Michael E. Mann, 2006, Climate Over the Past Two Millennia, Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2007. 35:111–36 is online here , No signs so far of Mann, M.E. et al, Robustness of proxy-based climate field reconstruction methods, 2006 (accepted), which was cited by “Anonymous Referee #2” in the Burger-Cubasch review.
Funding generously provided by NSF here.
Climate Audit 
65 Comments
Mann hasn’t lost his touch with the snipey comment:
I think Keigwin might give askance that his sediment record “cannot be explicitly calibrated”.
Mann does not appear to distinguish between the qualitative nature of evidence from proxy climate data and that of theoretical climate model simulations.
So where are references to variation in solar insolation? How can a paper with such a grand title avoid this?
I find it depressing that the HT is carrying on as though there were no M&M critique at all and as though their cherry-picking, data-snooping, PC4-elevating, bc pines backdoor-inveigling, r^2-censoring, data-occultating, methods-obfuscating, theory-dodging approach produced quantitatively valid millennial climate reconstructions, which are then accepted at face value by the press and loudly touted by the bloomeranians as yet more evidence for the bankruptcy of technical civilization.
I find it further depressing that there are far more of them than there is of Steve, and they are having no trouble at all keeping ahead with their gray-weather sleet of publications. Steve is ever playing catch-up, showing the analytical poverty of the last HT paper all the while three more are in the pipeline. Steve, you’re winning every battle while we’re all losing the war. Somehow soomeone needs to boot Wegman to stop speechifying, and get him and some of his colleagues to start writing critical papers. Maybe Ross can give him an academically collegiate phone call.
It doesn’t appear that Mann will reform. He is going to stick it out, getting more brazen every time, until the end.
Many more hockey sticks in that paper, now going back 2,000 years.
Have some fun with this one Steve.
Upton Sinclair explained it best way back in the last century: “It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I see mann refers to the Luterbacher Hockeystick:
http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/errenvsluterbacher.htm
On page 123, Mann now claims that every reconstruction performed to date indicates anomalous 20th century warmth.
Mann’s 4th Summary Point must be a classic.
Look at future issue 2:
What does “teleconnected” mean? Is it about how bristlecone pines may be more related to global than to local temperature?
Teleconnected means that local climates sometimes respond to distant climate events. Air temperature in Africa and the Indian Ocean is correlated with the El Niños in the Pacific, for example.
However, “teleconnected” seems to be invoked by paleodendroclimatologists to imply that trees can respond to distant climate events without the local climate responding to those events, a phenomenon I refer to as plantelepathy …
w.
Ah yes, that’s why I come here, for the high-brow humor.
Plantelepathy, lol.
Just finished reading the review and once again Mann according to Mann is the man, or more than the man if we assume that all men are imperfect. All his methods are correct and all criticisms of them are incorrect (even though that might be because he defaults all works as incorrect if it did not exactly replicate his less than totally revealed methods).
I saw no comments about MM, but he had some strong criticisms of the criticisms of Von Storch, Zorita, Burger and Cubasch of Mann’s methods. It will be interesting to see what kind of replies his paper receives.
Would not you expect that Mann and cohorts at some point will attempt (and maybe even feel scientifically obligated) to theorize a teleconnection of local proxy responses to at least regional climate events — say through a secondary variable such as rainfall that in turn can be correlated to temperature anomalies? I guess one could also conjure up a rationalization that local temperatures are not as precisely measured as their averages would be as represented by say the NH average, although I would expect something more imaginative than that.
LOL: give him enough rope and he will hang himself.
The paper has nice colors. PCA is minimized, the hockey stick is recycled with a postmodern reduction, and National Academy of Science and Wegman panels, much like M&M, don’t exist and never existed. All reconstructions have always given a hockey stick and all people who have ever questioned the unlimited sharpness of the stick, e.g. von Storch et al., are heretics who must be punished.
No et.al. on the paper? Where have all his friends gone?
LuboÅ¡ – 15 – there’s a real career opportunity here for a man of your talents. You can use Higgs theoretical formalism to derive a theory of the climate scalar temperature field (Tiggs field) that permeates the globe. It’s caused by the self-energy of reflected radiation beating against itself and decays rapidly to zero by 300 feet (maximal tree height), which is why it hasn’t been detected in the troposphere. This field will provide the theoretical basis for claiming that all trees everywhere (except in the second order quadratic divergence zone) produce rings of the same width no matter the local conditions. The field will operate by way, of course, of the Jones propagator, which is dipolar and restricted to the imaginary plane and for which all trees are an antenna (by excitation of cellulolignonic resonances). You can have a grateful and influential Michael Mann, physicist, as your co-author. It’ll mean instant tenure. 🙂 Don’t worry about having to build a Tiggs field detector for the skeptics. The hockey stick blade proves the existence of the field, which proves the validity of the blade, which proves … well, you know; all of AGW climate science works like that.
That question mark in “Lobo?” should have been an s-chupchik, but the new format didn’t recognize it.
I also see that the low countries (figure 3, page 12) are truncated at 1251, whereas data is available back to 751
http://www.knmi.nl/klimatologie/metadata/nederland_wi_zo.html
A.F.V. van Engelen, J. Buisman en F. IJnsen,
A Millennium Of Weather, Winds And Water In The Low Countries, in:
History and Climate: Memories of the future?
Edited by Jones et al., Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001
data:
http://www.knmi.nl/klimatologie/daggegevens/antieke_wrn/nederland_wi_zo.zip
#16 This paper is just a meta-collection of HS so what is the need of co-authors ? Besides, grant by the NSF for this work is “just” $146,755. You wouldn’t want Mann to share such a meager pie. He badly needs money for baby-sitters.
$146,755: that’s 1.5 man year in my calculations (including overhead and taxes).
I don’t think this paper has 1.5 man years of (new, unfunded by other grants) work in it.
$146,755 for a meta-study, that’s the price of celebrity, Hans!
Maybe the Royal Society should have a closer look to the money spent for junk science while sermoning Exxon for funding skeptics.
I am definitely not trying to defend Mann here, but please keep in mind that about 30% – 40% of the grant goes to the institution in overhead. Some portion is used to fund graduate assistants. Of what is left over, a portion goes to stuff like new computers etc. Then, the left over usually pays for a couple of months of the researcher’s summer salary.
No citation of M&M. Emperor Mann has a new invisible suit.
#23. He also got $100,000 for new computers separately – http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0548962
NSF regulations pertaining to research misconduct were updated and published in the Federal Register on 18 March 2002. They include the following:
#17, Brilliant! A second paper will discuss plantelepathy and the relationship to Gaia…
the gross monthly salary for a university professor in Holland is ”€š⪠8161 or annually ”€š⪠140,000
that’s high compared to us averages of $100,000
http://www.pitt.edu/~galletta/2006sals.html
So a grant of $146000 pays a fulltime research of 1.5 man years. However considering it is a grant for extra work, one could hire five graduate students for the same amount.
BTW, Is there turnkey software available?
Review articles such as this one serve an important function. They are designed to punctuate the literature, rather than advance the field. This paper signals the end of the first chapter in proxy-based temperature reconstruction. Hallelujah.
Chapter two began this summer. And you all know who is at the beginning of chapter two.
If you want chapter two to read like it should, it will probably be necessary for Steve M to somehow get on the granting gravy train, in order to get away from always having to play catch-up with the Team, and to start innovating.
#20.
It appears the paper is a ‘position statement’ as you say, you might expect other authors who have the same position to make the statement together. It costs nothing to add coauthors, he wouldn’t have to share funds to get coauthors. It can be the other way as people generally want to get more publications. Its kind of an idle speculation but really but could he really be on the out? Lets hope so.
No, David Stockwell, it is not a “position statement”. It is a review article. Authorship on a review article is not a matter of soliciting who buys in to the review. It is a matter of who did the writing. Reviews are very often single-author, invited papers. Mann is not alone on the view presented in this article. Mann is not “on the out”.
Dear Pat Frank #15,16, your ideas are really great but still, I will leave these breakthroughs and the related pies to others. 😉
Has this new Mann paper been accepted? How can he continue using questionable proxies without defending them initially?
He seens to have put an underline under something that hasn’t been fully answered.
Isn’t it therefore the task of his peers to point this out?
EP, It’s more than just been accepted. It’s been published. That’s how Steve M can provide the citation that opens this post.
It’s pretty amazing to see Mann’s PC1 continue to be used and illustrated. Usage of Mann’s PC1 has actually increased in Team-world since problems surfaced. Prior to the controversy, no third party had actually used Mann’s PC1 in one of the data-snooping exercises. In 2006, it was used in Osborn and Briffa 2006 (and then crops up in a NAS panel illustration as “Western U.S.”; it was used in Hegerl et al 2006; it was used in Rutherford et al 2005; and now recurs in Mann 2006. It’s more popular than ever.
This is either a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing or poor reviewing. How do scientists point out material that doesn’t justify using questionable data?
Re #36 The flaws in this work simply haven’t been proven & exposed to a sufficient degree yet for reviewers to know any better. One M&M GRL article is not a take-down. NAS & Wegman are only a start.
Change only comes from within. The ruling orthodoxy itself needs to fracture before any major reform happens. M&M can can act as a wedge, but they do not have enough force to drive their own wedge.
But now it is in press:
Can’t wait.
Lots of basic stuff in the paper (my emph):
#38 – UC quoted, “CFR methods do not require that a proxy indicator used in the reconstruction exhibit any local correlation with the climate field of interest…”
This gives them carte blanche to use any proxy they like, so long as it gives the desired answer. It also absolves them a priori from any experiment that tests whether a given proxy is a faithful reflector of temperature. “Good” proxies now need only to follow the accepted (and also uncritiqued) grid-cell average. I can’t imaingine how that statement could get past the reviewers and the journal editor.
# 39
And note the p refers to proxy noise autocorrelation. But what is proxy noise, given that there is no requirement for local correlation? Is it individual proxy minus NH Temperature? This is one reason I can’t wait to see Mann 2006a. Maybe, after reading that, we will finally understand what is going on..
I’m pretty sure that James Randi has a $1 million prize for Mann if he can prove that trees react to the global climate field without responding to local climate.
This is the 21st Century and I’m reading about voodoo in a science journal.
So it’s OK to use baseball batting averages, or % of pirates in the population as proxy indicators as long as they show some degree of correlation with the instrumental temperature record over the calibration period, right?
Re #38 I could not find this paper, but I have full access to JGR. Do you know the volume and page numbers?
re; #38ff
What about the second half of the statement,
Could someone translate this into plain english? I understand all the individual words and phrases, but the meaning of the entire statement eludes me?
There seems to be an expectation that advocates of disaster when proven to have been mistaken about their dire prophecy will simply amend their beliefs to be consistent with the demonstrated facts. That simply isn’t the way humans behave. Th phenomenon is called Cognitive Dissonance. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance.
Doom sayers don’t recant their beliefs when confrounted with disconfirming evidence. They redouble their faith.
Mann will go to his grave believing in the Hockey Stick. No one can dissuade him. Don’t bother trying. Concentrate on those who havn’t made up their minds yet.
By their fruits shall ye know them!!
Re #44 What a sentence. The writer must have had a prior career writing the tax code.
I have two possible interpretations:
1.”CFR methods determine how proxies are affected by changes in their environment. The environmental changes can be local or distant.” Or,
2.”Local changes in taxidermy affect the nuances flowing through the iceberg”.
I’ll take number 2, Dave; for $200.
Mann makes some interesting claims about the correlation “r” in his paper, viz:
and
These numbers seem high to me, particularly given that the correlation of the 18 proxies used by Juckes with local temperatures is not statistically different from zero. Anybody know whether these claims are true?
w.
Some absolutely priceless reasoning. The new Mann paper confirms its findings that MBH99 is really, truly correct, we’re not kidding this time, by comparing it against models forced with changes in historical solar and volcanic forcing.
The historical volcanic forcings are from the paper by Crowley.
Crowley estimated the size of the historical volcanic forcings by comparing the eruption sizes against the temperature record of …
…
…
yep, you guessed it …
…
MBH99.
I weep for the passing of science …
w.
#50 — Sounds like Tiggs field reasoning to me: 1 because 2 because 1. Buck up Willis. Someone is gratified. The post-modern cultural-relativists are thrilled, for example. Mann, by your recounting, has truly turned climate science into cultural text. He’s proven their case. Here’s a peculiarity that demonstrates how bizarre P-M thinking can be: When Mann is finally proven wrong by actual science, that disproof will prove the P-M case. That is, exactly by, and coincidentally with, the analytical disproof, his work’s status as cultural text will be proven. See? Contemplate the intellectual train-wreck of P-M and be glad you’re only worried about science.
#43
bender, I quoted the ‘Climate Over the Past Two Millenia Paper’, sorry for confusion. Mann refers to this Robustness of proxy-based .. ‘in press’ paper many times.
Me:
Already forgot the Ritson’s method. They don’t need reference signal to determine noise properties from the observations..
Re #52
Thanks, I realize that. No confusion. My point: if it is “In Press”, and it is slated for 2006, it should be available. So maybe it is actually slated for 2007 now?
#53
OK, so it cannot be published anymore in 2006? The ‘In Press’ paper is cited 6 times, and IMO it is very essential (‘A number of problems with theVon Storch et al. (2004) study have now been identified’ etc..) Kind of funny to cite a paper that doesn’t exist.
Re All Above: By their fruits ye shall know them!!
Further oddities from the Mann paper:
This seems very low. The average lag-1 autocorrelation of the 42 proxies listed by Juckes in his archive (“mitrie_proxies_01.csv”) is 0.58 ±0.05.
Steve M., do you have a file of the MBH98 proxies? And were there really 112 of them?
w.
Willis, I think he refers to proxy noise autocorrelation. To estimate that you need a reference. i.e. Noise=Proxy-Temperature. But as we know, there is no need for correlation with local temperature. Thus, to obtain noise p 1) they use NH Temperature or 2) they use Ritson’s method or 3) something I can’t even imagine.
re #44/#47/#51: I think it would be about time to write “The Mannism Generator” (ManGe) according to the well known “The Postmodernism Generator”:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo
Any volunteers? If someone is up to the task, I think we could have a thread here over CA, where people could post mannian phrases (with references) to be added to ManGe. If the thing works well, maybe one should submit a sample paper to, e.g., Climatic Change 😉
Well, it’s not the Northern Hemisphere residuals. The Mitrie NH-proxy residuals (42 proxies) have an average autocorrelation of 0.49 ±0.02.
I gotta say that I don’t see how the Ritson method would apply. Ritson says:
From this, it seems to me that the Ritson method, if it is valid, is only valid for a number of proxies from a single area, a “proxy-site” in their words. I don’t see how it could be used for a group of widely separated proxies. For a single site, it is possible that their assumption of a “large variance highly correlated slow component” in all of the proxies would be true.
But for a widely separated group of proxies, each of which is subject to a different slow local temperature swing, there is no “highly correlated slow component”. Otherwise, we could just use a low-pass filter to remove the high-frequency component (which they call “noise”) from each proxy, and the resulting curves would all be the same … which is clearly not true.
Finally, am I missing something here? It seems that what they are doing is determining the autocorrelation of the high-frequency component of the signal … I’m not clear on what the purpose of this calculation might be.
w.
re #50: Perpetual-motion machine! I can hardly wait for Crowley et al (2008) estimating the size of the historical volcanic forcings by comparing the eruption sizes against the temperature record of Mann et al (2007)…
#59
If the ‘signal’ is local temperature, then Ritson method underestimates p. Or at least I think so, some time ago wrote this http://www.geocities.com/uc_edit/ar_again.pdf ( but it is not peer-reviewed, Read at Your Own Risk)
Re; 50
Willis,
As do I.
Perhaps you have discovered the true meaning of “C” in “GCM”. It really stands for circular reasoning.
Willis, you’re reminding me of the good old days. Remember in the wake of MM03, when Mann said that MM03 made the “grievous” error of not using 159 proxies – a figure never previously mentioned. When I asked for an identification of the 159 series from Mann, he refused; Nature said that the figure of 159 series had nothing to do with them. A listing of series that appear to have been used in MBH98 is at the Corrigendum SI for MBH by step. There are some small curiosities as some series are used in (say) the 1450 step but not the 1500 step – which would be hard for anyone to replicate.
112 series were used in the AD1820 step – which is where this figure comes from. 22 series were used in the AD1400 step. The PC series are re-calculated in some steps but not others; and retained according to an unknown and non-replicable procedure.
If you want to look at data, look at the Nature SI. I really need to write up my emulation of MBH – I have lots of interesting notes. If you look at the Category MBH98 – Replication, there are some old posts that are mostly still valid.
wow … go see what Piekle Jr is saying in this thread, under: That Didn’t Take Long — Misrepresenting Hurricane Science, about recent statement by Mann.
On down the page, in the reference to the WMO report he says:
Seems I’ve heard that term before.
Mark