Holocene, historic and recent global temperatures from temperature proxies.
Guest post by: Frank Lansner, civil engineer, biotechnology
NOTE: Link to PDF of this article is HERE
In the climate debate, the temperatures of the past are used to determine if the present temperatures are unique and alarming. Any viewpoint can be supported by choosing specific science papers as reference
This paper is one of many attempts to give a realistic overview of the actual messages we get from the temperature proxies.
(“Temperature proxy”: Past temperatures reconstructed from samples using a row of techniques.
The “Spaghetti graphs” in the following gives an impression of the huge variability among the datasets. The essence of each graphic is the major trends. To enable display of multiple data series it was often necessary to interpolate temperature values to the specific years used in graphics.
To avoid most calibration problems, I have set specific years to zero for the different graphs I chose a year where practically all graphs has data, and no further calibration needed. In few cases I have calibrated from 1980-1990-2000 using UAH trend of approx. +0,1K/decade.)
Recent temperature proxies – 120 years
Fig 1: 10 multi proxies shown for the 20´th century. In addition 14 temperature proxy datasets. The black curve shows average of the 14 datasets as 1 multi proxy. This multi proxy + the 10 of the most used bigger multi-proxy series is the basis for the WHITE graph: “Average of 11 multi proxies”.
The temperature proxies does not show strong net warming since around 1940. In fact, proxy data does not show any warming since 1940. This is no news, it has been recognised for example here:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/fac/trl/downloads/Publications/divergence2007.pdf
The authors call the missing global warming in proxies for “The Divergence problem”. And they try to give reasons for this problem using characteristics of trees. But since other proxies than using tree ring proxies also indicates no global warming after around 1940, the problem seems not related with tree rings measurements.
“The divergence problem”:
Fig 2: The “divergence problem”.
The “All China” multi proxy: A reliable work where 8 regions of China where studied and then yield the final China multi proxy temperature line. The “All USA”, NOAA raw, is the official measured USA temperatures minus the official correction, that is, the raw USA temperature dataset. I find it stunning how close All-China and All-USA matches each other, see fig 2! (- a dataset of measured temperature compared to a dataset of proxies). And unlike GISS 2009, the Northern Hemisphere temperature set of 1976 supports the raw trends of US and China. Several of the multi proxy series have been smoothed with a “50 year weighted Gaussian filter” etc. and therefore any bigger dive around 1970 could not be seen in the multi proxy graph.
We see a divergence after 1950 between:
- GISS 2009 vs. Average of the multi proxies, that is, the temperature evidence in the ground and trees.
- GISS 2009 vs. USA, CHINA and NH temperatures
- GISS 2009 vs. Solar activity.
So, at least when comparing with mostly raw datasets, the GISS 2009 dataset could seem to be the source of “the divergence problem” – “the outlier”. Problems for the GISS data set might be incorrect adjustments, problems with UHI and poor measuring sites, see www.surfacestations.org!!
The “divergence problem” also seems to vanish when using satellite data (UAH/RSS) in stead of GISS data:
Fig 3: A: Briffa´s 2001 illustration of tree ring proxies combined with the GISS dataset as “Observations” (as the adjusted GISS temperatures are called). B: Same, however this time “Observations” are raw satellite data UAH from 1980 – 2000 with a slope of 0,1K/decade.
There is no divergence problem when using satellite temperature data as “Observations”. We now have total compliance between proxy data and modern temperature measurements stating: No net warming since around 1940-50.
Historic temperature proxies – 1200 years
For this analysis 33 data sets was used. The first that strikes you when working with historic temperature proxies is the apparent chaos of data. However, after keying in 6-8 data sets the well known features “Middle age warm period” and “The little Ice Age” becomes clear. Keying in the rest of datasets doesn’t change much.
First, take a good look at the period 1900 to 2000..
Notice how these 33 datasets confirms the trends from fig 1, the recent temperature proxies. We can conclude that we have a good ability to reproduce the result quite accurate with quite different datasets, and thus, neither of the graphs ( fig 1 and fig 4) are likely to reflect “random” results. All data evidence used in fig 1. + fig 4. actually suggests that today’s temperatures resemble the temperatures of 1940-50. Yes, a divergence problem for the temperature data from GISS and Hadcrut.
Fig 4: Historic temperature proxy data. Practically all methods and regions of the globe are represented.
6 of the data sets originate from tree ring data.
We see the Medieval Warm Period apparently ongoing already in year 800 and goes on for 5-600 years. First around year 1400 the Little Ice Age really takes over. It was around year 1400 the Vikings left the freezing Greenland.
From year 800 to year 1300 temperatures appears around 0,3 K higher than today. And from around year 1400 to 1900 temperatures appears to be are around 0,4 K lower than today. A difference from MWP to LIA of 0,7 K in average globally. (Max difference approx 1,1 K),
We will return to these historic data later, but lets first take a look even further back in time.
Holocene temperature proxies – 12000 years
For this analysis 29 long datasets where used. All graphs are calibrated to zero for year 1000.
First focus on years 800 to 2000…
Once again we see a reproduced trend between 2 different data sets. And again, the accuracy is nice. The MWP here appears almost 0,8 K degrees celcius warmer than the LIA, very close to what we saw it on fig 4, the historic data 0,7K. This once again confirms the impressing usefulness of data despite the chaotic and random appearance. There is however a tiny difference between the 2 graphs, around 0,1K. But it should be noted, that for the Holocene temperatures, no tree ring data was used. According to Loehle 2007, tree ring data tends to suppress the MWP somewhat. This we will return to.
Fig 5: Holocene temperature data.
The data point for year 2000 are based on too few datasets to be really trustworthy. Therefore I have inserted the red star where I use the value of todays temperature taken from fig 4, historic temperatures. By doing so, temperature for year 2000 got 0,2 K warmer than from Holocene data.
Fig 5 also shows that the whole debate about MWP is irrelevant. Imagine there was no MWP. Practically ALL of the Holocene period the eath appears to be between 0,5 and 1,5 K warmer than today. The little ice age does resemble a mini ice age or at least it appears to be the coldest period in over 10.000 years.
Finally, the overall picture from the graph is an almost perfect mathematical curve that tops around 5-6000 years ago. These Data tells the story quite clear: We are on a down trend in temperatures globally, we should not fear warmth by now. How much lower can the temperatures on earth go before we reach a tipping point to much colder temperatures at earth?
Medieval warm period
Arguments against the MWP often focus on the “fact” that the warmer temperatures from that period are a phenomenon exclusively to have appeared on the northern hemisphere.
Fortunately, the results from fig 4 and fig 5 shows an excellent match for the period year 800 to year 2000. It thus makes very good sense to combine the datasets and then obtain a better data foundation to analyse the MWP.
Datasets from fig 4 and fig 5 combined, a northern/southern hemisphere display of the Medieval Warm Period:
Fig 6: Historic temperatures, North and south hemispheres separated. Let’s first see what the graph actually says, very roughly:
NH MWP, 42 datasets:
Ongoing in year 800, temperatures mostly 0,3-0,4 K higher than today.
The temperature creeps below today’s level and ends around year 1300.
SH MWP, 13 datasets:
Ongoing in year 800, temperatures mostly 0,2-0,3 K higher than today.
The temperature creeps below today’s level and ends around year 1350.
Northern hemisphere is still much better represented than the southern hemisphere, so what can we conclude on this ground? Can we conclude anything?
On this ground I find it safe to accept the NH MWP approximately as described above.
To accept that globally there where no MWP, we will have to accept the following:
The 2 hemispheres have the ability to maintain a quite different temperature development for at least 500 years and did so from year 800 to year 1300.
What can we demand to accept this idea? We can demand solid evidence.
Anyone claiming the above must present solid evidence for a MEDIEVAL COLD PERIOD on the southern hemisphere.
IF data showed that the southern hemisphere had a MCP where temperatures for 500 years was 0,3-0,4 degrees colder than today, would this “kill” the MWP? Certainly not. Because, then we would have had 500 years with global temperatures just like today globally… – In that case, certainly no reason to be alarmed about the temperatures today.
No, if today’s temperatures should be alarmingly warm, the S. hemisphere temperature should show a very strong MCP at least 0,4 degrees colder than today in the 500 year period.
Is there ANY indication of a 500-year strong MCP in the southern hemisphere indicated in the data above? No, certainly not. There are not that many SH data, but still, there is not the slightest indication of a strong MCP on the S. Hemisphere.
Until the strong 500 year long MCP on SH has been proven, there is nothing that shakes the acceptance of a global MWP with temperatures resembling or higher than today’s temperatures.
I believe a massive use of tree ring graphs exclusively might show a strong southern MCP. In this case, the idea that there is no MWP globally is dependent on only on one specific method of making temperature proxies, tree rings. Tree rings are 1 of at least 20 different methods to measure temperatures of the past. As such, they should never dominate the measurements.
The South pole and MWP:
While examining temperature proxies, I found some odd results:
Fig 7: -A stunning mismatch between 2 Antarctic data series.
Not only are they both from Antarctica, but they are both from near the south pole. The well known “MWP-signature” has found its way not only to the Southern hemisphere, but to the south pole. But in the near by Vostok location, for many centuries, there has been absolutely no sign of the MWP? Obviously this is absurd, so at least one of the two results is not accurate.
The black graph (from “Remote Plateau”) has a resolution of 1 – 3 years per sample, excellent. The blue graph (vostok) has approx 23 years between data points. Both series should be considered fine quality then.
How likely is it, that the “MWP/LIA-signature” has come up in “Remote plateau” (black graph) data by a coincidence? When it has also been spotted many other places on the SH? See fig 6: The Vostok data has a dotted red line. How well does vostok data then fit the rest of the Southern hemisphere data?
The use of vostok data also moves the SH temperature profile away from the NH average.
Tree rings
If the MWP only disappears using one a specific measuring method, the idea as well as the method is invalid.
Proxy temperature data from tree rings are easy to get, but the quality?
Craig Loehle: “There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not capture long-term climate changes”.
Indeed. A good warm year will obviously help a tree growing, but decades of increasing temperatures could affect the whole area so for example more trees might be able to survive, the root nets would only be able to grow to some extend for other trees etc.
Example: Imagine that a warming after decades is accompanied by 10% more trees surviving in an area and eventually demands their “place in the sun”. By measuring tree rings for an individual tree you are not measuring the overall tree growth of the area. And measuring 10.000 trees does not change anything as all trees would have the same problem. Measuring tree pollen or isotopes etc in sediment cores avoids these problems and it makes me wonder how come so much energy has been used for tree ring analyses.
Selective adjustments?
Many kinds of adjustments are used in connection with climate results. But one adjustment I haven’t heard of is the down-adjustment of recent temperatures from temperature proxy data due to CO2-induced extra growth. If the CO2 level is indeed extraordinary high, then it is a fact that plants grow markedly more. And they grow at higher altitude etc.
Here is an impressing overview of plant response to extra CO2 in the atmosphere:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject_p.php
I have chosen the letter P for the link since several tree ring analysis are made for pine trees. Check the responses for pine trees when adding extra CO2.
Therefore any temperature proxy based on plant growth should be adjusted down in times of high CO2. Otherwise you will measure CO2 and not heat. But this obvious kind of adjustment seems not to happen? Or? Can it really be, that the crew of alarmists so happy for adjusting for all kinds of tiny issues, simply don’t adjust when there is a really good reason to do so?
Fig 8: Historic temperature proxy data with focus on tree ring-method. In the analyses I have used, it turned out that 7 of 55 datasets where from tree rings. On this figure, these 7 datasets actually does seem to differ in trend from all the rest. The 7 tree ring datasets suggests no MWP, in fact, they suggest that the MWP was 0,3-0,4 K COLDER than today’s temperatures. Quite the opposite result than the majority of datasets concerning MWP.
On might say that these 7 datasets are too little a basis for any conclusion, and therefore I have included a bigger tree ring multi proxi, “Esper et al 2002” and the trend from the 7 tree ring datasets are confirmed:
Unlike all other methods, tree rings shows no warm MWP.
Example, the European Alps:
Fig 9: Here from fig 4, we have 2 different temperatures in the same area, the European Alps.
Quite like Antarctica, we have 2 datasets, one showing the well known “MWP/LIA-signature” and one not showing this. Both cannot be correct, so we know that at least one of the datasets is faulty.
In addition, these measurements where taken in the middle of Europe where we have an overwhelming amount of non-tree temperature proxy datasets confirming a very warm MWP.
Therefore, if the tree ring method was useful, we definitely should see a warm MWP from tree ring data in Europe. But we don’t. And unless all the other temperature proxy methods just shows a very warm MWP in Europe by coincidence, the tree ring method does appear to be the faulty method.
The tree graph appears flat compared to the other methods (- a “yummy” to use if you want to produce a hockey stick), but we are not here to produce a hockey stick, we seek the temperatures of the past.
Now it becomes relevant to examine jus non-tree temperature proxies (As Loehle concluded) for better accuracy:
Fig 10: The Historic temperature proxy trend based on 27 non tree ring proxies show a slightly warmer MWP than when including tree rings, fig 4. The average temperature for year 800-1400 is approx 0,4 K warmer than today, and the years 1400-1900 is around 0,4 K colder than today. So the non tree historic temperatures now gives a MWP/LIA difference of 0,8 K like the (non tree) Holocene temperatures, fig 5.
We even see “peaks” in the MWP up to 0,6K warmer than today, and now 1950 actually appears slightly warmer than today.
Fig 11: Briffa’s 2001 all tree ring proxy data, compared with non tree ring data.
First of all, I have every respect for the huge work done using tree rings. There are indeed many sources to errors (like the idea about different SH/NH temperature development etc.) – but despite all, this graph speaks a very clear language.
Here we see the 27 datasets of non-tree rings, together with the well known tree ring graphs.
It becomes clear, that the non tree rings world wide – THICK BLUE CURVE – matches extremely well in the 20’th century and all the way back to year 1450. Then exactly as the MWP starts, the tree rings and the non
tree rings simply “looses contact”.
What ever the reason for the differences between tree ring or non tree ring temperature proxies,
it becomes evident, that choosing tree rings or not is the same as choosing a MWP or not.
.
One partly explanation for this huge mismatch could be CO2. If indeed the CO2 concentration today is a lot higher in the atmosphere than it was in the MWP, then trees simply grows faster than in the MWP, apparently even though temperatures are not higher.
S
Conclusion:
– Its way too early to consider the MWP gone. There is a lot of scientific work to be done before any such conclusion has any weight. MWP disappears when using tree ring data.
– In this writing we see that 48 non tree ring temperature proxies combined shows a MWP around 0,4 K warmer than today, lasting at least 500 years.
– Besides the MWP discussion: 80-90% of the Holocene period (last 10-12.000 years) has been warmer than today. The last 6000 years, the general temperature trend has been steady cooling. The temperature levels in the Little Ice Age were the lowest in the Holocene period.
I find it relevant to study the consequences of further cooling.
– Except for strongly adjusted temperature data, there is compliance between recent temperatures measured from satellites, evidence from tree-proxies, evidence from non-tree-proxies and more showing that: It does not appear warmer today than around 1940-50.
This is in compliance with solar activity in the 20’th century.
This does not suggest a warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
ome of the non-tree-ring measurement methods includes Be, O and C isotopes etc, that in some cases are more independent of changing tree growth or the like. These methods would be preferable if we wanted to clear CO2-induced errors on temperature measurements.
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Omigod, I can’t see to type, my glasses are all fogged up.
This is hysterical.
Johnny submits his first ‘picture’ to his teacher on PTA day.
The teacher is trying like hell to keep from busting up.
The parents are likewise red-faced.
Little Susie blurts out “Johnny’s picture looks like the dog we ran over last week”.
Great post! But I do not expect Hansen or GISS to be bothered as the agenda is settled the facts are without relevance.
Ok, I had my laugh. Sorry about that.
Seriously, does a tree know the difference for the most part between warm & dry vs cool & dry?
Great… Another article that will consume me for several days… Unfortunately, (or fortunately for you all) by the time I have enough understanding of the article to comment intelligently, there will be 8000 comments and the thread will have wandered into barycentric theory! LOL
😉 Good reading!
Wow!! Quite a report and difficult to digest in one sitting.
I’m dizzy. I guess I’ll watch the Masters and color Easter Eggs. I’ll come back to this later and read it for detail. It looks useful and underlines the conclusion that all of this AGW is dependent on the quality of the dataset.
That was truly “mind numbing”. I can’t wait to hear the smart kid (the one sitting under the teacher’s nose) pretend to understand the “true meaning” of Johnny’s picture. In the meantime, Johnny be “high fivin'” his pals in the back of the room.
Wonderful job!
I’m going to re-read this a few times. There is much to contemplate.
FWIW, having been through the GIStemp code, I would not call the output from GIStemp a ‘temperature series’. GIStemp fabricates numbers by repeated application of ‘the reference station method’ where one site can change the history of another site from 1000km to 1500km away. They use precision that massively exceeds their accuracy and they perform repeated operations on the data without have considered the impact this has on the low order bits. Then they get excited about changes in those low order bits that no longer have validity.
I’ve only done a fine review of the early steps (then I had to take a break from it, the mind recoiling in horror 😉 but all the source code is up for folks to look at (and anyone can post comments or reviews of any part of it).
See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
That you found agreement between the proxies and satellites but GIStemp was a big outlier does not surprise me in the least. It is exactly what I would expect from what I’ve seen in the code.
IMHO, GIStemp is useless and any work that is based on assuming GIStemp is valid is itself worthless.
The one clear message that comes through is that using proxies, be they tree rings, ice cores or speleothems, for measuring past temperatures (or CO2 levels, for that matter) produces highly dubious data. Adjusting the raw data introduces bias. At best he raw data can give us a very broad picture (over possibly a rather small – in global terms – area) that can be confirmed by geology and, more recently, contemporaneous history. Anything more is guesswork.
Climatology is to meteorology as astrology is to astronomy.
absolutely fantastic and thank you very much. How to get information through into the real world?
Jack,
Arguably, all analysis is “dependent on the quality of the dataset”. Imagine that!
Fantastic work Frank,
It’s good to see the different proxy types compared together. Especially the difference between hideously unreliable tree rings and the rest.
I didn’t expect much from this post when I started reading bc there is so much rubbish in proxies. I was pleasantly surprised at the extent of what you put together. Thank you.
This work should be published. It presents a compelling hypothesis backed up by abundant data.
If the major journals refuse it (and they may indeed do so, given their track record for studies that don’t conform to the meme), then E&E get it into the public domain in a way that WUWT can’t.
Robert Bateman (08:47:36) : Seriously, does a tree know the difference for the most part between warm & dry vs cool & dry?
It depends on the tree… Eucalyptus evolved for dry, but die back in significant cold for many varieties. Redwoods don’t care much about the cold, but only really like it when there is plenty of moisture (coastal redwoods being especially fond of fog.) The list goes on.
So any proxy based on trees must have a detailed understanding of the particular trees in question. (And for very long time periods, how they might have evolved during that time – for example the American Elm has low resistance to Dutch Elm disease. The present recovery program has repeated crosses to Chinese Elm followed by back crossing with American Elm to transfer the Chinese Elm resistance to a ‘mostly American’ survivor. In the wild something similar can happen in a population under, say, water stress. The individuals with good growth in a 1000 year drought will change the composition of the stand over that time…)
In general you can say that most trees most of the time will grow better when warmer (up to their heat stress limit) and they will grow better with optimal water (growing less when drought stressed and dying if waterlogged, modulo trees like Mangrove that love water logged…)
It appears most likely that tree-ring proxies are not valid for historical temperature use, but they may be useful for historical CO2 use. How do we check the CO2 relationship to verify this?
The curious case of Michael Mann’s two thousand year tree ring proxy once again rises from the golf course graveyard. It never seemed to be as good a proxy for temperature as it is for rainfall. Perhaps if the inverse correlation between seasonal temperature and seasonal rainfall could be taken into account it might actually be useful as a reliable temperature proxy.
Oh, and on the trees thing:
It has been found that higher CO2 levels let plants grow better with with the same water (or alternatively, let them grow the same with less water – that is: more CO2 compensates for the effects of water stress…)
So unless you calibrate your tree-ring ruler for CO2 growth promotion (which requires year by year historic CO2 data that is accurate) you will get a confounded answer.
It don’t know of any work on the effect of CO2 enrichment vs temperature. It may well have some ability to mitigate heat stress as well. AFAIK, this is an unexplored area.
Given the methodology and quality issues with GISS, I am not surprised that GISS would end up as an outlier on land temperatures. Yet, GISS uses satellite data for oceans, and therefore I am not surprised when I see studies that GISS and UAH & RSS have similar global trends. Therefore, I am puzzled in my first reading of this post — that GISS diverges but UAH does not.
Wow, I could make a whole powerpoint presentation from this, “An Inconvenient Cooling” (if I use the data sets with 1000 yrs or more). The Earth has a cold…… It wouldn’t get media play, so I’ll use my time reading more Wattsupwiththat instead. The truth is starting to leak out. My wife doesn’t let me talk about not believing in AGW in public (I live in California). Someone at work spoke about the snow in New York City last week and mentioned Global Warming, we all had a good laugh. No one said anything else, but we new what everyone was thinking.
Very good presentation. May I ask what software you used to prepare the graphs?
Is it possible to make a .pdf version of this post available for those of us who need to hold paper in hand for the study of serious documents ?
REPLY: Ask and you shall receive. Link to PDF is HERE
Excellent Article!
Brilliant really, and I agree with the others here, I don’t trust GISS that much either.
Trees are clearly not as simple as some might think
Great work, I will forward this along.
How is the UAH temperature trend (measured in lower troposphere) recalculated to absolute degrees, to replace GISTEMP dataset (ground stations, 2m above ground)?
One might conclude that the world was headed into another ice age around 300 years ago. What could have stopped it? Humans? Assuming a strong warming signal from soot as indicated by the NASA paper, the burning of wood and anything else humans could find to keep warm MAY have stopped the ice age in it’s tracks.
The addition of CO2 in recent times may well have continued that warming. IOW, we’d better keep on warming the planet with CO2 and whatever or nature may take over and get us back on track for an ice age.
It would be ironic if it turned out AGW was true and was SAVING our current way of life.
Btw, it is kind of shame that we have to use non-direct proxies in 20th century for determining the “true” temperature record, with all those thermometers around..
As shown in one of Frank Lansner’s links, the atmospheric CO2 concentration makes a big difference on the growth rate of plants. That’s probably why, against both evidence and common sense, alarmists insist that CO2 concentrations have remained static at right around 280 ppmv for millenia.
And as E.M. Smith notes, GISS fabricates data. That in turn results in GISS claiming the planet is warming, while its peers document cooling: click
And as Prof. Richard Lindzen points out in his article last week [update 3]:
Oh, again on the tree ring thing…
For many forests, you also need to know the history bear and salmon populations to properly interpret growth:
http://ring.uvic.ca/99jan22/bears.html
Bears can deposit about the same amount of “nitrogen fertilizer” (and since it’s from fish, it has a lot of P and other nutrients as well..) as professional forest management would use.
A tree (or any plant, really) will “growth limit” on some lacking nutrient and that will determine your growth ring. It may also limit on temperature extremes or on missing sunshine (think volcano dust or asteroid strike). If you don’t know for certain that the tree was not growth limited on a nutrient, then you are guessing that it growth limited on warmth, and at some times and in some locations that is demonstrably false.
So to make tree rings accurate, you need a soil nutrient profile (via bear population proxy? 😉 a solar output / atmosphere transparency profile, a soil moisture profile, and a CO2 concentration adjustment which depends on a CO2 profile. And all of these must be characterized for the particular species of tree in question and accurate for the particular site in question.
To the best of my knowledge this is not done. It’s just look at the rings and say “Oooh, look at the big ones!”…
(In some cases things would need to be known for the particular tree in question. A large tree shaded by a giant tree is not going to grow well; but will suddenly grow better when that giant tree blows over in a storm. One assumes that this is taken care of by averaging a large number of trees, but that is an assumption; and we all know where assumptions lead…)
In the end, all tree rings tell you is how happy or unhappy that particular tree was at that particular time. They do not tell you why.
Solomon Green (09:10:43) said: “Climatology is to meteorology as astrology is to astronomy.”
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=90127
“…One [Japanese] scientist likened computer climate modeling to ancient astrology…”
…But with 50-year Gaussian filters applied to the empirical modules.
Excellent summary of the situation!
More and more, it seems AGW is not happening to any significant extent. The burden of proof is with the AGW camp. But, their empirical results, so far, leave a lot of questions to be answered — Urban Heat Island data pollution, CO2 increasing tree growth, proxies indicating that today is no warmer than years ago, and on and on.
The IPCC should write a comprehensive report proving their apparent data problems are not really problems — the burden of PROOF is with the AGW camp. We need only ask the questions.
“It would be ironic if it turned out AGW was true and was SAVING our current way of life.”
Don’t you get it? According to the powers that be, our current way of life is the problem. There’s just too many people around who are alive and free. Population numbers must be reduced by at least 90% while freedom is curtailed completely. So far so good.
I’d like to know why MSU2-UAH page is not working:
http://www.atmos.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
Please see http://www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=3774
I posted this note mid-2008, almost a year ago.
Excerpt:
The evidence to date suggests that increased atmospheric CO2 plays NO significant role in causing global warming.
The best data shows no significant warming since ~1940. The lack of significant warming is evident in UAH Lower Troposphere temperature data from ~1980 to end April 2008, and Hadcrut3 Surface Temperature data from ~1940 to ~1980.
The graph title says it all:
“NO NET GLOBAL WARMING SINCE 1940”.
I have been accused of the usual cherry-picking, etc. by the warmists.
However, the warmists are the cherry-pickers – they choose the warming HALF-cycle of the PDO, extrapolate that modest warming to infinity, and then claim dangerous global warming.
I chose the FULL ~60-70 year PDO cycle and see NO net global warming.
Love that Divergence Problem – it lay quietly hidden until about 2006 – I first read about it on ClimateAudit.
The Divergence Problem is why Mann grafted recent Surface Temperature data onto older tree ring data – if he had used all tree-ring data, the blade of the hockey stick would have pointed downward!
Maybe the Hockey Team can explain to me how this was an innocent error.
******************************
Seems to be evidence of the MWP, of course I didn’t read the whole thing, so many graphs and so many explanations O.o
On the suggestion the 1950’s may be warmer, Wichita set quite a few high temperature records in the 50’s, other notable record years were in the 30’s and 1980, we have not had a recent year where we broke as many or more high temperature records as a number of those years.
Thank you very much Mr. Lansner. A great effort!
Frank Lansner is one of the few intelligent Danes in the Climate Debate in my country, and it makes me feel good and proud, that they still make them like this! Happy Easter.
More on the Divergence Problem, from Climate Audit
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=899
Juckes and the Divergence Problem
by Steve McIntyre on November 8th, 2006
not excerpted
***************
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1530
More on the Divergence Problem
by Steve McIntyre on May 4th, 2007
Excerpt:
Two new things on the Divergence Problem. The IPCC First and Second Drafts did not contain a whisper of a mention of the divergence between ring widths and density in the second half of the 20th century, although this is rather an important issue. It came up at the NAS Panel and was completely unresolved in the hearings discussed here, where D’Arrigo was only able to refer to Briffa’s cargo cult explanation of the phenomenon.
“In the absence of a substantiated explanation for the decline, we make the assumption that it is likely to be a response to some kind of recent anthropogenic forcing. On the basis of this assumption, the pre-twentieth century part of the reconstructions can be considered to be free from similar events and thus accurately represent past temperature variability.”
*********************
My comment:
One can understand why the Hockey Team did not want this Divergence Problem to be publicly discussed. The evidence points to fraud.
BTW, isn’t Briffa’s cargo cult explanation contrary to the Uniformitarian Principle, and also Occam’s Razor?
Nice post but I think the question is more scientifically treated on ongoing posts at climateaudit.
ERROR 404 returned for PDF link.
Wow. Information overload. Everything from goofy GISS to questions of the effect of CO2 levels on current proxies.
Talk about data that’s subject to interpretation!
The paragraph just above Fig 4, reminds me of how the popular media overlooks inconvenient facts: “All data evidence … suggests that today’s temperatures resemble the temperatures of 1940-50.”
Remember how Newsweek, back in ’75, warned that the growing season was two weeks shorter than around 1950. And then I think it was on BBC in the past year or so where the politically and environmentally correct line was that the growing season was about two to three weeks longer than 30 years ago or so. Do the math — according to the popular media then, our climate now is more like it was during the period 1940-50. What a coincidence.
REPLY: Ask and you shall receive. Link to PDF is HERE
Got it.
Thank You.
It appears the link to the PDF at the top of the post is broken whereas the one inline to the REPLY works.
Nice to see a conclusion I reached on my own look at several different data sources confirmed independently by someone else … that conclusion being that we have been in a general cooling trend for the past few thousand years (Fig 5). But there is something else that concerns me in Fig 5.
If you look at things about 11,000 years ago, you see that temperatures were rising, then appeared to “ring” a little with temps dropping then rising, then temps drop again but not as far and recover to a higher level and then the “ringing” damps out and we have a nice smooth curve until about 4000 years ago and it begins to “ring” again. It appears that as time passes, the temperatures cool and don’t quite recover to where they were before and each cooling period seems a little cooler than the one before. Then you get this rather large cycle with the MWP and the LIA.
As someone with some experience in electronics, this looks a lot like the ringing that occurs when a state isn’t quite stable and occurs on both sides of a state change. What I am saying is that the LIA might be an indication that we are very close … well within 1000 years of a major climate state change and are nearing the “flip” to 100,000 years of cold. As you can see from the figure, the last time temperatures were that cold were some 11.5k years ago.
My suggestion is to drill that North Slope oil while we still have access to it.
I can hear the warmists already: “We’ve debunked this stuff a thousand times already.” Sorry, I missed the first thousand times. I would like to see the 1001st time actually address what Mr. Lansner has done here.
1. i think it is an extremely simplistic method, to simply stick all proxies together in a single year (1950). all those proxies with a big amplitude will show completely different results, depending on the year chosen. not a good start for a paper.
2. the claims about GISS are extremely problematic. GISS is in good agreement with all other modern datasets. any person with massive doubt about the GISS measurement of glabal temperature data has some serious explanation to do, while pointing at proxy results. whatever problems there are with GISS data, it will always be more accurate than any proxy can ever be.
3. i have been waiting for an eternity for the expansion of the MWP , that this article finally argues for. the MWP is now considered to be an incredibly long time (over 500 years) at a higher temperature than today. with the effect that we see on flora and fauna today, i will start believing in such a period, when i see the first medieval report about zebras in middle europe.
4. talking about today, the article (as many others) uses the term “today” in a pretty “free” way. most of those proxies ended at least a decade ago.
apart from that, i found the article to be at least well structured and written.
It seems an isosbestic point.
Sod- What species would Zebra displace from Middle European fauna?
Their slot is surely occupied by the horse, something that’s quite at home over a fairly wide range of temperatures. A bit like us humans really.
Man, those graphs will twist your eyeballs around the back of your head. Advice to others trying to follow a line, enlarge the graph. That will save you from that dizzy feeling.
Excellent post, though.
GISS is in good agreement with all other modern datasets.
What?!? Have you not looked at the satellite data?
whatever problems there are with GISS data, it will always be more accurate than any proxy can ever be.
More accurate, yes, but no less prone to systemic error.
Adam G.,
To follow up a little more, and to keep “global warming” in perspective, it’s good to remember that most of the arm-waving was done as the alarmists pointed to only a 0.6° C rise in temps over the past century.
Since then most of that small rise has been retraced, and the planet is back around 1980 temperatures. If the alarmists want to get picky, maybe the range of zebra habitat might have moved 80 – 100 miles north, given enough time.
But what actually happens is that the planet’s temperature naturally varies, as it oscillates around a trend line. Bill Illis gets credit for this chart: click, which shows reality vs the IPCC’s scary models.
It’s also good to keep in mind that CO2 is beneficial; more CO2 is better; any small warming helped along by CO2 is more than offset by other factors, and the claim that CO2 is in any way bad is simply an unfounded presumption at this point, since the models’ predictions have all turned out to be wrong in their predictions. GCM models are all the alarmist can point to, as the planet laughs at their hubris.
And I’m willing to bet that zebras won’t be moving north into Europe any time soon.
As regards tree rings. bear in mind this gem from Nature, June 11th, 2008:
From Canada to the Caribbean: Tree leaves control their own temperature
“Tree photosynthesis, according to the study, most likely occurs when leaf temperatures are about 21°C, with latitude or average growing-season temperature playing little, if any, role. This homeostasis of leaf temperature means that in colder climates leaf temperatures are elevated and in warmer climates tree leaves cool to reach optimal conditions for photosynthesis. Therefore, methods that assume leaf temperature is fixed to ambient air require new consideration.”
Sorry for not having the link, just kept the text on file, I’ll speak to my office manager about poor filing habits…
I think that most scientific discoveries or realizations result from the frustrated attempt to answer one simple question: “What the hell is going on here!?”
I have been intensely studying the AGW debate for 6-9 months and have been baffled as to why Dr Tom says that it was warmer in the MWP, Dr Dick says no, today is warmer than it has ever been, and Dr Harry says no, it was actually warmer in 1934.
None of the three are lying, they are (naturally) using the data that best supports their hypothesis.
Holocene Spaghetti has brought me to a moment of enlightenment. and helped me understand just what an absolute mess the historical temperature “records” really are.
BTW, for those not familiar with U. S. colloquialisms, “Tom, Dick, and Harry” simply means person #1, person #2, and person #3 (in no particular order.)
Great Video
The Climate is Constantly Changing
Question the Hype!
An Inquirer (09:41:08) : Given the methodology and quality issues with GISS, I am not surprised that GISS would end up as an outlier on land temperatures. Yet, GISS uses satellite data for oceans, and therefore I am not surprised when I see studies that GISS and UAH & RSS have similar global trends. Therefore, I am puzzled in my first reading of this post — that GISS diverges but UAH does not.
I was sent off on the wild goose chase of ‘satellite data’ in GIStemp. The result is a posting where I show that this is, like most of the AGW claims, a bunch of hot air and deception wrapped around a tiny bit of almost truth and stretched out of all contact with reality. A small quote from my write up is below… In the original, I got a bit frustrated and included clickable links to Marvin the Martin saying various things… 😉
From: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/illudium/
Begin Quote:
Here a bit more detail on the illudium space modulator “satellite” component of the GISS stew. First, notice that this all talks about SST for Sea Surface Temperature. It’s not about satellite data coverage for land. The land data comes from land thermometers. From:
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/
Analysis Description and Recent Reanalysis
The optimum interpolation (OI) sea surface temperature (SST) analysis is produced weekly on a one-degree grid. The analysis uses in situ and satellite SSTs plus SSTs simulated by sea ice cover.
So here are your first clues. It’s an “analysis” not a reporting of satellite data. It uses “in situ”, that is surface reports from ships, buoys, etc.; along with satellite Sea Surface Temperatures and, my favorite, SSTs simulated by sea ice cover. Given the recent “issues” with sea ice reporting it kinda make you wonder…
So, ok, a stew of ships, buoys, whatever, a dash of satellite data, and some simulations (based on a broken ice cover satellite?) are used to create this analysis product (that some folks want to call “satellite data”…)
Before the analysis is computed, the satellite data is adjusted for biases using the method of Reynolds (1988) and Reynolds and Marsico (1993). A description of the OI analysis can be found in Reynolds and Smith (1994). The bias correction improves the large scale accuracy of the OI.
Oh, and the satellite data are adjusted based on an optimal interpolation method. We’re getting even further away from “data” and into the land of processed data food product…
OT but as of 6:20 pm EDT there is a big yellow streak on the sun just below the equator and slightly toward the left side. Watts up with that?
Allan M R MacRae (11:23:35) :
I have been accused of the usual cherry-picking, etc. by the warmists.
However, the warmists are the cherry-pickers – they choose the warming HALF-cycle of the PDO, extrapolate that modest warming to infinity, and then claim dangerous global warming.
They cherry pick more than that, and very precisely:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/picking-cherries-in-sweden/
And the reason they must fabricate data? There simply isn’t enough real data for most of the planet for long enough to make any real conclusions:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/so_many_thermometers_so_little_time/
Frank Lansner, I agree with Deadwood and Jeff Id (I have not had time to read further in the comments) and the others above who are quite impressed. Make it a bit more readable — you are working us hard, you know; publish it, posthaste. Great material; great synthesis. You have a gift for putting studies and charts together and giving us a new way to see a problem. Also add E.M. Smith’s note to it for all the world to see:
“That you found agreement between the proxies and satellites but GIStemp was a big outlier does not surprise me in the least. It is exactly what I would expect from what I’ve seen in the code.
IMHO, GIStemp is useless and any work that is based on assuming GIStemp is valid is itself worthless.”
SOd
you write::
“i think it is an extremely simplistic method, to simply stick all proxies together in a single year (1950). all those proxies with a big amplitude will show completely different results, depending on the year chosen. not a good start for a paper.”
Think again. Never mind what year you chose, the whole graph can only be moved up or down. If a graph comes in “high” its both todays temperature ans past temperatures that comes in high. It doenst change the temperatures compared to todays temperatures. Hope you get it…
K.R. Frank
First read – wow! I’ve got to make more time for this one.
INGSOC (08:49:52) : I sympathise. By the time you feel able to comment intelligently, I might be ready to appreciate your comments and perhaps add my own 😉
Smokey (13:56:31) : If the alarmists want to get picky, maybe the range of zebra habitat might have moved 80 – 100 miles north, given enough time. […] And I’m willing to bet that zebras won’t be moving north into Europe any time soon.
OK, just remember it wasn’t me who brought up zebra…
Zebra’s would do just fine in southern Europe. California has a Mediterranean climate and we have wild zebra… proving that they could live just fine in Spain or France or Italy, if they could just cross the Sahara and swim the Mediterranean Sea..
First stop, google: ” escaped zebra california Hearst” and you will find a lot of stuff like:
http://www.viamagazine.com/top_stories/articles/hearst_castle03.asp
but the less dangerous exotics, among them kangaroos and yaks, freely roamed the hills. (Remnants of the zebra herd can still be seen today, mingling with local Herefords.)
and
So you see, Zebra are quite at home in a Mediterranean climate and would do fine. No climate change needed. (Somewhere I have the California list of exotics that have escaped into the wild here that lists zebra as naturalized in California now, but I couldn’t find it quick, so you get the less scientific youtube video as authority 😉
I always thought California was a zoo…
😎
This is a great piece, but perhaps it would be better to break up articles like this into smaller pieces, published in installments over a week or ten days. Just a thought for future consideration. This article is like a two-foot long submarine sandwich. You start it, and get into it a bit, but only the hardiest souls will be able to finish it in one sitting. 🙂
I find the graphs very frustrating, for a couple of reasons. Too many lines, obviously. I understand it is very difficult to make the point without showing all the data from all the data sets, but still it’s murky. Maybe the labeling is not sufficient? For example, on figure 4, a lot of skinny little squiggles, but there seems to be a bold white line, a bold green line, and a bold tan-colored line. What are these bold lines? I cannot tell from the text. Maybe I’m going blind from squinting.
Second, this is a general frustration related to most historical temperature graphs. Why not have the y-axis labeled with actual temp in degrees Centigrade? Why always a zero level related to some specific year or average of years? Since zero in one study is not the same as zero in another study, graphs cannot be compared easily. The clearest way to represent temperatures would be with the absolute temperature in degrees C on the y-axis, and then if you want to make reference to a particular year or an average from 1960-1990 (or whatever range) use a dashed horizontal line to denote that reference point.
If I might make a plea, we (skeptics) need to make the complex as understandable as possible, so we don’t scare away ordinary folk who need to see these kinds of analyses. We don’t want to oversimplify, but if there are a few little modifications that can help make things a little cleaner and clearer, that would be a big plus.
Steve Keohane (14:10:19) :
As regards tree rings. bear in mind this gem from Nature, June 11th, 2008:
From Canada to the Caribbean: Tree leaves control their own temperature
That would be:
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08061131
Frank:
Thank you for this timely report.
Sod,
You have obviously not been looking at the 5 principle temperature data sets maintained by different organizations over the past 40 years. The GISS is an outlier to the other four, which track each other pretty cloy in comparison. And the deviation is growing.
Look at the data before you speak nonsense.
I do not employ ad hominem attacks. But If I were to criticize Astronomer Hansen as he does to others, he has committed a “crime against humanity” by corrupting the GISS dataset so as to make it unusable and unreliable for humanity. He is destroying a dataset, emplaced in his care, that is useful to all humanity.
His training is not in Climatology or Information Technology or Library Science. In his position, he should employ such professionals to assure the data placed in his care. His undocumented adjustments seem to remove any hope of evaluating the raw reported GISS data.
Frank,
Why are you using outdated satellite numbers when Roy Spencer and John Christy have provided corrected data?
REPLY: Tom I think you are being unrealistically nitpicky on this. The UAH data used is through 2008, and I see many graphs that go to 2008 on the black line of UAH data. A few of the proxy datasets don’t even make it to 2000. The three months of 2009 UAH data would make no difference in many of these comparisons, since much of the proxy data doesn’t extend to that date. If you’ll note the references, many of the paper cited are from the mid 90’s to 2006. Doing a comparison of all data sets with such wide variance in endpoints, and then focusing on one dataset that he used up to 2008 without the 2009 data seems to me to be irrelevant. Remember, this is a person doing this work on their own time at home, and may not have access to update data from all these authors as you might being connected with NASA. Cut him some slack. – Anthony
But what actually happens is that the planet’s temperature naturally varies, as it oscillates around a trend line.
That’s what I see in the tree ring data for my area (2000 yrs worth).
For every action (dry or wet) there is an equal and opposite reaction (wet or dry). It just takes a differing amount of time & amplitude to get it done.
As for the last 100 yrs of it, the amplitudes are far higher & lower, but it still all evens out.
The science of AGW can be summed up in the following bit of sophism from the book A Random Walk Through Science regarding Napoleon’s horse having an infinite number of legs. It goes something like this:
– The horse had forelegs in front.
– The horse had two rear legs.
– Four legs in front added to two rear legs equals six legs, an even number of legs.
– Six legs is an odd number of legs for a horse to have.
– The only number that can be both odd and even is infinity. Ergo, Napoleon’s horse had an infinite number of legs!
The science of AGW is built on too many unproven assertions. I don’t need to list them for this website.
On the time lapse, it appears in the last frame … let’s see if it presists or disappears on the next frame.
I find the focus on tree rings disturbing, because while they will show the annual variation in temperature they will tend to minimize the centuries-long variations, which is what everyone is interested in.
Regarding the divergence problem, could there have been an anthropomorphic effect that affects tree-rings over the last fifty years, the “global-dimming”, so that the tree-rings don’t grow properly due to a lack of light? Would this justify splicing on the temperature record for this period instead? If so, why wouldn’t this dimming affect uptake of CO2?
More questions than answers. The whole subject looks like a scientific debacle.
Those spaguettis, at this hour, need some sauce on it. The one of JH jumped out of the plate!
EM Smith
Thanks, but problem with graph at
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/picking-cherries-in-sweden/
Can you fix please?
“In the end, all tree rings tell you is how happy or unhappy that particular tree was at that particular time. They do not tell you why.”
So THATs what tree hugging is about, trying to make the rings wider.
Anthony,
All of the satellite data presented here end in 2000 and is not corrected. Other scientists have updated their analyses to include more recent data, so if you wish to dispute their conclusions it really is necessary to do the same. Otherwise the spaghetti can get rather rubbery!
REPLY: How can you say “All of the satellite data presented here end in 2000” when we clearly have UAH plot lines extending to 2008 on several graphs? And, what correction are you referring to? – Anthony
Enjoyed the article. The graphs are pretty well done especially when enlarged but could be improved. I would remove the shaded backgrounds and the grid lines for a start. Obviously figures like No 1 are pretty tough to do no matter how you go about it but for the simpler ones you may want to use both different colors for lines and different dash patterns, makes it easier for the color blind readers. For a great tutorial on how to present technical information try any of Edward Tufte’s books.
I had not heard of the divergence problem from proxy data but it obviously in any comparison of GISS to UAH.
I find the focus on tree rings disturbing, because while they will show the annual variation in temperature they will tend to minimize the centuries-long variations,
This got me thinking: Could it be that three ring growth as climate proxies , are NOT scale invariant (micro vs global climates ?
Could it be that biological proxies, because of their life processes, are acting as localized high-pass filters with respect to their immediate surroundings?
Could it be that the relationship between localized climates and the global climate is more complex and chaotic than currently understood ?
Many kudos to Frank Lansner. This is the kind of analysis Climate Science should have been doing all along if it was in fact attempting to do real science to begin with, that is, trying to disprove or at least see what might be wrong with its own hypotheses. Indeed, why even want to pursue any hypothesis which you can do so much damage to completely on your own simply by operating scientifically?
Concerning only the MWP issure, trying to erase/disprove or make merely local the MWP has always struck me as telltale insofar as these attempts seem to intentionally ingore warm period previous to the MWP, as though the AGW “scientists” think that because they have this myopic focus, everyone else would/should, too. Then they totally fail in destroying even their own “strawman”!
Another comment relative to ice ages … could it be that ice ages occur when CO2 gets too low? (along with other factors). The climate drops below a threshold and then cools to a stable ice age value. Eventually, somethings kicks off a warming mode which is then followed by increased CO2 (800 year time lag). Over time the CO2 naturally falls back down, the earth cools until another ice age is kicked off.
Still working on my “CO2 saves humanity” hypthesis … 😉
Hmm, Isaiah 44:25 is appropriate.
Great post. And I literally fell out of my chair laugh at sod’s zebra comment. How exactly are they supposed to have crossed the Sahara desert in a ~warmer~ climate? Which is generally thought to have also been drier (well, in the tropical regions, it is thought that there was a “mega drought” around this time-popular speculation has it the change crashed the Mayan civilization-I doubt it)? If anything, Zebras and other Savanna fauna were probably pushed south by dry conditions.
Thanks for your extensive work….great reading. On tree rings: I have two trees at one end of my property that were dying and I replanted them in a corner to hide them…. well, they recovered immediately and took off, now soaring over some others they were previously dwarfed by…. turns out, my neighbor had a remote water bib there that has been leaking. Moral of the story: Sun/heat is important, but water is at least as important if not more so. We need studies on growth of each species in each scenario (Hot/dry) (Hot/wet) (cool/dry)(cool/wet) (and perhaps projected precip patterns to give meaning to tree ring data. Thanks again…
Also want to comment on this for Richard M, A recent article here noted declining humidity: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/negative-feedback-in-climate-empirical-or-emotional/
Do we ultimately lose our water vapor blanket at some tipping point, and fall into the next ice age?
Anthony,
“How can you say “All of the satellite data presented here end in 2000″ when we clearly have UAH plot lines extending to 2008 on several graphs? And, what correction are you referring to?”
Apologies if I missed it, but which of the figures above are you referring to?
“And, what correction are you referring to?”
The corrections since 2000, endorsed by Spencer and Christy, which produce the current publicly available satellite dataset of temperatures.
REPLY: Now I understand what you are talking about. The UAH data available today, and for the last few years has already been corrected for that issue. In fact it is pretty hard to find the UAH data prior to that correction. Frank mentioned earlier today he is preparing a digital archive of all data used and when it is ready, I’ll add it here. I think it is an assumption that he used uncorrected data. As for the other data sets, we’ll also be able to see when they end.
I see the point you are trying to make about 2000 as an endpoint, but if you have UAH data to 2008/2009 there’s really not much you can do in the way of comparison if the endpoint for other datasets stops before that. Choosing an endpoint for all comparisons that “fits” all the datasets is of course subjective. Note for example in figure 3, many don’t make it all the way to 2000. I did make an error on interpreting figure 11, I thought I saw the x scale ending at 2008 for the UAH data, but that was an artifact of size compression and viewing on a laptop screen. Now seeing on my large 24″ screen at home I see that was not the case.
I think Frank has done an amazing job in his spare time, and the endpoint of 2000 seems to be a choice he made based on fitting the endpoints of the proxies to a reasonable and common endpoint, 200 makes a good choice when many proxies end near it. As I said before, using the 2009 data would leave a line with no data to compare to in the vicinity. When Frank publishes the datafiles he used, we can then decide if the complaint has any merit. – Anthony
Keohane (14:10:19 :
The study you referenced was posted about here when it came out,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=tree+leaves+maintain+their+own+Steve )
I thought it suggested pretty strongly that whatever tree ring variations were recording, it very likely wasn’t temperature.
Hope all this AGW BS goes away soon as I really don’t have more time to waste on the debate, even if it means all these pro-and anti sites will slowly die away as interest dies LOL sorry
One last comment on my CO2-ice age hypothesis. If true it means both the skeptics and the climate scientists are right. Think of the trend line as being downward instead of flat for current natural climate feedbacks. The release of soot and CO2 is then warming the planet from an ever decreasing base. The “expected” warming of the AGW science turns out to be correct. The fact the “data” did not support the science, the complaint of many skeptics, is resolved.
The only losers in this scenario are those who want catastrophic warming or who want to use AGW for political purposes. Both the physics and the data start to come together.
Now all that is needed is to find someway to determine if the natural forcings really were on a downward trend. An interesting task for some enterprising climate scientists.
I would doubt that ring growths are good for anything longer than their stage of life around a particular event, for example noting the effect of a volcanic eruption. I don’t see how you could extrapolate this to all biological proxies though. The position of the margin of a population of trees would move as the climate varied over the centuries, and the rings would be sampled from these marginal trees, automatically minimizing the centuries long variation in the cumulative record. Unless this particular line of reasoning applies to any other proxy, then it is not necessarily suspect.
I would say that the relationship is complex and chaotic but also that most would understand this. Thats why multiple proxies are employed and averaged. However saying its all too complicated is a bit of a cop-out.
I was over at solarcycle24.com looking at the latest string of spotless days that stands at 35 (soon to be 36). It seems to me that this is the longest string I remember seeing going back to the beginning of 2008, but I don’t have access to the same data to do the analysis myself. Any thoughts or input? It seems that the current string is quite interesting given how we are supposed to have passed the solar minimum.
Frank, thank you for this amazing body of work.
This will go a long way toward showing the utter futility of measuring the global temperature. As I have stated on WUWT and other fora, one can only control what one can accurately measure.
The entire concept of controlling global temperature by adjusting (reducing) atmospheric CO2 is beyond hopeless. Anyone who believes they can do so, will be defying the fundamentals of control theory and applications.
Readers might be interested in browsing the US National Climate Data Centre.
In particular their
listing of data sets (many of which are downloadable).
And their archive of 92 high-resolution temperature records covering the last 2+ millenia all of which are downloadable.
They include lists of the research papers (all peer reviewed) which present the datasets and the methodologies used.
Frank,
This is a tremendous post. It seems to drive a steel spike through the tree ring as temperature proxy hypothesis, and smashes the hockey stick forever.
Richard M.:
could it be that ice ages occur when CO2 gets too low?
Interesting, but temperatures seem to fall off before CO2, and CO2 follows. It looks like CO2 slows the cooling process. There was good post on this a few weeks ago on WUWT. So I thinkan ice age starts before CO2 gets low.
Trees.
About 1974 I was at Prudhoe Bay watching the cuttings from the drill flow into the mud pit. They were drilling the surface hole at about 1,200′ One of the things that came out of the hole was a perfect Douglas Fir cone, solid, pliable, and with the characteristic “mouse tails”.
Prudhoe is on the outwash plain of the Sag River. The cone could have come out of the hole sidewall anywhere between the bit and the surface. Debris in the outwash plain comes from the mountains. The nearest Douglas Fir I know of are coastal SE Alaska and central British Columbia.
So when did Doug Fir grow in the mountains of northern Alaska, and how much warmer and wetter would it have been then than now? If memory serves, current precipitation on the North Slope is around 3″ to 5″ per year. With less than 1,200 feet of debris it can’t be too long ago.
“Now all that is needed is to find some way to determine if the natural forcings really were on a downward trend. An interesting task for some enterprising climate scientists.”
God protect us from enterprising climate scientists!
@Pearland Aggie: for consecutive spotless day periods, see:
http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/Spotless/Spotless.html#Period
I like using CO2 as a proxy for the temperature a few months earlier. 🙂
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
Steve Keohane (14:10:19) :
I woke up with the same paper in mind:
From Canada to the Caribbean: Tree leaves control their own temperature, Penn study reveals http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uop-fct061108.php
I think that what the temperature from tree rings tells us is that trees control their temperature with feedback mechanisms to keep it at their desired optimum. In a sense proving the above paper.
It tells us that you cannot tell the ambient temperature from a tree temperature in the same way you cannot tell the ambient temperature from a human’s temperature,
( were you able to use it as a proxy) except in extremes, as we are watching with the Catlin expedition.
Frank Lasner: a great post.
“So when did Doug Fir grow in the mountains of northern Alaska, and how much warmer and wetter would it have been then than now?”
The last interglacial was significantly warmer than this one has been. I believe tree lines were about 400 miles North of current tree line. Would that be far enough North to put that cone in the drainage basin and possibly end up there?
From the link I gave above:
The research, published online in this week’s Nature, contradicts the longstanding assumption that temperature and relative humidity in an actively photosynthesizing leaf are coupled to ambient air conditions. For decades, scientists studying climate change have measured the oxygen isotope ratio in tree-ring cellulose to determine the ambient temperature and relative humidity of past climates. The assumption in all of these studies was that tree leaf temperatures were equal to ambient temperatures.
Researchers at Penn, using measures of oxygen isotopes and current climate, determined a way to estimate leaf temperature in living trees and as a consequence showed this assumption to be incorrect.
This is an unfortunate finding for the potential to reconstruct climate through tree-ring isotope analysis
anna v (19:58:34):
Steve Keohane (14:10:19) :
I woke up with the same paper in mind:
From Canada to the Caribbean: Tree leaves control their own temperature, Penn study reveals http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uop-fct061108.php
I’m conducting an experiment on spearmint (Mentha viridis L.) thermoregulation. Here an advance of my investigation:
http://biocab.org/Biophysics.html#anchor_36
Obviously, most living beings are not adequate as proxies for paleothermometry because, though plants are poikilotherms, they count also on thermoregulatory processes which permit them to survive at extreme temperatures. Their processes are not as efficient as birds and mammals thermoregulatory processes, but they react before changes of the environmental temperatures.
crosspatch:
I don’t think 400 miles will get it done. Probably closer to 1.000 miles.
Doug fir grow in the Colorado Mountains, I believe above 8.000′, as well as the lowlands of WA and OR, but said to be two different races. Provenance, and all that
Someone mentioned the time to read and digest this and then get in timely comments. Likewise for me, so:
~~~~~~~
1. I think everyone should be aware that tree rings were used for dating ancient sites and for comparisons with other dating methods – varve counting comes to mind. Temps were not the initial focus, I don’t think. Correct me if I’m wrong.
~~~~~~~
2. Allan M R MacRae (16:01:07) : “. . .cherry picking graph. . .”
Take the larger image view – it works
~~~~~~~
3. And “sod” commented (pro) on the quality of the GISS data
sod (13:04:32) “the claims about GISS are extremely problematic.”
Are not the GISS temperatures an extension of the process begun in the US – using station data that is highly problematic, as shown here
http://www.surfacestations.org/
for the US. Some similar reports are available for other countries also.
Also, has there not been a lot of rural station drop-out in many countries?
~~~~~~
4. Is there a statement showing how the “mannian” hockey stick weighted the bristlecone proxy? I have Steve McIntyre’s statement that the proxy was weighted by (400x, I think it was) so much that nothing else really mattered, and this post shows this to be wrongheaded. I’m asking for an equation or a table that would show what was done.
THIS IS FANTASTIC! This is a woirk of art!
I beg you… do tell…whom do I contact to purchase a reproduction in the quality suitable for my livingroom wall?
This is an AMAZING work of art. I simply MUST have it. (Assuming I can afford it.)
Terry J, there is also the possibility that it floated there from afar.
But look at the diagram on this page in the “Evolutionary History” section. You will notice a triangle on the North coast of Alaska. That means that there were Douglas fir fossils found there dating to the Quaternary. Picture here.
Nasif Nahle (20:37:37) :
Interesting.
I acquired new words : “poikilothermic”, in greek,even modern greek, poikilia means diversity. And “homothermic”, omoios means the “same”. I am amazed at the ingenuity of current researchers in constructing new terminology from ancient greek and latin roots.
The excerpt above, “The assumption in all of these studies was that tree leaf temperatures were equal to ambient temperatures.” in conjunction with the poikilotherm’s behavior ( 😉 ) clarifies for me why the tree ring temperatures are flat. They are temperatures of the leaves of the tree and not of the environment.
I just find it hard to understand why glaciers all over the world keep melting if the world is actually getting colder; why the permafrost in the Arctic keeps right on melting if the world is actually getting colder; why spring in the northern hemisphere arrives earlier with every decade if the world is actually getting colder. I do not believe that tree ring proxies tell us anything about the impact of a global industrial high-tech civilisation (which is transferring more than one hundred billions tonnes of pure carbon from the ground to the atmosphere every decade), and the effects of this on the world’s climate and ecosystems. And that is what we are dealing with right now. Just as you cannot infer anything about the nature of a nuclear war by studying the Napoleonic wars, you cannot infer anything about future climate change by looking at preindustrial climate change. Nothing like this has ever happened to this planet before.
Wow that was a lot of spagetti:) Seems to me the problem for the most part (short of those we think are cookin the books) is the predictions of the future by models, not the actual temps themselves. Lets face it given the seasonal noise, ie temp variations from summer to winter, around here its about 80 – 90 degrees.. is two degrees either way really going to be a disaster? We already get that sort of range from summer to summer depending on weather.
I agree too that trees are a poor indicator of temp. I should think that they would be more accurate in determining seasonal growth, the the variables are insane. Too hot, too cold, too much water, too little water, too much sun, too little sun, co2 content, fertilization, air quality..
Awesome, Frank, you killed several birds with one stone. Medieval Warm Period vindicated. Global with South Pole; but Vostok doubted. Dendrochronology displaced. UAH vindicated over GISS. Holocene far warmer. Solar correlation demonstrated.
You must get this published because I think people will read it. Your methodology looks pretty unassailable. But offer it to Climate Audit first, for an audit, like Craig Loehle did. It will toughen it up. With a bit of luck you’ll draw useful rude comments from RC too.
One interesting thought “under our noses”: lower CO2 in MWP?? Could this be because there was a rather woodier NH biosphere to instantly sequestrate any spare CO2? Therefore ALL plants register lower CO2 and their growth is less luxuriant, although as much CO2 as now was produced by the warming sea? Think about it. Forests across the whole Northern Hemisphere… a lot. If you look at the seasonal fluctuation of NH CO2 vs SH CO2 you can see my point.
Thank you Mr. Lansner; very interesting work.
Do you suppose Mr. Hansen is squirming in his chair as he reads this?
“They are temperatures of the leaves of the tree and not of the environment.”
Who says tree rings are related to temperatures? Maybe and elk died next to that tree and for nearly 50 years its soil was much more fertile than it had been. Maybe it warmed up but the storm track moved a little so it became dry and the rings didn’t change at all. There are too many things that impact ring widths with temperature being only one of them. And when temperature changes, maybe other things change, too, such as precipitation patterns or animal habitation (or the lack thereof).
That tree rings are a thermometer is a figment of someone’s imagination. They are an indication fo the whole environment around the tree with temperature being only one part of it. Where it gets most arrogant is where they attempt to find trees where temperature is the primary constraint. That might be true for the climate right now, but if you shift that climate, maybe rainfall changes. Maybe animals forage elsewhere and don’t leave droppings. There are any number of things that impact ring width and to assume that nothing else changes when temperature changes is actually quite knuckle-headed in my opinion.
Richard M
“One last comment on my CO2-ice age hypothesis. If true it means both the skeptics and the climate scientists are right.”
What is a climate scientist? What are the required qualifications? Why should Mr Lansner be considered less of a “climate scientist” than astronomer Hansen?
Great work, Mr Lansner – it will take some time to absorb.
Incidentally – in response to another commenter: Denmark has also given us Dr Svensmark and the skeptical enviro guy.
Anders L. (22:28:43)
Glaciers started melting long before industrial processes began. The changes – growth and decrease – are not new and it is not up to the UN to decide what comes next.
Permafrost has apparently defrosted in a few places but this doesn’t seem to be a major issue and certainly not a catastrophic one. Read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/science/23obsperm.html?ref=science
Early spring seems to have passed many folks by the last couple of years. Take a look at the Yakima, WA 2009 temperatures.
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/climate/temp_graphs.php?stn=KYKM&submit=Change+Station&wfo=pdt
Locally, April has seen a couple of nice days but the next few days are going to be below normal. The charts at the above link will show that spring has had a real hard time getting started. I know, just one place and one year but do some checking and you will find there is not much to the early spring reports. I haven’t saved the recent items — too non-issue.
And about global industrial high-tech civilization and carbon: Because CO2 as an agent of change doesn’t withstand scrutiny, I guess the new phrase is made to sound scarier. Still, it is hard to make a catastrophe where there isn’t one. Well, unless you do a trek in the Arctic ill prepared for cold and ice.
Zebra’s would do just fine in southern Europe.
i spoke of “middle europe” on purpose.
the MWP ideas had a massive problem: different studies found two different periods. a late and an early period.
linking the two of them removes an internal contradiction in sceptical writing, but produces a massive problem: a 500 year period warmer than modern times, would have lead to a massive effect on fauna and flora.
i haven t seen any discussion of this, beyond the incredibly weak “wine in england” meme.
Bateman
“Seriously, does a tree know the difference for the most part between warm & dry vs cool & dry?”
Bery pertinent question. and I imagine you will be surprised with the answer. Carbon starvation, which apparently sometimes occurs during glacial periods due to the low levels of CO2 that are reached, has the same effect on C3 plants *trees, shrubs, and such) as do warm, dry conditions when the warm is excesaive. In both cases, plant growth slows greatly or ceases. I can’t give you a reference because I am not that well organized. But it seems obvious that hot and dry conditions would certainly affect tree ring data quite differently than would hot and wet conditions.
Lucy Skywalker (22:41:12) :
Awesome, Frank, you killed several birds with one stone. Medieval Warm Period vindicated. Global with South Pole; but Vostok doubted. Dendrochronology displaced. UAH vindicated over GISS. Holocene far warmer. Solar correlation demonstrated.
I think it is important enough to be broken into the individual refutations in different publications. This will allow the focusing of the criticism on one subject. For example I would see Figure 11 as the basis for one letter, with clear reference to the results given in :
From Canada to the Caribbean: Tree leaves control their own temperature, Penn study reveals http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uop-fct061108.php .
A straight logical proposition: tree temperature measurements measure leaf temperatures which have been shown by measurements to be stable within a certain range and not correlated strongly with ambient temperature.
This would impose limits to criticism that would come when the total information is included and make the point clearer. Nothing like giving handles for the ones who want to obfuscate.
One interesting thought “under our noses”: lower CO2 in MWP?? Could this be because there was a rather woodier NH biosphere to instantly sequestrate any spare CO2? Therefore ALL plants register lower CO2 and their growth is less luxuriant, although as much CO2 as now was produced by the warming sea? Think about it. Forests across the whole Northern Hemisphere… a lot. If you look at the seasonal fluctuation of NH CO2 vs SH CO2 you can see my point.
I agree with this proposition. When Greece came out of the Ottoman empire in 1821 it was 80% forests while now it is 20%. Same must be true everywhere because the populations were much less and less land was needed to be cleared for cultivation.
Anders L.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to this planet before.”
Why bother posting this rubbish!!!!!!, you just look silly
Anders L. (22:28:43) wrote:
“I just find it hard to understand why glaciers all over the world keep melting if the world is actually getting colder …”
Regarding glacial retreat, see section 2.2 (pages 28-32), “Glaciers,” of Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s paper, “Two Natural Components of Recent Climate Change,” here (as a 50-Mb PDF):
http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/little_ice_age.php
He writes, on p. 28: ” Figures 9a-9f show records of glaciers in Alaska, New Zealand, the European Alps, and the Himalayas, respectively, which have been receding from the time of the earliest records, about 1800. … It is clear that the retreat is not a phenomenon that began only in recent years, or after CO2 emission increase in1946.”
And on page 32: ” Altogether, long-term glacier data presented here show that glaciers advanced from about 1400 and began to retreat after 1800 (cf. Akasofu, 2008). These facts confirm that the Earth experienced the LIA.”
******
“why the permafrost in the Arctic keeps right on melting if the world is actually getting colder; …”
Akasofu writes, on p. 45 (section 3.4, Summary): “Permafrost temperatures have stopped rising during the last several years (Richter-Menge et al., 2006); see Figure 17. It is puzzling why permafrost temperatures do not show an accelerated increase after 2000 if the increase from 1986 to 2000 was due to the greenhouse effect. It seems that snow depth has the most important effect on permafrost temperature (Osterkamp, 2007a, b).”
****
“why spring in the northern hemisphere arrives earlier with every decade if the world is actually getting colder.”
In one recent thread a commenter here contested that assertion, or at least the degree to which it’s true. (I.e., spring’s not coming two weeks earlier, as some have claimed.) I hope he/she will re-post his comment.
However, Akasofu doesn’t dispute that there has been a warming trend in recent decades since 1970 (except since 2000). His contention is that this is due to a natural multi-decadal oceanic oscillation that is in its warming phase, superposed on a natural 200-year warming trend-rebound since the end of the Little Ice Age. See the Abstract on p. 1 of Akasofu’s paper for his summary, and pages 2-27 for his detailed discussion of the matter. See also a recent WUWT thread on one of Akasofu’s diagrams, here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/20/dr-syun-akasofu-on-ipccs-forecast-accuracy/
****
“I do not believe that tree ring proxies tell us anything about the impact of a global industrial high-tech civilisation (which is transferring more than one hundred billions tonnes of pure carbon from the ground to the atmosphere every decade), and the effects of this on the world’s climate and ecosystems. And that is what we are dealing with right now. Just as you cannot infer anything about the nature of a nuclear war by studying the Napoleonic wars, you cannot infer anything about future climate change by looking at preindustrial climate change. Nothing like this has ever happened to this planet before.”
Browse this site for rebuttals to this. Or maybe someone will kindly point him/her to a spot that specifically discusses this contention.
Anders L. (22:28:43) is concerned that “….more than one hundred billions tonnes of pure carbon from the ground to the atmosphere every decade…”
As an ameliorative may I suggest Dr. Spencer’s vision test:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/50-years-of-co2-time-for-a-vision-test/
UPDATE:
Check out this updated fig 2 with Raobcare tropical measurement nicely free of UHI etc:
http://www.nofeestamps.net/climate/Fig%202.gif
Hmm, 10 billion tons of carbon shoved into the atmosphere ‘by Man’.
Where does that guess come from?
What are the current guesses for annual increase of Amazon jungle biomass over the last 20 years?
Roger Knights posted:
“In one recent thread a commenter here contested that assertion, or at least the degree to which it’s true. (I.e., spring’s not coming two weeks earlier, as some have claimed.) I hope he/she will re-post his comment”.
I was not the original poster but if I may observe.
The Director of Kew Gardens said in the last few months that spring is coming about two weeks early. I live two miles away from Kew and as I write this I look out of my window at the London Plane trees in the street which still show no signs of buds breaking into leaves. A few hundred yards further down the road, whole swathes of Richmond Park yesterday still had trees with no leaves.
This is one of the latest springs that we can remember. Perhaps because, in January/February, London had its heavieast and most prolonged cold spell for twenty years and since then we have had several nights of bitter frosts Less than a fortnight ago I had to break the ice which had formed in the birdbath and was still there three hours after sunrise.
And thank you to all for such nice feedback!!!
It took the evenings of 2 months to create this monster.
With your nice feedback, perhaps my wife can forgive me?
My biggest hope is, that this exercise will keep the investigations on the area going.
Its simply not acceptable with a totaly tree-ring /Giss based conclusion of anything. I may be an amateur (!) but i comparison with the tree ring / giss based “science”, things can only get better, even with me contributing.
About calibration etc: I made an historical graph where i fixed all data to year 1800 in stead of year 2000. Nothing changed in the appearence of the graph trend. I used year 2000 so that we could have todays temperatures as the zero line for comparison. In some cases there can be doubts about the year 2000 point. But the 1940,50,60,70,80, 90 and 2000 are fairly matching the trend showed in fig 1 from recent times with a huge data foiundation(!!)
Therefore, if there are any adjustments to be made to the year 2000 of the historical graph, its tiny and cannot change anything.
In some cases the year 2000 compared to year 1990 had to be calibrated, and i used either UAH trend.
There are some datasets with no points around the peak in 1950. These datasets then just (wrongly?) show one big rise of temperatures through the 20’th century. But I used that data anyway, so i am STRONGLY convinced that my use of data did not promote my personal views.
And as i said: Remeber that the outcome happened to match very fine the well founded data of recent data, fig one. This graph could be used for future calibrations.
Calibration issue about MWP?
For those who thinks that the MWP here is caused by my calibrations, take a gooood look at fig 11.
Im waiting…
Good. The curves are following each other VERY nice 1450-2000. How could I calibrate so that the MWP just came out of the graphs??
It is 100% impossible that the MWP of fir 11 comes from my calibrations..!
Please think about this.
K.R. Frank
Steve Keohane (14:10:19)… Try:
Tree leaves control their own temperature Science Centric
The D’Arrigo paper cited above is well worth reading. The article refers to quite a number of truncations, such as this one:
“The reconstruction was truncated after 1970 due to the weakened recent signal (D’Arrigo et al., 2004b)”
Is that telling us that the researcher’s response to “bad data” (that is, going against the presumed correct shape of the reconstruction) is simply amputated?
There are many other things I could comment on, although this also raised an eyebrow at the start of section 3:
“The principal difficulty is that the divergence disallows the direct calibration of tree growth indices with instrumental temperature data over recent decades (the period of greatest warmth over the last 150 years), impeding the use of such data in climatic reconstructions.”
Disallows the direct calibration? Is that not just saying that the data doesn’t calibrate to temperature? If there is no calibration in recent decades, what does Occams Razor tell us about the whole data series?
So much data, so little time. Thanks Frank, for your hard work in bringing all this data together.
Although it is almost impossible for a layman to peer-review the outcome, I trust that the general trends are represented truthfully.
So many thoughts have come into my mind while reading and rereading this that I can hardly capture them.
Frank, what you have done is just* to compare data, but reading your paper it feels like reading a set of runaway conclusions (I mean no sleight against it, far from it). What I mean is that the implications of your comparisons are almost lost by you having done so much work and presenting it all together.
(*using the word ‘just’ sounds dismissive, but I mean to convey simple elegance – what you have achieved is simple and beautiful but took a lot of work)
This needs to be published, however I agree with anna v that this needs to be broken down, not just just for maximum impact. As the paper stands it has probably less chance of being published (again anna v is right about chance for criticism). In more digestible chunks it will be easier to publish, partly for reasons of space, allowing an introduction/critique of the proxies used as source data etc.
You describe yourself as an amateur, but I am sure you can get help from scientists (if you feel you need it) to ease the path to journal publication. This is a science blog so perhaps some of the scientists here can help… I for one would be willing, but probably not the best person.
Zebras crossing the Sahara is no big deal, they could easily go by truck. However they are notoriously bad sea-farers so would run into trouble at the Straights of Gibraltar. I suppose they could work their way round to Istanbul but that could take years. 🙁
Frank, Thanks for a great presentation. I have borrowed just a very, very small portion of it for my blog and directed readers to this page to read the full content.
I also want to thank you for this inclusion:
That fact is not mentioned enough in the AGW debate.
Quick note. Interesting data west Australia via http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/03/global-warming-a-classic-case-of-alarmism/ :
A brief look at the inland low population stations show no hockey sticks. No slope, either. PDO immune? CO2 immune?
Absolutely brilliant work, Frank. Thank you.
This paper should be required reading for every college student, every faculty member, every high school science class, every teacher, every member of congress, every journalist and every employee of NASA, NOAA, CPC, and so on….
About three times a week I run through First Landing State Park, at the “end” of my corner of the world, situated at the confluence of the mighty Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean [called First Landing because that is where the Jamestown Settlers landed in 1607–ironically in one of the years that some say was the coldest in the LIA–and where many of the Jamestown settlers starved through a difficult winter].
Even more ironic are the “hills” in the park. This is the flat coastal plain so there should be no hills as there is no tectonic action around to be found.
On the “hills” are an interesting mix of northern hardwoods such as beech and maple, and subtropical loblolly pines and spanish moss.
This park is an extraordinary clash of zones which show prima facie evidence of the ebbs and flows of Earth’s climate both in the SHORT RUN [multidecadal] and in the LONG RUN:
In the warm AMO and PDO combination…the good ole’ south Scarlet O’Hara “well shuck-my-corn ya’ll and put some cheese in my grits” plantation advance of spanish moss, tupelo trees, and copperhead snakes reigns supreme.
When those oscillations shift negative, the beech, blueberries, and sugar maples take over on the “hills.”
Now in the LONGER RUN….look back into the earlier Holocene, just about 5,000 years ago, and we see these “hills” are not hills at all.
They are former waterfront sand dunes…when sea levels were higher around than they are now.
This all occurred in the Biblical times before there were enough humans to produce the CO2 to cause the supposed “warming”……which in the grand 10,000 year scheme of things…is not showing warming at all.
Thanks again Frank…..this work is another brilliant nail in the coffin for the new world religion of the International Church of the A.G.W.
Speaking of coffins….every time when I think of that first Jamestown winter in 1607 where people froze and starved to death…I shudder to think that the current world figures and organizations….Obama, Holdren, Hansen, NASA, the UK Met, et al….seem to be JUST as ill-prepared for such a turn in the climate if that is the direction things are going….
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
CORRECTION:
“They are former waterfront sand dunes…when sea levels were higher than they are now.”
Dear Frank, a heartfelt thank you for the second day’s reading of this magnificent synthesis. While I respect those who suggest that you break up the conclusions into a number of articles, I emphatically disagree. The greatness of your effort is that you are responding to every argument frontwards and backwards, leftwards and rightwards, through the conclusions of those who have spent so much of their lives in the dogged details of research.
There is no place to hide once one has read your article. It is most assertive, no, aggressive, for science and the truth. It places the accountability for deception right where it belongs — by comparing research and pseudo-research.
Go for it. It deserves a place in the most prestigious publication that will accept it. Or, perhaps prestige is not as important as a combination of prestige and wide readership.
Hey sod, where is the “massive effect on flora and fauna” from the Modern Warm Period? Your premise seems to be pretty wrong to me.
Comments above about someone saying we are adding some large amount of CO2 by mass into the atmosphere-sounds dramatic when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Except there are 3.5 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere already (the amount of carbon is a different story, but I’d wager it’s higher).
As someone who is red green colorblind (approximately 10% of the population has a color vision irregularity), I would strongly second that recommendation, and extend it to every presentation intended for large audiences made by any of the readers of this blog.
One of the most difficult problems for the people with atypical color vision, is to sort out similar gray tone pastel, or dark subdued color traces. If similar colors are placed side by side in relatively large samples, they can sometimes be distinguished from each other, but in narrow lines it becomes essentially impossible.
Even when using colorblind assistant tools like firefoxes colorzilla addon or the free ware tool “whatcolor4” which displays color triplets used in screen images, it can be difficult for me to distinguish similar shades as color ditthering can create a situation where the user can find no pixel to sample that has exactly the same color triplet as the key used in the graph.
One help is to use physical indicators on the traces like different dash patterns or symbols like triangles and squares superimposed on the traces. Likewise explicit labels on the traces even if only a key number is helpful as by process of elimination you can determine which of two similar traces you need to follow.
The use of the visual key was very helpful on the primary trace to make it completely unambiguous.
Even on the larger image I have great difficulty determining with certainty, which graph trace corresponds to which data set for some pairs. The major problem is no two red green colorblind people see colors exactly the same as the condition covers a range of response differences. In my case I am almost totally blind to the color cyan, and have reduced sensitivity to red (it has much less visual impact to me than to someone with normal vision although I can see red it appears much darker to me than to someone with “normal” vision)
This makes color pairs like yellow and yellowgreen, pale blue and turquoise, blue and purple, dark brown and green, very dark red and black, royal blue and purple almost impossible for me to distinguish depending on color size sample size and color intensity (subdued colors, or pale tints being more difficult that stronger hue colors). One check you can make is to see that no two color traces resolve to the same gray tone if converted to monochrome image. Sometimes the easiest way to differentiate colors is to copy the image and modify it by shifting to different color depth displays, or use the color fill tool to change a line to a different color. Line weight is also a very good way to separate similar color shades in a multiple trace graph.
Thanks to anyone who takes that presentation issue into consideration when you prepare public data displays for large audiences!
Great analysis and very interesting conclusions about the value of some of the proxy data.
Larry
I’m just a “grunt” forester, but I have been that for 45 years. One thing that my education (I have a Master’s Degree in Forestry) and decades of observation have showed me is that within their normal range, tree rings are most affected by sufficient to excess mositure during the growing season and freedom to grow (ie. spacing – as someone said, “…all a tree needs to be happy is a place in the sun and a little piece of earth to call its own”). Trees are adapted to elevation, aspect, soils, climate and latitude among other more and less significant site and microsite effects. It seems to me, therefore, that comparing Bristlecone Pines from an extreme elevation in California to Spruce trees from the tundra line in Finland would present some formidable problems in statistical variability requiring controlling for multiple variables at once. I don’t know if that is somehow being done but I am very doubtful that one of those variables (climate) over hugely long periods can be effectively coaxed from any level and amount of data. I find it interesting to note that during the last ice age, Eastern White Pine grew on the Grand Banks off the coast of New England.
In describing the complexities of forest succession Botanist Henry Chandler Cowles observed in1901 that it was akin to,”a variable converging on a variable.” Surely, given the number of site related elements that affect tree ring width, the current effort is at least that complex.
sod (00:53:48) :
…linking the two of them removes an internal contradiction in sceptical writing, but produces a massive problem: a 500 year period warmer than modern times, would have lead to a massive effect on fauna and flora.
i haven t seen any discussion of this, beyond the incredibly weak “wine in england” meme.
That would occur if believing that warm environments could effect massively on fauna and flora.
The actuality is that warm environments don’t effect massively on fauna and flora as to cause extinctions and/or unusual stochastic or competitive radiation. Massive extinctions occur more often under cool environmental conditions or when clades are submitted to extreme stress by natural catastrophes; for example, intense volcanism, glaciations, epidemics, etc. A fluctuation of temperature between -3 and 3 °C (∆T = 6 °C) is quite normal during the Holocene and don’t cause extinctions or unusual radiations. That’s another biomyth spread on AGW propaganda.
Frank:
How did you get the un-altered NOAA data?
It was my understanding that all NOAA data was altered (time of day, station moves, etc.) and that raw data was not available.
timetochooseagain (07:03:14) :
Hey sod, where is the “massive effect on flora and fauna” from the Modern Warm Period? Your premise seems to be pretty wrong to me.
Nasif has already answered sod’s point, but just to clarify: his argument is that modern temperatures sustained over a 500-year period in the past must must have had an enormous impact on flora and fauna. His point is utterly unscientific.
Sod:
The only “massive effect on flora and fauna” is from extrapolation of computer models that have failed to predict climate variation during the past decade.
In order for those derivative studies to have any validity, the models have to be accurate. Beyond that they are nothing better than unscientific wild-ass guesses.
Any comments on the paper below, also in relation to this post?
http://www.eawag.ch/organisation/abteilungen/surf/publikationen/2008_wanner.pdf
This is worth repeating ( from the link Tree leaves control their own temperature, Penn study reveals http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/uop-fct061108.php . )
For decades, scientists studying climate change have measured the oxygen isotope ratio in tree-ring cellulose to determine the ambient temperature and relative humidity of past climates. The assumption in all of these studies was that tree leaf temperatures were equal to ambient temperatures.
It has clarified for me how the tree ring measurements are done. The time is taken from the ring cycles. One of the first things we learned in natural history in grade school was how the 11 year sun cycle was evident in the thickness of the rings. Even if other inputs affect the thickness of the rings, the yearly measurements are there to be counted. The temperature is measured by the the oxygen isotope ratio , which we recently learned is the temperature of the leaves, and the leaves tend to keep a constant temperature. So all the tree measurements are measuring the stability of the tree biology. No wander the temperatures are flat.
Frank, thanks for this great piece of work. Thanks to all for the links to the trees trying to maintain an ideal temperature, I filed the link with the article for future reference.
Dave Wendt (18:04:19) Your thought is my point. I wanted to throw it out because it gives perspective on the usefulness of tree proxies. Steve McIntyre has done extensive analysis on Mann, Briffa et al. I would encourage anyone interested in proxies to look at his work, it can be technical, but worthwhile.
John F. Hultquist (21:29:35) : Thank you.
And thank you Frank Lansner for this most informative post.
Regards, Allan
Sod:
The only “massive effect on flora and fauna” is from extrapolation of computer models that have failed to predict climate variation during the past decade.
this is false. the change can be seen by direct observation.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/changing-climate-sees-britain-offer-a-warm-welcome-to-new-varieties-of-wildlife-731456.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/britain-in-bloom-as-spring-is-sprung-earlier-than-ever-776174.html
if you prefer scholar article, a short search should bring enough hits for a lifetime of reading…
That’s some swell anecdotal evidence, sod.
If you’re trying to imply that CO2 is the cause, say it. If you’re trying to make the case that the planet’s drop in temps over the past few years caused a warm and wet past winter, say it. If you’re claiming the planet is currently warming, say it. If you’re assuming that the British isles are representative of the planet, say it. If you’re claiming that the climate usually doesn’t change, as most alarmists want us to believe, and that’s why this is unusual, say it.
If you missed the reams of comments posted here by people living there, who were telling us that this past winter was much colder than usual, and begging the planet to ‘send us some of that global warming’, then go back over the archives and tell us they were all wrong, and that those articles are accurate when they say “The unseasonably warm and wet winter so far in Britain has coaxed plants into early flowering.” Really? The past winter was unseasonally warm in GB?
Who should we believe? Posters commenting here about the extremely cold winter weather there, who have nothing to gain by fabricating their stories — or should we believe a very biased newspaper, which must sensationalize every story in order to stay in business? Or maybe we should believe someone who posts an article reporting on the winter of 2002, seven years ago. Who should we believe?
Next thing you’ll probably be telling us is that there was no MWP.
sod (00:53:48) :
“…linking the two of them removes an internal contradiction in sceptical writing, but produces a massive problem: a 500 year period warmer than modern times, would have lead to a massive effect on fauna and flora. ”
– Its sounds as though you really believe a little extra warmth would massively benefit all fauna and flora? Nice to have pointed out some good things about global warming, it doens happen so often.
Smokey, this is simple:
our planet has warmed significantly over the past 50 years. the evidence can be found in fauna and Flora changes basically everywhere.
if you don t believe those articles, feel free to read scientific articles on the same subject, or talk to gardeners. the story will not change.
if the planet was WARMER for 500 years during the MWP, we would have A LOT of evidence of similar changes.
i haven t seen that evidence.
Deadwood:
You asked about the RAW US temperatures.
Heres a graphic showing (fig 3) the raw US set.
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/ustemp.jpg
-in fig 4 i have compared with trend in US temperature records: A perfect match!
The background for adjusting is the official numbers:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/30/ushcn_corrections.gif
Thanks for the interest!!
sod,
Your first article was reporting on the winter of 2002. Why did you pick an article that stops at 2002?
Here’s why: click
Since 2002 the planet has been cooling.
And re the MWP: “i haven t seen that evidence.”
You are being deliberately blind to the really huge volume of evidence supporting a global MWP. You pick only the evidence you want to see. Cognitive dissonance claims another victim.
I just find it hard to understand why glaciers all over the world keep melting if the world is actually getting colder;
Glaciers will melt irrespective of whether the climate is warming or cooling. This is because all glaciers without exception are a process to transport ice from where it doesn’t melt to where it does melt.
If you meant glaciers retreating, i.e losing ice mass, then glaciers react to climate changes with a lag of decades to millenia.
Most temperate glaciers react with a lag of around 100 to 200 years. So we can say with confidence that the current climate is warmer than 150 years ago.
The real problem is the confusion between change and migration. There are many causes of migration and change of distribution of species. A sole explanation to migration, like attributing it to climate change = global warming, is confusing and not scientific. Migration has more than one explanation and it’s different for each species (Jablonsky et al. 1996).
For example, mosquitoes cannot fly more than 100-200 meters; however, we have found mosquitoes crossing the oceanic barrier. Obviously, those species of mosquitoes didn’t fly from Asia or Africa to America and they were not dragged by winds either; they were brought hidden in imported products. Many, many butterfly species expand their territories through eggs fixed on leaves of imported garden plants.
When we talk about radiation we’re referring to the production of new species; this is change. Other change could be the distribution of populations, communities, etc.; nonetheless, the latter change is due to multiple factors. When we talk about extinction we’re referring to a dying off of a clade; consequently, the examples on butterflies and frogs migrations not necessarily are due to climate changes. Migration not always leads to change.
As an illustration, we have a case of Columbina passerina L. (common ground dove) invading our very warm megalopolis. Columbina is a common inhabitant of mild and cold regions in Central and Southern Mexico, for example, Zacatecas, Jalisco, Guanajuato, etc. What is the cause of this territorial expansionism behavior from cold to warm regions? On this case, the climate obviously didn’t force them to migrate because Columbina population and climate on the regions from where they did come from have not been altered. We are working on finding a plausible cause; however, this expansionist migratory behavior is not exclusive of Columbina passerina and it fairly illustrates that the current behavior of territorial expansion of many species is happening on both ways, from warm to colder regions and vice versa.
Migrations from North to South or from warm to colder regions have also happened nowadays.
Population growth could be a plausible cause of migration.
Frank, you’ve really got me thinking about tree cover and the MWP doing so badly on the dendrochronology. It won’t let up and I suspect it may be significant. What if today’s CO2 rise, that is still continuing despite falling global temperatures, is in part because of ongoing loss of forests? What if it is the loss of forests in some places that has helped the increase of food production and the greening of the Sahel elsewhere? If you look at the seasonal CO2 fluctuations globally, the steady impacts of the tropical rainforests at those latitudes, and the seasonal impact of the Russian taiga at that latitude, are enormous.
Tom P (16:25:22) :
Im not shure i understand your critic with UAH.
I used the MAR 2009 display from WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/uah_global_temperature_anomaly_mar2009.png
I used UAH from the specific year 1980 to the specific year 2000.
Actually 2000 is slightly colder than 1980, so i drew a trend line getting starting from the year 1980 and forward. It gives the well known 0,1K/decade for UAH. This is what i used, to be 100% fair and avoid any critic on this.
I have seen the “adjustments” to UAH, and they are TINY. No way in a hundred years could anyone see the difference if I had used LT5.2 or LT5.1.
Therefore im not sure i understand what the issue really is, could you explain??
Frank,
The UAH linear trend, which I agree is all you need to draw on your plots, is 0.13 degC a decade, with a current value of 0.3 degC. Hence looking at fig. 11, today is warmer than a good portion of the MWP you have reconstructed, except for the two peaks. I’ve modified the figure to show how this looks:
http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/5131/fig11mod.png
Tom P.:
Those ‘two peaks’ cover a lot of years! Way more years than we’ve experienced recently, before temps started down again.
For some reason ‘except for the two peaks’ brings to mind the comment, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
Smokey,
Other reconstructions, which also like Frank’s work exclude tree-ring proxies, do not show such long-duration high-temperature peaks in the MWP. This is a set of such reconstructions from Climate Audit:
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/1276/proxyq.png
E.M.Smith (14:16:04) :
Thank you for your posting — and for the work that preceded the posting. When GISS released its code over a year ago, did that code include algorithms for both the land and ocean temperatures?
Tom P.,
But that was your reconstruction! There are other reconstructions, too: click
The one here eliminates the falsified Michael Mann invention, and so is closer to the truth — which Mann doesn’t seem to be familiar with.
Here’s a fun one (and from a different “Mann”)…nice Mideval WP on this chart.
http://longrangeweather.com/images/GTEMPS.gif
Correction on my screen name above LOL. Type too fast
savethesharks (20:19:20) :
Here’s a fun one (and from a different “Mann”)…nice Mideval WP on this chart.
http://longrangeweather.com/images/GTEMPS.gif
Have you seen the current state of climate on that graph? It’s quite cool!
Unfortunately, I won’t be here for 2040 AD.
When I was a boy, Easter temps were typically 80-90 F. This was the 1970’s, BTW. Last few years have been significantly colder, with a snow squall today to liven things up.
Yup, thats global warming.
“If you meant glaciers retreating, i.e losing ice mass, then glaciers react to climate changes with a lag of decades to millenia.”
This is part of the recovery from the Little Ice Age. But advance can happen quite rapidly. Also there’s this paper:
Western Canadian glaciers advance in concert with climate change circa 4.2 ka
(Menounos 2008)
Now think about that for a moment. Those receding glaciers are exposing wood that dates to about 4k years ago. That means that 4k years ago, the area where those glaciers are now was forested. That means the area had been ice free for a long time, long enough for trees to become established. The glaciers advanced and are only now returning to where they were then.
That also means that the glaciers would been significantly smaller earlier in the Holocene than they are now. More indication that we have actually been cooling rather than warming. While the mention of in situ stumps means those items have probably not moved from where they grew, a lot of the other material grew even further up the glacial stream and has been brought down to its present location.
This matches other papers dating similar wood samples exposed by retreating glaciers in the Alps to about 5k years ago. So it can be said with fair confidence that the climate 4-5 thousand years ago was much warmer than it is now and had been warmer for long enough for trees to become established in what are now glacial valleys. And there wasn’t a single SUV, oil well or coal mine around to influence that climate.
Smokey (19:58:51) here are a couple more. This one is Craig Loehle’s onto which I added Mann et al in purple, to scale, to show the difference between tree rings and other (Loehle) proxies.
http://i39.tinypic.com/2q3arlw.jpg
This one is from the Page Science Center Site, on the Lake Powell website, government sponsored, this chart ‘disappeared’ from the site circa 2005. I can’t imagine why 😉
http://i39.tinypic.com/35hkz1d.jpg
Here is another one that certain parties would rather forget, IPCC 1990 Fig 7c:
http://i39.tinypic.com/bgemm9.jpg
Smokey,
“But that was your reconstruction!”
No it wasn’t. It came from McIntyre, S. How do we “know” that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium?. Ohio State University Seminar, May 16, 2008
I’m not sure what is the basis of calculation of these “reconstructions”:
http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/gorebot/nwarm05.gif
http://longrangeweather.com/images/GTEMPS.gif
http://i39.tinypic.com/bgemm9.jpg
but I don’t think they’ve been calculated by combining time series of proxy data, as Frank has taken the trouble to do for this article.
Steve,
“This one is Craig Loehle’s onto which I added Mann et al in purple, to scale, to show the difference between tree rings and other (Loehle) proxies.”
This one certainly is a temperature reconstruction using proxies. Loehle used the same premise as Frank in his 2007 paper “A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Tree Ring Proxies “:
http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025
Frank should be aware of this work, which concludes:
“the MWP peak remains 0.07 Deg C above the end of the 20thCentury values [0.34 degC], though the difference is not significant.”
Tom P:
All respect that you go into the matter and try to find the truth!
But then you have found that UAH today should be 0,4 K warmer than in the year 1980..!
Come on! You use your temp-increase/decase also in the decade 2000 – 2010 where UAH was NOT increasing !!
http://www.climate-movie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/uah_global.gif
On this graph you can see, that an averaged curve in:
1980 is 0,1 K lower than year 2000 !
1980 is 0,2 K lower than year 2008, and if you go longer than the average cuve temperatures temperatures goes down again.
Even though the average graph says that year 2000 is only 0,1 K warmer than 1980 i used 0,2 K so that NO ONE with any weight could argue with this.
If you take a close look here again:http://www.climate-movie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/uah_global.gif
at the actual 1980 level, you will see, that the average curve is considerably under the actual values for 1980. This is because that values in 1979 is under 1980 level and that these lower values has been accounted for.
At NO time does the average curve go more than around 0,26 K over 1980 average level. that happened with the average around 2005-6, but as i said 2008 is back to 0,20000 K over 1980.
So you 0,4 K is far out, honestly.
(If you look at the specific values – not averageded) of UAH, today is around 0,1 K warmer than 1980.
I could have used 0,1K in difference between 1980 and 2000 (because thats what the graph says) but I used 0,2 K to be 100% fair.
Tom, another thing:
http://www.climate-movie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/uah_global.gif
If you want to compare the medieval warm period with for example the peak in approx 2006 where temp in UAH was 0,27 K over 1980 level, then you have to ask your self an important question:
“Was there no peaks in the MWP?”
You see, when adding alle these differen temperature proxies with different methods and definetly some timing problems, the resulting MWP curve is a very flattened MEAN temperature curve.
Obviously there has been Lots of EL NINO periods etc in the MWP (thats documented) Obviously a lot of periods in the MWP where temperature rose perhaps 0,3-0,5 K or more over the mean level of MWP that i reported.
So if you wanted to compare a PEAK of El nino years today with an average temperature of the MWP, obviously you would see a less warm MWP. But that not a scientific approach.
A real compare with mean trends of MWP should be at least year 2000 +/- 10 years, and its hard to make that 0,4 K over 1980 level.
The furthest i can get in your direction is the following:
If you take 1980 – 1990 average and compare with 2000-2010 average you get an increase of afpprox + 0,25 K over the 2 decades.
But then you have started with focus on the peak cold year 1985 and ended with the peak warm year 2005…
– And theres nothing that indicates that temperature from 2005 and 10 years ahead should continue increasing that rate or any rate, so honestly, 0,4 K is not a balanced view on the UAH increase 1980 – 2000.
0,2K or MAX 0,25 K is.
K.R Frank
Tom, i forgot an important point (!)
The 500 year long MWP i have talked about many times in the writing on many graphs was base ONLY on temperature proxies!!
The temperature proxies where the evidence that showed a strong 500 year long MWP.
I just showed that using UAH in stead of GISS changes Briffas hockey stick extremely much.
But this little UAH talk has nothing to do with what we can see from the temperature proxies: A 500 year long MWP.
Frank,
An up-to-data linear fit to the UAH data is here:
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/6856/uah0309.png
which shows a 0.4 degC increase over the series.
0.3 degC for the current temperature does not seem unreasonable from the data and a slightly higher value of 0.34 degC was used by Craig Loehle in his analysis.
Your first article was reporting on the winter of 2002. Why did you pick an article that stops at 2002?
because for a LONG TERM LOOK at the first date of flowers showing up in the year, it doesn t matter what year i chose. i just picked one of the first articles that showed up!
Smokey (19:58:51) here are a couple more. This one is Craig Loehle’s onto which I added Mann et al in purple, to scale, to show the difference between tree rings and other (Loehle) proxies.
http://i39.tinypic.com/2q3arlw.jpg
the problem with the Loehle graph is, that it ends in 1935 (NINETEEN THIRTY FIVE). that is not exactly “today”.
if we take a detailed look at the spagettis presented by frank, we will most likely get a similar result.
Come on! You use your temp-increase/decase also in the decade 2000 – 2010 where UAH was NOT increasing !!
this is false. the slope is 0.13 °C per decade since 1980.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1980/plot/uah/from:1980/trend
you cannot calculate the trend and then subtract the “flat” period at the end again.
and a one year comparison between 1980 and 2000 (or 2008) is simply stupid.
now add in error bars, (and any proxy reconstruction will surely have bars broader than modern measurement by a factor of 10), and the claim that a MWP was warmer than TODAY falls apart immediately.
But this little UAH talk has nothing to do with what we can see from the temperature proxies: A 500 year lon MWP.
as i said above, please think about the consequences of such an event!
we are talking about several hundred years with an ice free summer arctic. the alps being glacier free. spring plants showing up in december and a massive movement of plants and animals. (many of them don t need modern man to move them)
there simply is no evidence of such an event.
– And… Tom.
As i wrote in the article, Briffas and the other tree proxies are HEAVILY averaged, typically 50 years filters.
This is essential to our little UAH discussion, because the dive around 1970-80 using 50 filters is likely to be too too small in the Briffa tree ring graph.
Therefor we start the UAH on a probably too high point.
So on the bottom line is:
The temperature proxies tells that temperatures today a likely not to be higher than 1940-50 level, at leat not much higher.
The temperature proxies (Except for tree rings) tell that we have had a lon MWP that makes recent temperatures within normal range. Thats the point.
In holocene perspective we are generally in the coldest period in 10000 years. Since we have been in a temperature decline for 6000 years, it does become relevant to study the concequences if the trend does not change.
Using UAH in stead of GISS does appear to diminish the “divergence problem” beteween measured temperatures and temperature evidence from the ground, proxies. But “accuracy” on this matter is hard to get.
Tom, check out fig 2, the graphs without 50 year smotthing… you will see that the dive might be much much bigger, so whatever UAH graph you put in that abyss of 0,4 – 0,6 K dive, the UAH cannot produce temperatures today higher than 1940.
sod , about the MWP you say.
”
sod (02:45:06) :
there simply is no evidence of such an event.”
Look. I have shown you TONNES of evidence!!
Do you know how these temperature proxies – nontree rings are made?
Made are made from fauna/ flora related indicators in the ground. Like Pollen levels from the lake sediment cores, corals or other indicators of life in the ocean. These life-related indicators DOES show the increases implying warmer middle ages.
and on top og this, we have other indicators like isotopes telling the same story.
sod, another thing is as I wrote, the high CO2 levels is beyond any doubt influenting plant growth. This does complicate all indicators relates to plant growth. So if it is true that CO2 level today are higher than in the MWP, the use of many plant related indicators are likely to underestimate MWP. Therefore the MWP in my writing could be underestimated.
I wasn’t too clear in my earlier posts. Let me be more specific.
I will be referring to figure 5 in Frank’s article which you can see here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure5.png
By looking closely at this chart you can see that temperatures increased rapidly after the last ice age and then leveled off to a moderate increase before starting a downward trend about 6000 years ago. Yiou may want to draw a trend “arc” over the entire plot to understand my thinking.
Based on this chart if you extrapolate from the more gradual decline right through the MWP and LIA and assume increasing negative slope to match the early increases in temperature at around the same temperature range, we should have a base anomaly rigth now of around -1K or lower. We should also have a downward trend that could be as much as -.05K/decade (also assumes a steeper slope similar to the increase in slope early in the chart). In addition, if you draw a line from the temperatures at the LIA across to the other side you will see we were in a period of extreme warming. If an interglacial is a symmetric process then it’s not out of the question that the LIA actually passed a cooling tipping point and we should be rapidly cooling at the persent time on the way to the next ice age.
From what I’ve been able to determine the current batch of GCMs assume a flat trend and a based anomaly of around -.2K (based on where the star is placed on figure 5. This means the GCMs are already starting too high and don’t account to the natural negative pressures on temperature. The primary reason for this is Mann’s hockey stick which utilized the tree proxies that Frank has shown to be questionable.
If these natural climate factors were incorporated into GCMs then, clearly, the increases normally shown would be less. This would most likely bring the GCMs into closer agreement with measured temperatures. The scenarios provided by the IPCC would suddenly look more realistic when super-imposed on a natural negative trend. This would also mean that many of the alarmist projections are significantly overstated since much of the heating from added CO2 is simply holding our current temperature steady. We should not see positive feedbacks because there is so little actual warming.
This could also explain the NH/SH anomaly. Since the NH has both soot (warming aerosols) [see NASA article] and CO2 while the SH has much less soot. We should see a stronger warming signal in the NH. However, CO2 would still be warming the SH over and above the natural cooling. That would eliminate one the prolbems that skeptics have with the current situation. Essentially, the scientists have much of the physics right, they are just applying it to an incorrect baseline. By adding this declining trend and soot the GCMs may be much closer to reality.
Finally, this would mean that we are in a very delicate climate. If we stop adding CO2 and soot to the atmosphere we could set off catastrophic cooling. However, if we add too much we really could set off more significant warming.
sod,
You seem to understand that the woodfortrees interactive site is a cherrypicker’s delight. Right?
From that site I can make a chart showing any trend. For instance: click
Don’t misunderstand, I like woodfortrees’ site. But when someone uses it to make a point, I look at their claim with a jaundiced eye.
And regarding your statement: “there simply is no evidence of such an event,” I’ll quote a better man than I: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Frank,
“Therefor[e] we start the UAH on a probably too high point.”
UAH is on of the best measures of global temperature for the last three decades. It is not disputed by Roy Spencer or John Christie. It is completely invalid to reject it based on the derived values from earlier proxy data!
Tom P (04:09:12) :
you are not understanding me correct.
Theres NOTHING wrong with the UAH. I was talking about the point where to start the graph in 1980, at what level.
As I said, the tree ring graphs has been 50 year averaged and therefore the dive is not as deep as without averaging. So without averaging, the starting level for the fine UAH graph shold be lower.
Then i said: SEE FIG 2.
Here you will see that NOT-averaged temperature graphs has much lower values in 1980. If you start at the 1980 levels here, a UAH at 0,4 K (if you like!!) still hardly makes 2000 warmer than 1940.
And i hope you understand, that the MWP is concluded on the basis of temperature proxies only. Its better not to mix totaly different measurements method for the most reliable result. I think this debates shows how inaccurate such an approach is from Briffas and the alarmist side.
Sod, I am puzzled by your postings. In general, you seem to be a reasonable individual, and that impression seems to be inconsistent with your statement that there is “simply no evidence” of the MWP. I wonder if I am misunderstanding you, but there is ample evidence of the MWP. And we are not talking just about Greenland. In the last few decades, glaciers in the Alps have retreated to reveal evidence of MWP flora. In the Western United States, retreating glaciers reveal remnants of trees that grew during MWP. In China, there are physical remains of MWP flora that now grow much farther south. In addition to this physical evidence, we have reconstruction on every continent and under water that shows the MWP. Therefore, I puzzled by your declaration of “no evidence.”
sod (02:38:48) : the problem with the Loehle graph is, that it ends in 1935 (NINETEEN THIRTY FIVE). that is not exactly “today”.
I don’t see how the digits “2000” read as “1935”.
Frank,
“you are not understanding me correct.
Theres NOTHING wrong with the UAH. I was talking about the point where to start the graph in 1980, at what level.”
I’m glad we agree about the validity of the UAH data – it makes sense to match the proxies to the instrumental data rather than the other way round. This gives the plot I showed earlier:
http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/5131/fig11mod.png
“Then i said: SEE FIG 2. Here you will see that NOT-averaged temperature graphs has much lower values in 1980. If you start at the 1980 levels here, a UAH at 0,4 K (if you like!!) still hardly makes 2000 warmer than 1940.”
Figure 2 is very dependent on your choice of the matching year. Again the instrumental ground-based records are much more reliable than the proxies, so the evidence is that we are considerably warmer than 1940.
“And i hope you understand, that the MWP is concluded on the basis of temperature proxies only.”
I’m not sure I understand why you claim only to be using “temperature proxies”. All proxies are used to derive temperature, whether they are tree rings, ice-core or borehole measurements, though there is certainly debate about their validity. But excluding tree-ring data does not necessarily make for a more robust reconstruction. For instance, why do you think your reconstruction is markedly different from Craig Loehle’s who avoided the same tree-ring data but gets lower temperatures prior to 1400 AD?
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/7035/lanservsloehle.png
I find the denial of the MWP to be disingenuous. I started looking at climate reconstructions in 1961. They all concurred with this graph well into the 1990s.: http://i39.tinypic.com/35hkz1d.jpg See the source from my post at 4/12-21:41 hrs.
Even the IPCC agreed with a similar reconstruction as late as1990 as regards the MWP. Even prior to the MWP, the Roman Period was even warmer, so was the Minoan Period. Here is an O18 reconstruction from 2007: http://i40.tinypic.com/2zgzuqv.jpg
The political need to remake CO2 into a major climate factor is apparently just like the; pick one, communists or Orwellian 1984 goverment, rewriting history to suit their political ambitions. This necessitates the elimination of any previous warming that can’t be attributed to the evil human race’s production of CO2. Thus the propagation of the Hansen/Gore/Mann/Briffa ad nauseum ‘CO2 is the only significant driver of climate’ mantra. Anthony provides a real service to humanity via this blog. His hard work and that of the contributors, as well as other skeptic sites, and input from bloggers is all we have between the on-going propaganda and science.
07:33 I submitted a comment, but it did not show as waiting for moderation, I assumed I did not post it as I was simutaneously doing some maintenance on my wife’s computer, so I tried to post it again, and got the message that it was a duplicate post, so moderator pease deleat it if true. My message still does not appear as waiting for moderation after a refresh. I am posting this as I’ve not seen this happen before. This can also be snipped as not relevent to the topic.
REPLY: Due to the links in in plus word combos it ended up in the spam filter, recovered. – Anthony
sod (02:45:06) :
we are talking about several hundred years with an ice free summer arctic.
You really sound: I have made up my mind, don’t bother me with the facts!
Have you ot heard of the greening of Greenland? Yes, the arctic had ice free summers.
the alps being glacier free. spring plants showing up in december and a massive movement of plants and animals. (many of them don t need modern man to move them)
Yes, there are trees being revealed now that the glaciers are retreating in the alps.
there simply is no evidence of such an event.
And you have a funny idea of how animal species respond to temperatures. There used to be lions in Greece during the greek cold period, back in 300BC. Humans exterminated them. A two degree change towards warmth is beneficial to plants and animals but not drastic:We have more than 20C degrees change between night and day ,and summer and winter. Animals are used to it and will expand slowly as the regions warmed and retreat as they cool. It is the food chain that is important.
Tom P (06:55:54) :
You write “….This gives the plot I showed earlier..”
Tom, see Fig, the black curve, an average of 14 proxies incl 3-5 tree rings I think. The 1980 point is around 0,45 K under todays level. On fig 2 you see Whole NH actual temp measuring reaching arouns 0,5 K under todays level in 1976. these are actual measurements of temperature. You see proxies of all china reach 0,6K under todays level. Then as I have tried to make you accept, the tree ring proxies does NOT have such a big dive. Without ANY doubt the fact that it has been 50 years averaged (!!) is making the tree ring proxy curve a lot higher in 1980.
A lot of in accurracy, yes, but fact is, the 1980 point from where the UAH is started IS to high, it only goes down to – 0,2K.
If we don’t know the starting point for the UAH, this talk is meaningless.
Lets assume that the true starting point is in between the 14 proxies (-0,45K) and the averages tree ring proxy (-0,2K). That gives a starting point -0,32 K.
And if we accept UAH rise in temp at 0,3K from 1980 (-0,32) til today (even though UAH today is only 0,2K warmer than 1980 http://www.climate-movie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/uah_global.gif ) then there is still not warmer today than the + 0,02 K in 1945. Then we are still 0,04 K under 1945.
Tom, its really an error that you don’t accept that the starting point is highly affected of a 50 average (!!!). And you don’t mention it, don’t you just ignore this basis.
So I do not at all agree with you graph.
Then you write: “Figure 2 is very dependent on your choice of the matching year.”
No, Tom, it is not. The Giss graph has far higher temperatures today than 1940-50. The other graphs has not higher temps today than 1940-50. It doesn’t go away by chosen another year to zero point. And never mind what you do, then all the other graphs has much lower 1980 value than 2000 value for temp. Its not dependent on my zero point. The divergence problem is there, not my invention.
I wrote to you, Tom:
“And i hope you understand, that the MWP is concluded on the basis of temperature proxies only.”
You write: “I’m not sure I understand why you claim only to be using “temperature proxies”. All proxies are used to derive temperature, whether they are tree rings, ice-core or borehole measurements, though there is certainly debate about their validity. But excluding tree-ring data does not necessarily make for a more robust reconstruction. For instance, why do you think your reconstruction is markedly different from Craig Loehle’s who avoided the same tree-ring data but gets lower temperatures prior to 1400 AD?”
Tom, My MWP graphs every last one are based on Proxies and nothing else. Your focus on my little stunt with the UAH graph thus In no way can change anything what so ever.
Then you mention tree rings. Tom, first I got a strong long MWP including 7 tree ring graphs. Then I got a strong long MWP without tree rings. Your point?
Yes the MWP is bigger without tree ring use.
Then you drag in Loehles results, proving what? Loehle has to a large extend used the datasets Moberg used, just without tree rings, and then he added some extra sets, ending on 18 datasets. In my analysis I have concluded MWP using up to 55 datasets, which where then only a few used also by Moberg. It made a difference, that’s just a fact.
But for you to deny the results of 55 proxies, you must come up with MORE than 55 proxies showing the exact opposite, that there was a Medieval Cold Period. Can you do that? No, that not possible I can assure you. I have seen SO many datasets, and theres just not that kind of datasets out there.
Administrator: sorry for the long writing, i will try to make it shorter next time.
Steve Keohane (07:31:16) :
Very true, Steve. This blind denial of MWP is really sad for science.
K.R. Frank
Frank,
“If we don’t know the starting point for the UAH, this talk is meaningless.”
But we do, as the UAH data has been carefully calibrated to be consistent with the ground data. If you wish to dispute this, please take up the matter with Roy Spencer and John Christy.
“…its really an error that you don’t accept that the starting point is highly affected of a 50 average (!!!).”
No – you cannot shift thermometer or satellite data to fit the proxies, how ever many proxies you have. Each proxy is calibrated to temperature so you are removing any solid ground for your analysis if you then adjust the satellite or thermometer temperatures on the basis of the proxies.
“My MWP graphs every last one are based on Proxies and nothing else.”
So are everyone else’s! It would have been good to have some diligent monks recording temperatures, but the thermometer was only invented in the 17th century!
The choice of proxies is a fraught one, and there has been much ink split on how to statistically validate one choice above another. Your results are considerably out of agreement with the next closest reconstruction published by Loehle. Your claim is that you were using a greater number, and therefore your result is better than the rest. But you will have a hard task convincing scientists of very different viewpoints of this unless you can justify how each proxy was derived, the weighting you gave to it, and do a thorough error analysis.
It’s up to you to decide if such an effort is worthwhile.
Tom P (09:53:04) Any given thermometer will give a temperature to within a couple of degrees. Furthermore, a thermometer that is correct at 20 F can be off at 60 F. This is because the diameter of the mercury column can vary. The accuracy of drawing the glass tube has been good for how long, and just how good is it? We are talking about an allegedly devastating increase in temperature of a fraction of a degree of warming today. If the satellites are calibrated to the GISS results, they lose their provenance for an absolute accurate reading, because GISS is a joke at best. Its temperatures are adjusted upward of late when they should be adjusted down to account for UHI, and the past is lowered to make the modern increase seem more dramatic than it is. This means the starting point (calibration point) is artificially high. I think that is Frank’s point.
Here is GISS 1999 vs. 2008: http://i42.tinypic.com/vpx303.jpg
Here are the adjustments: http://i42.tinypic.com/2luqma8.jpg
Tom P (09:53:04) :
Your claim is that you were using a greater number, and therefore your result is better than the rest. But you will have a hard task convincing scientists of very different viewpoints of this unless you can justify how each proxy was derived, the weighting you gave to it, and do a thorough error analysis.
I have to laugh at this. Have you read the IPCC reports, the physics justifications?
There is absolutely no error analysis, and all those spaghetti graphs are the modeler’s estimate of what happens to their model once they fiddle the parameters to fit the temperature curves and they change the initial conditions of the time development! In chapter 8 they even formally say they have no likelihood functions for the mess.
So my conclusion is that climate “science” does not do a thorough error analysis, just a hand waving one.
I am sure that when this is presented to be published an error analysis of the way the proxies have been combined , that is what is the error bar of the combined curves, is sine qua non. In principle, unless some of the proxies have huge error bars, the more, the merrier.
Frank, I don’t know why you bother with Tom P or Sod. They obviously hold religiously to the dogma and their ideas will not be moved by science. If by responding to them, more information re the data came to light, then fine. However, as I read it you are having to spin your wheels in the muck. Your time is too valuable for that. I know I was looking forward to reading more comments on this site, but my time is too valuable to spend on reading repetitive attempts to convince those who will not be convinced. They are trolls.
Also, there is so much evidence for the MWP that anyone who denies its existence as a warm period on Earth doesn’t deserve the efforts of this extradorinarily fine blog.
Tom…
The dataset of treeproxies has the paricular 1980 value because it was 50 years smoothed. If not 50 year smoothed it would have had another value.
If you chose NOT to calibrate so that both datasets has same value in 1980, then you cannot compare the 2 datasets. As simple as that.
Sod, I am puzzled by your postings. In general, you seem to be a reasonable individual, and that impression seems to be inconsistent with your statement that there is “simply no evidence” of the MWP. I wonder if I am misunderstanding you, but there is ample evidence of the MWP.
sorry, i think i was unclear: we don t have (or at least i haven t seen) any evidence of a 500 years period (MWP) with temperatures (mostly and significantly) above “today”.
we witness the changes on Flora and fauna that the recent temperature increases produce, and we measure them.
a 500 year MWP would produce a similar change to fauna and flora PLUS additional change for the longer period PLUS additional change for the extra temperature. (MINUS the additional changes that were caused by modern humans. i am aware that those exist)
i am aware of findings in greenland, and under alp glaciers. but such a massive time would leave massive evidence.
i live in south germany. a lack of snow and winter freeze makes the difference between apples or peaches growing on trees here. i am quite sure, that over 500 years somebody would have noticed it…
I don’t see how the digits “2000″ read as “1935″.
this is from the Loehle paper:
With the corrected dating, the number of series for which data is available
drops from 11 to 8 in 1935, so that subsequent values of the reconstruction would be based on less than half the total number of series, and hence would have greatlydecreased accuracy. Accordingly, the corrected estimates only run from 16 AD to 1935 AD, rather than to 1980 as in Loehle (2007).
i am pretty sure that the same would happen to these “spaghettis”, if anyone took a closer look.
Any given thermometer will give a temperature to within a couple of degrees.
thermometers are pretty accurate. (at least to the digit after the comma). and satellites are not calibrated by GISS data. (they don t measure the same thing actually)
anna v,
“There is absolutely no error analysis.”
I don’t think you’ve been keeping up with the literature – there’s a huge amount. For example:
“Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere surface temperature reconstructions: Sensitivity to method” S Rutherford, ME Mann, TJ Osborn, RS Bradley, KR … Journal of Climate, 2005: http://www.realclimate.org/RuthetalJClim2004.pdf
“Testing the fidelity of methods used in proxy-based reconstructions of past climate” ME Mann, S Rutherford, E Wahl, C Ammann – Journal of Climate, 2005: http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MRWA-JClimate05.pdf
“Robust estimation of background noise and signal detection in climatic time series” Michael E. Mann and Jonathan M. Lees – Earth and Environmental Science 1997: http://www.springerlink.com/content/nk12h33m6r9t6j58/
“Robustness of proxy-based climate field reconstruction methods” Michael E. Mann, Scott Rutherford,Eugene Wahl,and Caspar Ammann – J. Geo.Res. 2007: http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MRWA-JGR07.pdf
etc.
There was a workshop on just this topic at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste last year “Representing and reducing uncertainties in high-resolution proxy climate data”. From that workshop:
“Each high-resolution proxy type is subject to a unique combination of uncertainties that obscures the climate signals of interest. Such uncertainties must be identified, quantified, and ultimately minimized in order to maximize the potential of high-resolution proxy data.”
You add:
“In principle, unless some of the proxies have huge error bars, the more, the merrier.”
Agreed, but some proxies do indeed have large error bars so adding them in willy nilly will not improve the result. That is why researchers in this area are quite careful what they include and have used smaller datasets than Frank – bigger is not always better.
pyromancer76 (12:08:18) :
Agree. I see no will to understand at all.
K.R. Frank
Tom P (13:00:53) :
I don’t think you’ve been keeping up with the literature – there’s a huge amount. For example:
“Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere surface temperature reconstructions: Sensitivity to method” S Rutherford, ME Mann, TJ Osborn, RS Bradley, KR … Journal of Climate, 2005: http://www.realclimate.org/RuthetalJClim2004.pdf
“Testing the fidelity of methods used in proxy-based reconstructions of past climate” ME Mann, S Rutherford, E Wahl, C Ammann – Journal of Climate, 2005: http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MRWA-JClimate05.pdf
“Robust estimation of background noise and signal detection in climatic time series” Michael E. Mann and Jonathan M. Lees – Earth and Environmental Science 1997: http://www.springerlink.com/content/nk12h33m6r9t6j58/
“Robustness of proxy-based climate field reconstruction methods” Michael E. Mann, Scott Rutherford,Eugene Wahl,and Caspar Ammann – J. Geo.Res. 2007: http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/MRWA-JGR07.pdf
All by Mann, who has problems with his own work. Don’t you think that these might just be a circle jerk? ie. Mann is involved with reviewing the robustness of his own work or finding fault with anything that would refute his findings? Any others without Mann?
Tom, I have been very careful what datasets i used. It appears the tree ring datasets are not good enough to use, but besides that i have no reason to use far out datasets. Waste of time.
Now that you claim i use faulty datasets, can you give a list of 5-10 datasets i should not have used? I would like to see that.
Pete,
As Mann has written the some of the most cited work in this area, it would be remiss to ignore it. A brief selection of extensive other work includes:
“Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data” Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita, Julie M. Jones, Yegor Dimitriev, Fidel González-Rouco, Simon F. B. Tett – Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5696/679
“Globality and optimality in climate field reconstructions from proxy data”
MN Evans, A Kaplan, MA Cane, R Villalba – Interhemispheric climate linkages, 2001 – http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.31.3895&rep=rep1&type=pdf
“A kernel-based Bayesian approach to climatic reconstruction”
I Robertson, D Lucy, L Baxter, AM Pollard – The Holocene, 1999 – http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/495
Frank,
“Now that you claim i use faulty datasets, can you give a list of 5-10 datasets i should not have used?”
I’m not suggesting you either reject as faulty any particular sets, rather that you indicate how your choice adds to the signal rather than the noise, as has been done with other reconstructions in the analysis contained in the papers above.
pyromancer76 (12:08:18) :
Frank, I don’t know why you bother with Tom P or Sod. They obviously hold religiously to the dogma and their ideas will not be moved by science.
Worst of it is they and their patrons are trying to erase the scientific knowledge accumulated from two centuries back.
Sod wrote: “i live in south germany. a lack of snow and winter freeze makes the difference between apples or peaches growing on trees here. i am quite sure, that over 500 years somebody would have noticed it…”
Wait a few years brother and you will get all the snow that you ever wanted and then [unfortunately] you will not have to worry about apples and peaches for sure…
Frank….agreed with Pyromancer and Nasif…..don’t cast your pearls before swine.
In a matter of years….Mother Nature is going to let her opinion be known….and whoever is wrong….well….Mother Nature wins either way.
So no sense debating with sophists. They are impossible to argue with.
May PURE science continue….free from political-ideologues [either way] who have nothing better to do with their time than hijack websites with countless manipulative words.
Back to topic….I post here a post from earlier that got lost in the fray…next post.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Frank,
There is absolutely nothing wrong with your paper. TomP does not disagree with anything you have done. He only disagrees with the conclusions you have reached. If you had reached the proper conclusions you would have heard not even one tiny peep from Tom.
Posted this earlier:
Absolutely brilliant work, Frank. Thank you.
This paper should be required reading for every college student, every faculty member, every high school science class, every teacher, every member of congress, every journalist and every employee of NASA, NOAA, CPC, and so on….
About three times a week I run through First Landing State Park, at the “end” of my corner of the world, situated at the confluence of the mighty Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean [called First Landing because that is where the Jamestown Settlers landed in 1607–ironically in one of the years that some say was the coldest in the LIA–and where many of the Jamestown settlers starved through a difficult winter].
Even more ironic are the “hills” in the park. This is the flat coastal plain so there should be no hills as there is no tectonic action around to be found.
On the “hills” are an interesting mix of northern hardwoods such as beech and maple, and subtropical loblolly pines and spanish moss.
This park is an extraordinary clash of zones which show prima facie evidence of the ebbs and flows of Earth’s climate both in the SHORT RUN [multidecadal] and in the LONG RUN:
In the warm AMO and PDO combination…the good ole’ south Scarlet O’Hara “well shuck-my-corn ya’ll and put some cheese in my grits” plantation advance of spanish moss, tupelo trees, and copperhead snakes reigns supreme.
When those oscillations shift negative, the beech, blueberries, and sugar maples take over on the “hills.”
Now in the LONGER RUN….peer back into the earlier Holocene, just about 5,000 years ago, and we see these “hills” were not hills at all.
They are former waterfront sand dunes…when sea levels were higher around than they are now.
This all occurred in the Biblical times before there were enough humans to produce the CO2 to cause the supposed “warming”……which in the grand 10,000 year scheme of things…is not showing warming at all….anyway.
Thanks again Frank…..this work is another brilliant nail in the coffin for the new world religion of the International Church of the A.G.W.
Speaking of coffins….every time when I think of that first Jamestown winter in 1607 where people froze and starved to death…I SHUDDER to think that the current world figures and organizations….Obama, Holdren, Hansen, NASA, the UK Met, et al….seem to be JUST as ill-prepared for such a turn in the climate if that is the direction things are going….
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Correction: “This paper” should read “Your paper” [Frank’s paper]
Robust evidence (just using AGW “scientific” terminology) on the occurrence of a MGW, warmer than the last decade warming, comes from the analysis of the flux of biogenic opal (SiO2.nH2O). The origin of CO2 from deep oceans is supported by overwhelming evidence (once again, using AGW words) coming from the upwelling of biogenic opal during deglaciations. It is unavoidable evidence which supports the fact (using again AGW “scientific” terminology) that increases of the concentration of atmospheric CO2 occur after the warming of the oceans and not before. (Anderson et al. Science. 13 March 2009)
Amen
sod (12:29:42) You should have read the next couple of paragraphs, the data goes to beyond 1935. But that is a spurious argument for I was stating that the extermination of the MWP by the AGW/CO2 promoters is disingenuous. So your retort is irrelevant, because Loehle’s corrected paper from which you refer, shows an even warmer MWP and colder LIA than his original paper, from which the graph I linked was from. This is exactly the type of true but fallacious statement true believers like to make.
As regards thermometers, the diameter of the mercury column with only a +/- 2.5% deviation in diameter will yield a 10% error over the number of increments counted.
The MWP was warm for a very good reason, its one of the only periods in the last 11000 years without a grand minimum. Grand minima drag the Sun down for many years and also stifle the recovery. I think the MWP is the period between the Oort and Wolf minima which is a bit shorter than 500 years, but still an extended period without grand minimum.
Tom P
As we talked about, the UAH today is 0,2 K higher than 1980 and UAH in year 2000 is in fact at the same level as 1980.
But you added a trend line, and then the trend line showed that today is 0,4 K warmer than 1980 for UAH.
I do see a point in trend lines rather than actual UAH measurements, but then, Tom, if you want to compare the historic proxies with a trend line UAH, you should be scientific and consequent. Then you should also make a trendline for the proxies.
You cant choose the trend line only for the datasets where it benefits your belief.
I made excel add a trendline to the Proxies, and the proxi trendline shows that MWP is 1,0 K warmer than today 🙂
So if we use trendlines on both datasets, we get MWP 0,6 K warmer than today.
With actual data MWP was in average 0,4 K warmer than today.
Ot, Tom, perhaps you have an argument that trendlines should be used exactly when it goes against MWP?
Another thig Tom, if there had not been the 2 big dives 1985 and 1993 your trend line for UAH would have been 0,2 K from 1980-2009.
And these two bumps are clearly made from two vulcanoes:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/lansner2.png
The above is from my earlier WUWT article
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/17/the-co2-temperature-link/
See also
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/
So Tom, your 0,4 K is not 0,2K because of 2 vulcanoes, so really honestly, I font think you have a good case with 0,4K UAH
If 2 vulcanoes should determine 0,2K of the whole MWP? Naaarh.
Tom P (13:00:53) :
Tom, I have worked for over 35 years in fitting models to data in the field of particle physics. All these “sensitivity”, “robustness” and “estimates” would be laughed out of the conference room had one dared to use them.
When we came out with a number from the fit, there were chi square per degrees of freedom and error bars +/- statistical, +/- systematic.
I have dived into the IPCC models, It took me time to realize that the bands around the models are not error bars. It was what I assumed they would be! I was wrong. They are “estimates” of what the models would develop into if the initial conditions were changed , not the parameters of the model by 1sigma of their error as is the kosher method, just the initial conditions.
Take the toy model at http://junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Earth_temp.html
and change the albedo , given as 0.31 into 0.3131, a 1% change, and whoever says that they know the albedo better than that is not being truthful, see http://www.leif.org/research/albedo.png . The temperature goes from 15C to 14.67C. The error bar that should be around the temperature calculation, +/- 0.34C just from one parameter. ( And I have not considered the considerable change in albedo in the data given in the link in the overall argument of time projection, just the statistical error).
The model is a toy model, but it is at the root of the GCMs. So really varying by 1 sigma the parameter errors that enter into the GCMs makes their whole temperature projections nonsense.
And tom , even with the 2 vulcanoes El chicon and Pinatubo that makes your 0,4K trend , a slightly more advanced (!) trendcurve confirms my use of 0,2K :
http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/extensions/InlineImages/image.php?AttachmentID=631
This more advanced trend curve confirms my use of UAH fully, fig B:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure3.png
resulting in :
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure11.png
And tom , even with the 2 vulcanoes El chicon and Pinatubo that makes your 0,4K trend , a slightly more advanced (!) trendcurve confirms my use of 0,2K :
a higher order polynomial fit is NOT an “advanced” method of fitting a trend. most people would consider it to be simply WRONG.
http://deepclimate.org/2009/04/09/the-alberta-oil-boys-network-spins-global-warming-into-cooling/#more-219
I made excel add a trendline to the Proxies, and the proxi trendline shows that MWP is 1,0 K warmer than today 🙂
what sort of a trend did you fit? i am not sure that i understand what you did, but it is interesting.
it is a real problem, that the modern warming period is very short and at an endpoint of the graph, so i m really interested in your methodology.
o your retort is irrelevant, because Loehle’s corrected paper from which you refer, shows an even warmer MWP and colder LIA than his original paper, from which the graph I linked was from.
the revised Loehle paper does not show the MWP to be warmer than modern temperatures.
sod (09:15:06):
the revised Loehle paper does not show the MWP to be warmer than modern temperatures.
Sorry, but It’s not true. I have both uncorrected and corrected Loehle’s databases ’cause he kindly send them to me immediately after he amended his article. MGW prevails also on corrected databases.
Frank,
If to justify your values you need to use a fourth order polynomial, as is shown on the trend you present, you have to show that there is a significant improvement in the correlation coefficient between the trend and the data by using three additional fitting parameters.
A simple linear fit to the UAH temperature series gives a correlation coefficient of 0.53, while your fourth order polynomial gives 0.59. This is not a significant difference and so there is no justification in using a fourth order fit. The linear trend and a 0.4 degC rise therefore remain correct.
Sorry, but It’s not true. I have both uncorrected and corrected Loehle’s databases ’cause he kindly send them to me immediately after he amended his article. MGW prevails also on corrected databases.
sorry, but data that ends in 1935 simply can NOT show, that the MWP was warmer than today.
sod (12:07:39) :
sorry, but data that ends in 1935 simply can NOT show, that the MWP was warmer than today.
Um, the databases only need to show what the temperature during the MWP was since we already know how warm it is today.
Try to think outside the box a bit, sod.
Mark
sod (12:07:39):
sorry, but data that ends in 1935 simply can NOT show, that the MWP was warmer than today.
Fill it with new data from 1935 to 2009 and… Presto! MGW warmer than last five decades global warming.
NOAA + AMSU2 Databases:
1935 6 0.1142
1936 6 -0.0178
1937 6 0.0827
1938 6 0.0979
1939 6 0.0748
1940 6 0.1163
1941 6 0.138
1942 6 0.1242
1943 6 0.1178
1944 6 0.2134
1945 6 0.0667
1946 6 -0.0289
1947 6 -0.0304
1948 6 -0.0414
1949 6 -0.0681
1950 6 -0.1555
1951 6 -0.0118
1952 6 0.0339
1953 6 0.1128
1954 6 -0.1115
1955 6 -0.1314
1956 6 -0.1878
1957 6 0.049
1958 6 0.0994
1959 6 0.053
1960 6 0.0048
1961 6 0.0745
1962 6 0.0979
1963 6 0.1272
1964 6 -0.1399
1965 6 -0.0732
1966 6 -0.0298
1967 6 -0.0142
1968 6 -0.0213
1969 6 0.0786
1970 6 0.0324
1971 6 -0.0643
1972 6 0.0178
1973 6 0.1429
1974 6 -0.1047
1975 6 -0.0319
1976 6 -0.1107
1977 6 0.1282
1978 6 0.0503
1979 6 -0.073
1980 6 0.0871
1981 6 0.0521
1982 6 -0.1535
1983 6 0.0351
1984 6 -0.2584
1985 6 -0.214
1986 6 -0.1476
1987 6 0.11
1988 6 0.10775
1989 6 -0.1105
1990 6 0.073
1991 6 0.117
1992 6 -0.192
1993 6 -0.1491
1994 6 -0.01242
1995 6 0.12425
1996 6 0.0208
1997 6 0.0462
1998 6 0.5132
1999 6 0.0405
2000 6 0.0346
2001 6 0.199
2002 6 0.314
2003 6 0.272
2004 6 0.1942
2005 6 0.33
2006 6 0.276
2007 6 0.27
2008 6 0.05
Tom, you can see as well as I that if not El chicon and Pinatubo where placed in 1985 / 1993 there would have been a linear UAH trend of 0,2K 1980-today, approx. Therefore your 0,4K is complete random and for no scientific use.
Had a El Chicon even been around 2002-7 then trend would have been even lower. You cannot make me think that this kind of dice-throwing should improve me 55 sets of data that united shows a VERY VERY strong commen result: A stron long MWP. Period.
sorry Nasif, i don t know what you are trying to do there.
both GISS and Hadcrut give a slope of 0.07 per decadess ince 1935, leading to a temperature increase of about 0.5°C, that need to be added to that last point of the Loehle graph on page 97. the graph ends at about 0.1, +0.5 makes 0.6, which is ABOVE the high point of the MWP.
(which is in the year 800, quite at the start of the 500 years period outlined in the article we are discussing here, btw…)
are you trying to tell me, that it is not 0.5°C warmer in the period around today than in one around 1935?
sod (12:56:29) :
are you trying to tell me, that it is not 0.5°C warmer in the period around today than in one around 1935?
Given the data Nasif just posted, no, it is not. He also noted that those are NOAA and AMSU2 data, not GISS and HadCrut. Nice strawman, sod.
Really, can you make ANY argument without some logical fallacy? Just curious, I’m waiting to see one.
Mark
Naisif:
Loehle, Energy and Environment 18, 2007: “Even keeping in mind that Figure 1 shows 30-year running means, it would indeed seem to show the MWP to be warmer than the late 20th century. The eighteen series used here show a mean difference of about 0.3°C between the MWP and the 20th century”
Loehle, Energy and Environment 19, 2008: “Even adding this rise to the 1935 reconstructed value, the MWP peak remains 0.07 Deg C above the end of the 20thCentury values, though the difference is not significant. ”
It looks like Loehle’s MWP is getting cooler as he corrects his analysis!
http://www.freesundayschoollessons.org/pdfs/climate-history.pdf
Frank,
“Tom, you can see as well as I that if not El chicon and Pinatubo where placed in 1985 / 1993 there would have been a linear UAH trend of 0,2K 1980-today, approx. Therefore your 0,4K is complete random and for no scientific use.”
Maybe some data would help clarify. I’ve removed all below-trend data for temperatures after El Chicon and Pinatubo. The UAH series gives:
http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/6061/uahexvolc.png
and a trend of 0.120 rather than 0.133 degC/decade, so a 0.36 rather than 0.40 degC change from 1979 to date. The removal of these lower temperatures means the current anomaly has actually slightly increased and is now +0.28 degC.
I’m sure you will amend your analysis accordingly.
Given the data Nasif just posted, no, it is not. He also noted that those are NOAA and AMSU2 data, not GISS and HadCrut. Nice strawman, sod.
no strawman at all. if he can pick his datasets, so can i.
i chose the two most common used sets of surface temperature.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1935/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1935/trend
i am sorry, if you don t like the data. but you will have to struggle hard to find scientific support for the claim, that the 30s were NOT 0.5°C below the temperature of the last decade.
Really, can you make ANY argument without some logical fallacy? Just curious, I’m waiting to see one.
using a different dataset is not a logical fallacy. you might want to google that term, before you use it.
anna v,
“Tom, I have worked for over 35 years in fitting models to data in the field of particle physics. All these “sensitivity”, “robustness” and “estimates” would be laughed out of the conference room had one dared to use them.
When we came out with a number from the fit, there were chi square per degrees of freedom and error bars +/- statistical, +/- systematic.”
My background is in physics as well, as is also the case for a lot climate scientists. The techniques physicists generally use are to fit theory to data, but this is not what a proxy reconstruction is trying to do. Such reconstructions are trying to derive the underlying time series behind a set of derived measurements. There is mostly no actual past temperature series to compare, and so the techniques you cite are of little relevance – what model is Frank supposed to do a chi-square test against?
Hence the tests of the “skill” of a reconstruction are to show that it is robust in that it is insensitive to choice of proxies, that the proxy temperatures are derived correctly, and the weightings are reasonably applied given the uncertainties in the derived values. I was also unfamiliar with these techniques, but that is no reason to dismiss them.
Climate models have the same problem in that again there is no future data to model against. My subsequent engineering practice, though, suggests a way of analysing the robustness of such models. If I want to be sure that my finite element analysis (FEA) of a mechanical system, for instance, is giving a reasonable answer, I first check it is consistent with a simplified analytical approximation and then change the analysis parameters, such as cell number and shape, to see that my FEA solution doesn’t change drastically. If I want an estimate of the accuracy of the solution, I tweak the input parameters.
This is the day-to-day experience of modellers in engineering, and I’m not at all surprised that climate scientists use similar approaches in their GCM modelling, which is just time-dependent finite element analysis.
Here the whole paragraphs from Loehle’s corrected article:
The peak value of the MWP is 0.526 Deg C above the mean over the period (again as a 29 year mean, not annual, value). This is 0.412 Deg C above the last reported value at 1935 (which includes data through 1949) of 0.114 Deg C. The standard error of the difference is 0.224 Deg C, so that the difference is significantly non-zero at the 10% level (t = 1.84). While instrumental data are not strictly comparable, the rise in 29 year-smoothed global data from NASA GISS (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp) from 1935 to 1992 (with data from 1978 to 2006) is 0.34 Deg C. Even adding this rise to the 1935 reconstructed value, the MWP peak remains 0.07 Deg C above the end of the 20th Century values, though the difference is not significant.
Scientific articles must not be read the same as you read the Bible, i.e. taking verses out from the context:
While instrumental data are not strictly comparable, the rise in 29 year-smoothed global data from NASA GISS (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp) from 1935 to 1992 (with data from 1978 to 2006) is 0.34 Deg C. Even adding this rise to the 1935 reconstructed value, the MWP peak remains 0.07 Deg C above the end of the 20th Century values, though the difference is not significant.
sod (14:20:30) :
no strawman at all. if he can pick his datasets, so can i.
i chose the two most common used sets of surface temperature.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1935/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1935/trend
i am sorry, if you don t like the data. but you will have to struggle hard to find scientific support for the claim, that the 30s were NOT 0.5°C below the temperature of the last decade.
Are you suggesting NOAA and AMSU2 databases are not correct?
Sod said: “Sorry, but data that ends in 1935 simply can NOT show, that the MWP was warmer than today.”
How about the a simple fact that Eric the Red named Greenland more than 1000 years ago…because it was “green” enough to have a settlement and raise crops.
Also Newfoundland….is “Vinland” at the same general time as explored by his colleague Leif Erikkson:
Wine-land The earliest etymology of “Vinland” is found in Adam of Bremen’s 11th-century Latin Descriptio insularum Aquilonis (“Description of the Northern Islands”): “Moreover, he has also reported one island discovered by many in that ocean, which is called Winland, for the reason that grapevines grow there by themselves, producing the best wine.” (Praeterea unam adhuc insulam recitavit a multis in eo repertam occeano, quae dicitur Winland, eo quod ibi vites sponte nascantur, vinum optimum ferentes). The implication is that the first element is Old Norse vín (Latin vinum), “wine”.This explanation is essentially repeated in the 13th-century Grœnlendinga saga, which provides a circumstantial account of the discovery of Vinland, and its being named from the grapes (vínber) found there.
Maybe not warmer than today….but comparable.
Either way…you are wasting your time.
What are you trying to prove? What is your goal? You seem to be a plant.
Do you get paid for this, Sod?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Tom P (15:38:51) :
This thread is fast getting out of front page. I suppose we can pick up arguing in a newer thread :).
I was talking about IPCC models when I was talking of chi**2 fits.
Robustness is good for gymnastics and it seems genetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness
Have you not heard of validation in engineering studies?
The world is asked to commit trillions and destroy its way of life on studies that are “robust” instead of validated, as should any engineering product be before use?
Maybe you should edit the wikipedia entry to include what robustness means for climatology.
For pure data:
Frank has to take care in the correct statistical method the addition of errors , statistical ( which are added by squaring and square rooting) and systematic ( which are added straight, no ice) and display it for his final curve. It may be that that after that the whole significance of any bumps becomes moot. This means that the significance of the present “hot period” also becomes moot and a chasing of video game visions.
Hi tom,
I believe you have not corrected for Elchicon.
Here you see indications of atmosphere disturbing afer Elchicon and Pinatubo, Stratosphere and troposphere UAH.
http://atmoz.org/img/global_temperature_index_1.png
I cannot say exactly when the direct effect of El chicon ends, perhaps around 1985. A few years after El chicon temperatures seems to recover.
So if you want a more total flat trend curve (for some reason) then remove ALL the El chicon effect.
The MWP magnitude should obviously not depend on the random timing of recent volcanoes.
After doing so, you will have a UAH trend curve under 0,3K.
This demonstrates the random-sensibility of using a flat trend curve.
Lets look at a handfull approaches to UAH temp rise 1980- today, and get a realistic picture, right?
Temperature difference 1980 to 2000 and 2009 :
UAH actual vals, 5 year smooth. 2000: 0,10K 2009: 0,20K
http://www.climate-movie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/uah_global.gif
hadcrut, actual vals. 2000: 0,1K 2009: 0,3K
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5254/tropicshadcrut3rb1.png
polynom UAH trend. 2000: 0,18K 2009: 0,25K
http://www.holtlane.plus.com/images/uah_anomaly.jpg
polynom 2 UAH trend. 2000: 0,2K 2009: 0,15K
http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/extensions/InlineImages/image.php?AttachmentID=631
polynom 5th order trend. 2000: 0,1K 2009: 0,0K
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/uah_june08_curvefits.png
(- linear trend also shown to compare)
Linear trend , Tom P. UAH. 2000: 0,24K 2009: 0,36K
I suggest: 2000: 0,2K 2009: 0,24K
Now Tom you want me to use your 0,36K, but in order to make me accept this outlier value, you need to do some serious argumenting.
OK, lets make a compromise, we say UAH 1980-2000 shows a difference of 0,3 K, ok?
Fine. So we “know” that UAH contributes with 0,3K to the level at 1980.
Take a look at fig 2 in the article. Here you see not the “drawn” tree rings, but the actual, more precise average of 11 multiproxies, mostly trees.
The value here in 1980 id -0,18 K .
UAH temp rise of 0,3K from 1980 to 2009 would then result in + 0,12 K
BUT!
The tree ring average IS 50 YEAR AVERAGED (!!!) which gives a FAR higher 1980 value than original tree ring data says!
So we end up considerably LOWER than the + 0,12 K after inserting UAH +0,3K
These numbers are NOT absolute Kelvin values (please understand this), but Kelvin values that is then callibrated to the Proxi data in order to compare (!)
Summa: Incl + 0,3 K from UAH, we today have most like a value of +0 to +0,1 K which can be compared with the +0,4 to +0,6K in the long MWP.
This resembles the situation on my graphs.
On top of this, before the MWP it was even warmer, 1-1,5 K! For 6 many thousand years.
Probably sod cant find evidence for this either…! But others can.
Finaly DO NOT DO THE MISTAKE, that you blindly want to compare PEAK temperatures of today with AVERAGE temperature of the MWP!!!!
Obviously, if you somehow extract the absolute PEAK temperature after an El Nino, YOU MUST COMPARE WITH PEAKS OF THE MWP!!!
Did the MWP also have EL NINO Peak with far above average temps?? YES!!
So what we have done here is UNDERESTIMATING the MWP, because we have had a positive PDO + som some strong EL Nino data that we compare with MWP.
Tom. Now I have argued 100% truth seeking, please show that you do the same, and that you dont have som kind of agenda/religion. I dont want to waste my time on you if thats the case. Let me see some honest scientific thinking from you.
– And Tom, we have also underestimated MWP in another way, as i wrote, some of the Proxies are plant dependent and thus influented by high CO2 number in recent times.
So to declare MWP “dead” is mostly a kind of wishful thinking.
Tom: Studying the effects of El chicon and Pinatubo more:
http://atmoz.org/img/global_temperature_index_1.png
Notice that both after Pinatubo and El Chicon it does take years after the direct effect before the temperature levels are up on the “before-vulcano” trend. You have thus only removed a small part of whats needed if you really want to use flat trend UAH.
Frank,
“I believe you have not corrected for Elchicon.”
If you use the Mauna Loa Observatory data to remove all temperatures when the atmospheric transmission was outside of normal variation, the trend actually increases from 0.120 to 0.122 degC/decade:
http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/6383/uahexvolcwtrans.png
“Lets look at a handfull approaches to UAH temp rise 1980- today, and get a realistic picture, right?”
As I explained before, there is no justification for using anything other than a linear trend to fit the UAH data – the correlation coefficients show no significant improvement as a result of putting in the additional fitting parameters for a polynomial trend. To use such fits has no mathematical basis.
“Finaly DO NOT DO THE MISTAKE, that you blindly want to compare PEAK temperatures of today with AVERAGE temperature of the MWP!!!! Did the MWP also have EL NINO Peak with far above average temps?? YES!!”
I am not combining peak temperatures of the UAH record with filtered averages from the past – I agree it would be incorrect to use the 1998 El Niño maximum to make my point. Any filtered average of a linear trend is the same as the trend itself, so the comparison I’m making is absolutely proper.
“So to declare MWP “dead” is mostly a kind of wishful thinking.”
I have never declared it dead – there’s certainly evidence of a warm period at that time. But there’s little evidence that it was noticeably warmer than the climate today, as indeed Loehle states.
Your proxy reconstruction does not amount to evidence as it stands. At a minimum you first have to follow anna v’s advice:
“Frank has to take care in the correct statistical method the addition of errors, statistical ( which are added by squaring and square rooting) and systematic ( which are added straight, no ice) and display it for his final curve. It may be that that after that the whole significance of any bumps becomes moot.”
anna v.,
“Have you not heard of validation in engineering studies?”
Heard of? I’ve had great enjoyment over the years in developing and using validation and verification matrices!
As for “robustness” in wikipedia, try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_statistics
“Robust statistics provides an alternative approach to classical statistical methods. The motivation is to produce estimators that are not unduly affected by small departures from model assumptions.”
I think you might enjoy the example concerning the determination of the speed of light.
Tom, again:
I said: “Tom: Studying the effects of El chicon and Pinatubo more:
http://atmoz.org/img/global_temperature_index_1.png
Notice that both after Pinatubo and El Chicon it does take years after the direct effect before the temperature levels are up on the “before-vulcano” trend. You have thus only removed a small part of whats needed if you really want to use flat trend UAH.
”
And you just go on showing this:http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/6383/uahexvolcwtrans.png
etc etc. This is not dialog, sadly.
http://atmoz.org/img/global_temperature_index_1.png
Tom , do you honestly think, that the low temperatures in 1985 just after El Chicon Has nothing to do with El Chicon??
AND that the low temperatures in 1993 just after Pinatubo has nothing to do with Pinatubo??
Coincidence coincidence?
Tom, then we just dont agree even in these simple matters, and can agree that we dont agree….
And as i said, if “flat trend” is your preference, no matter that if for sure gives an outlier trens result, then you should use a just as faulty flat trend for the historic proxies.
This also gives an outlier result, + 1,05 K for the MWP.
Then i suggested +0,3K as a compromise to be able to move on in the dialog.
You did not comment.
I then used 0,3 K, and showed that we still have over 0,4 K MWP.
You did not comment.
Frank,
“Notice that both after Pinatubo and El Chicon it does take years after the direct effect before the temperature levels are up on the “before-vulcano” trend. You have thus only removed a small part of whats needed if you really want to use flat trend UAH.”
Please look more carefully at:
http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/6383/uahexvolcwtrans.png
I have removed all the temperature data where the transmission coefficient measured at Mauna Loa Observatory is outside of normal variation. Is there any contribution outside of that? Yes, but it’s less than 1% of the transmission coefficient, which itself is varying by 2%.
A more valid criticism is that I’m actually taking out too much data, as the eruptions are only partially responsible for cooling in that period – for instance there was a La Niña episode in 1984
” do you honestly think, that the low temperatures in 1985 just after El Chicon Has nothing to do with El Chicon??”
Yes. This is more than two years after the eruption, the transmission coefficient has almost completely recovered – the cause was another La Niña event that year.
“AND that the low temperatures in 1993 just after Pinatubo has nothing to do with Pinatubo??”
I’ve already removed the 1993 data from the plot!
“And as i said, if “flat trend” is your preference, no matter that if for sure gives an outlier trens result, then you should use a just as faulty flat trend for the historic proxies.”
I prefer a linear fit when a more complex fit gives no significant improvement in the correlation. This will not be the case historic proxies, so a more complex fit can be justified.
“I then used 0,3 K, and showed that we still have over 0,4 K MWP.”
Whether your peaks are 0.3 or 0.4K above current temperatures, you have to demonstrate that these peaks are likely, even when they contradict all other proxy reconstructions.
Unless you can do that, I’m afraid you are wasting your time.
Ok Tom, perhaps A la Nina is part of the explantaion for the cold 1985-87.
But I saw ealier in this blog – as far as I understand – that you would consider +0,3K for UAH ok. And as I have 5 other trend types around +0,2K the + 0,3K is not that “far out”.
So lets move on 🙂 (administrator would love that!)
Then you write:
“Whether your peaks are 0.3 or 0.4K above current temperatures, you have to demonstrate that these peaks are likely, even when they contradict all other proxy reconstructions.
Unless you can do that, I’m afraid you are wasting your time.”
Tom, I have really done EVERYTHING you could possibly demand to illustrate how much and how come tree rings are not usefull.
And you know very weil (?) that leaves only Loehle´s research that “contradicts” my results! (Moberg uses partly tree rings)
So your argument is: Frank, your results does not match Loehle, therefore its wrong. But if Loehles results are so correct that anything not matching it is wrong, then I hope that Loehles and my COMMON conclusion that tree rings are NOT usefull will be accepted by you.
Loehle is right, you know 🙂
Craig Loehle did a SUPER good anf important reasearch!! He was definetly one of the reasons i did this larger investigation. Loehle used 18 datasets including some sets also used by Moberg.
I have for weeks and weeks searched after a bigger basis of data to if possible get more precise result. A MWP around 0,3-0,4 K above todays average is supported by 55 independent datasets. Loehle stopped at 18 datasets.
Craig, if you are out there: “I have 55 datasets, that does in average show a 0,3-4 +K MWP. If you have the time, i would like to hand over all data to you and see what came out of it. We would win Tom P, how about it??”
In addition i have assembled a BIIIIIG pile of similar research papers, where direct temperature curves are not avaulable, by datasets like O18 C14 etc IS.
These clearly comfirms a substantial warmer MWP than current temperatures.
Tom, with all the datasets I have seen, i find it VERY hard to believe you could possibly find 55 datasets that told a quite different story.
Tom, Im not Loehle, so lets just agree that you dont think ive got the correct answer, and end this dialog.
K.R. Frank