How a new hockey stick was created to coincide with the next IPCC Report – and still on cue to be an icon. Another piece of doomsaying full of environmentalist gibberish. It all started with a PhD on paleoclimate but for some reason grew legs – and a very sharp uptick in temperature that led to lots of swooning by the CAGW types and general over excitement..
The paper was published in the journal Science and the suspicion is that the uptick came as a result of the anonymous reviewers who may have encouraged the authors to spice things up a bit as it seems originally to have been a somewhat run of the mill paper. If so the usual villains would be implicated – but various conspiracies are going the rounds, and who knows, they could have genuinely produced it themselves with no help from the older guys. It's brought a lot of discussion about methodology, the use of proxy data and the smoothing of that data in order to achieve a long term trend rather than a multitude of spikes (the usual pattern in such graphology). Whatever, the fuss has hardly reached the ears of the mainstream media and Joe Public is largely switched off altogether from all things climate (warming, change, or cold). As such, the paper has achieved its purpose – providing music for the ears of the faithful, and all things clinging to the gospel.
For a flavour of the deed, but too late by far, go to www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13498/ or http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-clima…
Spiked makes the point those most keen on clamping down on greenhouse gas emissions are the very same as those that demand an end to the debate. The science is settled – leave us alone to fill our pockets (might be added to that). Sceptics, in their view are deniers, flat earthers, and reactionaries … not sure what is worst. Meanwhile, we may again note that the world is heading downhill very fast towards a real calamity – not the imagined one found on computer screens. One that will have a direct line back to all those earnest climate activists and the CAGW policies so eargerly adopted by politicals looking for money to fill the coffers they have wantonly emptied. All it takes is a couple of poor world harvests and the continuance of the biofuels gravy train. Sadly, it will be the same people doing the bleating, blissfully ignoring their own guilt. May be there is a hidden agenda – reducing the global population, and what better and quicker way than mass starvation. There is definitely a bad odour about.
Over at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/03/proxy-spikes-the-missed-message-in… … is an attempt to turn the paper inside out by using analogy. Not sure it works but it does explain the difference between low resolution and high resolution methodology. This is one of a succession of papers on Marcott's offering and most of them have been attempts to understand how they produced the sharp uptick in temperature in the 20th century. This has now been achieved but in this post the use of analogy is used to get the hows and whys across to those that have not fully grasped what has been going on. In this instance, low resolution smoothing was used to achieve a long term trend. This means the spikes have been polished off the finished product – an 11,000 year climate trend (dating from shortly after the end of the Younger Dryas in order to miss the real and actual sharp uptick at that point). That was how the paper was presented as a PhD. However, after submission to Science, or at some point prior to pubication, the addition of the uptick in the 20th century was stuck on the end of what was a low resolution graph. After criticism the authors accepted the uptick was not robust and posted on a CAGW blog what they decided were some FAQs that might ward off further criticism. The climate science peopel seem to have corralled the wagons and gave out the message, as thermometer records in the 20th century support an uptick the sceptics are making a lot of noise about nothing. What they did not tell anyone is that thermometer data is high resolution and sticking it on the end of a low resolution graph was a mite naughty, engineering a fallacy.