deny the basics. So you just have to find side issues to try to wibble about. Notice the only reconstruction he has offered ends in 1935. But the claim is that there is no 'hockey stick'.

Remember it is an evil trick of evil scientists to put add the actual temperature data to that data that ends in 1935 so you will have to close your eyes and imagine it. (had the data been published on WattsUpWithThat adding thermometer readings would have been fine, one has to differentiate between evil tricksters and heroic bloggers when passing judgement).

and that there was no MWP or LIA.

No MWP? No, the point being they have a faith that the MWP was warmer than today.
Anything that shows this to be wrong must be fraud by a priori reasoning.
They have nothing to show a warmer MWP.

and draws into question whether or not the heat island affect has been completely removed

Blooming heck.

Even Watts has given up on that.

Amazing....so the argument that by taking out invalid data from the paleoreconstructions makes the hockey stick disappear and accentuates the MWP is not a good argument? I am stunned at such a statement.

Yes, your handwaving is not very impressive.

Stunning isnt it.

If you want to understand the issues around paleotemperature proxy reconstructions then yes that is the best source because it is McIntyre who not only identified the issues in the first place

Nope.Ken Biffra and Tim Osborne.

And you disparage Montford's book

Yep the guy is a clown.

neither Montford or McIntyre discuss the "basic physics" because

They are part of the denial noise machine.

[rockdoc123]

You double CO2 you get a 4 watts per square meter increase in returning energy to the surface.

You increase temperature you get more moisture in the atmosphere and a melt back of ice and snow.

As rockdoc says this is nothing to do with hockey sticks. As he admits you cannot deny the basics. So you just have to find side issues to try to wibble about. Notice the only reconstruction he has offered ends in 1935. But the claim is that there is no 'hockey stick'.

BS. The reconstruction I showed of Yamal versus other Russian tree ring data clearly shows Yamal removed removes the hockey stick. Along with stripbark removal there is no tree ring support for the hockey stick and that is for the same time period that Mann’s various papers cover. Removal of the Tiljander upside down series removes the hockey stick for the non-dendro proxies. This is very clear from the work McIntyre has done and it is all available for you to argue with at Climateaudit.org where you would kindly get your ass handed to you by a group of knowledgeable mathematicians, physicists and engineers. Much of this was published contrary to your ascertains:

McIntyre, S. (2006). Interactive comment on “Millennial temperature reconstruction intercomparison and evaluation” by M. N. Juckes et al. Clim. Past Discuss. 2 S708–S712.
McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. (2005a). Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance. Geophys. Res. Lett. 32 L03710.
McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. (2005b). The M&M critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere climate index: Update and implications. Energy & Environment 16 69–99.
McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. (2005c). Reply to comment by von Storch and Zorita on “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 32 L20714.
McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. (2005d). Reply to comment by Huybers on “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 32 L20713.
McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. (2009). Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106 6.

Some of the important differences in data with supporting graphs was presented to the UK parliamentary committee meeting on UEA data release.
http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre-scitech.pdf
Ross McItrick presented a paper to the APEC study group in 2005 that is a very good summary of the importance of the hockey stick, again including relevant graphics
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
and more recently a fully statistical discussion of the proxy data without removing any of the “bad” data but simply using proper statistics shows an uptick in temps in the late twentieth century from the instrumental record that is not as high as the MWM, the argument being the long flat handle shown in AR4 is a construct of poor statistical analysis. Again the authors did not seek to question what data was included or not. This was a highly discussed paper but the authors stood by their analysis

McShane, B, and Wyner, A, 2011, A statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies: are reconstructions of surface temperatures over the last 1000 years reliable. Annals of Applied Statistics, V5, 1, p 1-44

You are using slight of hand in your arguments here, something you no doubt picked up from your extensive reading of John Cook’s website.
And your continual lament that it all has to do with GHG radiation is complete and utter BS. This is another red herring you have picked up from John Cook. There is not a single skeptical scientist of merit who has argued that CO2 does not play a role in climate. Lindzen, Pielke Sr, Shaviv, Curry, etc all recognize that CO2 has a forcing. What is argued is not what CO2 sensitivity is but rather what climate sensitivity is which requires a host of other forcings and feedbacks to be understood and the argument has been that empirical observations suggest the climate is not as sensitive to a doubling of CO2 as some would argue. What skeptical scientists are arguing against is “dangerous climate change” not some minor climate change or status quo with respect to the earths history.

Remember it is an evil trick of evil scientists to put add the actual temperature data to that data that ends in 1935 so you will have to close your eyes and imagine it. (had the data been published on WattsUpWithThat adding thermometer readings would have been fine, one has to differentiate between evil tricksters and heroic bloggers when passing judgement).

What a ridiculous comment. When you are looking at proxy data you are looking at proxy data. If you want to compare it directly with the instrumental record then you should do so but that was not what the chart shown in AR4 was intended to do (and I won’t even talk about the proxy data that was truncated in that chart). And the point being made now is that without Yamal, strip bark and upside-down Tiljander sediments you have no hockey stick in the proxy data. The fact it doesn’t support the instrumental record should have generated a lot of questions, which it didn’t have the chance to.

No MWP? No, the point being they have a faith that the MWP was warmer than today.
Anything that shows this to be wrong must be fraud by a priori reasoning.
They have nothing to show a warmer MWP.

Not sure who you think you are fooling here with your slight of hand approach. The proxies you plot are exactly the ones that contain the problematic strip bark and Yamal data. Have you not been listening (I guess that is a rhetorical question).
The only way you get a much cooler MWP (the AR4 plot shows almost zero MWP) is by including instrumental data with unreliable proxy data and applying poor statistical analysis to the proxy data to boot. The two disagree over the past century why would you think you can use them as a means of comparing temperature today with that of mideval times? There is also a host of supporting historical evidence with respect to the MWP and how warm it might have been. Defending the indefensible.

Nope.Ken Biffra and Tim Osborne.

Again you try slight of hand. Their analyses include Yamal and strip bark. It has been demonstrated to be flawed and even the NAS said it should not be used and Ken Briffa (get his name right) knows that fact because he actually had the fuller Russian dataset but chose not to use it in the AR4 work. Again all of this is outlined in McIntyres analysis which was the first critical approach to this work the chronology of which is outlined in the released UEA emails

To those interested in actually understanding the sum of the detective work that went into all of this and in-depth discussion on a majority of the recent climate related dendro literature it is readily available on McIntrye’s website. Most of the time it is a highly technical read requiring a bit of math, statistics and dendro knowledge.

[dorlomin]

You are using slight of hand in your arguments here, something you no doubt picked up from your extensive reading of John Cook’s website.

You really have to stand back and applaud the brass necked hypocrisy.

Post vast long uninteresting tracts about the awesomeness of climate audit.

Then trying to insinuate all I do is read a web site.

But you are playing a little game here. Funnily enough it is the game you have been trained to play by McIntyre. Write really long boring meandering posts that go nowhere and declare yourself a winner.

Where is the temperature reconstruction from McIntyre?

He does not have one. You cannot post it. You will complain that as I am not being dragged into your endlessly boring discussion about the microtwists in the hockeystick. Either you have a reproduction to show us or I am not interested.

You are just playing games and trying to drown the discussion in irrelevant technical details.

And your continual lament that it all has to do with GHG radiation is complete and utter BS. This is another red herring you have picked up from John Cook.

I have not.
But its about how you feel, you feel a need to diminish my questions by claiming I am not bright enough to think of them for myself.

There is not a single skeptical scientist of merit who has argued that CO2 does not play a role in climate. Lindzen, Pielke Sr, Shaviv, Curry, etc all recognize that CO2 has a forcing.

You routinely post links to WUWT.

Still, by 1989, the AGW science did not make sense to me in light that it would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Which I remind everyone – remains in effect to this very day.

Its a common enough meme with your lot.

But then again there are good websites that clever people get their information from (i.e. watts and climate audit) and bad evil sites that stupid people read (i.e. anything I have ever read and if I post anything I picked up in a physics class then I clearly must have read it on a evil website)

What is argued is not what CO2 sensitivity is but rather what climate sensitivity is which requires a host of other forcings and feedbacks to be understood

The basics are pretty easy to understand.

Funny though how the usual leaps of lack of logic go from the MWP being warmer than today by some mystical force but suddenly feedbacks being weak today. The so called skeptics are not even trying to be consistent. They cant show a warmer MWP, and also insist feedbacks must be low. That and the constant effort to create mysticism about feedbacks.
Here it is, the August Roche Magnus formula.

When you ask them why it was as warm in the Cambrian they insist we cannot know anything about the distant past.
When you ask them why it was so warm during the PETM they insist we cant know anything about the distant past.
When you ask them how we were able to get from glacial to interglacials they wave their hands and say 'natural variation'.

But they are absolutely certain their is a climate sensitivity that is "low".

But when you start asking them questions they immediately go to the only tactic they have that works. Its how they admit defeat without conceding it publicly. They post vast amounts of guff about 'hockey sticks'. But cant really post a reconstruction that has their beloved MWP warmer than today. Ok they have one that is about as warm as 1935. But don’t you dare add a thermometer to it.

Evil scientists do that.

10 years ago the skeptics had cooling satellite data, 'its the sun' and things like Soon and Balliunas.

Now all they seem to have left is 2003 "the hockey stick is brocken".



Oh and lots of handwaving.

[SeaGypsy]

I'm not finding Roc boring. I am following his argument and it seems at least cogent enough to reinforce the need for question marks around a subject some people seem to think is virtually set in stone.

[dorlomin]

I'm not finding Roc boring. I am following his argument and it seems at least cogent enough to reinforce the need for question marks around a subject some people seem to think is virtually set in stone.

The deniers are getting great value for the money they have invested in the tired old hockeystick then.

They cannot answer questions about how you can have a low climate sensitivity and avoid a freezing earth over the past 500 million years.

But the hockeystick guff is great millage.

(funny how the deniers dont mention Ordovician glaciation anymore.... wonder where that one went too )

[Lore]

The hockey stick controversy has regressed into nothing more then a dog whistle call to keep the denialist knuckle dragging faithful coming back for a taste of red meat. There has been so much in the way of peer-reviewed scientific facts since then supporting AGW that the discussion of its importance is inconsequential to the bulk of the other reliable supporting evidence.

[dissident]

The whole debate is a joke. You can quantify with fundamental equations the effect of added CO2 and water vapour in the atmosphere on the temperature. Of course there will be complications like exchange of heat and kinetic energy between the atmosphere and the oceans (the largest part of the variability in temperature series) and of course albedo. But we have had over 30 years of satellite weather mapping and there ain't no trend in the cloud cover. Atmospheric H2O is increasing following the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. More cloud albedo requires more condensation, which would imply more H2O removal and a deviation from reality.

The real problem is all in the perceptions. The internal dynamical variability is not vanishingly small compared to the background heat accumulation in the global system. So you can expect really cold winters in various regions in the future and the associated claims that warming is a hoax. But for people who don't have their head in the sand it is apparent that something has changed since the 1970s. In southern Ontario the winter is over 2 weeks shorter and the summer heat waves are much more frequent. The only process by which 30+ year variability can exist in the system is via oceanic heat storage. Atmospheric timescales are just too short with the most significant variation happening on daily and annual timescales (semi-annual in the tropics).

But the oceans are not warming all on their own via volcanism or some other unknown process. They accumulate the downwelling infrared and visible band photon flux. Clearly the visible band is not undergoing some sort of multi-decadal ramp.

[rockdoc123]

Then trying to insinuate all I do is read a web site.

Well my apologies but it strikes me as odd that a lot of the diagrams you post and the exact arguments show up on Cooks site.

But you are playing a little game here. Funnily enough it is the game you have been trained to play by McIntyre. Write really long boring meandering posts that go nowhere and declare yourself a winner.
Where is the temperature reconstruction from McIntyre?

First off I pointed to publications by McIntyre and McItrick in peer reviewed journals (which you claimed didn't exist0. Those articles as well as the other ones I linked to all show those temperature reconstructions (which you asked for). The initial plots I showed of the response to removing Yamal and including the other Russian data are “temperature reconstruction from McIntyre”. I also pointed to a recent paper that has a temperature reconstruction which shows a higher MWP although it uses the exact same data as Mann and his cohorts. In a discussion of the hockey stick there is really no better place to reference than McIntyre, he has deconstructed each and every paper by Mann, Briffa etc….why would you ignore the expert who did all the work and formulated the arguments? I find that a rather silly approach.
Also if you are looking for a “spaghetti graph” recreation McIntyre has a few of those in his early posts on the dendro data but quickly moved away from that approach the reason being that by merging the datasets you are required to make adjustments (so they are comparable in the same graph) that are statistically unsound and artificially change the various datasets. His view, and that of others, is that by looking at individual proxy records in detail, applying the proper statistics and screening you get results that are internally consistent.
The paper I referenced (McShane and Wyner, 2011) made precisely that point and by applying proper statistics they get something that shows a very accentuated MWP which Mann and others omitted through the need to make corrections to the data in order to plot them on top of each other. Similarly, Dergachev and Raspopov, 2010 in their own review of all of the Mann and other proxy data pointed out that incoherence amongst the datasets results in close to a flat line (the hockey stick handle) when the various datasets are averaged as done by Mann, effectively removing the climate signals from each and creating an artificial construct. Hence the need to look at the reconstructions individually or in groups that do not require averaging.
Dergachev, V.A. and Raspopov, O.M. 2010a. Reconstruction of the Earth‘s surface temperature based on data of deep boreholes, global warming in the last millennium, and long-term solar cyclicity. Part 1. Experimental data. Geomagnetism and Aeronomy 50: 383–392.
Dergachev, V.A. and Raspopov, O.M. 2010b. Reconstruction of the Earth‘s surface temperature based on data of deep boreholes, global warming in the last millennium, and long-term solar cyclicity. Part 2. Experimental data analysis. Geomagnetism and Aeronomy 50: 393–402.
There are numerous examples of paleo-reconstructions that demonstrate a MWP higher than or as high as the recent warm period. I pointed to only one previous another would be:
Ljungqvist, F.C. 2010. A new reconstruction of temperature variability in the extra-tropical northern hemisphere during the last two millennia. Geografiska Annaler 92A: 339–351
Where they show the Roman Warm Period (~100 – 200 AD) and the MWP (~1000 – 1100 AD) as being slightly warmer than the current period in the northern hemisphere
Kobashi et al, 2010 showed the MWP being slightly warmer than the current warm period for the area around Greenland
Kobashi, T., Severinghaus, J.P., Barnola, J.-M., Kawamura, K., Carter, T., and Nakaegawa, T. 2010. Persistent multi-decadal Greenland temperature fluctuation through the last millennium. Climatic Change 100: 733–756.
And Clegg et al, 2010 showed a reconstruction for southern Alaska where both the RWP and MWP were warmer than the current warm period.
Clegg, B.F., Clarke, G.H., Chipman, M.L., Chou, M., Walker, I.R., Tinner, W., and Hu, F.S. 2010. Six millennia of summer temperature variation based on midge analysis of lake sediments from Alaska. Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 3308–3316.

You routinely post links to WUWT.

Actually I don’t. I hardly ever post links from there, occasionally when there is something interesting and I am not sure what you are suggesting. This is what Watts had to say recently about climate change and CO2 through a guest post from Robert Brown of Duke University:

This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation.

Jo Nova also wrote a letter that appeared on WUWT with the same point being made:

Firstly, to save time and money we must analyze the leaders of the denial movement. I have emailed or spoken to virtually all of them.
They are happy to accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and causes warming, that humans produce CO2, that CO2 levels are rising, and that the earth has warmed in the last century. According to Hansen et al 19841, Bony et al 20062, and the IPCC AR4 report3, the direct effect of doubling the level of CO2 amounts to 1.2°C (i.e. before feedbacks).
All they need are is the paper with the evidence showing that the 1.2°C direct warming is amplified to 3 or 4 degrees as projected by the models. Key leaders in the denial movement have been asking for this data for years. Unfortunately the IPCC assessment reports do not contain any direct observations of the amplification, either by water vapor (the key positive feedback4) or the totality of feedbacks. The IPCC only quotes results from climate simulations.

There is a small group that Judith Curry refers to as the “sky dragons” who believe that CO2 is not a forcing at all but this is not the widely held view amongst skeptics as is quite apparent from how often they are torn apart on Climate Etc. discussions.

Funny though how the usual leaps of lack of logic go from the MWP being warmer than today by some mystical force but suddenly feedbacks being weak today. The so called skeptics are not even trying to be consistent. They cant show a warmer MWP, and also insist feedbacks must be low. That and the constant effort to create mysticism about feedbacks.

The warmer or as warm MWP has been demonstrated by so many papers it is actually quite astounding (I think I have references in my notebook for about 200 and I know there are more). For you to be ignorant of the literature says something about your credibility in this argument. You are making things up and portraying them as fact. And I would point out if the knowledge around feedbacks was as simple as you suggest (which it isn’t) there wouldn’t be so much research being devoted to the subject. In a recent paper Carslaw et al, 2010 noted that based on their analysis of the impact of aerosols and climate forcings both from observational data and models and stated:

the number of drivers of change is very large and the various systems are strongly coupled

there have therefore been very few studies that integrate the various effects to estimate climate feedback factors

the level of scientific understanding of the climate drivers, interactions and impacts is very low.

Carslaw, K.S., Boucher, O., Spracklen, D.V., Mann, G.W., Rae, J.G.L., Woodward, S., and Kulmala, M. 2010. A review of natural aerosol interactions and feedbacks within the Earth System. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 10: 1701–1737.
And closely linked is the discussion regarding clouds and whether or not they act as a direct forcing or only as a feedback. This is still hotly debated. I could go on and on about other feedbacks that are poorly constrained but won’t bother as I’m pretty sure you aren’t interested.
The problem here is you want to try to describe the whole climate argument around what you call “simple physics” which is not much different than the story about a blind man trying to describe an elephant from touching its tail. Simple physics only works when all “other things being equal" applies. Unfortunately in climate it never applies.

When you ask them why it was as warm in the Cambrian they insist we cannot know anything about the distant past.
When you ask them why it was so warm during the PETM they insist we cant know anything about the distant past.
When you ask them how we were able to get from glacial to interglacials they wave their hands and say 'natural variation'.

This is BS and you know it. There are a host of papers written up to around 2003 that talk to Paleozoic climate and what might have been the drivers. The discussion around glaciers has been in the paleo literature for well over 50 years. It is only recently that some scientists have been trying to explain everything by CO2, which is ridiculous because there are periods in the earth’s history where that is empirically impossible to do as the two are disconnected irrespective of any arguments regarding changes in the suns output through time. The issues around working with any data from the Paleozoic is that the isotope error bars get bigger and that in itself creates some uncertainty.
And what you dismiss as “natural variation” or magic refers to the vast research that has been done and continues to be done on subjects such as ENSO, the Atlantic and Pacific decadal oscillations, the apparent delayed link between solar influx and ocean temperatures and its possible relationship to AO, carbon sequestration and the interplay between the ocean and the atmosphere, other solar forcings such as solar magnetic dipole changes, cosmic gamma rays etc. There are scads of scientists working on this research and publishing continuously and I suspect they will continue to do so, meanwhile ignoring your claim that their research is not valuable given it all comes down to “simple physics”. I guess for simpletons it might.