Comments on: No Uptick in Marcott Thesis

By: Geoff

Geoff — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:16:43 +0000

Very good news. Yes, please keep the snark out of the published literature, but do document the omissions. I hope an electronic version will be available. Cheers…

By: snarkmania

snarkmania — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:05:47 +0000

Thanks Geoff!
Barring an unforeseen event, I am publishing part of that presentation in a peer-reviewed proceedings volume soon. Most of the ‘snark’ has been removed. The volume is associated with a meeting this coming May in New Mexico on “The Carboniferous-Permian Transition”

I coauthor with Cheryl Wilgus, a subject matter expert on some aspects of paleo-oceanography. I’m working hard on it now.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:08:19 +0000

Very interesting presentation – would make a good paper if it could get published.

By: Mystery Uptick Added to Paper Published in Science « Homologus

Mystery Uptick Added to Paper Published in Science « Homologus — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:09:50 +0000

[...] McIntyre of Climate Audit blog pointed out an interesting anomaly in a recent Science paper published by researchers from OSU and [...]

By: Coldish

Coldish — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:23:54 +0000

Thank you, Kenneth and Ryan. I’m glad I’m not alone in being suspicious of multiproxy reconstructions.

By: Loser of the Month — That’s all Folks! « the Air Vent

Loser of the Month — That’s all Folks! « the Air Vent — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:14:54 +0000

[...] I have been enjoying climate blogs recently again. Joe Romm provided a bit of entertainment on March 8 with his delightfully uncritical eye to the new Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix hockeystick. The paper, which unfortunately was the wishful extension of a thesis (some pun intended), that was debunked by Steve McIntyre before most of us had read the SI. By debunked, I mean really, really trashed. I have seen some weak engineering work but wow, this paper was special. Jean S even noted that there was no blade on the stick in the original thesis but the publication picked up by the press had a dad-would-be-proud blade on it. [...]

By: Att skarva med proxivärden | The Climate Scam

Att skarva med proxivärden | The Climate Scam — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:08:39 +0000

[...] i ett inlägg (länk) här på TCS. Artikeln har kritiserats också på andra blogginlägg.(länk1, länk2, länk3). Dagens inlägg är endast ett urval av den kritik som redan framförts i dessa [...]

By: snarkmania

snarkmania — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:53:25 +0000

I have a problem with your comment because you seem to think that peer reviewed journals would support Steve’s deconstructions of various papers that they publish. But at least one influential journal makes it very difficult to critique the papers they publish. I tried to correct factual misrepresentations in an article on climate change in NATURE last year through the conventional method of writing a Letter to the Editor. But I was told that I had to purchase a $200/year subscription for the right to write.

Whatever the deficiencies of review-by-blogger, it’s certainly as transparent as one could imagine, and helps a lot in the big picture, given that many journal Editors don’t seem to understand what their academic priorities are.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:13:00 +0000

I agree with you Kenneth. I actually don’t have a big issue with some sort of “averaging” across the series being used as long as the scientist that does this discusses the nature of the distribution shown and the confidence intervals for the mean of the entire population vs the sample mean. Now, from what I have seen of the results from the original proxies if you plotted the distribution of the results for any given date, you would end up with a rectangular distirbution from which it would be clear that the real mean might be way outside the sample mean.

In this case I presume that “averaging” of any kind is not the cause of the problem, since avergaing is a low-pass filtering and in this example they have take naturally low-pass data and found a way of inserting some high frequency results! Quite an achievement which one would have hoped would have set off alarm bells with at least one of the reviewers!

I see these departures from the usual statistical representation of results all the time in these climate papers. It real isn’t acceptable. As an engineer that deals with this kind of thing all the time, the question you ave to ask yourself is “are my measurement results showing me anything useful?” and “can I do something valid with my results that will tell me anything useful?”. What I see with climate analysis is they are always taking measurements that on eyeballing you would say “there’s no useful information there, it is all noise” then they take this noise and apply some bizarre mathematical approach without ever really explaining why it is valid and voila! they have the hockey stick they were hoping for, despite not one of the measured proxies showing any such event.

By: Ron Yates

Ron Yates — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:23:32 +0000

If Steve McIntyre is so certain of his results, he should do what every other reputable scientist does and publish them in a reputable peer-reviewed science journal instead of posting them on a blog.

Steve: I try to be accurate in my commentary and believe that comments on Marcott et al are accurate. If you disagree with any of the results presented here, I’d appreciate any input that you can provide and would be happy to correct any inaccuracies.

There was extensive favorable blog commentary on Marcott et al; did you object to that blog coverage as well?