The warmist's MO

Andrew Neil has been getting a hard time on Twitter, with Nuccitelli et al shouting that he is misrepresenting things but as usual presenting very little actual evidence to support his case.

There was another delicious example of this kind of thing overnight. Readers will of course remember the Economist's minor scoope about what WGIII were going to say about climate sensitivity. The article was heavily caveated as to the draft nature of the IPCC table concerned:

There are several caveats. The table comes from a draft version of the report, and could thus change. It was put together by the IPCC working group on mitigating climate change, rather than the group looking at physical sciences. It derives from a relatively simple model of the climate, rather than the big complex ones usually used by the IPCC. And the literature to back it up has not yet been published.

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Tamsin's SciFoo talk

Tamsin Edwards points us to the talk she wants to give at Google's prestigious SciFoo conference. It's called "Tea with the Enemy".

Some science has a bad relationship with the public: in particular, climate science and many life sciences. Whether due to misinformation or misunderstanding, controversy or contested results, politicisation or fear - or all of these - such scientific "hot potatoes" are dangerous because non-experts must engage with, trust, and understand scientific results to make well-informed decisions about themselves and society. They can also damage the reputation of science in terms of its impartiality or aim to improve human understanding and quality of life.

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Sheep or shepherd?

I had an interesting exchange with Marshall Shepherd, President of the American Meteorological Society today. Marshall had tweeted as follows:

Marshall: learned n strange emails/blogs some disagree with my #Tedx Talk, @MichaelEMann HockeyStick discredited (hasn't), & wx varies-gee "who knew"

In my usual polite way, I responded as follows:

Me: I attended a debate with a paleoclimate guy a few months ago. In q&a he was asked about hockey stick. He said "it's broken".

To which Marshall's response was this:

Marshall: @aDissentient why don't you ask @MichaelEMann

Marshall: @aDissentient and fyi, I generally don't debate anything that isn't published in the peer-review lit, best regards

Hardly a meeting of minds but it was all going rather well. Unfortunately at this point Mann himself joined in:

MichaelEMann @DrShepherd2013 Marshall, I don't engage disinformation-spewing trolls. It just encourages them...

Moments later, Shepherd blocked me.

Hmm.

The silence of the Manns

Judith Curry is highlighting a report by Emil Røyrvik of Norwegian outfit SINTEF, which looks at the climate wars in a not unbalanced fashion. Yours truly gets a mention:

[There are] allegations, not entirely unfounded (see section “Climategate” below), of for example seeking to “hide” the Mediaeval Warm Period (as well as the Little Ice Age) supposedly in an attempt to exaggerate and overstate the significance, unprecedentedness and man-made character of the current warming period. And when Mann in his book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” does not mention with a single word the comprehensive account and critique of the “hockey stick” made by Montford (2010) it just adds fuel to the fire.

I'm glad someone has picked up Mann's silence on Hockey Stick Illusion. It does cast Mann's protestations in an unfavourable light.

Mann libel case postponed

I just saw this on twitter:

Oral argument in Michael Mann's libel case against Nat'l Review, Mark Steyn, and CEI, Rand Simberg postponed until June.

First day in court

An email correspondent writes to say that he has learned that the first day of hearings in the Mann/NRO libel case will be on 11 April in the District of Columbia.

No joke - Josh 211

The Marcott FAQ at Real Climate has been causing comment over the Easter weekend, particularly at Climate Audit. Roger Pielke Jr also has an excellent post, aptly titled Fixing the Marcott Mess in Climate Science.

Roger writes in the comments:

"There are a few bad eggs, with the Real Climate mafia being among them, who are exploiting climate science for personal and political gain. Makes the whole effort look bad."

H/t to Anthony at WUWT for requesting this cartoon.

Posted by Josh

Well sampled science - Josh 209

Click image for a larger version

Apologies for the lack of cartoons this month but I have been snowed under (!) with the day job. Even sadder when the Climate Blogosphere has had so much hilarious material on offer. This cartoon was inspired by Steve McIntyre's posts on the Marcottian redating of cores. How do they get away with this stuff?

Cartoons by Josh 

Mann says "McIntyre"

Readers are no doubt aware that Steve McIntyre is back in the blogging saddle, taking a look at Mann's AGU talk from before Christmas and noting that its rhetorical effect relied upon some amusing presentational choices:

There were two components to Mann’s AGU trick. First...Mann compared model projections for land-and-ocean to observations for land-only. In addition...Mann failed to incorporate up-to-date data for his comparison. The staleness of Mann’s temperature data in his AGU presentation was really quite remarkable: the temperature data in Mann’s presentation (December 2012) ended in 2005! Obviously, in the past (notably MBH98 and MBH99), Mann used the most recent (even monthly data) when it was to his advantage. So the failure to use up-to-date data in his AGU presentation is really quite conspicuous.

Interestingly, Mann has now responded in person (rather than via say RealClimate). Intriguingly, he had decided to mention McIntyre by name, a rare and perhaps significant event I would say. One has to say, it did appear rather silly to refuse to do this.

Mann's response features a lot of huffing and puffing and conjuring up of unidentified "falsehoods", but through all the verbiage he seems to admit the point about the data stopping at 2005:

I will be updating my lecture slides, many of which are indeed somewhat out of date.

...although he is silent on the use of a land-only dataset to compare to land-ocean predictions.

Update on Mar 4, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Brandon Schollenberger has more at WUWT.

A new hockey team paper

There are lots of familiar names behind this new paper in JAMS - Rutherford, Mann, Wahl and Ammann. It seems that their infilling RegEm methodology has received some criticism. Apparently though, it "doesn't matter".

Smerdon et al., (2010) report two errors in the climate model grid data used in previous pseudoproxy-based climate reconstruction experiments that do not impact the main conclusions of those works (Mann et al., 2005; 2007a). The errors did not occur in subsequent works (Mann et al., 2009, Rutherford et al., 2010, and Schmidt et al., 2011) and therefore have no impact on the results presented therein. Results presented here for the CSM model using multiple pseudoproxy noise realizations show that the quantitative differences between the incorect and corrected results are within the expected variability of the noise realizations. It should also be made clear that the climate reconstruction method used in Smerdon et al. (2010) to illustrate the nature of the errors, RegEM-Ridge, is known to produce climate reconstructions with considerable variance loss and has been superseded by RegEM-TTLS in Mann et al. (2007) and subsequent works.

Kahan't see the wood for the trees

Dan Kahan has a problem with Michael Mann's review of Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise.

Frankly, I find the gap between Mann’s depiction and the reality of what Silver said disturbing. You’d get the impression from reading Mann’s review that Silver is a “Chicago School” “free market fundamentalist” who dogmatically attacks the assumptions and methods of climate forecasters.

I don't think this discrepancy is any kind of a surprise to readers here - it's the way the great Mann works. But it's certainly fun to watch Kahan grappling with the problem of what he calls a "great climate scientist" mispresenting the work of a sympathiser. You wonder if he has considered the possibility that Mann might misrepresent his critics too.

I mentioned The Hockey Stick Illusion in my comment, but I think the moderator at Kahan's site has not yet recovered from the New Year celebrations. No doubt it will appear in due course.

(As ever, please be nice if you decide to comment at sites I link to.)

The roadmap

This is a guest post by Chris Horner.

Information continues to flow in the struggle to bail out the Hockey Team, piecing together the relevant "context" to ClimateGate. This pursuit is of critical importance to he Team, and "the cause", given the solemn vow that this missing context would explain ClimateGate away as something other than "the worst scientific scandal of our generation". Despite this, and the eagerness of certain among the team to claim "exoneration" where sadly none exists, the Team don't seem to want to be helped.

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NRO wants help

The National Review Online is seeking assistance in fighting off Michael Mann's libel suit.

Donate here.

Virginia Mann

The story linking attempts by the University of Virginia to recruit Michael Mann to a professorial chair and attempts to get its president to resign refuses to die. Bacon's Rebellion, a specialist Virginia blog, reviews the evidence for and against.

Lonely old Mann

A group of prominent paleoclimatologists has written a paper rebutting one of Michael Mann's recent contributions to the scientific literature. The new paper was announced on the ITRBD Forum by Rob Wilson. The list of authors of the new paper is very long. Almost looks like they are ganging up on him. ;-)

In February of this year, Mike Mann and colleagues published a paper in Nature Geoscience entitled, "Underestimation of volcanic cooling in tree-ring based reconstructions of hemispheric temperatures". Their main conclusion was that a tree-ring based Northern Hemisphere (NH) reconstruction of D'Arrigo et al. (2006) failed to corroborate volcanically forced cold years that were simulated in modelling results (e.g. 1258, 1816 etc). Their main hypothesis was that there was a temporary cessation of tree growth (i.e. missing rings for all trees) at some sites near the temperature limit for growth. This implies Dendrochronology's inability to detect missing rings results in an underestimation of reconstructed cold years when different regional chronologies are averaged to derive a large scale NH composite.

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