Wednesday
Dec212011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The sports implement that must not be mentioned
Dec 21, 2011 Climate: MWP The sports implement that must not be mentioned is the title of an email (#0922) from Stefan Rahmstorf to Jonathan Overpeck and the IPCC 4AR paleoclimate chapter authors.
You can't say he hasn't got a sense of humour.
The text is less funny - it's a call for proxy reconstructions to be normalised on the twentieth century values. Otherwise they might diverge. And we can't have any divergence on show I guess.
Reader Comments (30)
If you take measurements of any unrelated properties with positive slope trends iwth time (house prices, CO2, childhood obesity etc) and normalise them so the latest time period is aligned it will look as though those properties are all agreeing on measuring the same thing. Even if they aren't.
Great for lying with graphics to politicians and "decision makers" who have no idea what they are looking at.
A once decent, quiet, and promising-to-be-useful subject called climatology has been degraded and demeaned by newcomers over the past 20 to 30 years. It is as if it was no more than a vehicle for 'the cause'. A cause as yet undefined, as far as I can see, but apparently shared by the team and so shameful and/or so lacking in support that they dare not make it a public one. Bit of a mess all round. The world would have been a better place today without them, and without the IPCC.
If they are all normalized on the 20th century era then that would mean the the divergences would be shown in the past or so it seems to me. So, the 20th century would be close but the past (say the MWP or LIA) would exhibit the spread divergence that exists between the reconstructions. So a close 20th century would create large error bars in the past.
I think that Lucia pointed this out in terms of climate model hindcasts
John Shade, 10:33 PM
It's quite clear what 'the cause' is if you read the words of the IPCC's Edenhofer: it's global redistribution of wealth via climate policy. This sort of thing has always worked out well in the past of course:
http://tinyurl.com/2cluuyt
If they are all normalized on the 20th century era then that would mean the the divergences would be shown in the past or so it seems to me.
With judicious weighting, not so much. And if averaged out you would get a flat line. The desired hockey shaft.
Lucia at the Blackboard was either a speed reader or clairvoyant with her recent post showing how using a current baseline will show less divergence!!
That is indeed a plausible contender, woodentop, and is at least, I suspect, a substantial part of 'the cause'. As the man says 'One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore...'
If the IPCC should survive long enough to produce another big report, we may well get more clues. Since the scientific rug, so to speak, has been pulled from beneath their feet, and they know that their 'summaries of the science' will get Fisked more thoroughly and more rapidly than ever before, my hunch is they will downplay the science (maybe just using a 'take it for granted' spin) and major on their favourite lines of policy development. In which case the good folks of CRU and elsewhere will be deemed to have served their purpose and will be sidelined, if not written out of the narrative altogether.
I had long thought that the MWP was a global thing, allowing farms on Greenland, and such like. I have been informed that it was a local anomaly centred, oddly, over Greenland, as can be seen on this map on the obviously totally unbiased site Skeptical (sic) Science - getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.
Why do the goalposts keep being moved?
Radical Rodent
There is considerable evidence that the MWP and Little Ice Age were global phenomena. If you follow the Soon and Baliunas thread over on Discussions it will give you some idea. Despite misgivings over some aspects of Soon & Baluiunas 2003, even BBD (our resident wamist commentator) accepts that the balance of evidence points to the existence of these phenomena, that it can be found all over the globe and that the events were of significant magnitude. Beyond that, claims about the detail of the MWP (strength of warming relative to the C20th, speed of onset, speed of change to the LIA etc etc) seem to me to be on very dubious ground.
If skeptical [sic] science [sic] is still trying to bang the drum for the MWP being less warm than today or confined to the northern hemisphere (or just a part of the northern hemisphere) then it just shows how partisan and close-minded they are.
An other example, how Rahmstorf science works, if something "stands out in Medieval times".
"Nice".
"I have a question regarding your picture. Would it be easy to make a somewhat modified
version of it for our publication? This concerns just our model run, Bauer et al. You
chose to depict the one based on C14 solar data, which kind of stands out in Medieval
times. It would be much nicer to show the version driven by Be10 solar forcing, which
fits your data very well."
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/5039.txt
@Radical Rodent:
I like that map at sic sic very much, especially the bit in South America, must be Peru, where they have two adjacent grid cells, one with the maximum positive anomaly next to another with the maximum negative anomaly.
I guess the have collected studies that are impossible to prove wrong, put them in red and compensate by colouring a very blue grid cell next to it, where there is no data whatsoever.
Patagon
I think we have coined a new term to avoid the controversy over shorthand for that dreadful propaganda site: sic sic it is.
Gixxerboy Dec 22, 2011 at 4:32 AM wrote
quote
If skeptical [sic] science [sic] is still trying to bang the drum for the MWP being less warm than today or confined to the northern hemisphere (or just a part of the northern hemisphere) then it just shows how partisan and close-minded they are.
unquote
You have obviously failed to read and understand the explanation of how Dr Mann is able to resurrect... reconstruct past temperatures at any point of the Earth's surface. Let me help you -- here's how they explain it:
quote
Mann 2009 uses a Climate Field Reconstruction (CFR) method. This method involves analysing proxies and instrumental records for spatio-temporal covariance patterns during periods when sufficient data is available, then applying those patterns to build past maps when and where there is no physical data.
SSTs at any given gridpoint would be reconstructed by reference to proxies (land or ocean, near or far) with an established covariance relationship.
unquote
You see, Gixxerboy, the relationships which exist now have always existed, the teleconnections between all points on Earth are established science and... Hmmm.... hang on a bit. I wonder if Dr Mann has tried to work out if a warm Antarctic teleconnects with other points? No, of course it doesn't, no way, otherwise the Arctic warming calculations might not work because a cooling Antarctic would mean a cold Arctic*, I'm not listening, la la la, I can't hear you...
Anyway, 'SSTs at any given gridpoint would be reconstructed by reference to proxies (land or ocean, near or far) with an established covariance relationship' means we can save a lot of work.
HTH. That'll be ten trillion dollars. I thank you. Kerching!
JF
*please insert any two points that fit your favourite proven science here.
I see I have made an error in my previous post by using the word 'teleconnections'. This term, with its science fictional -- not to say fantasy -- feel, has been replaced in the lexicon by 'an established covariance relationship'. I'm sure everyone agrees that it now sounds much more scientific.
To explaining new science terminology, making good etc, 10 billion dollars, kerching!
JF
A once decent, quiet, and promising-to-be-useful subject called climatology has been degraded and demeaned by newcomers over the past 20 to 30 years.
Dec 21, 2011 at 10:33 PM | John Shade
John, I thought back then it was called meteorology or weather forecasting back then! Still, you are correct in your comment.
The whole global warming/climate change/climate disruption (call it what you will) show is over. Unfortunately, it will die a slow, painful death as there will be many adherents who will refuse to give up their faith; a faith that gave them prominence and a sense of their own importance. The claims of imminent catastrophe will become ever more outlandish and shrill and the vitriol will plumb new depths. The public have seen through the scam and politicians are gradually and subtly distancing themselves from what is now a vote loser. With the initial claims of man-made disaster having been screamed through headlines across the world's media, the retraction will be low key and made without fanfare (a good analogy would be the way papers bury apologies for incorrect front-page headlines).
Merry Christmas and a doomless New Year to you all
SJ
"spatio-temporal covariance patterns"
BS baffles brains, as usual.
Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970 ed.): p. 150 quoted the German physicist Max Planck who said:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Perhaps we will have to wait until most of the leading lights in the present generation of climate scientists have retired before the consensus that human activities are the main factor in climate change is discarded.
Put simply - making the data fit a narrative.
The MWP was a Greenland local phenomenon, its extension limited to just 20,000km in all directions.
Well of course they are reduced to saying the MWP is a northern hemisphere phenomenon because there is nowhere near enough worthwhile data to reconstruct the southern hemisphere's temperature. The whole concept of a 'global temperature' is so absurdly flawed it is not worth taking seriously. And to argue that because of CO2 we are heading for a soar-away world temperature is simply to pile absurdity upon absurdity.
Hey Bishop Hill folks, there’s more! Went back to Climategate 1 code and guess what I found – what looks like nearly a decade of code ‘hiding the decline’ across a bunch of supposedly independent studies.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/17772
AJStrata - those headers do look like an interesting find!
But in the data4alps.pro code, am I right in thinking that the printf statement is actually outputting data to a file? i.e.either osborn_briffa_WITHLOWFREQ.alps.dat or osborn_briffa.dat
In which case the note about the decline having been artificially removed is actually being output as a header which is then being stored at the top of the data file.
So how were these files subsequently being used, and what use was the header?
mathu,
Yes it is a print statement. But where it goes is not as important as what it admits (deleting real data and using fudged data). I do know it was associated with a Osborn, Briffa series, who knows where it went!
That is the problem - their code says they fudged the data.
Now where, why and when needs to be answered.
What sports implement are they using? A racket?
BTW, major updates confirming my original analysis are now added to the post on 'hide the decline'
This email http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/4021.txt gives interesting insight into how reliable the code headers are:
An email extract I found interesting:
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/2627.txt
This email gives an insight into how climate change scientists might be prepared to manufacture data or alternatively rely on synthetics in order to conceal bad data. Harry has made a suggestion to Tim Osborn that data might be legitimately (?) manufactured to replace some inconvenient data. Tim forwards the suggestion on to Phil Jones who has a preference for relying on synthetics. (What are synthetics?)
This part of the email is from Harry:
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1061.txt
Don't forget Sea Who Must Be Obeyed:
MISREPRESENTATIONS OF SARGASSO SEA TEMPERATURES BY ARTHUR B. ROBINSON ET AL
Boslaugh, Mark B., Exploratory Simulation Technologies, Sandia National Laboratories, \ and Keigwin, Lloyd D., Geology & Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
Keigwin (Science 274:1504–1508, 1996) reconstructed the SST record in the northern Sargasso Sea to document natural climate variability in recent millennia. The annual average SST proxy used δ18O in planktonic foraminifera in a radiocarbon-dated 1990 Bermuda Rise box core. Keigwin’s Fig. 4B (K4B) shows a 50-year-averaged time series along with four decades of SST measurements from Station S near Bermuda, demonstrating that the Sargasso Sea is now at its warmest in more than 400 years, and well above the most recent box-core temperature. Taken together, Station S and paleo-temperatures suggest there was an acceleration of warming in the 20th century, though this was not an explicit conclusion of the paper. Keigwin concluded that anthropogenic warming may be superposed on a natural warming trend.
In an unpublished paper circulated with the anti-Kyoto “Oregon Petition,” Robinson et al. (“Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” 1998) reproduced K4B but (1) omitted Station S data, (2) incorrectly stated that the time series ended in 1975, (3) conflated Sargasso Sea data with global temperature, and (4) falsely claimed that Keigwin showed global temperatures “are still a little below the average for the past 3,000 years.” Keigwin’s Fig. 2 showed that δ18O has increased over the past 6000 years, so SSTs calculated from those data would have a long term decrease. Thus, it is inappropriate to compare present-day SST to a long term mean unless the trend is removed. Slight variations of Robinson et al. (1998) have been repeatedly published with different author rotations.
Various mislabeled, improperly-drawn, and distorted versions of K4B have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, in weblogs, and even as an editorial cartoon—all supporting baseless claims that current temperatures are lower than the long-term mean, and traceable to Robinson’s misrepresentation with Station S data removed. In 2007, Robinson added a fictitious 2006 temperature that is significantly lower than the measured data.
This doctored version of K4B with fabricated data was reprinted in a 2008 Heartland Institute advocacy report, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.”