Tuesday
Sep012015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill More Appell comedy gold
Sep 1, 2015 Climate: MWP The climate change world has, I think it's fair to say, been a little quiet recently, but thank goodness we have David Appell around to provide entertainment.
In his latest offering he announces a "long and useful list of studies that find a hockey stick from reconstructions of paleoclimate data".
Sounds interesting. Here's one of them.
;)
I have to say, an ice hockey team armed with sticks shaped like that would be a sight to behold.
Josh?
Reader Comments (174)
I'm astounded that this buffoon continues to find ways in which to beclown himself further.
What's the dots at the end? Is that the puck flying off?
Perhaps it's Mr Appell losing his grip?
"What's the dots at the end?"
Bristles mate! That's them dodgy bristles, can't trust 'em, dead ringers they are. Go flying off in all directions!
Hiding the decline is highlighted. How deliciously ironic!!
Do we know how the cited 2010 paper by Ljungqvist was received by the climate science establishment given that it asserts that the Roman and Warm Medieval Periods were very close to the present in mean decadal temperature?
I wonder what explanation David is going to come up with to try to explain the warm temperatures around 1000AD, because if I understand him correctly (and that is not as easy as it sounds) the only explanation for the alleged rapid rise (0.7C in 100 years?) in the late 20th century temperatures is the 'super-exponential' rise in anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 emissions. I'd also like to know what he thinks caused the much higher temperatures in the Roman Warm Period, the Iron Age and also during the Holocene Climatic Optima, when there were also ice-free seas in summer at least off the north coast of Greenland.
.
"What's the dots at the end?"
They are the instrument data grafted onto his proxy data.
Usual issues:
The proxies are unreliable recorders of temperature (too many other influences)
The proxies are all low pass filtered with a period of around 169 years (according to the author) so filter out all the rapid changes
The overlap of the proxy series and the instrument series is too short to get an accurate calibration
The instrument series is not low pass filtered
The graph appear to conveniently end in the year 2000
Where does the link lead to? I've been some bad places but I'm not going to click on it if it goes to his blog.
Right now, Appell is playing with his broken hockey stick in Roy Spencers's stadium: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/08/summer-snow-to-greet-obama-on-alaska-climate-trip/#comment-198415
The link goes to the referenced paper
He graced my blog one day wailing about sea level rise and the 'trillions' for mitigation. I believe I showed a video of the 'baddie' security guard being run over by a steam roller (in very, very slow motion, which left henchman with plenty of time to scraper-hence the joke) from the first Austin Powers movie. Not seen him since. 110% troll ;)
As stewgreen noted earlier on Unthreaded, David has also been commenting over at Pierre's:
Gross Suppression Of Science …Former NOAA Meteorologist Says Employees “Were Cautioned Not To Talk About Natural Cycles.
A really interesting graph. I followed the link above the graph to the original paper and read the conclusions. These two sentences put it into perspective very well:
"Since AD 1990, though, average temperatures in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere exceed those of any other warm decades the last two millennia, even the peak of theMedieval Warm Period, if we look at the instrumental temperature data spliced to the proxy reconstruction. However, this sharp rise in temperature compared to the magnitude of warmth in previous warm periods should be cautiously interpreted since it is not visible in the proxy reconstruction itself."
This is probably one of the best cases for natural variability I've seen in a while.
The Appell of my eye, boyo! Keep up the good work, showing Climate Alchemists may be good sports' fans but are bloody awful scientists and liars.
Imagine that. The climate was changing before 1950. How could that be?
I was under the impression that there are lots of 'studies' that prove a Hockey stick, the problem is they are all the same statitically incapable people using crap proxies and confirming each others mistakes.
This is very much Joshable
Proving something in Climate Science is easy, when all the other Climate Scientists peer review it and say it is great.
David Appell belittles people who are not Climate Scientists, who do not believe him.
There is an error here, but do not expect a Climate Scientist to spot it.
It's time for the referee to send him off the ice for the rest of the game, major game misconduct, and for the sport executive board to hand him an indefinite suspension for playing with a none compliant stick. Bozo that he is, he doesn't even make "grinder" level for the team.
The Appell is a comedy cavalcade that keeps on giving:
Aug 19 - Appell at his own blog in the comments on his correction/apology for the Steyn smear:
"Thanks, but on second thought, no. I'm not interested in spending more time discussing the hockey stick, which is now established thru the scientific literature...........The hockey stick is an old subject, the science has moved on......"
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/08/mark-steyn-says-he-quoted-email-in-full.html
He then proceeds to move on from the Hockey Stick by making a blog post about the Hockey Stick on Aug 21....
....and another on Aug 22....
......and another on Aug 27 (where he actually includes an exchange with Phil Jones who very politely tells him to (in effect) pull his head out of his backside).....
.....and another on Aug 30.
Whether he's boasting to be a clever sock puppet out of one side of his mouth while out of the other side claiming he always comments under his real name........
.......or taking credit for sidestepping facts........
.......or asserting that he's moving on from the magic Hockey Stick before making four Hockey Stick-centered blog posts within a week and a half........
.....he's the absolute best example of an alarmist that the reality-based community can cite as dishonest, deficient and delusional.
Isn't that Cassiopeia?
(For those not familiar with Cassiopeia, she's the set of stars that look like two breasts in the sky).
MikeHaseler 6:34 PM
TWO breasts??
This is a very good hockey stick graph, previous temperatures have been higher and there are many 'rapid' rises of temperature in the past.
Whats not to like?
Qld shopkeeper held up with hockey stick
"Two boys have run off empty handed after trying to rob a Queensland convenience store armed with nothing but a hockey stick."
http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/08/31/11/27/qld-shopkeeper-held-up-with-hockey-stick
I've always wondered. When proxies are calibrated, what are they calibrated to? Do all the adjustments to station data and global series, make a difference? Are proxies periodically recalibrated?
What, no post-2000 data on the graph?
One bosom.
Whilst "Obama on ice" is as sure footed as Bambi was, in Walt Disney's classic, it is worth noting that in about 1850, the arctic ice almost reopened for the North West Passage to be sailed, leading to various expeditions, including the ill fated Franklin.
How is it that none of these reconstructions show any notable rise in temperature, which matches this historical fact? We are informed by experts that Arctic ice is an important feature of global warming, but clearly nothing much happened in the 1840's-55ish, despite the ice melting back. I guess it just cooled off, and came back. But I am no expert.
'HMS Investigator 1848' is a good Google search tipping point. A sailing ship, with no engine please note!
Mk1 eyeball says -- @ 1700ish on that HS
= not enough beds for the alarmists to wet I hazard.
Goodness me.
He's a real keyboard-smasher, isn't he?
edwin writes-
"The proxies are all low pass filtered with a period of around 169 years (according to the author) so filter out all the rapid changes."
Good catch. Even though many of the proxies claim annual resolution, there is a large uncertainty in absolute dating of the proxies. As the authors state in their paper-
"The dating uncertainty of proxy records very likely results in “flattening out” the values from the same climate event over several hundred years and thus in fact acts as a low-pass filter that makes us unable to capture the true magnitude of the cold and warm periods in the reconstruction (Loehle 2004). What we then actually get is an average of the temperature over one or two centuries."
So what does the 1850 - 2000 instrumental record look like if we pass it through the same low pass filter with a time constant of 100 - 200 years? A lot flatter I suspect.
Did the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire lead to a decline in temperatures, or did the decline in temperatures lead to the decline in Roman Civilization? Classical Historians would love to know whether they have to rewrite history to match climate science's demands.
The peak around 1000AD, will also cause people to reconsider whether the Norman invasion in 1066, was not evidence of early climate refugees, taking over another country, and hence changing history.
The survival of the Holy Hockey Stick depends on Climate Scientists rewriting the historical record. It is as easy as Climate Science, if in doubt, make it up!
Despite being constantly informed about this, Appell (and others ... He isn't alone by any means) fails to understand that the main problem with the hockey stick isn't the (instrumental overlay) blade, it is the handle.
(There is also a problem with the blade, but it is a different problem - one which does, however, cast additional doubt on Mann's "handle".)
And that is why he genuinely believes that studies which replicate the blade - but not the handle - "validate" Mann's "hockey stick".
Sometimes I'm reminded of the famous quote: "you can never make somebody understand anything which his job depends on his not understanding".
I am confused by this post.
Is the Bish saying that that the LJUNGQVIST curve (pictured above) is a dodgy hockey stick ?
I know it has some spliced stuff but it does show the warm/cold/warm/cold/warm sequence that non paleo climate sources [historical,archaeological etc.] suggest such a curve might be credible.
It reminds me of a double re-curve bow (typical of Mongolian horsemen)
So is the Ljunngqvist bow a better weapon than the Mannian hockey stick?
Our old friend ATTP is calling you a "pedant" for posting this.
Seems that (as I mentioned above) Appell isn't the only one who has failed (refused?) to understand the issues regarding the "hockey stick".
Nic
The main issue with the hockey stick is, and always has been, the stick - not the blade.
One of my favorite so-called hockey sticks was Steig bladeless series illustrated here:
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/steig-2013-figure-3.png?w=1020&h=692
(See post http://climateaudit.org/2013/04/23/steigs-bladeless-hockey-stick/ ) Steig had referred to it in a RC post called "Ice Hockey" http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/04/ice-hockey/ but, for some reason, didn't show the series in his post.
Andrew:
I can definitely understand why you are hurt from having your book and claim-to-fame proven irrelevant in three simple mathematical steps. That's gotta sting.
As ATTP wrong on my blog, the Ljundqvist 2010 graph is for the NH extra-tropics (90N - 30N) only.
He also points out "the paper explicitly says
"This amplitude is considerably larger than that in the pioneering reconstructions (e.g. Jones et al. 1998; Mann et al. 1999; Crowley and Lowery 2000) which were hampered by a very limited and unevenly dis- tributed set of proxy data.""
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2015/08/36-hockey-sticks-and-counting.html?showComment=1441142729326#c3154176873707391767
WFC wrote:
"The main issue with the hockey stick is, and always has been, the stick - not the blade."
Which is exactly the part of the HS graph my arguments shows isn't surprising, but required by the laws of physics.
WFC wrote:
"Despite being constantly informed about this, Appell (and others ... He isn't alone by any means) fails to understand that the main problem with the hockey stick isn't the (instrumental overlay) blade, it is the handle."
Wow -- you haven't understood the first thing about my argument.
I haven't said a word about the stick. My argument is about the large and rapid warming shown in the blade -- the most important part of the hockey stick.
The reconstructed hockey sticks shows no evidence for a global MWP. Ironically, if they had, it would make our current situation WORSE, for it would show our climate is much more sensitive to forcings than we think. That would make the risks we face from manmade GHGs even higher.
David Appell, you keep posting Marcott et al as support for your faith that the uptick (blade) is exceptional. But it isn't known to be in any way unusual. There is no study that shows the current rise as being strange.
Will you now please acknowledge that you misunderstood the evidence of Marcott et al and that Mann is not supported by that paper? It is not a study that shows the current rise as being strange.
If not... well - please acknowledge that you are a zealot, not a rational person.
According to the graph, something really big happened around 1690 to change the downward trend into something resembling the blade of a hockey stick. This was long before the Industrial revolution.
Keen students of scientific history will know that Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking 'Principia' in 1687. Did his peers and rivals all have to burn barrels of midnight oil to keep up? Obviously midnight oil releases far more CO2 than daytime oil, due to the superexponential fairy effect.
"David Appell, you keep posting Marcott et al as support for your faith that the uptick (blade) is exceptional. But it isn't known to be in any way unusual. There is no study that shows the current rise as being strange."
Define "strange."
"Will you now please acknowledge that you misunderstood the evidence of Marcott et al and that Mann is not supported by that paper?"
Misunderstood what?
"If not... well - please acknowledge that you are a zealot, not a rational person."
If you expect further replies, you'll stick to the science and can the insults.
I always find this claim of simple physics for a complex chaotic system to be very strange, Mr Appell claims simple physics means:
> Global temperatrure [sic] change is proportional to changes in radiative forcing.
Since averaging temperature made no sense when I took physics, I don't see how a "Global temperature" can be claimed to be any sort of physics.
climatebeagle wrote:
"Since averaging temperature made no sense when I took physics...."
Ridiculous. The average of any scalar field S(x,y,z) over a surface A is defined as
<S> = (1/A) {integral over A} S(x,y,z) dA
David Appell, why is it so important to climate science to prove there was no MWP, when all evidence prior to the Hockey Stick established there was a MWP?
Why should valid work outside Climate Science be sacrificed for the sake of Climate Science?
You can choose when your own history started, but not rewrite the history you choose.
"David Appell, why is it so important to climate science to prove there was no MWP, when all evidence prior to the Hockey Stick established there was a MWP?"
What evidence?
David Appell, you appear to unfamiliar with statistics, completely unfamiliar. In fact the "stick" of the Hockey Stick is exactly what you would expect if a load of poorly correlated "proxies" are thrown together; the variances are random and thus a relatively straight line is produced. It has nothing to do with "physics" as such expect that you can attempt to draw a correlation, but, as I'm sure people have told you before, correlation is NOT causation. And especially not (as I'm sure your cognitive dissonance will chime in here and you will want to dispute this) with data that has been statistically manipulated first.
You have failed to understand Mann 1998 & 1999 completely. There is nothing surprising about the blade at all. They selected data that correlated to 20th century temperature records and weighted it by the degree of correlation. Using that method it is impossible not to have a rapid rise. The key is that these studies purported to show that this recent warming was "unprecedented". You are clueless about the intent of the study but claim to defend it ! And you cite Wahl & Amman in support, but W&A include the R2 statistic showing that almost the entire "stick" is statistically insignificant. You can argue whether RE is a reasonable yardstick, but having performed an R2 test, it is fraudulent to omit the result in a paper where it disagrees with the conclusion if you also cite it where it supports your conclusion. Mann did exactly that by citing R2 in support of his 1815 step. Why do you support fraud ?
And further, you continue to ignore another elephant in the room, on what basis can you claim that the Bristlecone Pine proxies that are essential to the Mann reconstructions are temperature proxies ? There's peer reviewed research (Gray & Idso) from 1993 "proving" that they are CO2 proxies, and nothing after that to refute that peer reviewed conclusion. The correlation of that proxy with LOCAL temperatures is not very high, in fact they are better correlated with local precipitation. Then there is a later far better controlled set of Bristlecone records, collected by Linah Ababneh that shows no such radical rise in ring widths. Conclusion, the Gray & Idso bristlecone proxies ARE NOT temperature proxies at all. If you wish to claim that they are correlated with some other temperature dependent measure, that must first be shown to exist.
Just for your education as you seem intent on remaining stunningly ignorant on the details, the Gray & Idso samples are probably neither CO2 or temperature proxies but are demonstrating a (probable) mechanical deformation related to the "strip-bark" phenomena. G&A appear to have preferentially sampled strip bark examples in the strip area and this shows anomalous results likely arising from the response of the trees to the strip bark process. The later and apparently more carefully collected Ababneh samples that do not include a high proportion of strip-bark trees has quite different properties. Ones that, BTW, are far better correlated with local conditions. It is also possible that the G&A data has been "unusually" detrended for growth effects, but I haven't looked at the details on this.
'As ATTP wrong on my blog, the Ljundqvist 2010 graph is for the NH extra-tropics (90N - 30N) only.'
Yup - comedy gold - please keep it coming.
Ed Snack wrote:
"In fact the "stick" of the Hockey Stick is exactly what you would expect if a load of poorly correlated "proxies" are thrown together; the variances are random and thus a relatively straight line is produced. It has nothing to do with "physics" as such expect that you can attempt to draw a correlation."
More misunderstanding. My physics-based argument pertains to the blade, not the handle.
It was the blade -- a rapid increase in temperatures relative to the several hundreds of years before -- that was so notable about the hockey stick -- a clear sign of the anthropogenic signal.