There is such a thing as unhealthy skepticism. As I keep telling Andrew, “natural variability” is not an alternative theory for GW. It’s just a simple fact that must be contended with, can not be ignored, but is often ignored (or over-simplified) when it comes to statistical attribution exercises.

No alternate theory is required if the new theory (AGW) doesn’t adequately explain what it purports to theorize. IOW, there’s nothing to see here.

Linus Van Pelt: That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor. And that group of clouds over there [points] gives me the impression of the Stoning of Stephen. I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side.

Lucy Van Pelt: Uh huh. That’s very good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?

Charlie Brown: Well… I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsie but I changed my mind.

They do have a graphic showing smoothed versions of ROW proxies, including some ones that I haven’t seen before and not available digitally. I’ll discuss them at some point.

But the argument doesn’t rise above handwaving.

When we visited the Spirit Cave in Thailand, the guide (a hill person who didn’t speak English or Thai) pointed to a stumpy rock and said “Buddha”. Was the resemblance more or less “remarkable” than the resemblance between squiggles that we are regularly invited to consider by climate scientists? I didn’t think so.

I think there’s a more productive line of enquiry that could follow from Dr Loehle’s question, which was:

Not to put too fine a point on it but to prove the MWP was absent from the rest of the world, don’t you need data from the rest of the world?

which is “what was the empirical basis for the Trouet assertion that the MWP is linked to a NAO-style anomaly, and not some other pattern?”. i.e. What is the quantitative degree of similiarity between the present-day NAO and the MWP-era “MCA”? The Team has made this type of assertion on other occassions – that this pattern here “resembles” that one there – for example in the Steig et al. paper. What’s the difference between that kind of statement and some clown saying this apple here looks quite a bit like that orange over there? What is the IPCC-approved metric of pattern “resemblance”? Is hand-waving ok? Is that all that Nature and Science reviewers ask?

Not to put too fine a point on it but to prove the MWP was absent from the rest of the world, don’t you need data from the rest of the world?

Not when you have The Mannomatic: it slices, it dices, put anything in and it will become… whatever you want.

Mark

The classic series showing the MWP was Lamb’s temperature recon used in IPCC 1990 and hated by the Team. The Team argues that the Lamb recon was regional and regional in a more restricted way than modern warming. (I don’t think that they’ve proved their point, but their failing to prove the point doesn’t imply that the opposite has been proved either.) Even if it is only regional evidence, an MWP in northern Europe is not evidence against a global MWP though, if it is only regional, it doesn’t prove the point either.

Whatever the merits of the arguments on the above issue, the Lamb series on its face is not evidence against a global MWP and surely there is irony in it being so used.