Are we heading for a mini ice age?

[pjclarke]

Or, whisper it quietly, if someone posted a solidly-referenced scientific basis on which to deny the existence of a cause for concern .....

[BlasterBates]

Or, whisper it quietly, if someone posted a solidly-referenced scientific basis on which to deny the existence of a cause for concern .....

or point out how dishonest the evidence supporting AGW argument is

Hiding the Decline | Climate Etc.

Bad science and/or dishonesty?

There is no question that the diagrams and accompanying text in the IPCC TAR, AR4 and WMO 1999 are misleading. I was misled. Upon considering the material presented in these reports, it did not occur to me that recent paleo data was not consistent with the historical record. The one statement in AR4 (put in after McIntyre’s insistence as a reviewer) that mentions the divergence problem is weak tea.

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document. Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one). The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced. I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.

McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way. If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted. I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues. Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable? I sure don’t.

Can anyone defend “hide the decline”? I would much prefer to be wrong in my interpretation, but I fear that I am not.


Professor Judith Curry

What was that you mentioned earlier?

I'm just pointing out when "balony" is "balony".....

have a nice day pj

[d000hg]

Did you mean balcony?

[BlasterBates]

Did you mean balcony?

I was requoting are resident climate expert, it's called sarcasm. I do apologise.

[pjclarke]

One of your favourite soundbites. As I pointed out previously, in context the few graphs referred to are of tangential relevance to the AGW debate. Indeed, they could be dropped from the report and the conclusions would remain intact. Also, Dr Curry is entitled to express her opinion on her blog - but that is all it is - an opinion. Other scientists have opinions on her opinions, as expressed in the comments:

You have gone significantly over the line with this post. Accusations of dishonesty are way beyond a difference of opinion on how a graph should be displayed.

If you thought that a single, smoothed graph of estimates of paleo-temperature told the whole story of paleo-climate reconstructions is far more a failing at your end than it is the authors involved. How can a single graph say everything that can possibly be said?

Summary graphs are by their very nature, summaries. The graphs you pick out were summaries of various estimates of what paleo-temperature estimates from the literature were. It is therefore not surprising that they show only the reconstructions where the authors had confidence that the reconstructions were actually of the temperatures.

Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are. [....] Try actually reading the papers on the subject, and perhaps you would be less confused. Start with briffa et al (1998): Briffa et al (2001): or D’Arrigo et al (2007):

But if you think that the divergence problem makes Briffa et al (2001)’s reconstruction unreliable for whatever reason, go ahead and ignore it. It doesn’t affect Moberg et al, Ljundqvist 2010, Mann et al 2008 or Osborn and Briffa (2006). And it doesn’t make Briffa dishonest.

Gavin Schmidt, NASA. As for Judith, she is an atmospheric scientist and concedes she is out of her comfort zone on this one:-

paleoproxies are outside the arena of my personal research expertise, and I find my eyes glaze over when I start reading about bristlecones, etc.

So I was hoping for something a bit more informed, substantial, referenced and relevant. But there ya go.

[BlasterBates]

One of your favourite soundbites. As I pointed out previously, the few graphs referred to are of tangential relevance to the AGW debate. Indeed, they could be dropped from the report and the conclusions would remain intact. Also, Dr Curry is entitled to express her opinion on her blog - but that is all it is - an opinion. Other scientists have opinions on her opinions, as expressed in the comments:



Gavin Schmidt, NASA. As for Judith, she is a atmospheric scientist and concedes she is out of her comfort zone on this one:-



So I was hoping for something a bit more informed, substantial, referenced and relevant. But there ya go.

You mean McIntyre's paper

Happy to oblige:

you can find it on his website

Climate Audit

McIntyre makes mince meat out of the paleoclimate record which Judith Curry describes as dishonest.

...and here is another substantial paper, that describes exactly how the sun changes the climate:

http://www.dsri.dk/~hsv/

Recent experiments in CERN seem to support his theory.

oh by the way an IPCC reviewer was so appalled at what he found in his area (renewable energy) he decided to look at the rest of the IPCC report.

He's now written a book discrediting AGW. I think you'll find something substantive there as well:


German Fear Of Warming Plummets…Yet-To-Be-Published Skeptic Book Climbs To Amazon.de No. 4!

It's very satisfying to see eminent scientists change their opinions; as he was very much in the AGW camp.

It is also very satisfying to see the books from AGW sceptics become best sellers.

Have a nice day pj

[EternalOptimist]

ha ha. he's quoting Gavin Scmidt now. that paragon of not hiding things

'... Frankly, I would simply put the whole CRU database (in an as-impenetrable-as-possible form) up on the web site along with a brief history of it's provenance (and the role of the NMSs) and be done with it'

[pjclarke]

ha ha. he's quoting Gavin Scmidt now. that paragon of not hiding things

Yeah, cos there's no way we're going to actually engage with Dr Schmidt's arguments. We'll forget his 60-odd peer-reviewed papers on climate science, we'll negate the possibility that this might mean his opinions qualify as 'informed', we'll forget that the American Geophysical Union awarded him their 'Climate Communicator' prize. What we will do is shave away the context from a purloined private message and lift out the two sentences that make him look bad. And snigger.

Cos that's how we roll.

The context being, of course, the vexatious FOI spam campaign, orchestrated by the heroic McIntyre under the guise of honest research, who was handing out pro-forma requests for his acolytes to harrass CRU with. Check out FOI_09-97 here for the bilge that the academics had to spend my tax money dealing with. Faced with that nonsense, Schmidt's response was mild.

All of the issues could be examined using the NOAA or GISS
analyses but what would be the point? The idea is not to find out
anything interesting, but to keep pushing the ‘data is being hidden’
meme. If Phil were to release the whole database, they would spend a
week trying to do something, but then get bored and move on to someone
else who is apparently hiding something.
These games that are being played with the FOIA requests and the like
aren’t going to stop – just playing those games is enough for these
people, regardless of the response, because the very fact they’re doing
it leads people to think the data is hidden.
The current situation where they ask ridiculous and irrelevant questions
and the response is well-meaning but ‘lawyerly’ just feeds the fire.
They aren’t interested in asking questions that can be answered, but in
asking questions that just put Phil on the defensive. The less he can
respond, the happier they will be.
Frankly, I would simply put the whole CRU database (in an
as-impenetrable-as-possible form) up on the web site along with a brief
history of it’s provenance (and the role of the NMSs) and be done with
it.

[KimberleyChris]

Is that the same thing as Baloney?

Nya!...gotcha!



One man's baloney is another man's........

[pjclarke]

You mean McIntyre's paper, Happy to oblige: you can find it on his website.

LOL. The devastating rubuttal is McIntyre's 2005 paper on a 1998 paleoclimate study? And all I have to do is trawl through a 40,000 page website to find it? Must be hot stuff.

As it happens I have read it. He points out some minor flaws in the the 1998 and 1999 'hockey stick' papers. What he leaves out is that these did not affect the results to any significant extent.

The ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of Mann et al. (1999) has been the subject of several critical studies ... McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they were unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998). Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence of differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) had implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a,b) raised further concerns about the details of the Mann et al. (1998) method, principally relating to the independent verification of the reconstruction against 19th-century instrumental temperature data and to the extraction of the dominant modes of variability present in a network of western North American tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components Analysis. The latter may have some theoretical foundation, but Wahl and Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the amplitude of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C; for further discussion of these issues see also Huybers, 2005; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita, 2005).

6.6 The Last 2,000 Years - AR4 WGI Chapter 6: Palaeoclimate

0.05C. Mincemeat? You're easily impressed.