Bishop Hill Away with the fairies
Aug 28, 2015 Climate: MWP Climate: Mann ;)
Journalist David Appell appears a couple of times in The Hockey Stick Illusion, firstly in Chapter 4, in the section entitled "Mann's mouthpiece", where he is the source (if perhaps not the ultimate source) of the (false) claim that Mann sent McIntyre an Excel spreadsheet. It's worth reading again if you have a moment.
Anyway, in the wake of Mark Steyn's book on Michael Mann, Appell has written to Jonathan Jones enquiring about the latter's comments on the Hockey Stick and the results have been written up in a blog post here. It's hilarious.
For example, Jones observes that bristlecones are not reliable temperature proxies and that principal components analysis requires data to be centred, before following up with similar scientific objections to a couple of other papers that Appell has cited in support of Mann. Appell's response to all of these objections is, in total:
This is clearly just a lot of hand-waving.
Read the rest of it too. The guy is away with the fairies.
Reader Comments (231)
Ivor: Only because Watts bans me from commenting there under my real name, as he does for most people who know science.
THINKS they know David. There is a difference. Those that believe the know it all tend to be pompous and arrogant showing little regard for the opinions of those who run counter to their beliefs.
Sound familiar?
Mailman
Mailman
I see Roy Spencer, like other bloggers, has finally had enough of Doug Cotton trolling his blog.
The Appell cart can't be far behind.
"Only because Watts bans me from commenting there under my real name, as he does for most people who know science."
You did not seem to be having much trouble commenting there at length under your own name at that time. So we have established that Mr Watts does not ban you from commenting under your own name. So that is perhaps somewhat misleading a statement.
Further , we have established that you are in fact somewhat economical with the truth when you say you ALWAYS comment under your own name.
Tell me....do you ever have any issues about people believing what you say?
David Appell, you know that Marcott does not support Mann's Hockeystick. Marcott himself said the hockeystick period was not robust.
You know that because I showed you Marcott said that over at WUWT. I do post under my own name.
Yet, now I find you spreading a lie that you know is a lie.
You are no journalist.
And you are an enemy of science.
Science seeks the truth. You seek to spread lies.
For your sake I hope you are forgotten as worthless. For your epitaph otherwise would be most cruel. Rightly so.
Aug 29, 2015 at 8:45 PM | Unregistered CommenterDavid Appell:
Please would you care to elaborate on which bit of science that you think you 'know'?
David Appell misunderstands the implications of the hockey stick curve and his supposed demonstration reveals that misunderstanding.
The important part of the hockey stick was shown by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth". That is its strong correlation with the atmospheric concentration of CO2. However this correlation was incompatible with the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. If the MWP did exist then the simple relationship (as expressed in Appell's comment) between CO2 concentration and the global mean surface temperature would not exist. The important part of the hockey stick is the flat handle and not the blade.
Appell's demonstration is circular. He assumes a simple relationship between CO2 concentration and GMST and then shows that correlation.
David Appell misunderstands the implications of the hockey stick curve and his supposed demonstration reveals that misunderstanding.
The important part of the hockey stick was shown by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth". That is its strong correlation with the atmospheric concentration of CO2. However this correlation was incompatible with the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. If the MWP did exist then the simple relationship (as expressed in Appell's comment) between CO2 concentration and the global mean surface temperature would not exist. The important part of the hockey stick is the flat handle and not the blade.
Appell's demonstration is circular. He assumes a simple relationship between CO2 concentration and GMST and then shows that correlation.
Wow..You know its all over... when the best argument against the $CAGW$ madness...is to point sceptical readers to the "writings" of a $CAGW$ apologist who is so out of their depth..that its beyond comical..
Why would anyone want the public to see that exchange on his page.?
Hide it man for god sake..are you that detached from reality.?????
David Appell
Your comment can be summarised, I hope fairly, as, the hockey stick must be robust, because it is what one would expect to find.
Passing over the "cart before the horse" nature of this position, I'm afraid that the hockey-stick is far from robust even in your terms.
If you were correct, you wouldn't expect to see the proxies showing a decline in temperatures after the 1960s - yet that is what they did (which is why they were replaced by instrumental readings).
Either temperatures have declined since the 1960s, or the proxies used by Mann, in the way they were used by Mann, didn't accurately reconstruct temperatures.
Which is it?
Just been back to Appell's blog article and I see that there are now some comments -predominantly hostile.
I was surprised to see our old friend ATTP commenting there, given Appell's stated view that mere physicists, unpublished in the field of paleoclimatology, are not qualified to opine on the "hockey stick"!
WFC, I am not an IT expert, but know that a mobile phone smashed into pieces, is broken. Appell appears to be the only 'expert' who has not yet worked out that the Hockey Stick is sawdust.
The copious amounts of hi-tech patches and glues used in previous repairs, probably renders the sawdust unsuitable for a rat's bedding. It is too toxic. That is why most climate scientists have been so keen to wash their hands and avoid further contact. Most rats have worked this out too.
@diogenes and @brandon
Did I imagine a climategate quote about they hope the skeptics never looked too closely at the many reconstructions because none of them matched.
I've been searching but not found any evidence of it.
Heh, in comments, there are Victor Venema, Josh Halpern, and Ken Rice rising in defense of the defender of the Piltdown Mann's Crook't Stick.
Like flies to uh, er, honey.
==============
Off-topic :
Anyone have references at hand as to how the UEA 'investigations' into Climategate were selected and paid for ?
Thanx.
Kim, was it in Peter Pan that it was stated that fairies die, when children say they don't believe in fairies?
I am sure that those going on the record in support of the Holy Hockey Stick, believe they are doing something honourable and decent, in their tipsy-topsy world of make believe and made up beliefs.
Mr Appell does not appear capable of stringing two sentences together without lying, handy trick that ^.^
Ivor Ward (or anybody) - please could you give the URL link to the 7 Aug 1:09 am comment so it can be verified? (I did not find it when I looked)
____________________________________________________________
OK found it. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/07/friday-funny-mann-gets-real-time/#comment-2002711
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/07/friday-funny-mann-gets-real-time/#comment-2002711
WFC wrote:
"If you were correct, you wouldn't expect to see the proxies showing a decline in temperatures after the 1960s - yet that is what they did (which is why they were replaced by instrumental readings)."
If you read my post, you'd see that it only applies to the period when CO2 was superexponential. That was not the case after the 1960s -- the GROWTH RATE of human population peaked in the 1960s, after which it was population was no longer superexponential.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-about-generating-hockey-sticks.html
The proxy data is affected by the divergence problem after the 1960s:
"On the ‘Divergence Problem’ in Northern Forests: A review of the tree-ring evidence and possible causes,"
Rosanne D'Arrigo et al, Global and Planetary Change 60 (2008) 289–305.
"CO2 was superexponential"
Please give a definition for this term "superexponential".
Re: David Appell
I'm familiar with the concept of super-exponential growth rate of human population but I have never seen it claimed for CO2.
In fact a search of the entire ipcc.ch site does not find a single reference to either superexponential or "super exponential". Could you point me to something that makes this claim (no blog posts please).
Re: michael hart
Mathematically, something is superexponential when it has the following properties:
f(0) = 1 and f(g)f(h) ≤ f(g+h) ∀ g, h ≥ 0
which is why I'm looking for how CO2 increase is superexponential.
TerryS and michael hart,
Unless David Appell cares to respond otherwise, it would be safe to assume that super-exponential means something really strange, that is only understood by people who worship the Holy Hockey Stick, and would suffer from enrichment depravity, if the secret was revealed to non-believers.
Dr. Appell, your point is silly. Sure, if CO2 causes warming, we expect to see warming. That doesn't tell us how much warming, or how it compares to natural variation, and those are the million-dollar questions. Mann et al claimed to answer that: not too much natural variation (flat handle) and lots of CO2 warming (20th century). By now we know that the flat handle is wrong; the latest (PAGES2K + corrections) shows variation from the past that equals or exceeds the current warming. We still don't know how fast that varies, there isn't that much temporal resolution in the past. The proxies don't do well on the last century where we can compare w instrumental temperatures anyhow, so no one is too sure how well they did on the past (see Jim Bouldin). Not too much is left of the hockey stick that tells us about AGW.
And as both panels concluded, Mann's statistics were wrong; even if the result turned out to be right, that would just be luck, not a defense of Mann et al.
Thanks, TerryS.
I'll be blunt and say that I don't believe David Appell means that, and that he is just using journalistic license to add an inflammatory superlative.
The visual interpretation of a real exponential curve is also frequently misinterpreted in observations. Many people get the impression that the "steep part" of the curve is somehow different from the "flattish part", when you can 'zoom in' and visualize the same pattern at any scale.
I'm amazed that no one has remarked at the way David Appell (Aug 29, 2015 at 7:27 PM) defends Mann's science, which seems to boil down to the simple statement that “the ends justify the means”.
Even if the simplistic "proof" he presents were true, it’s absolutely no justification for the questionable methods used by Mann (e.g. bad statistics and biased selection of data). Therefore, if I believed in Appell’s theory, I’d be furious at Mann for giving sceptics a perfect excuse to both attack and discredit the science behind it (i.e. with friends like these, who needs enemies).
So, my question to Appell is: why continue to defend Mann if you believe others have provided better (i.e. scientifically sound) evidence for your theory?
Dave Salt, I think many on both sides of the argument regard it as history.
David Appell's defense of Mann's hockey-stick calls to mind the apocryphal stories of Imperial Japanese soldiers on Pacific islands in late 1945, and even later: They were isolated as irrelevant failed history after the active front moved past them to the conclusion of the war elsewhere.
Completely cut-off, they were left with no option but to aggressively defend a small island for the honour of the Emperor. I don't doubt it would have had lasting, serious psychological effects on such soldiers.
What a lot of peoples time wasted on this Appell guy
Although I have enjoyed as always reading golf charlies clear analysis
But as the commentator says in one of his posts.... Aug 29, 2015 at 7:15 PM | David Appell
"I comment under my own name, always. I have nothing to hide and am not ashamed of my opinions"
Whenever I here opinions mentioned, I cant help thinking of Dirty Harry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlYMctb7Y4
climatebeagle, I don't recall seeing any quote like that, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I might have missed it or just forgot about it. I'd expect it to have been talked about more if it existed though.
'Super exponential' ? oh my
SuperExponentialMannAndAppellSymbiosis
Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious
If you say it loud enough, you'll always get neurosis
SuperExponentialMannAndAppellSymbiosis
Um fiddle, fiddle fiddle, um fiddle ay
Um fiddle, fiddle fiddle, um fiddle ay
Um fiddle, fiddle fiddle, um fiddle ay
Um fiddle, fiddle fiddle, um fiddle ay
"For example, Jones observes that bristlecones are not reliable temperature proxies and that principal components analysis requires data to be centred"
"Figure 1 (top) shows the result of these pseudoreconstructions
for one realization of the white noise (with
noise variance 50%) and (bottom) one realization of the red
noise (high-frequency noise variance 50% and with 1-year
lag autocorrelation of a = 0.8): in both cases PCA-centerings
has a small relevance for the final result and the
differences are within the uncertainty range (Figure 1).
The conclusion is essentially the same for all realizations
and other constructions of noise. For instance, white noise
with r = 0.7 yields a standard deviation of the differences of
0.006K; r = 0.4 yields 0.007K; red noise with a = 0.5 and
r = 0.7 (r = 0.4) yields 0.01K (0.02K); red noise with a = 0.8
and r = 0.7 (r = 0.4) yields 0.02K(0.03K). Therefore, the
differences increase slightly with the amount and redness of
the noise, but they remain small, even in the case of high and
red noise with a steep red spectrum."
-- "Comment on ‘‘Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious
significance by S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick,"
Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita,
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L20701, doi:10.1029/2005GL022753, 2005
Yeah, good scientists always use non-standard methods when using standard methods would yield the same result.
Why am I thinking of corporations who prefer to use non-GAAP numbers? I'm sure they think "it doesn't matter" too.
Response by McIntyre and McKitrick
Your point?
David,
The fact that Zorita and Storch's analysis of their own pseudo proxies showed that they were not much affected by de-centering does not mean that the same is true of the MBH proxies. The MBH proxy roster used for the early period has very weak correlation with the instrumental record, much weaker than Zorita and Storch's proxies do with their target. McIntyre and Mckitrick point all this out in their peer-reviewed reply to Zorita and Storch in the same issue of GRL. Your obtuseness on issues like this is astonishing. The real issue with the MBH papers is whether bristlecone pines are adequate proxies. It seems pretty clear they are not. As "everyone" (not including you?) has known since 2005, if not earlier if you include bristlecone pines by using lots of principal components you can get a hockeystick. If you exclude them, either by using only the first two principal components or by fiat, you don't get a hockeystick. The methodological details of how to get the bristlecones in are basically smoke and mirrors to draw attention away from the simple question of whether they are adequate proxies or not.
Oh, Snap!
David Appell, if you are not going to explain super-exponential, ..........
Mann's Hockey Stick, now in terminal decline, is sustained only by Parasitic Narco-Thromboses. It thrives on dopey clots.
David's lack of shame over the alarmist crap he promotes and the intellectual dishonesty he revels in is as revealing as his self-confessed confusion about his identity.
"Even if the simplistic "proof" he presents were true, it’s absolutely no justification for the questionable methods used by Mann (e.g. bad statistics and biased selection of data)."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yup, Dave Salt, that's it in a nutshell.
At the time that McIntyre and McKitrick demolished the Hockey Stick, McIntyre was openly agnostic about CAGW in the broad sense. He wasn't on any kind of crusade, except a crusade against bad "science." And, as others have noted, getting the right answer by the wrong method is meaningless. When I was at school, in maths and science exams you had to show your workings. You could get some marks for using the right method but accidentally ending up with the wrong answer.
Right answer but wrong method = zero marks.
Johanna 12:04
Right answer, but wrong method = zero marks.
But top dollar rating, and maximum kudos in climate science.
I wonder why he did it?
Right now, David Appell is busy trolling at Roy Spencer's blog.
I should add that I do it occasionally for fun, after a beer. David Appell appears to to it for a living while claiming to be a journalist.
There are a bunch of thing tangled up here.
First, Jones' arguments is basically formalism, absolutely true for a mathematician, pretty much besides the point for a physical scientist. To quote dsquared: ""devastating critique" is my word for when half-bright self-appointed science police get on the case of actual researchers. "
Gerry North nailed this and Jones several places including an interview with at the Chronicle where he says
North, of course, chaired the NAS panel which evaluated the MBH papers.
Second, the McIntyre issues are best bundled into the bag of look very carefully at what they write, it is not what everybunny thinks they are claiming and one might argue that that is not accidently not on purpose.
Nick Stokes has been very good at exploring these tricks.
http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2014/03/mcintyre-mann-and-gaspe-cedars.html
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/effect-of-selection-in-wegman-report.html
Eli, your citing of (as Steve McIntyre says, 'Horserace Haynes) Nick Stokes is another example of why you and David Appell will always in the end lose on the merits in the subtlties of climate debates such as this one. Because either you do not understand, or prefer to ignore, the subtlties. Certain proxies are known not to be mainly representative of temperature. Like stripbark bristlecones and Gaspe cedars. Decentered PCA will produce hockeysticks from pire red noise. M&M showed how and why.
You persist in defending the indefensible. That is an indication of a low IQ. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, "when confronted with new information I change my mind. What do you do?" Well, you continue to defend the indefensible.
Archeology PROVES thatnthe MWP was significant, at least in the NH. Norse grew barley in Greenland, something impossible today. Chinese written records show was at least NH.
Yoir assertion that Jones was mainly mathematical formalism (a) ignores the significance of faulty math and (b) ignores the significance of the faukty proxies he pointed out. Perhaps you did not read Jones reply at Appells. I did before a somewhat orthongonal comment about Appell techniques much upthread.. You just showed either your own ignorance or your own obfuscation of fairly simple to verify facts. Either way, you have yet again diminished yourself further (if such is possible)with respect to intellectual capacity and trustworthiness.
David Appell:
Dave Salt wrote:
"Even if the simplistic "proof" he presents were true, it’s absolutely no justification for the questionable methods used by Mann (e.g. bad statistics and biased selection of data). Therefore, if I believed in Appell’s theory, I’d be furious at Mann for giving sceptics a perfect excuse to both attack and discredit the science behind it (i.e. with friends like these, who needs enemies).:
Yes, my simple heuristic "proof" is correct. It's easy to understand, and obvious even.
That's why no one here has refuted it. Instead all I've seen are personal attacks and ad homimen insults and chest thumping.
Newsflash: In the climate scientific community, the hockey stick is old news. Reconstruction after reconstruction finds them (http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/08/36-hockey-sticks-and-counting.html), It's only on blogs like this, that have created an alternate reality, where there is supposedly some huge conpiracy and scandal.
I haven't said a word about Mann's work or anyone else's. Instead, I've said that simple physics and mathematics shows a hockey stick should result from last millennium's forcings.
Sure, there are lots of details and choices when anyone actually does a reconstruction. But it's not in the least surprising that they keep getting hockey sticks time after time after time -- that's what the physics requires. And it certainly suggests all the crazy accusations about centering and bristlecone pine trees and Illusions and disgraces to the profession ad nauseum are very likely without any merit at all -- sound and fury, signifying nothing. Manufactured to attempt to create a scandal where there is none, because the science of AGW is strong and climate change is here.
That's exactly the beauty of my argument -- it sidesteps everything.
David Appell, PhD Physics, Salem, OR
Aug 30, 2015 at 8:44 PM | Unregistered Commenter EternalOptimist
Very good Sir!
I couldd recommend a good psychiatrist for both Mr Appel and Mr Bunny Rabbett.
Appell Aug. 7 at WUWT:
“I comment here all the time, usually using a pseudonym. And none of you ever realize it.”
Appell Aug 29 at Bishop Hill:
“You are wrong.
I comment under my own name, always.”
Appell Aug 31 at Bishop Hill:
"That's exactly the beauty of my argument -- it sidesteps everything."
Appell's Law: Choose an argument that sidesteps everything.
David,
you rather conveniently missed out
I have asked you where this "superexponential" claim is made (your comment is the first time I've ever seem this). You are even specific as to when this "superexponential" increase ended:
Perhaps you could provide me with a non blog reference to this superexponential increase.
Alternatively, consider your "proof" refuted since CO2 increase was not superexponential and therefore 1) is incorrect.
What is it with David Appell and Doug Cotton?
Do they not realize that all this messing about with aka's only lowers the respect readers will give to their comments.