… who attended Feynman’s “Lost Lecture”, but unfortunately took no notes …

Was that the geometric proof of the r-2 dependence of gravity? I have the CD of that.

Re: Luboš Motl (#40), I have thought, more than once, that it is very sad that Feynman isn’t around for this circus. His “grasp of the obvious” in the face of what “everyone knows” and his talent for making it simple enough for laymen to understand is sorely needed.

This is getting OT, but alas, yes. Now it’s up to the rest of us to carry on!
– Hu McCulloch, Caltech ’67
… who attended Feynman’s “Lost Lecture”, but unfortunately took no notes …

Remember that the reviewer has no knowledge of the Almagre update. They likely wouldn’t know about Ababneh’s data either. All they have in front of them is the manuscript, maybe a few references.

Yes but surely the reviewer if they are knowledgable in this field at all must have been aware of the problems with the original hockey stick and therefore at the very least had their shields up.

This reminds me of a story from Feynman’s book, “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman”.

http://www.lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/FEINMAN/feinman_engl.txt

I went to Professor Bacher and told him about our success [with Gell-Mann], and he said, “Yes, you come out and say that the neutron-proton coupling is V [vectorial] instead of T [tensorial]. Everybody used to think it was T. Where is the fundamental experiment that says it’s T? Why don’t you look at the early experiments and find out what was wrong with them?”

I went out and found the original article on the [hockey-stick-like] experiment that said the neutron-proton coupling is T, and I was shocked by something. I remembered reading that article once before (back in the days when I read every article in the Physical Review — it was small enough). And I remembered, when I saw this article again, looking at that curve and thinking, “That doesn’t prove anything!”

You see, it depended on one or two points at the very edge of the range of the data, and there’s a principle that a point on the edge of the range of the data — the last point — isn’t very good, because if it was, they’d have another point further along. And I had realized that the whole idea that neutron-proton coupling is T was based on the last point, which wasn’t very good, and therefore it’s not proved. I remember noticing that!

… Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.”

That was a story when Feynman and Gell-Mann, two theorists, were completely right and the experimenters were wrong. The particular error of the experimenters was that their whole conclusion depended on the data on the edge of the range. That surely affects Mann et al. 2008 because the extrapolation done here is probably unacceptable, but even if it were acceptable, like in the case of the experiment Feynman referred to, there would be a lot of reasons why the extraction of qualitative facts from the edge of the range – the blade – could mislead us.

After you’ve finished catching up on all the proxy reconstruction stuff, don’t forget to have a good look at all the threads on instrumental temperature record adjustments and in particular the ‘bucket adjustments’ and the voefully inadequate GISS UHI adjustments etc. Once you’ve finished that, make sure you then have a good look at the GCMs and eventually it will all become clear how all this fits together to make up the scam that is man-caused global warming.

Right now you have twigged that the MBH98 and the ‘new’ non-dendro HS are ENTIRELY an artefact of Mann’s cherry picking and ‘novel’ statistic techniques. You’ll soon find out after more digging that the claimed warming trend at the end of 20th century is also largely an artefact of the ‘adjustments’.

If you get a chance to see Bob Carter’s lecture on YouTube (see here) you’ll also see that even if you are unwise enough to think that the ‘adjusted’ instrumented temperature record is sound and that the claimed recent warming trend is ‘real’ it is hardly significant and is most definite NOT ‘unprecedented’ in the last 1000, 10000 (pick your time span) years. It is but a ‘blip’ when compared to past temperature anomalies when viewed on a geological timescale (see Bob’s very witty presentation to see what I mean).

After you’ve researched how the GCM’s are ‘backcasted’ and deliberately tuned (by invocation of aerosols, soot etc) to fit with the ‘adjusted’ 20th century instrumented record and in particular the recent warming trend and are so therefore claimed to be able to model past climate with some skill, you’ll then grow to appreciate just why it is so important to ‘get rid of the MWP’ because not that much CO2, nor aerosols etc existed back so forcing the backcasted GCM’s to agree with the clearly well documented significantly high temperature anomaly that existed back then (which makes the recent anomaly therefore look just like yet another natural anomaly) is somewhat inconvenient so AGW protagonists MUST discredit and at the very least play down the significance of the MWP.

You’ll also then see that the ENTIRE AGW protagonist case that ‘we must act now to save the planet’ from imminent catastrophic climate change is based on the deliberate assumption (IMO) built into the GCMs that water vapour (by far most dominant GHG) is a net vey significant POSITIVE feedback and that without this vital assumption (which is largely based on the opinions/papers of two men, Brian Soden and Isaac Held) there is no mechanism for catastrophic climate change, no ‘tipping point’, nada, so absolutely no need to ‘act now to save the planet’.

Regards

KevinUK

Sediments have the same problem. Why assume they are only a reflection of temperature? They are a function of temperature when the lake is fed by meltwater from glaciers or snowfields. This was the original source of varve studies in climatology from Scandinavia. (Originally, rhythmites were the collective term for annual or seasonal layer, varve specifically for glacially related layers) Even here however, the amount of runoff is a function of the snowpack formed during the winter months. Witness flooding in mountain regions. However, in all other situations the sediment load is a function of precipitation through erosion and transportation and deposition of the sediment to the lake or ocean.