Mann’s Hockey Stick

Gone. And the Medieval Warm Period, restored:

Untruncated and unspliced data used in a new paper from Briffa and Melvin at UEA restores the Medieval Warm Period while at the same time disappears Mann’s hockey stick.

…Whoo boy, I suspect this paper will be called in the Mann -vs- Steyn trial (if it ever makes it that far; the judge may throw it out because the legal pleading makes a false claim by Mann).

No comment. The most amazing thing is that this paper is co-authored by Keith Briffa:

I have to wonder if this is some sort of attempt to “come clean” on the issue. Mann must be furious at the timing. There’s no hint of a hockey stick, and no need to splice on the instrumental surface temperature record or play “hide the decline” tricks with this data.

As he notes, expect a bunch of desperate papers soon to try to resurrect it. The “climate” “community” is eating its own.

And here’s a bonus: thoughts on the upcoming legal proceedings from Roger Pielke.

[Update a few minutes later]

A new paper from Judith Curry on the manufactured consensus:

Students of science are taught to reject ad populam or ‘bandwagon’ appeals, a sentiment is articulated by the motto of the UK Royal Society: ‘nullius in verba’, which is roughly translated as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. How then, and why, have climate scientists come to a scientific consensus about a very complex scientific problem that the consensus-supporting scientists themselves acknowledge has substantial and fundamental uncertainties?

Because, sadly, there was an agenda. And many of the supporters of the climate “science” don’t understand how science actually works.

15 thoughts on “Mann’s Hockey Stick”

  1. Unfortunately, even a properly conducted proxy study is just a best guess as to what actually occurred. The number one truth in Science is that Nature is pernicious, and often refuses to perform according to script when acting beyond the range of direct observation. Assumptions must be made about the impact of factors other than those being studied, and the probability of being right decreases geometrically with each assumption.

  2. Unfortunately, even a properly conducted proxy study is just a best guess as to what actually occurred.

    Hell, even the “instrumental period” is just the best guess as to what actually occurred. Prior to the satellite era, temperature was being measured by pretty ordinary point-source thermometer. They’re adjusted for elevation and humidity.

    But you have an ordinary thermometer, with an ordinary error bar of 0.1C (or so), and then make a claim that the gridcell temperature is the same with the same error bars. And then interpolating into areas with no measurements at all … but propagating the error too. This inappropriate error estimation propagates through the entire calculation. Meaning that even ignoring the urbanization, siting, and other gross systematic errors, the error handling can only ever yield a measure of ‘internal self-consistency’, not an actual error.

  3. Good grief, Did everyone at WUWT miss this bit: “in this region”? The MWP was more pronounced over the North Atlantic/Europe, if anything this paper only confirms other evidence – except of course for this one: The new chronologies presented here provide mutually consistent evidence, contradicting a previously published conclusion (Grudd, 2008), that medieval summers (between 900 and 1100 ce) were much warmer than those in the 20th century.

    1. Good grief, indeed. Addressed in comments here. And, for this:

      The new chronologies presented here provide mutually consistent evidence, contradicting a previously published conclusion (Grudd, 2008), that medieval summers (between 900 and 1100 ce) were much warmer than those in the 20th century.

      I do not think that sentence means what you think it means. Note the comma after the last parenthesis. If you remove the stuff between the commas, you will be able to see the meaning more clearly.

        1. “the links to posts on convincing”? don’t know how that happened should have said:”the links to his own posts are unconvincing.”

          1. Well, it was poorly punctuated, then. But, the operative phrase is still “were much warmer”. This construction merely shows them as warm, which is still a huge climb-down from the warmist position that the late 20th century was “unprecedented”.

            As for the rest, I found Anthony’s comments, and those of others which followed, to have adequately addressed Dr. Shore’s complaint.

  4. Science is easy.

    Conservatives are dead set against it.
    [I learned that from CNN / MSNBC / Katie Cutipie]

    Liberals believe in it, but only believe in that science that gets reported, ‘verified’, and beaten about by other Liberals or Liberal sources that support the Liberal agenda.

    The scientists that didn’t buy into the AGW and said so are proof of it. The street level Liberals not only didn’t look into the claims of the non-believing scientists, they threatened them with badly harm and death.

  5. Rand, you did see this, right?
    http://climateaudit.org/2012/10/28/gergis-et-al-correspondence/

    Australian researchers attempting to replicate Mann’s work in their own region mistakenly failed to “de trend” the proxies prior to selection. This left ONLY the one that — by chance — matched in the instrumental period and therefore ensured a “hockey stick” Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre and commenter Jean S almost immediately recognized the problem with “detrending” and proxy selection. The Australisan team wanted to clean up the paper quietly. Micheal Mann and others are revealed, in recently obtained emails, to have urged what I would call — you are not obligated to — a cover up.

  6. With regard to using proxies at all to estimate a parameter such as “global temperture” I’m reminded of Enrico Fermi’s dictum that “Your math should never be more precise than your measurements.”

    Uhm, exactly what percentage of climate researchers took degrees in physics?

    1. Well, Freeman Dyson worked on this problem — his background is Mathematics but can we call him a Physicist?

      We worked on it connection with one of the National Laboratories (dunno, Oak Ridge) “looking for something non-weapon related to do”, and this was long before the field became trendy (pun intended). I think he came to the conclusion that the field was “hard” inasmuch as understanding the underlying physics to draw meaningful predictions to compare against available data.

    2. I’ve always wondered about the basic assumption that tree rings can provide a good proxy for temperature. It’s well known that tree ring thickness varies from year to year. However, what are the driving factors on tree growth? Is temperature the driving factor or could it be precipitation? You could have a hot, dry year where the trees don’t grow very much, or you could have a cool, moist year where the trees grow quite well. They may be measuring tree rings, but are the rings telling them what they want to know?

  7. FYI, maybe the CEI could hit this guy with a defamation lawsuit if the Mann one falls through. Imagine, blaming them for Hurricanes like Sandy.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-welner/hurricane-names_b_2035964.html?utm_hp_ref=green
    Kevin Welner
    Director, National Education Policy Center

    A Modest Hurricane Proposal for Honoring Climate Change Deniers
    Posted: 10/29/2012 8:29 am

    [[[As with NASCAR, we should give credit to the proud sponsors who make these disasters possible. ]]]

    [[[Next up, we would be drowned in the tears of Hurricane Boehner. Hurricane ConocoPhillips would follow, although the Competitive Enterprise Institute really deserves the recognition here as well.]]]

    1. This Wehner seems to be deliberately confusing stadium “naming rights” with plastering advertising everywhere. The latter case is more like a typical front page at the Puffington Host.

      And if there was any reason to name hurricanes after living people, they’d all be named after US Senators from West Virginia.

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