[GreenSpartan]

Originally Posted by lars

Point 2.
Quote:

I won't bother arguing the evidence from one snow cap. If you think you have a point, carry on. You don't. So much for point two.

Not basing my arguement on snow cap. Merely pointing out what he said is true. . Stike 2

Point 3.
Quote:

{gasp} You mean there's year to year variations (not sure how precipitation matters anyway)?? Yeah, again, not relevant. In fact we know why the northern hemisphere (hey not global) winter was cold and snowy. ENSO. Yep weather. Strike 3.

Again, Not basing my conclusions on this..But the author does have the FACTS correct. Whiffed again.

"Not basing your conclusions"? Why mention this "facts" if they don't matter? Hey it rained yesterday in Seattle, that's a fact, climate change is wrong. Face it lars. These facts are presented in an op-ed to be misleading. They're true, but irrelevant to the point at hand.

Originally Posted by lars

Point 4.
Quote:

The hockey stick exists. McIntyre is wrong. Sorry. Strike 4.

The hockey stick was flawed. Proved out..author is getting the fact correct ...again you whiff.

At best you can dismiss Mann's work (although most scientists think Mann was right). You're wrong. The hockey stick exists.

Numerous myths regarding the so-called "hockey stick" reconstruction of past temperatures, can be found on various non-peer reviewed websites, internet newsgroups and other non-scientific venues. The most widespread of these myths are debunked below:

MYTH #0: Evidence for modern human influence on climate rests entirely upon the "Hockey Stick" Reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures indicating anomalous late 20th century warmth.

This peculiar suggestion is sometimes found in op-ed pieces and other dubious propaganda, despite its transparant absurdity. Paleoclimate evidence is simply one in a number of independent lines of evidence indicating the strong likelihood that human influences on climate play a dominant role in the observed 20th century warming of the earth's surface. Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence in support of this conclusion is the evidence from so-called "Detection and Attribution Studies". Such studies demonstrate that the pattern of 20th century climate change closely matches that predicted by state-of-the-art models of the climate system in response to 20th century anthropogenic forcing (due to the combined influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations and industrial aerosol increases).
MYTH #1: The "Hockey Stick" Reconstruction is based solely on two publications by climate scientist Michael Mann and colleagues (Mann et al, 1998;1999).

This is patently false. Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature by different groups all suggest that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in a long-term (multi-century to millennial) context (see Figures 1 and 2 in "Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and The So-Called 'Hockey Stick'").
Some proxy-based reconstructions suggest greater variability than others. This greater variability may be attributable to different emphases in seasonal and spatial emphasis (see Jones and Mann, 2004; Rutherford et al, 2004; Cook et al, 2004). However, even for those reconstructions which suggest a colder "Little Ice Age" and greater variability in general in past centuries, such as that of Esper et al (2002), late 20th century hemispheric warmth is still found to be anomalous in the context of the reconstruction (see Cook et al, 2004).
...
MYTH #4: Errors in the "Hockey Stick" undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.

This statement embraces at least two distinct falsehoods. The first falsehood holds that the "Hockey Stick" is the result of one analysis or the analysis of one group of researchers (i.e., that of Mann et al, 1998 and Mann et al, 1999). However, as discussed in the response to Myth #1 above, the basic conclusions of Mann et al (1998,1999) are affirmed in multiple independent studies. Thus, even if there were errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, numerous other studies independently support the conclusion of anomalous late 20th century hemispheric-scale warmth.
The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the "hockey stick" shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.
False claims of the existence of errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction can also be traced to spurious allegations made by two individuals, McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist). The false claims were first made in an article (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003) published in a non-scientific (social science) journal "Energy and Environment" and later, in a separate "Communications Arising" comment that was rejected by Nature based on negative appraisals by reviewers and editor [as a side note, we find it peculiar that the authors have argued elsewhere that their submission was rejected due to 'lack of space'. Nature makes their policy on such submissions quite clear: "The Brief Communications editor will decide how to proceed on the basis of whether the central conclusion of the earlier paper is brought into question; of the length of time since the original publication; and of whether a comment or exchange of views is likely to seem of interest to nonspecialist readers. Because Nature receives so many comments, those that do not meet these criteria are referred to the specialist literature." Since Nature chose to send the comment out for review in the first place, the "time since the original publication" was clearly not deemed a problematic factor. One is logically left to conclude that the grounds for rejection were the deficiencies in the authors' arguments explicitly noted by the reviewers]. The rejected criticism has nonetheless been posted on the internet by the authors, and promoted in certain other non-peer-reviewed venues (see this nice discussion by science journalist David Appell of a scurrilous parroting of their claims by Richard Muller in an on-line opinion piece).
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, which hold that the "Hockey-Stick" shape of the MBH98 reconstruction is an artifact of the use of series with infilled data and the convention by which certain networks of proxy data were represented in a Principal Components Analysis ("PCA"), are readily seen to be false , as detailed in a response by Mann and colleagues to their rejected Nature criticism demonstrating that (1) the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction is robust with respect to the elimination of any data that were infilled in the original analysis, (2) the main features of the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely insensitive to whether or not proxy data networks are represented by PCA, (3) the putative ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick, which argues for anomalous 15th century warmth (in contradiction to all other known reconstructions), is an artifact of the censoring by the authors of key proxy data in the original Mann et al (1998) dataset, and finally, (4) Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick have now been further discredited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in a paper to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, "Journal of Climate" by Rutherford and colleagues (2004) [and by yet another paper by an independent set of authors that is currently "under review" and thus cannot yet be cited–more on this soon!]. Rutherford et al (2004) demonstrate nearly identical results to those of MBH98, using the same proxy dataset as Mann et al (1998) but addressing the issues of infilled/missing data raised by Mcintyre and McKitrick, and using an alternative climate field reconstruction (CFR) methodology that does not represent any proxy data networks by PCA at all.
References:
Cook, E.R., J. Esper, and R.D. D'Arrigo, Extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere land temperature variability over the past 1000 years, Quat. Sci. Rev., 23, 2063-2074, 2004.
Crowley, T.J., and T. Lowery, How Warm Was the Medieval Warm Period?, Ambio, 29, 51-54, 2000.
Esper, J., E.R. Cook and F.H. Schweingruber, Low-frequency signals in long tree-line chronologies for reconstructing past temperature variability, Science, 295, 2250-2253, 2002.
Jones, P.D., K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett and S.F.B. Tett, High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last millennium: Integration, interpretation and comparison with General Circulation Model control run temperatures, Holocene, 8, 455-471, 1998.
Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004.
Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, Nature, 392, 779-787, 1998.
Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations, Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 759-762,
1999.
Mann, M.E., Ammann, C.M., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Oppenheimer, M., Osborn, T.J., Overpeck, J.T., Rutherford, S., Trenberth, K.E., Wigley, T.M.L., On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late 20th Century Warmth, Eos, 84, 256-258, 2003.
Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Methodology, Predictor Network, Target Season and Target Domain, Journal of Climate, in press, 2004.
Soon, W., and S. Baliunas, Proxy climatic and environmental changes over the past 1000 years, Climate Research, 23, 89-110, 2003.
Soon, W., S. Baliunas, C, Idso, S. Idso and D.R. Legates, Reconstructing climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years, Energy and Environment, 14, 233-296

(from realclimate)


If you're right you should be able to produce "corrected" reconstruction graphs that show no temp increase.

I'll hang up and listen.

Originally Posted by lars

Point 5.
Quote:

So we're now comparing arctic ice trends over years with ice from one region for one year that we already know was colder for weather reasons not climate. Strike 5.

Key data was left out to give the impression that ice pack was less than it was. In fact the ice recovered beyond what was orginally there. Author points out misleading info. Correct. Strike

Wow. Do you really not see the difference here?

Originally Posted by lars

Point 6.
Quote:

Yeah, well score one for those models that don't work. They predict Antarctica will be colder during this time.

The model have gotten many things wrong. The biggest to data is the non-existance of a positive water vapor feedback loop. Without warming is mild at a worst going forward and barely noticible at best.

lars, this is an example of where the models are getting it right. Your op-ed portrays it as a mystery. It's not. And your response when confronted with yet more evidence the models work? "uh, the models are wrong....Spencer's new data"

Have you read Spencer's papers?

Originally Posted by lars

Pointg 7.
Quote:

See point one. Still don't know what to do with that extra energy re-radiated back to the earth. We've known the oceans were heat sinks for some time.

The author points out accurate data..what you know.. he got right again and you got wrong.

You missed my point entirely.

So the currents in the Pacific shift and the ocean in that area cools. Where did that heat energy go? Hint: the currents moved it someplace else. The earth is still warming.

Originally Posted by lars

Point 8.
Quote:

50 years ago Martin Gardner pointed out cranks operate outside the scientific discussion. Congrats. Welcome to the club that include diviners, mysitics, etc. And see my previous post. The discussion occurred and continues to occur.
I would say that much of the debate is happening on the net. Which is not a good thing but true. However, some of the media is waking up. As evidenced by this aritcle.

The debate happens in the journals, at conferences, and in the hallways of research centers. Scientific debate does not happen in the popular press as evidenced by the stupid mistakes this op-ed makes with things as simple as explainable regional weather compared to global climate.

Originally Posted by lars

Point 9.
Quote:

As I said before, if this is true you should easily show the graphs showing the diverging curves.
Sorry no graphs to make it simple for you. Just that more and more is coming out in the form of reports, studies and articles. That is true.

Don't you claim advanced degrees in science? And you dismiss graphs as "make it simple"? OK, you don't have graphs, cite some journals (yes, I know there's the Spencer data, you're claiming "more and more").

Originally Posted by lars

Once again you bias comes through. But that is expected.

When the data aren't on your side claim "bias".