Let's get you on record.
Do all of them adjust the temp numbers or not?
Yes or no, dipstick.
Polar Temps... warming... all guesswork
- Thread starter jem
- Start date
Let's get you on record.
Do all of them adjust the temp numbers or not?
Yes or no, dipstick.
Update from NOAA, June 4
Science publishes new NOAA analysis: Data show no recent slowdown in global warming
Science publishes new NOAA analysis: Data show no recent slowdown in global warming
Here's his post in its entirety:
If you want to point out the science content, do tell. Here's his next reply to me:
He gets an A- for foul language. An A+ for foul language and an (arts department) A+ for completely avoiding any discussion of the science. The reason he doesn't answer my posts with science is that he doesn't understand science. All he can do is call names and use foul language. Not very convincing.
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Update from NOAA, June 4
Science publishes new NOAA analysis: Data show no recent slowdown in global warming
Makes sense, buoys are more accurate than buckets of water pulled aboard a ship, but this will just get the deniers even more hysterical. It may even make some that are on fence about the issue say WTF? However, this is actually a good example of how science improves with time.
To me, it came across as though you were suggesting that FC never offers scientific content. So perhaps that is where we may have a misunderstanding.
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Regarding "This was all exposed in their climategate emails. In private they admitted that Mann's hockey stick was bogus but they never admitted this to the public because ..."
Here are some quotes from the emails. To get more context, names of authors, dates, and a link to the original source, see the Tom Nelson pages I've linked to. (Of course future currents only answer the first one, and then conclude that he doesn't need to respond to the others. It seems that he's not trying to win over any converts from the undecided. Instead, all he seems to be doing is trying to shore up the faithful.)
Hi Keith,
Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating. The only way to deal with this whole issue is to show in a detailed study that his estimates are clearly deficient in multi-centennial power, something that you actually did in your Perspectives piece, even if it was not clearly stated because of editorial cuts. It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.
Ed [Cook]
I have just read this lettter - and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more) Keith [Briffa]
At every meeting I go to where Mike gives a talk, he always presents more on why his series is correct. Honestly, most people I talk to think that he is being way too defensive (as we all know too well). In any case, he is coming out with a new NH reconstruction. It will be interesting to see what it looks like. One problem is that he will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from. Cheers, Ed [Cook]
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/climategate-scientists-on-michael-mann.html
My one real worry is the use of the term "reducing uncertainty". The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years and with all the different calibration methods, data processing methods, proxy interpretations - any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.
Rob
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/rob-wilson-2009-palaeo-world-has-become.html
Many of us were pleasantly surprised that our leading scientific societies have recently adopted such strong statements as to the reality and seriousness of anthropogenic climate change. There really is a scientific consensus, and it cannot be refuted or disproved by attacking any single data set.
I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific uncertainties work both ways. We don't understand cloud feedbacks. We don't understand air-sea interactions. We don't understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long. Singer will say that uncertainties like these mean models lack veracity and can safely be ignored. What seems highly unlikely to me is that each of these uncertainties is going to make the climate system more robust against change. It is just as likely a priori that a poorly understood bit of physics might be a positive as a negative feedback.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/2004-email-from-richard-somerville-don.html
Colleagues, I'm very torn between being drawn into endless exchanges outside normal scientific discourse (e.g. tit-for-tat with the Idsos group) and leaving the field open to them. They clearly have the resources to do fairly careful literature searches, even if there are some serious conceptual problems in their writings, and there is a real audience for their kind of [i.e. "denialist"] materials, both in print publication and on the web. I fear that you would find more colleagues and grad students than you would like to think read their materials and are influenced by them. Apart from anything else they respond better to the heavily referenced articles by Idso or Soon than to "ex cathedra" statements like the recent editorial by Barnett and Somerville. I know this to be the case in the paleo community, although there the picture is complicated by the differences in scientific approach of those working on interannual to century time scales (i.e. folks like us) and those working on millennial and longer time scales (notably Wally Broecker, Wijbjorn Karlen, but many others too). One consequence of this intersection of differing sources of scepticism (sensu stricto) is that an appeal to the NAS could be counterproductive - remember the poor treatment of high-res paleo in the NAS report requested by the White House the other year. Let's learn from these guys. We don't have to strain to publish in the peer- reviewed literature - it's our normal way of working. We do have to find a more effective way of publicizing and interpreting these publications, when appropriate, to a wider audience, including policy makers. How best to do this? Cheers, Malcolm
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/malcolm-hughes-on-creeping-skepticism.html
Here are some quotes from the emails. To get more context, names of authors, dates, and a link to the original source, see the Tom Nelson pages I've linked to. (Of course future currents only answer the first one, and then conclude that he doesn't need to respond to the others. It seems that he's not trying to win over any converts from the undecided. Instead, all he seems to be doing is trying to shore up the faithful.)
Hi Keith,
Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating. The only way to deal with this whole issue is to show in a detailed study that his estimates are clearly deficient in multi-centennial power, something that you actually did in your Perspectives piece, even if it was not clearly stated because of editorial cuts. It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.
Ed [Cook]
I have just read this lettter - and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more) Keith [Briffa]
At every meeting I go to where Mike gives a talk, he always presents more on why his series is correct. Honestly, most people I talk to think that he is being way too defensive (as we all know too well). In any case, he is coming out with a new NH reconstruction. It will be interesting to see what it looks like. One problem is that he will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from. Cheers, Ed [Cook]
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/climategate-scientists-on-michael-mann.html
My one real worry is the use of the term "reducing uncertainty". The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years and with all the different calibration methods, data processing methods, proxy interpretations - any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.
Rob
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/rob-wilson-2009-palaeo-world-has-become.html
Many of us were pleasantly surprised that our leading scientific societies have recently adopted such strong statements as to the reality and seriousness of anthropogenic climate change. There really is a scientific consensus, and it cannot be refuted or disproved by attacking any single data set.
I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific uncertainties work both ways. We don't understand cloud feedbacks. We don't understand air-sea interactions. We don't understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long. Singer will say that uncertainties like these mean models lack veracity and can safely be ignored. What seems highly unlikely to me is that each of these uncertainties is going to make the climate system more robust against change. It is just as likely a priori that a poorly understood bit of physics might be a positive as a negative feedback.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/2004-email-from-richard-somerville-don.html
Colleagues, I'm very torn between being drawn into endless exchanges outside normal scientific discourse (e.g. tit-for-tat with the Idsos group) and leaving the field open to them. They clearly have the resources to do fairly careful literature searches, even if there are some serious conceptual problems in their writings, and there is a real audience for their kind of [i.e. "denialist"] materials, both in print publication and on the web. I fear that you would find more colleagues and grad students than you would like to think read their materials and are influenced by them. Apart from anything else they respond better to the heavily referenced articles by Idso or Soon than to "ex cathedra" statements like the recent editorial by Barnett and Somerville. I know this to be the case in the paleo community, although there the picture is complicated by the differences in scientific approach of those working on interannual to century time scales (i.e. folks like us) and those working on millennial and longer time scales (notably Wally Broecker, Wijbjorn Karlen, but many others too). One consequence of this intersection of differing sources of scepticism (sensu stricto) is that an appeal to the NAS could be counterproductive - remember the poor treatment of high-res paleo in the NAS report requested by the White House the other year. Let's learn from these guys. We don't have to strain to publish in the peer- reviewed literature - it's our normal way of working. We do have to find a more effective way of publicizing and interpreting these publications, when appropriate, to a wider audience, including policy makers. How best to do this? Cheers, Malcolm
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/malcolm-hughes-on-creeping-skepticism.html
And some more emails...
[Ed Cook] So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain's commment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated. If, as some people believe, a degree of symmetry in climate exists between the hemispheres, which would appear to arise from the tropics, then the existence of a Medieval Warm Period in the extra-tropics of the NH and SH argues for its existence in the tropics as well. Only time and an enlarged suite of proxies that extend into the tropics will tell if this is true.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/origin-of-term-stick-explained-also-ed.html
Phil, I have just read the M&M stuff critcizing MBH . A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH [i.e. the hockey stick paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes] is a very sloppy piece of work -- an opinion I have held for some time. Presumably what you have done with Keith is better? -- or is it? I get asked about this a lot. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike is too deep into this to be helpful. Tom [Wigley]
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/2004-email-phil-jones-on-why-he-thought.html
Keith Briffa points out that the very strong trend in the 20th century calibration period accounts for much of the success of our calibration and makes it unlikely that we would be able be able to reconstruct such an extraordinary period as the 1990s with much success (I may be mis-quoting him somewhat, but that is the general thrust of his criticism). Indeed, in the verification period, the biggest "miss" was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the "antis" difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are "on the scent"). Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don't have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info. in the (very few) proxies that we used. We tried to demonstrate that this was not a problem of the tree ring data we used by re-running the reconstruction with & without tree rings, and indeed the two efforts were very similar -- but we could only do this back to about 1700. Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been "warm", to the irritation of my co-authors!).
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-case-you-missed-it-hockey-stick-co_24.html
I am increasingly unconvinced by the majority of climate impact studies - including some of those I am involved in - and feel we are not really giving the right message to our audiences.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/great-quote-by-uea-warmist-mike-hulme.html
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no-one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data. As Ed wrote, in the tree-ring records that form the backbone of most of the published estimates, the problem of poor replication near the beginnings of records is particularly acute, and ubiquitous. I would suggest that this problem probably cuts in closer to 1600 than 1400 in the several published series. Therefore, I accept that everything we are doing is preliminary, and should be treated with considerable caution.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/michael-mann-hockey-stick-co-author.html
yes there IS (or at least WAS) a sting in the tail. Mike [Mann] was certainly not the best collaborator , and in some aspects of his work , not sufficiently aware of the characteristics of some of the data with which he worked. This would not be bad in itself , were allowance made and advice sought and accepted from a wider circle of colleagues or specialists than he was inclined to consult. There was a certain , apparent , overconfidence in his work which bordered on seeming arrogance and this has led to SOME EXTENT to a degree of unnecessary conflict with researchers and some members of the wider public , as regards the validity and certainty of some of his (and the IPCC) conclusions. I qualified this statement , because it is undoubtedly true that some of his critics have strong vested interests in attacking his work , and almost without exception , their criticisms have bee ill founded , even fraudulent.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/briffa-gives-mann-positive-reference.html
Let me tell you a story. A few years back, my son Eirik did a tree ring science fair project using trees behind NCAR. He found that widths correlated with both temp and precip. However, temp and precip also correlate. There is much other evidence that it is precip that is the driver, and that the temp/width correlation arises via the temp/precip correlation. Interestingly, the temp correlations are much more ephemeral, so the complexities conspire to make this linkage nonstationary. I have not seen any papers in the literature demonstrating this -- but, as you point out Mike, it is a crucial issue. Tom.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/priceless-climategate-email-682-tom.html
[Ed Cook] So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain's commment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated. If, as some people believe, a degree of symmetry in climate exists between the hemispheres, which would appear to arise from the tropics, then the existence of a Medieval Warm Period in the extra-tropics of the NH and SH argues for its existence in the tropics as well. Only time and an enlarged suite of proxies that extend into the tropics will tell if this is true.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/origin-of-term-stick-explained-also-ed.html
Phil, I have just read the M&M stuff critcizing MBH . A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH [i.e. the hockey stick paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes] is a very sloppy piece of work -- an opinion I have held for some time. Presumably what you have done with Keith is better? -- or is it? I get asked about this a lot. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike is too deep into this to be helpful. Tom [Wigley]
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/2004-email-phil-jones-on-why-he-thought.html
Keith Briffa points out that the very strong trend in the 20th century calibration period accounts for much of the success of our calibration and makes it unlikely that we would be able be able to reconstruct such an extraordinary period as the 1990s with much success (I may be mis-quoting him somewhat, but that is the general thrust of his criticism). Indeed, in the verification period, the biggest "miss" was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the "antis" difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are "on the scent"). Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don't have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info. in the (very few) proxies that we used. We tried to demonstrate that this was not a problem of the tree ring data we used by re-running the reconstruction with & without tree rings, and indeed the two efforts were very similar -- but we could only do this back to about 1700. Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been "warm", to the irritation of my co-authors!).
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-case-you-missed-it-hockey-stick-co_24.html
I am increasingly unconvinced by the majority of climate impact studies - including some of those I am involved in - and feel we are not really giving the right message to our audiences.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/great-quote-by-uea-warmist-mike-hulme.html
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no-one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data. As Ed wrote, in the tree-ring records that form the backbone of most of the published estimates, the problem of poor replication near the beginnings of records is particularly acute, and ubiquitous. I would suggest that this problem probably cuts in closer to 1600 than 1400 in the several published series. Therefore, I accept that everything we are doing is preliminary, and should be treated with considerable caution.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/michael-mann-hockey-stick-co-author.html
yes there IS (or at least WAS) a sting in the tail. Mike [Mann] was certainly not the best collaborator , and in some aspects of his work , not sufficiently aware of the characteristics of some of the data with which he worked. This would not be bad in itself , were allowance made and advice sought and accepted from a wider circle of colleagues or specialists than he was inclined to consult. There was a certain , apparent , overconfidence in his work which bordered on seeming arrogance and this has led to SOME EXTENT to a degree of unnecessary conflict with researchers and some members of the wider public , as regards the validity and certainty of some of his (and the IPCC) conclusions. I qualified this statement , because it is undoubtedly true that some of his critics have strong vested interests in attacking his work , and almost without exception , their criticisms have bee ill founded , even fraudulent.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/briffa-gives-mann-positive-reference.html
Let me tell you a story. A few years back, my son Eirik did a tree ring science fair project using trees behind NCAR. He found that widths correlated with both temp and precip. However, temp and precip also correlate. There is much other evidence that it is precip that is the driver, and that the temp/width correlation arises via the temp/precip correlation. Interestingly, the temp correlations are much more ephemeral, so the complexities conspire to make this linkage nonstationary. I have not seen any papers in the literature demonstrating this -- but, as you point out Mike, it is a crucial issue. Tom.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/11/priceless-climategate-email-682-tom.html