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Sunday, September 02, 2007

Say What?

Proxy records may display fluctuations in climate variability that are artifacts of changing replication and interseries correlation of constituent time-series and also from methodological considerations. These biases obscure the understanding of past climatic variability, including estimation of extremes, differentiation between natural and anthropogenic forcing, and climate model validation. Herein, we evaluate as a case-study, the Esper et al. (2002) extra-tropical millennial-length temperature reconstruction that shows increasing variability back in time. We provide adjustments considering biases at both the site and hemispheric scales. The variance adjusted record shows greatest differences before 1200 when sample replication is quite low. A reduced amplitude of peak warmth during Medieval Times by about 0.4°C (0.2°C) at annual (40-year) timescales slightly re-draws the longer-term evolution of past temperatures. Many other regional and large-scale reconstructions appear to contain variance-related biases.

Short version: if this holds up, it means the Medieval Warm Period was not quite as warm as some (the Denialists or, as I like to call them, Warmocaust Collusionists) have claimed. Therefore The Hockey Stick is vindicated. All hail The Hockey Stick.

13 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:58 PM

    You may kiss my blade.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbsam/149009904/

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  2. Anonymous3:22 PM

    Dream on!

    They can't even measure temperatures accurately *today* (as Anthony Watts demonstrates over and over again), any more than they can for the last 100 years; and you seriously expect an intelligent observer to accept what they allege happened 750 years ago.

    Please, tell me you were kidding!

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  3. A little over-the-top, David. Careful...you'll lose credibility and get lumped in with the Warmocaust Collusionists, who think scientific observation is simply a matter of saying things like "oh, yeah, right!" and "puh-leeese!"

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  4. Anonymous6:50 PM

    Well david, we won't really know unless an intelligent observer comes along.

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  5. Anonymous10:57 PM

    or you could just make up data like Hansen over at NASA to "prove" what you want and ensure your billion dollar budget gets funded every year.

    Its easy when you are One of The Believers, where scientific method has been replaced by fraud, deceipt and political correctness . . . . all causes that bring warm fuzzies to the hearts of Liberals, Socialists and Warmongers everywhere.

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  6. Anonymous1:36 AM

    But it really doesn't matter to the future (except for a few researchers, and insofar as it helps our general understanding]. Edward Wegman said it really well:

    'As we said in our report, "In a real sense the paleoclimate results of MBH98/99 are essentially irrelevant to the consensus on climate change. The instrumented temperature record clearly indicates an increase in temperature." We certainly agree that modern global warming is real. We have never disputed this point. We think it is time to put the "hockey stick" controversy behind us and move on.'

    http://energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/Hearings/07272006hearing2001/Wegman.pdf

    I saw this comment in the full report when I studied it, and then Wegman reaffirmed it in the later hearing above. I don't know how anybody could be clearer.

    For some reason, certain people never quote that specific comment...

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  7. Anonymous10:02 AM

    The Year the Global Warming Hoax Died
    By Alan Caruba (09/02/07)

    When did the global warming hoax die? Historians are likely to pinpoint 2007. It will take another decade to insure it cannot be revived, but the avalanche of scientific studies and the cumulative impact of scientists who have publicly joined those who debunked the lies on which it has been based will be noted as the tipping point.

    It took some forty years to unmask the Piltdown Man hoax that began in 1912 alleging that the skull of an ancient ancestor of man had been found in England. Any number of British anthropologists unwittingly contributed to the hoax by confirming the authenticity of the skull until it was found that the jaw of an orangutan had been cunningly attached. The unmasking of “global warming” has taken less than half that time.

    The hoax has mainly been a creation of the United Nations Environmental Program and took off in earnest with the 1992 Earth Summit. It culminated in 1997 with the Kyoto Climate Control Protocol, an agreement to reduce the generation of carbon dioxide, a
    “greenhouse” gas (CO2) said to be the cause of an accelerated warming of the earth. By 2005, 140 nations had ratified the pact, agreeing to reduce CO2 emissions. Notably exempt from the pact were nations such as China and India. Few, if any, nations have ever met the limits that require reductions in CO2 production, attributed to the use of so-called “fossil fuels” such as oil, natural gas, and coal.

    The United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and, at one point, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution rejecting it. This has not kept the U.S. from spending billions on so-called “climate research” intended to address climate change with the aim of reducing or capturing CO2 emissions. Had that money been devoted to maintenance of the nation’s infrastructure, tragic events such as the collapse of the Minnesota bridge over the Mississippi might have been averted.

    In August, it was revealed that NASA scientists had corrected an error that resulted in 1934 replacing 1998 as the warmest year on record in the U.S. Repeatedly the data put forth to justify the global warming hoax has been debunked.

    As Dr. David Wojick recently noted, “The real significance is that such a small correction can make such a big difference. The reason is that the much touted warming of the last three decades is merely a return to earlier warm times, after an equally long period of cooling…There is no way this pattern constitutes a warming trend…In short, there is no evidence for human-induced global warming in the U.S. temperature record.”

    “Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing a new study that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research authored by a Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. A former Harvard physicist, Dr. Lubos Motl, said the new study has reduced global warming fear-mongers to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”

    The new research concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as a series of reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has asserted for years. The IPCC reports have been increasingly dismissed as deliberate distortions of data that amount to little more than propaganda to advance the “global warming” hoax.

    Having testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, paleoclimate scientist, Bob Carter, noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped. There has been little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 17 percent. Thus, the connection between CO2 and “global warming”, the key to the claims that it is occurring and will increase has been proven wrong.

    Dr. Roy Spencer, another critic of the global warming hoax, has noted that “At least 80 percent of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.” The computer models used by advocates of global warming have been unable to include the actions and impact of clouds, thus rendering them seriously flawed.

    Prior to and during 2007, one research study after another revealed that the central premise of “global warming” lacks any scientific merit. One by Dr. Tim Patterson concluded that, “The earth temperature does respond to the solar cycle as confirmed by numerous studies.” The solar cycle is known to be about eleven years in length and reflects increased or decreased sunspot (magnetic storms) activity. It is the Sun that largely determines the Earth’s temperature, which is never the same throughout the planet, given seasonal and solar changes.

    In 2007, meteorologist Anthony Watts who led a team of researchers revealed that, “The U.S. National Climate Data Center is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster.” It had been discovered that many of the measuring stations were placed in locations such as on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, and even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills!

    Determining the Earth’s temperature, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Borh Institute, University of Copenhagen, collaborated with two other professors to write an article in Science Daily, saying, “It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of the Earth.” Indeed, “differences in temperature drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate.”

    In May 2007, Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin dismissed fears of increased man-made CO2 in the atmosphere. He called the “global warming” argument “absurd.” As to any increase in the Earth’s temperature, he said, “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting carbon dioxide in the air.”

    On August 15, 2007, meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said, “If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.”

    There will be dying gasps to this hoax, not the least of which is a planned $100 million media blitz by Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, but the public is already far more concerned about instability in the Middle East, the forthcoming national elections, and shocks to the U.S. economy to accord such an effort much credibility.

    Hoaxes have a life of their own and “global warming” is now coming to an end. Mark 2007 as the year it began to seriously bleed to death.

    © Alan Caruba, September 2007

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  8. Ding Dong, no one reads your cut 'n pastes.

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  9. ...Well, I read a little bit. I stopped at Alan Caruba:

    "Defending Fumento

    In a January 2006 column, Caruba railed against the decision by the Scripps Howard News Service to drop Michael Fumento as a columnist after Businessweek revealed he had been funded by Monsanto for his 1999 book BioEvolution. "Courageous journalists that they are, Scripps dropped Fumento without even contacting him to determine the truth or falsity of the claim of bias leveled against him in a Business Week column," Caruba complained.

    Arguing that the book was accurate Caruba described the Businessweek article as "nothing to do with his ethics and everything to do with a leftist attack intended to smear his reputation and hopefully remove a leading critic of environmentalism and other manifestations of dubious science intended to frighten people."

    ...*sigh* Another liar...

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  10. Anonymous4:41 PM

    So, how have you believers changed your lifestyle to reduce your CO2 output by 40%?

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  11. I got rid of my car and take transit or taxis, and rent a car when I need to. It's much cheaper.

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  12. Anonymous3:32 AM

    They hate being called "deniers," yet they love using the word "hoax."

    Maybe this "hoax" was actually the creation of the US National Academy of Sciences who issued the Charney Report way back in 1979 (and several reports since then, all affirming the science). But it's more effective for "skeptics" to wave the blue and white flag of the UN with its black, black helicopters.

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  13. Anonymous9:57 AM

    Bow down to your Holy Grail, your Holy Hockey Stick. Say prayers to your Saints Gore, Suzuki, et al. BELIEVE in AGW, you don't have to prove it, because it's your religion, and you should be free to worship it. Just don't try to teach your hokey slackjawed religion to others.

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