I really do think it way past time we stopped citing all these 'climate scientists' as if they were possessed of some sort of latter-day papal infallibity. In this I tend to agree with David Evans in his cogent rejoinder, "Data trumps theory."

My question here is concerned with why is so much climate data so very difficult to access? Even though much of it, certainly not all of it, is ostensibly public, members of the public require advanced research skills of their own to get even hold of it much less read it.

Given ready access to the data, it might then be argued that trained interpretation is required. I'm prepared to accept that to a point, except to suggest that there are far more out here well-enough trained in and familiar with protocols for handling data than is being assumed, and certainly far more who could help with advising and educating the public assuming we could all get onside finally.

But what we are getting is all this stuff filtered endlessly through the media by untrained journalists looking to tug at the public heart-strings instead of reliably informing them, and in doing so sell advertising into the bargain. In turn, we are further having to deal with all this whinging and wimping out over so-called battalions of marine 'climate deniers' at war with boy scout troops of 'climate scientists', all by email no less.

No wonder it is increasing difficult to take much of this seriously, even beyond public disaster weariness. I doubt that most of the reason for falling levels of public support for the reality of anthropologenic climate change is their minds are wandering off the topic, seeking something more interesting and engaging than the crap they are fed.

I continue to argue that climate change is not the only anthropogenic effect on the planet, it is fundamental and widespread across all areas of human engagement, with everything. How do you get that across without the culture of blame and retribution already disturbing our ability to manage, again propagated by 'climate scientists' and their political activist cohorts?

If nothing else, the whole thing has been a PR nightmare with nobody to point the finger at but the 'climate scientists' themselves. Except, it's far more than that. Constant negativity, perpetually bad news and portents of catastrophe inevitably inculcate helplessness, when in fact we are managing very well and have made good progress in so many areas.

How about some good news for a change? How about promoting the good work people are doing successfully heading off disaster, tangibly reducing risk, and further enhancing productive output beyond sustainability into prosperity in otherwise potentially high-risk environments?

If there is one thing we are very good at here in Australia it's that. Some of the turnaround over the past 20-30 years has been nothing short of miraculous (supposing we believed doom-sayers instead of simply getting on with the job) except nobody hears of it much beyond Landline, and then some.

Conclusion, close down the newspapers and switch off the television, open our university science faculties to public scrutiny, and require climate scientists to undertake professional development in English, Media and Communications over in the Arts Building. Lawyers and others have to do it, why not scientists?

That's the very point of The Conversation, at least getting public debate somewhat back on track finally, isn't it?

That would help an awful lot right now . . . . .

There is a saying which has proven to be absolutely true: "Tell a lie and it is heard around the world in second and is believed> Tell the truth with facts and it takes a century to be heard and believed!
Every one of the supposed proves of Mann-made global warming has been shown to be false. The ocean is raising- check Dutch 200 years of continuous reading show that the ocean level is dropping. Global temperatures have been dropping for the last 10 years. Ocean acidification is cause by underwater sources and have nothing to do with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. And on and on, every global warming claim has been disproved. The real cause of "climate change is variation of Solar output. The list of astrophysics that are speaking out on this is growing longer each day.
Hockey Stick Was Refuted Before Its Fabrication – Study Ignored – IPCC And Mann Took World On 10-Year Joyride
By P Gosselin on 17. June 2012

Geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt found a Japanese tree-ring temperature reconstruction from 1995, one that should have been heeded by the IPCC and Michael Mann before they took the world on a 10-year joyride in the stolen car of “climate science”.

Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age found far, far away from the North Atlantic, before the IPCC took the world on a 10-year joyride.

====================================================

Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age as a local, North Atlantic phenomenon: Since when is Japan located in the North Atlantic?
By Sebastian Lüning & Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated with permission, copyright English text NoTricksZone)

Leading representatives of the IPCC tried for years to have policymakers and citizens believe the per-industrial temperature history was more or less uneventful and was the ideal climate condition that we should all strive to maintain. The warming of the 20th century, on the other hand, was completely unusual, something dangerous. However, as we now know, the page turned a few years ago and the notorious Hockey Stick chapter ended. The flawed curve was taken off the market and the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age reappeared.

As is often the case in history, it is in retrospect difficult to comprehend how this historical joyride could have happened to begin with. It started at the end of the 1990s with a doctoral thesis by Michael Mann, and did not end until about 10 years later – thanks to the discovery of the scientific scandal by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (see the book The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford). Today it is difficult to fathom how the main players and proponents of the Hockey Sticks are still able to act as experts and public opinion shapers.

One of the main excuses used back then was that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in Europe and North America were local phenomena. At other locations on the planet the temperature anomalies were more than evened out (e.g. Stefan Rahmstorf, Gerald Haug). For years we had to listen to their tales and we had to trust these “specialists” for better or for worse. Moreover, we paid them with our tax money so that they could deal exclusively with the climate and carry out the tedious work all this entails.

However, anyone who knew a little something about the scientific literature soon began to wonder. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age as a local North Atlantic phenomenon? A nutty claim. Naturally these characteristic temperature fluctuations had been described for other parts of the world. Here we report on a case study from Japan which had appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters already in 1995, in other words, in the years before the Hockey Stick episode.

In the early 1990s, Japanese scientists Hiroyuki Kitagawa and Eiji Matsumoto extracted eleven tree ring cores from cedars on the South Pacific Japan island of Yakushima. The cores contained tree-rings going back some 2000 years. The researchers determined the carbon 13 isotope values and found the delta-13-C values fluctuated in a characteristic manner (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Temperature reconstruction for the South Japan island of Yakushima based on the C-13-isotopes. Attention! Temperature axis is inverted: cold temperatures are up and warm temperatures are down. Figure supplemented as to Kitagawa & Matsumoto (1995).

What did these fluctuations mean? Carbon-13 amount is influenced by a number of factors, among them temperature. The Japanese scientists calibrated the isotope development on trees of different elevations (and thereby temperature level) above sea level. Using this method they were able to come up with a formula that could be used for computing the temperature value using the isotope change. The results showed that temperatures over the previous 2000 years in South Japan fluctuated over a range of 5°C. The course of the temperature fluctuations takes on a shape that is very well known to us (see Figure 2). A clear millennium cycle is depicted. The cold period of the Migration Period, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warm Period are clearly recognisable. Moreover, this climate development is well documented in Japanese historical records.

Therefore, it is incomprehensible that with the clear Japanese data from the year 1995, the talk of a “local North Atlantic phenomenon” would go on for years after the data’s publication.

Figure 2: The same curve as Figure 1, but reinverted (up is warm, down is cold ) with the known warm and cold periods labelled. Völkerwanderungs-Pessimum = Migration Cold Period, Mittelalterliche Wärmeperiode = Medieval Warm Period, Kleine Eiszeit = Little Ice Age, Moderne Wärmeperiode = Modern Warm Period.

The two Japanese scientists even took it a step further. They carried out a detailed frequency analysis of their data and found characteristic cycles with periods in the range of several decades and centuries. Among others, they discovered a period of 187 years, which coincides with the known Suess/de Vries solar activity cycle. In a similar manner the 70 and 89-year Gleissberg-cycle was identified. In their results the authors saw a clear sign that the climate of the last 2000 years in southern Japan was predominantly influenced by solar activity fluctuations. The IPCC appears not to have been at all interested in the study. Indeed it did not fit with their climate catastrophe picture.

Posted in Hockey Team, IPCC, Paleo-climatology | 9 Responses
9 responses to “Hockey Stick Was Refuted Before Its Fabrication – Study Ignored – IPCC And Mann Took World On 10-Year Joyride”
P Gosselin
17. Juni 2012 at 13:52 | Permalink | Reply
If climate science had the same rules and standards as the securities and financial instruments industry, the SEC would have hauled the IPCC insiders to court long ago. Blatant to no end!
John Barrett
17. June 2012 at 14:00 | Permalink | Reply
Question
1 : Is Carbon 13 a good analogue for temperature ?

2 : Did Biffra et al use such a method or did they just use the size of the rings and extrapolate from there ?

Love that nosedive in temperatures circa 1300, it makes the historian in me turn cartwheels.

DirkH
17. Juni 2012 at 14:53 | Permalink | Reply
MBH98, the original hockey stick, was ring width only, postprocessed by Mann’s decentered PCA as documented by Steve McIntyre.
Ric Werme
17. Juni 2012 at 15:05 | Permalink | Reply
The major moves in this curve are reflected in a recent long term Tibetan tree ring series, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/07/in-china-there-are-no-hockey-sticks/

The 2485 year record is long enough to permit Fourier analysis on the first half replicate the temperature record of the second half and forecast a temperature decline from 2006 to 2068 that wipes out the warming of the last century.

It would be very interesting if the same analysis was done to the Japanese record.

Ed Caryl
17. Juni 2012 at 15:15 | Permalink | Reply
You can do the frequency analysis by eye. The 350 – 400 year cycle is clearly visible.

Ric Werme
18. Juni 2012 at 03:27 | Permalink | Reply
Yeah, but my eyes don’t tell me if this series is calling for cooling from 2006 to 2062!

Ed Caryl
18. Juni 2012 at 15:41 | Permalink | Reply
The Little Ice Age began about 1600. Add 400 years.
Mindert Eiting
17. Juni 2012 at 23:33 | Permalink | Reply
Paleoclimate studies may be of a high quality. Sometimes, I think that the hockey stick is a personal tragedy. Mann’s doctoral thesis would have been forgotten, if he would not have become the poster boy of the IPCC. Suppose, that you had to defend your doctoral thesis for the rest of your life and had to write after many years a book in order to justify it. Almost all articles and books reside in our museums, which is the consequence of a healthy science.
Mervyn
18. Juni 2012 at 15:50 | Permalink | Reply
As a professional auditor, I remain puzzled how company directors can face prosecution for engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct by knowingly releasing reports to the market place that are seriously flawed if not fraudulent… yet the climate change charlatans (the IPCC and its assisting cabal of snake-oil salesmen scientists) can issue reports of greater consequence to the world, which are knowingly biased and flawed, and contain blatant errors and anomalies, but they still remain ‘untouchables’! There is something immoral and corrupt about that.

Hi Daryl,
That's an important post. As a burnt out peak oil activist who helped set up a group that eventually briefed the NSW Cross Bencher's on peak oil way back in 2005, I feel your pain. But what *if* that fracking gas can offset oil in the quantities claimed? What do you make of Thomas Freidman agreeing that America may soon need to join OPEC? Surely if the enormous quantities claimed pop up all over the place in peer-reviewed journals, there's got to be some credibility to them? I'll need to check what the ASPO guys say about it all after their conference this year.