David Holland’s article was a very interesting read, and I am no climatologist. I was wondering how the ice cores factor in. It would seem that the uncertainties in the tree ring proxies are larger than the ones for ice cores, but that the argument about pre-1800 temperatures seems to occur with the tree ring data. Is there a reason the ice cores aren’t used in the same way? Do they agree with the instrumental temperatures in the 1900′s? Is the resolution good enough? Is the problem with geography, only having a couple of places at high latitudes to sample from?

You state that “Since 1990’s we have had a continuous increase in global average temperatures …” I agree that there has been an increase in temperatures but the prime cause may not be greenhouse gases but rather the increase in the solar wind intensity during the same period.

INREASED SOLAR WIND THE REAL CAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING

1996 [SOLAR MINIMUM]
Number of high velocity solar wind days 37
Global temperature anomaly [land +ocean 1C] 0.30

2005[HIGHEST RECORD TEMPERATURE]
Number of high velocity solar wind days 107
Global temperature anomaly [land + ocean 1C] 0.62

2007[ALMOST SOLAR MINIMUM]
Number of high velocity solar wind days 73 (to-date) UP 197% OVER 1996
Global temperature anomaly [land +ocean 1C] 0. 60(estimate) UP 200% OVER 2006

NOTES
2007 High velocity solar wind days up to Nov1, 2007.
High solar wind velocity days are days with wind velocity of 500km/s or more
This some what similar to ACE in measuring hurricane energy.
Global temperature anomalies per GISS. The 2007 figure is the arithmetic average of the first 10 months.

Comment
The high velocity solar wind days are analogous to the number of days in a year that our planet’s furnace and fan were on and set on high. The global temperature anomaly is what your thermostat reads as the actual in temperature. Since about 1996 the number of high solar wind days per year and the global temperature anomalies haves both gone up together by about 200% up. The years 2003 and 2005 show where both were at near record or high levels. There are other factors involved but these two measurements seem to be related. Good solar wind data only goes back to early 1990’s, otherwise I would go back earlier to the 1980’s when the so called “manmade global warming” started. I continue to state that that the prime cause [80%] of global warming is the sun. Man made greenhouse gases contribute to the warming but only about 20%.

Sod, with all due respect I can’t figure out what you mean here. My guess is that I should show that everything Gore said is “disproved”? Why? Even if we grant that every word he ever said was true, the point here is why should we believe him? Put another way, should we believe the Gore who speaks, or the Gore who acts? Or, presuming a man’s actions mirror his beliefs, what do you think Gore really believes?

To drive this point home consider the moral categorical imperative that our actions should be a universal law for all. What would the CO2 emissions graph look like if Gore’s carbon footprint was the universal norm? Based on which ever CO2 sensitivity you prefer how hot would things get? You have research skills, math skills, and persistence, so let’s see the numbers.

Also sod be careful about the “…completely absolutely and without doubt…” stuff. Remember, Descartes’ method of discovering perfect truth by accepting only that which he absolutely could not doubt turned out to make the contingent physical world unknowable. Heck, without the help of his version of the ontological argument, all he could be absolutely sure of was that he was a mind without a body. Also, I know it’s a real stretch but imagine a scene with Descartes and some climate modellers fighting over computer time to help make deductions with mathematical precision. So the story goes, Descartes had a morbid fear he would die before he could deduce all the “facts” of health and thus become immortal. And the climate modelers….?

Cheers.

golf court. player W sees player M, just ready to strike a ball with a hockeystick.
W: “what are you doing there?!?”
M: “BOING” (hits the ball which lands in a sand trap, then declares “Wow, a hole in one”
W: “you are doing it all wrong!” (graps the score card of M) “this is all false! it can t be done like that!”
M: (takes a golf club from Ws bag) “BOING” (hits the ball into the same sand trap, then declares, “Zowie, another hole in one —see with my swing I can use any dam club I like and still score an ace.”)

For some reason I had got it into my head that they did something rather more cunning than just 2X calibration residuals (plus the dubious red noise correction). My memory must be slipping. I would go on an MBH98 refresher course but I’m not sure it would be good for my sanity.

You can close your eyes if you need to

Here are some clues, MBH98:

Having established reasonably unbiased calibration residuals, we were able to calculate uncertainties in the reconstructions by assuming that the unresolved variance is gaussian distributed over time.

MBH99:

In contrast to MBH98 where uncertainties were self-consistently estimated based on the observation of Gaussian residuals, we here take account of the spectrum of unresolved variance, separately treating unresolved components of variance in the secular (longer than the 79 year calibration interval in this case) and higher-frequency bands.

Not really helpful, and shows that Mann is not very familiar with Gaussian processes..

We need to check ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/MANNETAL98/nhmean.dat , (and note that columns are labeled incorrectly, see also http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=647), and well get one-sigmas.

From here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n6995/extref/nature02478-s1.htm
you’ll see that data1700.txt is missing and that both datalist and data for 1650 step are missing. You’ll find data1700 from here http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/research/MANNETAL98/PROXY/

Yet, there is a clear change in one-sigmas in 1650, and MBH98 Figure 5 a RPC no. 5 starts at 1650. Where’s that data? We’ll have to skip that one, and re-run MBH98 (hockeystick.m) to obtain following 1-sigmas from calibration residuals, and compare to archived when possible:

year hockeystick.m archived
1400 0.150 0.149
1450 0.146 0.15
1500 0.149 0.148
1600 0.112 0.112
1650 X 0.103
1700 0.106 0.105
1730 0.106 0.105
1750 0.101 0.108
1760 0.100 0.103
1780 0.0997 0.0973
1800 0.0991 0.0973
1820 0.0972 0.0955


And we’ll see that they almost match.

But that’s not even important. There’s an issue here that (to me at least) is overriding; is “a global temperature” a thing? And my answer is no, there isn’t such a thing as “global temperature”. The anomaly it’s just an idea of what the overall planet is doing over time vis a vis weather.

But let’s say it is a single thing, a meaningful number, a percise indication. Is it clear that the numbers we’re looking at show a +.7C trend over 125ish years? Yes. Is the number meaningful? Probably not, but let’s say it is. What’s its margin of error? We don’t know, but let’s say there is no margin of error. Are the measurements accurate? We don’t really know, but let’s say they are. So what’s causing this +.7C?? Let me put it this way.

Humans burn fossil fuels which creates particulates. These in the air cause a cooling effect.

Luckily for us, this cooling effect is offset by a few things, in a slightly positive manner (overshoot) in short term intervals (tens or hundreds of years) than the cooling that’s created by the particulates and how they interact with the clouds. The amount of heating and cooling in the climate changes where some periods are cooler and some are warmer. We are currently in a trending warmer phase of the cycles.

First, some GHG help to absorb more heat for the IR portion of the sun, which the GHG water vapor moderates back down by using the energy to evaporate the water. So there is a GHG loop which produces and uses energy. Next, these processes eventually result in the particulates being deposited on the ground, which decreases the albedo of snow and ice, causing more heat to be absorbed and melting the solid water, again both creating and absorbing heat. In this process, the behavior of the ocean takes warmer water and that system melts ice giving fresh water, and depositing the heat in the ocean. The oceans also transfer energy and regulate both temperature and GHG concentrations. Lastly, humans build cities and pave roads et al. This often causes the ground to absorb more heat.

So in the net, these processes result in more heating than cooling, and together the system both regulates itself and reduces air pollution from our particulates. Each of the separate pieces of the system interact in various ways, resulting that over time, we have a slight warming trend. As various other actions are taken by humans, the system will again react in various ways, which could lead to more warming, less warming or some type of narrow range dynamic equilibrium that continues to alternate, chaotically, between warming and cooling.

So, taking no margin of error, and an accurate and meaningful mean global anomaly as givens, the observed +.7C is what the climate is doing over the last 125 years. No one is sure of what the future holds for the next 125, but if guesses are correct, and nothing is changed, it seems that it would continue to trend up at least short term.

As I said, luckily for us, the cooling effects of particulates has been offset by various other parts of the system that both create and absorb heat to various degrees. A particularly appropriate word in this situation.

The NAS, Wegman report and congressional hearing found that there was a statistical error in how the data was processsed, invalidating it as reliable. The math is bad. It’s not reliable.

What else?

A) They stated that this error resulted in graphs that could not be used to prove anything. Not that the error proved the graphs disproved anything, just that they were, therefore, useless for proving anything.
B) Among other things, this process resulted in the admonition to not use bristlecone pine tree rings for temperature proxies, because they aren’t good temperature proxies. It was stated mildly but was clear. (Bristlecones are good for other things, but not as a temperature proxy.)
C) Therefore, any study using bristlecones is suspect. Again, this does not disprove anything, but can’t prove anything either.
D) The graph is two different types of data, and there isn’t any data to understand how they were combined, further casting doubt on the information even if there hadn’t been a mathematical error that already invalidated it as proof.
E) It only covers the Northern Hemisphere anyway, so it’s not “global” regardless of anything else. We could call it half-global, but since everyone with any independence and statisical expertise has said it’s flawed, does that even matter?
F) The other papers are peer-reviewed by co-authors which proves nothing, but certainly leads to at least some degree of groupthink. And they use the same bad proxies, if not the exact same data. And they are certainly not independent nor from outside experts on subjects they themselves have acknowledge they’re not expert at.
G) Dr. Wegman is an expert, however – and he’s also associated with the IPCC (He’s the chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics) In addition, his report was informally peer-reviewed.

Read all about it here, which includes all the links to all the materials involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wegman

i didn t take a detailed look, but it seems to avoid a LOT of the errors found with other papers: no “spliced” overlay of different data, (at least so far) no “strip bark” problems. (and any problems found would most likely damage the MWP part of the paper as well. ouch.

Sod, your cursory evaluation covers two items:

1) No “spliced” overlay. I certainly would hope not! We have rarely seen splices around here. The fact one showed up in AIT is just ridiculous. 99.99% of papers hopefully do not exhibit that.

2) No apparent “strip bark” problems. I’m curious how you would come to this conclusion. It’s rare for such things to be simply stated up front. Steve has often had to dig deeply to get enough information so that such an evaluation can be made.

What other problems exist? Who knows with these guys. I’ve learned to be cautious, and gave you a litany of my cautions. Bottom line: until the underlying data is made available, and an independent party has checked it out, I will remain cautious.

It’s sad, but they’ve earned our caution.

_Jim, you are being very tough on obnoxious 10 year olds!! In my experience of 10 year olds (however obnoxious), none are so arrogant as to parade their ignorance of sound scientific practice in that fashion!