Wednesday, March 27, 2013

The "Hockey Stick" climate graph has been proved!

Remember the "Hockey Stick", the graph showing a long-term stable climate that all of a sudden started going way, way up in the last hundred years?  Remember the controversy about dodgy data and [ahem] novel statistical analysis techniques?  Well, there's a new peer-reviewed™ paper in Science magazine showing that this is absolutely, positively shows that it's a hockey stick, all right.

Yup, it's a hockey stick.  A peer-reviewed hockey stick.  Yup.  Sure is.

You may have seen this in the press.  The problem is, it's [ahem] bollox:
This instantly ‘famous’ 2013 Science hockey stick paper derived from Marcott’s 2011 Ph.D thesis at Oregon State University, available here. His thesis doesn’t show a hockey stick ‘blade’ projecting above its anomaly baseline NCDC 1961-1990. H/T to Jean S, posted at Climate Audit. Something changed after the thesis was published to produce the new ‘blade’ in Science. That something was significant, since the Science paper’s Supplementary Information discussion said it did not enable discriminating such a temperature variation (i.e. a ‘blade’) on such a short a time scale.
Just to level the playing field, the link above comes from Dr. Judith Curry's site.  Dr. Curry leads the climatology department at Georgia Tech, and come down on the "we're probably doing something to warm the climate" side of the argument.  You should read both of those links, which are about as "warm" (so to speak) for the warmist side as you're likely to see in a mainstream science blog.

So what do you see on the "denier" sites?  OMG:
As noted in my previous post, Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix disappeared two alkenone cores from the 1940 population, both of which were highly negative. In addition, they made some surprising additions to the 1940 population, including three cores whose coretops were dated by competent specialists 500-1000 years earlier.
Let me highlight that last sentence.  This paper took some proxies that showed rapidly increasing warming a thousand years ago - during the Medieval Warm Period - and redated them so that they show rapid warming now.  They arbitrarily added 1000 years to each data point, showing ZOMG industrial Thermageddon caused by burning carbon in today's factories when in reality the carbon would have been burned by monks in the day of William the Conqueror.

Let me say that again: this article shifted a number of warming proxy series by 1000 years to show that (a) the Medieval Warm Period didn't actually exist and (b) today it's ZOMGTHERMAGEDDON!

Let me say that again: they changed the data so that it was off by a thousand years.

Ahem.

And here's the punch line: this is a peer-reviewed paper published in Science magazine, probably the most prestigious scientific journal in the world.

Ahem.

So now we know that it's OK to do massive (thousand year) surgery on your data so long as you get an Approved™ result.  Go ahead, it'll still get published in Science.  But Sarah Palin is really dumb and ZOMGREPUBLICANWARONSCIENCE!!!eleventy!!!!!

Ahem.

Remember, even "luke warmist" sites are shooting this more full of holes than the 8th Air Force returning bombers in 1943.

At this point, every Progressive who ever said the words "Republican war on science" can just STFU and sit down in the back of the room.  Grown ups are talking.

1 comment:

Chris said...

TRUTH need not be factual, to progressives. Besides, (proper) feelings are more important than math and hard science.