82 thoughts on “The Hockey Stick”

    1. Someone’s a little touched. Read the update at your link. You got it wrong.

      Moreover, this is immaterial. You can find all the sympathetic voices you like to support your claim that the Hockey Stick is sound. But, what matters is what Rand et al. believe to be true, whether it is a reasonable belief, and whether the plaintiff suffered injury as a result.

      These two requirements are in opposition to one another. If their beliefs are reasonable, then there is no case. If their beliefs are unreasonable, then there is no injury.

      1. Rand’s link has a direct quote attributed to Overpeck. The claim is unsupported, using it at as quote is a lie.

        If their beliefs are unreasonable, then there is no injury.

        A stupid assertion, going on what you said in the other thread, your logic is:
        If Fred accuses John of being a pedophile and it’s a claim with no reasonable basis, there’s no injury to John.
        You assume mud doesn’t stick.

        1. Read the link.

          “If Fred accuses John of being a pedophile and it’s a claim with no reasonable basis, there’s no injury to John.”

          A stupid example. Nobody has accused anyone of being a pedophile here.

        2. You appear to have very little understanding of American jurisprudence. Read about the case here. You might well believe that accusing a prominent pastor of having sex with his mother in an outhouse, with no reasonable basis whatsoever, would be beyond the bounds of allowed speech. But, the SCOTUS disagreed.

          The case hinged on how likely a reader would consider the allegations to be true. The Court determined that few would, and there was therefore no, or at least negligible, injury.

          If Mann’s science were solid, few people would consider Rand or Steyn’s comments to be factual. Indeed, the only people who believe they are factual are the people who already agree with them. They have no impact on people who believe in Mann’s work, as your doggedness shows. If the science were solid, you would be in the comfortable majority, and the words would have negligible impact. Even as things stand, there is negligible impact. Rand and Steyn are preaching to the choir, and the choir members are already reading from the same music.

          1. I’m familiar with the Falwell case, are you claiming that Rand and Steyn’s accusations are so ridiculous that they constitute satire?

          1. 😉 fair point, the pedophile reference was unnecessarily hyperbolic, but the point stands; accusing someone of an action that is untrue doesn’t mean there’s no injury because it’s untrue.

          2. To me, this whole thing is rather silly. We have a strong first amendment tradition in the USA. It usually cuts across party lines but our friends on the left often take it to extremes which is why it is so boggling to see these same people not stand up for the first amendment now.

            Take a look at this article about Courtney Love being sued for defamation. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/courtney-love-wins-twitter-defamation-673972

            “”I was f***ing devestated [sic] when Rhonda J. Holmes esq. of san diego was bought off.””

            That statement makes some serious allegations about the integrity of her ex-lawyer.

            “Because the attorney was deemed to be a limited-purpose public figure as a result of her connection to a celebrity, Holmes needed to demonstrate that Love acted with malice…

            Love also testified that she believed her message to be true when she sent it. That might have been the prevailing defense. ”

            Mann’s suit is lawfare, a tactic common with radical environmentalists, and harassment. Bringing this suit is just as offensive as anything Rand wrote and actually brings real world harm to the defendants.

          3. “Did Rhonda Holmes prove by clear and convincing evidence that Courtney Love knew it was false or doubted the truth of it?”

            That is the legal hurdle Mann must surmount. Short of Noble Cause corruption infecting the entire chain of the judicial proceedings, he doesn’t stand a chance.

        4. Here are two articles which explicitly lay out a case that Mann’s work was shoddy and underhanded, and the investigations a whitewash. Being far more detailed than either Rand or Steyn’s quips, they should be far more injurious to Mann’s reputation. Yet, Mann is not suing Forbes. Why?

          Because he cannot hurt them as much, i.e., he is a bully who only picks on the relatively weak. And, because his hackles were raised by the Sandusky reference. Here, there is a direct linkage to the Falwell case. Would any reasonable person, on the basis of the quip, believe Mann was a child molester? Of course not.

          Take the Sandusky reference out, and this case is all about whether one has the right to form an opinion and criticize another person’s work. If you wish for a world in which criticism is forbidden, you may come to regret having wished for it.

          1. I don’t see any paleoproxy data and math or statistics in any of those two articles. You do win an award for willful ignorance, gullibility and stupidity though, the Dunning-Kruger award, lol.

          3. Here are two articles which explicitly lay out a case that Mann’s work was shoddy and underhanded, and the investigations a whitewash. Being far more detailed than either Rand or Steyn’s quips, they should be far more injurious to Mann’s reputation. Yet, Mann is not suing Forbes. Why?

            Maybe it’s because the articles don’t accuse him of “scientific fraud, or “torturing data” they only raise questions about the thoroughness of the inquires.

          4. Again, you are raising questions of decorum, not of the fundamental issue.

            The US Constitution does not require that people be polite to one another. The law bears no sanction for what some may consider boorish behavior. You are either arguing that Mann’s analysis is objectively proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or you have nothing.

          5. Maybe it’s because the articles don’t accuse him of “scientific fraud, or “torturing data” they only raise questions about the thoroughness of the inquires.

            Inquiries into “scientific fraud” and “torturing data”, or in short, scientific misconduct. Shouldn’t Mann sue his university for starting an inquiry whose very existence would cast a pall on his reputation? Shouldn’t Mann sue the people who hurled the charges that caused his university (and other organizations) to start such inquiries?

            It’s one thing for OJ to sue someone who made the first claim that he killed his wife. It’s one thing for OJ to sue the people who charged him with it. It’s quite another, at this late date, for OJ to sue a comedian or writer for using “and OJ did it” as a punch line, or asserting it as fact.

            And let us ask who has done the most to grievously injure Mann’s reputation over the short quip, which wouldn’t have been remembered for more than a day without his insanely stupid lawsuit. Indeed, I say worse things about Mann almost daily, but they don’t make headlines over and over again.

          6. Inquiries into “scientific fraud” and “torturing data”, or in short, scientific misconduct.

            No, they’re Inquiries to determine if there has been scientific fraud, scientific misconduct etc.

          7. Wait. You admit there were actual, official inquiries into charges of scientific fraud and misconduct?

            Progress!

          8. Progress!

            Sorry to be a spoil sport, but there were inquires, and I don’t have a problem acknowledging facts.

          9. there were inquires, and I don’t have a problem acknowledging facts.

            Will you acknowledge that Penn State investigated Sandusky in 1998, when he was still a coach, and ended up not filing any charges? You should, because it is a fact.

            So why should anyone conclude that if Penn State investigated Mann and found nothing wrong, that conclusively means Mann did nothing wrong?

            That’s the heart of the issue right there. Maybe Mann is wrong, maybe he isn’t, but an investigation by Penn State is not sufficient, which is how I read Rand’s comments at the time.

            If you think the point is that comparing Mann to Sandusky is unseemly, then you are missing another point. Sandusky’s crime is far worse than what Mann may have done, but PSU was willing to look the other way for Sandusky. If they would look the other way for Sandusky, then looking away from Mann is easy to believe.

  2. The brief overview of what “Mann’s method” -does- to the data should en expanded a bit to bring in ‘hide the decline’. This is actually a crucial bit of -intentional- deceptiveness.

    Briefly, Mann’s method takes 1,000(ish) separate scientific results, already published as valid in their own right. And discards down to about three. “Discards” is an overstatement, really ‘gives -very- little weight to’ – as is mentioned. The three (or so) chosen are “the best” because then happen to provide the best overlap with “real records” up to about 1960.

    There is a crucial assumption made: “Because these proxies are -so- good between (say) 1900 and 1960, we’re going to -assume- they’re good prior to 1900.”

    Nothing too shocking.

    …
    Except. Those exact same three proxies are complete crap AFTER 1960. The core ‘Bristlecone pines’ go -down- making a -decline’.

    That is: The assumption is PROVEN FALSE going in the -other- direction. It’s one thing to assume “This tree tracks temperature -sometimes-, and something else to assume this tree -always- tracks temperature.”

    They’re fundamentally using trees PROVEN to only track temperature SOMETIMES as if their were instead proven to always track temperature.

    Meaning that rerunning Mann’s -exact- method with the -new- up-to-date data would get three -new- “best treerings”. That really just shouldn’t happen. So… they memoryholed it, and were -quoted- doing it in their own internal correspondence “Let’s hide the decline”.

    And apparently we can’t even declare the bare -minimum- of what they’ve done to the data without running afoul of the censors because some of their (admitted!) buddies have said “No, we see no fraud here, he’s a good guy!” without actually performing competent investigations.

    1. That is: The assumption is PROVEN FALSE going in the -other- direction. It’s one thing to assume “This tree tracks temperature -sometimes-, and something else to assume this tree -always- tracks temperature.”

      Tree ring growth tracks the growth of trees. There are many climatic factors that can affect how much a tree grows in a year. Temperature can be one of those factors, but so can soil conditions, rainfall, and sunlight.

  3. Also, they mention that “feeding in random data still gets a hockey stick”.

    That’s true, but it’s not as thought provoking as this: Feeding in the -same- data, but upside-down and backwards still gets a hockey stick.

    1. But given his propensity to accidentally use data sets upside-down, isn’t that a plus?

      Mann: “As you can see in this graph of proxy temperatures versus time, from years zero to 2000…”

      Student: “Sir? Is that graph 0 to 2000 AD or 0 to 2000 before present, and is the proxy measure hotter toward the top or the bottom?”

      Mann: “I don’t recall – and due to my ingenious data handling methods it doesn’t affect the results anyway! Hey, are you really a student in this class who wants a passing grade or are you a shill for big oil, or perhaps a serial climate disinformer or a garden variety troll?”

  4. Great link Rand, good read and good summary. I’d forgotten that the red-noise discovery occurred before the bristlecone pine (“censored” folder) mess. This is perfect:

    of course the Hockey Stick disappeared if you stopped using Mann’s techniques and that you should carry on using Mann’s techniques and then you could get the Hockey Stick back!

    Give us back our hockey stick! And stop being so mean to such a great and benevolent man! I really can’t believe he wants to get anywhere near a situation where this can all be layed out for a judge or jury to contemplate.

  5. I seem to remember that Mann fought for years to keep both his data and his methods secret, only releasing bits as he was forced to do so. Since science is built upon repeatability of the experiments/studies by others, it seems to me that whatever Mann was doing back then, it had little relation to the commonly accepted definition of “science”.

    1. He’s still fighting. He hasn’t released any of the data requested in the Dr. Timothy Ball case, which is in limbo. It appears he is just trying to use the judicial system as a weapon to punish and silence critics.

      1. In real science, the way to silence critics is to produce good data and results. That approach seems to be outside Mann’s area of competence.

        1. In real science, the way to silence critics is to produce good data and results. That approach seems to be outside Mann’s area of competence.

          That only works if the “critics” are willing to fairly weigh the science, if they’re only interested in attacking the science because the results don’t suit them, no matter how good the data, there will always be room for creating doubt outside of being able to offer simple mathematical proofs, which isn’t possible in something as complex as climate science.

          1. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. The “science”, or the miserable excuse for it, has been weighed and found wanting. The “data” are especially bad, there having been no increase in the global temperature metric for 17 years, while CO2 concentration has increased an additional 30% above pre-industrial levels.

            Now matter how you wave your hands, you cannot say with any assurance what global temperatures will do in the future. At this point, the only reason for believing in AGW is religious in nature. You, and those who hold with you, are primitive throwbacks to a pre-Enlightenment era.

  6. The fact that the hockey stick has been utterly discredited and has been revealed to be junk science (a statistical method that produced the same results regardless of what data was fed to it) and the fact that so few people in the public are aware of that is the biggest shame of the climate science community. Science is supposed to be conducted in the open, it’s supposed to be honest. But with the hockey stick we see that a very influential piece of research has been invalidated almost in secrecy. If climatologists are so reluctant to address and correct errors on such a huge magnitude what other erroneous conclusions must they be flinching away from correcting? You can’t conduct science with one hand tied behind your back, even more so when it’s science that we’re supposed to be basing very serious public policy on.

    1. The fact that the hockey stick has been utterly discredited and has been revealed to be junk science (a statistical method that produced the same results regardless of what data was fed to it)

      Totally untrue, you need to examine the details rather than just running with the meme.

      1. The Hockey stick is not a statistical method, the shape of the graph is not the result of the statistical methods used.

        1. Well they’re certainly not the result of the data, unless you weed out all the data that doesn’t match the pattern they’re looking for. The Vostok ice cores don’t produce a hockey stick, nor do EPICA dome or the Greenland ice cores (GISP2), nor stalagmite reconstructions, foraminifera reconstructions, nor much of anything else that wasn’t a magical tree selected, averaged, smoothed, spliced, grafted, and plotted by Mann.

          1. Loehle & McCulloch only covers up to 1935, add the last 75 years and you get your hockey stick.

            Many studies have been done without tree rings since the MBH 1999 paper, the hockey stick stands.

          2. Um, no. For one thing, according to the hockey stick, the 1930’s would still be warmer than the medieval warm period, and the 1930’s are still vying for US temperature records even today (the difference being hundredths of a degree), so if there was a hockey stick, it would’ve shown up in his study.

            Here’s a graph from Judith Curry comparing 27 non-tree ring reconstructions with the output of “the team”. Notice that almost everyone but “the team” has the medieval warm period much warmer than present temperatures, which is why Vikings were farming wheat on Greenland.

            Or you could argue that temperatures really are a hockey stick, and we’ve gone up the blade and are now drifting down the tip, and temperatures will soon plummet down the bottom that rakes along the ice.

          3. Um, no. For one thing, according to the hockey stick, the 1930′s would still be warmer than the medieval warm period,

            Not true, the 1930 were 0.6C cooler than now, this puts the 1930’s temps below the peak of the MWP according to paleotemperature reconstructions.

            Not sure why you want to bring the 1930’s temperature from one particular part of the Earths surface into this, I wouldn’t go looking for unusually cool temperatures in South America or some place to try to cherry pick surface temperatures that look useful to me.

            There are thousands of non-tree ring data sets, the fact Curry can cherry pick 27 that suit her doesn’t impress me.

        2. “The Hockey stick is not a statistical method, the shape of the graph is not the result of the statistical methods used.”

          Man, you are clueless. This is not even a starting position.

      2. Andrew, on the earlier thread http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=53370 I posted numerous quotes from an important member of Skeptical Science who said that 1) McIntyre was correct, Mann’s work had been thoroughly discredited, 2) that he fought like a dog to avoid admitting it and tried to discredit anyone who disagreed, 3) that important people in the profession stay away from the Hockey Stick because it remains dubious. (If you’ll read the original thread at climateaudit you’ll find still more quotes from SkS people, including ones that say that no one has done a good job of making a hockey stick that really answers McIntyre’s objections. If you read further on climateaudit you’ll see constant dissections of paleo results. Basically no one has ever made a hockey stick without using the most dubious proxies as its basis.)
        Neither you nor anyone else answered.

        1. I didn’t answer it because it was irrelevant to the case, two of the claims you make now are untrue.
          ” McIntyre was correct, Mann’s work had been thoroughly discredited, ” is not something Way claimed.
          “that important people in the profession (should) stay away from the Hockey Stick because it remains dubious.” is not something Way claimed.

          1. Actually he said both of them, as anyone can see from the quotes. Though the second one was a slight typo, I meant, “important people in the profession (said to) stay away from the Hockey Stick because it remains dubious.”
            Whatever. Pretend he didn’t say it. Pretend that the public statements of SkS are the ones that count, because you like those better.

          2. The truth is that anyone who only follows sites like SkS will never know anything about the controversy about Hockey Stick and bad proxies. For that you have to follow climateaudit; RealClimate and Skeptical Science rarely link there, never link to rebuttals, and routinely hide effective comments. Climateaudit is the opposite, always providing complete access to everything said.
            There’s just no comparison if you care about getting both sides. Just read the history of Judith Curry’s transformation a few years ago, as she tried to write on both sets of blogs and gradually developed contempt for those public relations firms, and respect for McIntyre’s people.

          4. As I said before, I provided the quotes in full the first time, and you stayed away from them, though you answered many other comments. Now I am paraphrasing them, neither vaguely nor inaccurately. Let everyone judge for himself.

        2. And yet virtually every new proxy method (and they routinely come up with new and ingenious ones), recreates the Roman Warm Period and MWP as widely accepted before Mann and his team pushed the bogus hockey stick. Why is that? Are all the fossils just lies?

          Here’s a recent paper from Science (November, 2013) that shows that the Ocean Heat Content (OHC) during the MWP was much higher than today (0.65C warmer than present), and that the MWP was global in scope, from the North Pacific to the Antarctic. This matches up with research from South America (such as this) which shows that the MWP is very distinct there, so it can’t be confined to just “certain regions of the Northern Hemisphere”, as blogs like Skeptical Science still claim, and as do Mann’s supporters.

          1. I don’t doubt that the Ocean Heat Content was higher in the MWP than it is today, as the globe warms the OHC will lag behind, even with ~97% of the radiative imbalance making its way into the oceans each year.

            As I said earlier in the earlier thread “MBH 1999 shows NH temperatures warmer around 1000AD – 1250 AD than at any other time up to the early twentieth century (though with low confidence)”

            This whole Mann got rid of the MWP is a fiction, a result of people buying into the lie that Overpeck said: “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”

            Show me a quote from Mann that there was no MWP.
            If you can.

          2. Here, I’ll save you wasting your time:

            Separating forced from chaotic climate variability over the past millennium
            Andrew Schurer,1 Gabriele Hegerl,1 Michael E. Mann,2 Simon F. B. Tett,1 and Steven J. Phipps3

            Journal of Climate 2013 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00826.1

            Abstract
            Reconstructions of past climate show notable temperature variability over the past millennium, with relatively warm conditions during the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ (MCA) and a relatively cold ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA). We use multi-model simulations of the past millennium together with a wide range of reconstructions of Northern Hemispheric mean annual temperature to separate climate variability from 850 to 1950CE into components attributable to external forcing and internal climate variability.

          3. It’s in his graph. It was cool, then it got really cold, and then it warmed up. It’s a hockey stick.

            The reason they had to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period is that it was a climate optimum, and nobody would fear us going into an “optimum”. So the Medieval Warm Period had to be made to seem colder than present so that what we’re experiencing can be peddled as alarming, which it’s not (except for the recent cold snap that’s killing lots of people, because cold is deadly).

            So what they set out to do was sift through all sorts of samples to cherry pick a set of data that would show that the MWP was colder than present, even though Vikings still aren’t farming in Greenland and English wines still suck, if you ever manage to find one.

            All the “non team” reconstructions are going to keep showing that the MWP was warmer than present because it was, and the team’s antics will continue to bring discredit and shame on paleoclimatology and science itself.

            As for the 97% of heat imbalance that’s going into the oceans, I’m pretty sure that was made up just last year, or perhaps the year before. It didn’t appear in AR4 or any prior IPCC document. So if the ocean soaked up 0% of the heat imbalance and we only expected 2 to 4 degrees of warming, with the 97% suck up we should only expect 0.06 to 0.12 degrees of warming. Problem solved!

            Do those morons ever think more than one step ahead, or do they think spouting “97 percent!” is like reciting the Rosary in front of a vampire? As Judith Curry points out, we actually have very little idea what the Ocean Heat Content is doing. The heat is not going into the layers from the surface to 2000 meters, and our coverage below 2000 meters is wildly spotty. Physics also can’t explain how the heat can travel through 2000 meters of water without heating it up along the way. It’s just magic, or more accurately, a straw grasped in desperation.

            Funnier still, since the OHC was 0.65 C higher than present during the MWP and they’re currently bandying about thousandths of a degree increases, we can sit back an enjoy the optimal weather for another century, idly penning books on the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated.

          4. “The reason they had to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period…” a fiction.

            “So what they set out to do was sift through all sorts of samples to cherry pick a set of data that would show that the MWP was colder than present, even though Vikings still aren’t farming in Greenland and English wines still suck, if you ever manage to find one.”

            There’s plenty of farming going on in Greenland.

            I can easily understand wine being produced in England in Medieval times even if they weren’t very good, the imported alternative, given the cost of long distance transport back then, would have made the imported product damned expensive.

            “All the “non team” reconstructions are going to keep showing that the MWP was warmer than present because it was,”

            Great, prove it.

            “As for the 97% of heat imbalance that’s going into the oceans, I’m pretty sure that was made up just last year, or perhaps the year before.”

            AR4 covered sea level rise through thermal expansion, but if you don’t like that, just make sh!t up George.

            “the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetrated.”

            Congratulations, you qualify as a conspiracy theory nutter.

          5. Now that’s some funny sh*t!

            First off, Greenland’s farms can support dozens of people. They actually produced a handful of strawberries! They have a dozen sheep farms now.

            The farm temperatures in March on the bountiful Greenland farms runs about -20C (the little dash thing is a minus sign). They’re still dependent on food imported from Denmark.

            I’m sure you can easily understand wine being produced in England in medieval times, but it would require magic grapes that mature in freezing weather. The English didn’t quit producing wine because the English taste buds are so sophisticated (because the English would eat cardboard and wash it down with motor oil without complaint), but because they couldn’t get drunk off locally grown grape products, however vile, which is all that counts for the English.

            As for proving that the MWP was warmer than present, just about every climate scientist who is not a member of the team has done so, in some cases several times. But they don’t count because they don’t have the true faith in the one true church of the bitter bald guy who can’t do math.

            And the AR4 sea level rise was all based on the shallow ocean heating up. The deep ocean doesn’t figure into it because at deep ocean temperatures water is at the peak of the expansion and contraction curve, where it’s hardly affected by either warming or cooling. The AR4 predictions obviously didn’t pan out or they’d be pointing to increases in shallow heat content instead of deep ocean heat content.

            As it is, they can’t explain where the heat went, and I’m not inclined to tell them that I found the heat imbalance in the bottom of my sock drawer because then they’d try to make me a martyr and poster boy for global warming. When you hear that the MacGuffin is hidden in the only place you can’t look, you know that it’s a MacGuffin and completely irrelevant to the actual story. It’s just a plot device.

      3. Meme? Mann’s methods were designed to cherry pick data in order to provide the same result. The fact that they produce the “hockey stick” regardless of whatever junk is input to them is a serious problem and indicative of a faulty technique. A technique which has not seen use in any paper since then or by any other authors. Even the climatology community believes Mann’s hockey stick techniques are bullshit, but they don’t have the guts to publish papers smashing Mann’s “research” to pieces as they should. Mann’s technique produces a hockey stick result even if you feed it backwards and upside down data. Again, certain signs of a faulty methodology.

        And when you look at temperature data from proxies that have not been infected by willful intent to bias them towards “proving” AGW you see results that differ strongly from Mann’s paper. The fact that folks like you continue to defend what amounts to scientific fraud is nothing short of shameful.

        If you want to make a case for AGW, make a goddamn case, but if you have to resort to fraud and if you don’t have the balls to admit that some prior work has been roundly discredited then why should anyone take your opinions seriously? How can you possibly claim to scientific legitimacy with a track record like that?

        If you truly believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming then you should hang your head in shame for your defense of the hockey stick paper. Because by defending Mann’s junk science you are making it easier, far easier!, for others to assail the claims of AGW and for the public to disbelieve such claims.

        1. Robin, for the true believers, the fact that you can feed any data through Mann’s methods and generate a hockey stick is actually a plus, because it means that the truth can’t be hidden by mathematics. No matter how you feed in the data, the “truth” pops out.

          For them it’s kind of like seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, or going nuts and sculpting Devil’s Tower to meet the arriving alien mother ship. It’s so far from science it boggles the mind.

          1. You still haven’t given a link to the graph that uses the right technique on Mann’s data set, you know, the one the disproves the hockey stick graph.

          2. And why on Earth would anyone bother to use a “correct” technique on a tiny sample of cherry picked pine trees that were selected out of hundreds of candidates so that they would show exactly what Mann wanted to show, except that they didn’t really do it, which is why he had to hide the decline. According to his own trees, late 20th century temperatures are actually nosediving and we risk going into an ice age. That’s why he had to splice the data with the instrumental record, and then try to make sure nobody very prominent noticed or complained about it very much.

            So stop complaining and just behold the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.

          3. From the Wahl Ammann 2008 paper which uses the same data as MBH, but different statistical techniques.

            Our results do not support the large upward “correction” to MBH reconstructed 15th century temperatures described in MM03 (p. 766) and MM05b (p. 71), and leave unaltered the single-bladed hockey stick conclusion of strongly anomalous late 20th century temperatures.
            The conclusion of strongly anomalous late 20th century temperatures is retained even if the bristlecone/foxtail pine records were eliminated for the 15th century, because the maximum high excursion when following the MBH method (rescaling of RPCs) would be ∼0.35◦ during the entire 15th century, which is essentially the same as the highest values that occurred during the mid-20th century, but still well below late-20th century temperatures (scenarios 5d, 6a–b

            https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/cv/cv_pubs/wahl/NH-and-Climate-Field-Reconstruction-Papers/Wahl_Ammann_ClimChange2007.pdf

        2. And when you look at temperature data from proxies that have not been infected by willful intent to bias them towards “proving” AGW you see results that differ strongly from Mann’s paper.

          You mean the half assed papers published in E&E to “disprove” the hockey stick?
          Maybe you’re talking about articles published on “skeptic” blogs like WUWT, Climate Audit, and RealScience?

          Because you sure as sh!t aren’t talking about papers that have had the depth and breadth of analysis that goes into papers published in Nature and other top journals.

          Instead of trolling through skeptic blogs looking for things to buy into, how about you get your head out of your ass and check out the wider range of tested and reviewed information that’s available?

          Hell, I can answer that: because you don’t want to read anything that conflicts with what you want to believe.

          3. Would that be the NAS report in your link, which says:

            It concluded “with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries” [ed – that would be The Little Ice Age], justified by consistent evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies, but “Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from 900 to 1600”, and very little confidence could be assigned to hemispheric or global mean surface temperature estimates before about 900.

            “Very little confidence” about their reconstruction for the Medieval Warm Period. And that’s your link?

            And of course the problem is that the trees they keep using don’t track temperatures correctly, which is why they don’t match the late 20th century instrument record, which is why Mann had to “hide the decline.” They’re picking proxies that don’t respond to hot periods and then holding it out as proof that there were no prior hot periods. That’s not science, that’s crap.

          5. Andrew, no evasions, just answer the question, do you back the methodology of MBH98? Yes or no?

            Some questions don’t have yes/no answers Robin, for example:

            Are Americans bad people?
            A reasonable person couldn’t answer that yes/no, but a fanatic could.

            Is Obama ethnically an African?
            A reasonable person would point out his multiracial heritage, a fanatic wouldn’t delve so deep.

            The fact you think a yes/no answer is a sensible answer to your question is because you’re showing mindless fanaticism.

          6. Andrew, that’s bullshit. We’re not talking about abstract things, we’re talking about a scientific paper. If we can’t answer the question of whether or not a given methodology is fundamentally good scientific practice or not then well shit we should just pack up the whole fucking scientific revolution and shove it off a cliff because then we might as well just be farting around with shamans and witchdoctors and god damned homeopathic medicine.

            Let’s try some variants, you can answer any of these that you like.

            Did MBH98 deserve to be printed in a scientific journal? Yes or no?

            Is MBH98 worthy of being used as a reference in any other scientific paper (assuming that said paper is not refuting it)? Yes or no?

            Is the MBH98 methodology good science? Yes or no?

            If it’s not possible to judge even the validity of methods used in research then what the fuck value is there in peer reviewed journals? Isn’t that the entire purpose of peer review?

            How about this then?

            Did MBH98 deserve to pass peer review? Yes or no?

          7. From the Wiki link:

            At the press conference the three NRC panellists said they found no evidence supporting the allegations of inappropriate behaviour such as data manipulation, or “anything other than an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure”. Bloomfield as a statistician considered all the choices of data processing and methods to have been “quite reasonable” in a “first of its kind study”. He said “I would not have been embarrassed by that work at the time if I’d been involved in it”. In response to a question from Edward Wegman on the MBH use of principal components analysis, Bloomfield said this had been reviewed by the committee along with other statistical issues, and “while the issues are real, they had a very minimal effect, not a material effect on the final reconstruction.”

          8. Robin.
            Like any typical fanatic you’re trying to rationalize why you can label people as goodies and baddies, including me, tough shit, I’m not playing your game
            As the comments by Bloomfield above suggest, MBH98 and 99 were ground breaking efforts to get good results in a first of its kind study, but you’re not interested in the merits of a study that had some faults in the methodology, even though those faults “had a very minimal effect, not a material effect on the final reconstruction.” because you’re not interested in the science, all you’re looking for is a justification for whatever it is you want to believe and that requires that the study be dishonest and incompetent, so you look for reasons to believe that.

            Can you spell “confirmation bias”?

          10. You truly have no sense of irony, do you?

            what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, (or should that be what’s bad for the goose is bad for the gander?).

            Either way, the charge can be pointed both ways, or are you also living in that dream world in which climate “skeptics” can’t be wrong, because that would upset the natural order of things?

        3. Well, did you read McIntyre’s rebuttals to Wahl and Ammann? There were several at the time, and they’re easy to find.
          http://climateaudit.org/?s=wahl+and+ammann
          It’s no problem proving your point if you only read one side. I presume you know that these authors co-authored a number of papers with Mann, Bradley, Rutherford; it’s all the same group of people. Which doesn’t disqualify them, but it gives context.

          The answer remains about the same after ten years: all hockey sticks ever published, without exception as far as I know, depend critically on the same few dubious proxies. Leave them out, and there is no hockey stick at all. After every exciting new publication, McIntyre shows up with a post or two noting that those same proxies are in this study too, and that they are essential to the result. He generally also points out various proxies that showed no hockey stick, were nearby to the ones chosen, and were omitted for no obvious reason. There are a lot of “proxies” that just don’t show anything at all. Validation of temperature proxies has not gone well; there are too many confounding variables. Presumably those who only read RealClimate know nothing about this.

          1. Your demand for a multi-proxy study is interesting, because it’s the multi-proxy studies that introduced scientifically invalid methods and mathematically invalid statistical techniques. The error bars in our current measurements of planetary temperature are quite large, amounting to about a degree or more with honesty, yet with even more sparse data sets the certainty is claimed to be a tenth or a hundredth of that. As has been said, if trees are that accurate why on Earth do we use thermometers?

            At present each proxy has flaws and big error bars. Inventing novel, new, and invalid statistical techniques to somehow combine them isn’t going to shrink those error bars in a real way, and given that the climate has complicated modes, one number is going to be woefully insufficient to describe it.

            The juvenile antics of Mann and his team, along with the IPCC, have driven Judith Curry to make a whole lot of posts about ethics, knowledge, and certainty. What do we know and what do some people only pretend to know? She approaches it from the perspective of the chair of a top rated climate science department, acknowledging the glaring uncertainty in predicting the future state of a chaotic system with a vast array of inputs, only some of which are known and whose complex interrelations as yet escape us in large part.

            Meanwhile, there’s a bald little man who’s bad at math who’s up on a soap box selling certainty to any fool who will believe him. He has all the answers if you’ll just give him power and acknowledge his superior intellect, even though he uses upside down data sets and denounces all the people who say his numbers just don’t add up as heretics, liars, demons, and evil capitalist Jews.

            It’s an old game, and one many of us have seen far too often to give such a man or his deluded followers any credence. Such people always hide behind the mantle of the king, the church, “common sense”, “the people”, or “science”, but they’re always the same. A power-mad charlatan who’s terrified that the light of insight and analysis will shine down upon his fabrications, upset his flock of devoted followers who think they’re going to save the planet and all of humanity, and expose him for the fraud he is.

            Such men have shaken people’s faith in kings, in the church, in “common sense”, in “the will of the people”, and now this fraud is going to shake their faith in science. That’s a shame, because it didn’t have to happen.

        4. Volokh had a nice 2009 post on how discredited the Wahl and Amman paper is.

          To do this, Wahl and Amman came up with a value which they called a calibration/verification RE ratio. As the name suggests, this was the ratio of the two RE numbers for calibration and verification. This ratio is however, entirely unknown to statistics, or to any other branch of science. But it was not plucked out of the air. The ratio and the threshold value which was set for it by Wahl and Amman was carefully calculated.

          It’s quite amusing how far such unethical and incompetent “scientists” will go in their quest to prove the truth of their wacko religion. The ridiculousness of their claims and methods are so far out there that they even get posted on legal blogs (a blog which has been cited by the United States Supreme Court numerous times).

          2. Any of the commenters. You have been on the Internet before, haven’t you? ^_^

            Mann claims the NAS report (which you cited) exonerated his findings, when it did the opposite. Dr. North, the NAS panel’s chairman, was asked about this in the House, and he said that his panel agreed with the Wegman report that shredded Mann’s methods. That’s not the version Mann tells, nor will you hear it on pro-AGW blogs.

            So you cite another paper that also got shredded, since it had to invent entirely novel statistical techniques to cherry pick the data. If the bristlecone pine records were robust and accurate, nobody would have to bother to do that. They’d just plot the mean and be done with it, and everyone would join in and you’d have a big pile of confirming data that everyone agrees on. That hasn’t happened because the bristlecone pines are not well suited to such studies, as numerous tree experts have pointed out, which is why they don’t agree at all with the wide range of 27 non-tree ring proxy studies that Judith Curry cited.

            Among the many problems is a serious selection bias, because very old trees, which necessarily make up the set of older records, happen to be still around because they grew very slowly when they were young, making the past seem cooler than it was. Studies on things like foraminifera, corals, dO18, or stalagmites don’t suffer this bias and show a big, booming Medieval Warm Period.

            Such studies will continue to refute Mann’s hockey stick, and such studies will continue, such as the ones from Vostok, the North Pacific, the Pacific North West, Chile, Peru, Greenland, Denmark, and Russia, because many scientists need to know the truth about what their local environment was like in the past, answering such questions as how Andean runoff varies during different climatic periods, and what they can thus expect from different climate regimes.

            Yet many climate scientists will be reluctant to publish such useful work, or find difficulty in doing so, because a small band of sanctimonious religious zealots who are third-rate scientists and horrible at math has largely succeeded in positioning themselves as powerful, well-funded gate keepers for academic journals. This is no more beneficial to science than staffing geology journals with professors who are still convinced of the truth of Noah’s Flood.

          4. Interesting graph from Connelly, et al (who make sure no accurate climate information makes it into Wikipedia).

            The dark red line is based on glaciers and doesn’t extend past 1600 AD, so is useless regarding the MWP. The red line is from a group that doesn’t seem to be “the team” and ironically shows that the MWP was warmer than present.

            The red-orange line is from Huang who merged his data with Mann and Jones’ data – which would thus produce a hockey stick.

            The orange line is Jones and Mann. The yellow line is Mann and Jones. The green line is from Cook (a team member). The lightest blue line and the dark blue lines are both from Briffa and Jones (famous team members), The blue line is from Mann. The black line is from the CRU of climategate fame.

            The light blue line is from Crowley. Here’s some of his alarming correspondence with Mann and Jones as they plot against Soon and Baliunas.

            Note that Wikipedia’s graph consists pretty much entirely of the work of “the team”, and you present it as if these are somehow independent reconstructions from a random assortment of scientists. It’s not. It’s just Mann, Jones, Briffa, and friends playing games with their tree rings.

          5. The red line is from a group that doesn’t seem to be “the team” and ironically shows that the MWP was warmer than present.

            You probably should get your eyes checked.

          7. More than two links will dump a comment into the spam filter, so here’s a quick map of some of the reconstructions. This paper would be rather typical (A 2,300-Year reconstruction of the South American summer monsoons). If you hover over text that says “figure 5” you can see some of their reconstructions.

          8. so here’s a quick map of some of the reconstructions.

            Great, more crap from blogland, CO2 science got this project underway three or four years ago, they asked their readers to provide proxy studies to refute the hockey stick graph – cherrypick anyone?

            But even making that effort to find proxy studies that suited their agenda they royally cocked it up.

            If you look carefully at when the MWP (MCA) was supposed to be, you’ll notice that it jumps about from being entirely prior to 1000AD to not starting till 1200AD and continuing as late as 1400AD. (Yeah I know some are BP and some AD)

            So what happens if you take lots of proxy studies with MWP’s at different times and combine them to get a mean? The effect is to spread the length of time of the MWP and reduce the degree of the temperature anomaly.

            I score you a D- on this one. (the little line after the D means minus)

            SkepticalScience has more on that project:
            http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval_project.html

          9. Well, I’m glad you ran to a priest and asked for help. You asked for links, and as I mentioned, I can’t post 30 or 40 without running afoul of the spam filter, and I was just reading an interesting one about a South American lake that yielded very good data, too. The interesting thing about geographically divergent studies of the MWP is that they all show a long period of sustained higher temperatures, but not all at the same time. The Andes don’t show quite the same pattern as Argentina, regions of the US, or the North Pacific, but they all share an overlapping warm phase.

            To wacko religious zealots like Mann and the team, this means they’re all somehow invalidated. To an actual climatologist the timing would hold fascinating clues and possibly deep insights into how the climate modes shift. Judith Curry’s stadium wave, combined with such data, might provide a treasure trove. But that would be actual climate science, instead of the bug-eyed babblings of The Team, who are probably the worst thing to happen to science in the last fifty years, if not longer, as they bring further disrepute down upon the entire endeavor, as Judith Curry’s recent post on Mann v Steyn points out.

            And the funny things about it all is that the MWP is actually completely irrelevant. It exists due to random chance, and we could just as well live in a world where it didn’t actually happen. What would that change about climate sensitivity, CO2, and cloud feedbacks? Absolutely nothing. What would it change about how we should respond? Not a single thing.

            Yet Mann and his idiot cronies, all sorely challenged by ethics and math, decided to just eliminate the MWP to make themselves powerful and respected, but did so in such a ridiculously sloppy fashion as to call their own integrity and competence into doubt. Caught out, they keep having to churn out unsupportable dreck to defend their positions and reputations, and if the entire of endeavor of science, its public perception and respect, has to go down with them, so be it. They’re perfectly okay with that, because they’re self-centered, self-important third-rate scientists with ego issues.

            After all, it’s much more rewarding to lead a religious movement than to crunch the world’s most boring numbers. Come on. Even people who lived in the MWP couldn’t give two sh**s if the temperature was one degree warmer or colder. They wouldn’t even have a way to measure it. MWP temperatures are less important to the people it directly affected than not being caught wearing 1139 AD fall fashions in the spring of 1141.

            Yet Mann has his clown car of fools out defending a graph that falls apart just by picking a different set of his own trees. The NAS panel pointed this out, as did a whole lot of other people, so they set up a lot of websites to preach to their deluded flock, one of whose members would be you.

            Did you ever get a knock on the door and have some young person try to tell you about the power of Jesus and how they know the truth and that the end is near, and then you kind of politely play along till you get them to leave, and then feel kind of sorry for the position they’ve been put in? Well, that’s how all us non-believers feel about people like you. You’ll eventually realize you’ve been hoodwinked by a bunch of zealots who all got rich or famous off of it, and then you’ll look back at the data with your science/engineering mind, go through a short period of shakes and rattles and rants like a recovering Scientologist, and then rejoin us normal folk.

            And the shame is, it’s climatology, a new field that’s going to have many blind alleys and many breakthroughs and produce many new insights, and none of this had to happen at all. It got hijacked by a bunch of angry third-rate morons who played on the nuts in the ecology movement because of their own vanity, and now you have legions of blind paranoid followers who see the Koch brothers or big oil behind every tree.

            Do you really think everyone here but you is paid from some kind of secret bank account to say these things? Do you really think that we just don’t know “the truth” and need educating? I read books on coupled atmosphere ocean dynamics for fun. I read through GCM source code for fun. I respond to people like you for fun, because it is fun.

            As an aside, when I was growing up deep in Eastern Kentucky we’d occasionally have religious recruiters work the neighborhood. My dad, raised a Baptist, had all sorts of fun with them by poking so many holes in their story line in so many ways (sometimes he claimed to be in league with Satan so as to protect his golf game) that they’d often run away in horror. Toying with zealots is like a kitten and a ball of yarn, and the Team’s yarns are just too tempting to pass up.

          10. Well that’s a pretty bizarre comment, I have to admit I’m not sure what’s serious and what’s supposed to be humorous.

            It’s starting to sound that you, like me, are getting bored with this game, the big disappointment for me is that you’ve been unable to provide the evidence to support your beliefs.

            At the risk of taking seriously statements in your comment that are actually satirical, I’ll address a few of your points.

            Well, I’m glad you ran to a priest and asked for help. You asked for links, and as I mentioned, I can’t post 30 or 40 without running afoul of the spam filter, and I was just reading an interesting one about a South American lake that yielded very good data, too.

            How about just one link to a multi-site, multi-proxy study that’s been published in a peer review journal that concludes that the hockey stick graph is wrong, that is temperatures didn’t decline slowly from the MWP to the LIA, and then climb rapidly after around 1850 – 1900?

            Thinking about it, just what exactly is it that you’re expecting that’s different to that graph? Is it all down to a need for the MWP to be significantly warmer than to-days temperatures?

            The interesting thing about geographically divergent studies of the MWP is that they all show a long period of sustained higher temperatures, but not all at the same time. The Andes don’t show quite the same pattern as Argentina, regions of the US, or the North Pacific, but they all share an overlapping warm phase.

            The studies on the map you linked to did not all share an overlapping warm phase.

            To wacko religious zealots like Mann and the team, . . . But that would be actual climate science, instead of the bug-eyed babblings of The Team, who are probably the worst thing to happen to science in the last fifty years, if not longer, as they bring further disrepute down upon the entire endeavor,

            What a devastating argument – name calling, wow you’re such a sophisticate.

            And the funny things about it all is that the MWP is actually completely irrelevant. It exists due to random chance, and we could just as well live in a world where it didn’t actually happen. What would that change about climate sensitivity, CO2, and cloud feedbacks? Absolutely nothing. What would it change about how we should respond? Not a single thing.

            OMG! something smart, well said!

            Yet Mann and his idiot cronies, all sorely challenged by ethics and math, decided to just eliminate the MWP to make themselves powerful and respected, but did so in such a ridiculously sloppy fashion as to call their own integrity and competence into doubt. Caught out, they keep having to churn out unsupportable dreck to defend their positions and reputations, and if the entire of endeavor of science, its public perception and respect, has to go down with them, so be it. They’re perfectly okay with that, because they’re self-centered, self-important third-rate scientists with ego issues.

            Damn! Back in the gutter.

            After all, it’s much more rewarding to lead a religious movement than to crunch the world’s most boring numbers.

            Still practising the mud throwing

            Come on. Even people who lived in the MWP couldn’t give two sh**s if the temperature was one degree warmer or colder. They wouldn’t even have a way to measure it. MWP temperatures are less important to the people it directly affected than not being caught wearing 1139 AD fall fashions in the spring of 1141.

            Yep, well hasn’t our discussion been pointless then (yeah, blog discussions usually are, though they can be a fun waste of time I suppose.

            Yet Mann has his clown car of fools out defending a graph that falls apart just by picking a different set of his own trees. The NAS panel pointed this out, as did a whole lot of other people, so they set up a lot of websites to preach to their deluded flock, one of whose members would be you.

            You’re not supposed to tell porkies about things like to NAS report, they never suggested it was “a graph that falls apart just by picking a different set of his own trees.”

            Did you ever get a knock on the door and have some young person try to tell you about the power of Jesus and how they know the truth and that the end is near, and then you kind of politely play along till you get them to leave, and then feel kind of sorry for the position they’ve been put in? Well, that’s how all us non-believers feel about people like you. You’ll eventually realize you’ve been hoodwinked by a bunch of zealots who all got rich or famous off of it, and then you’ll look back at the data with your science/engineering mind, go through a short period of shakes and rattles and rants like a recovering Scientologist, and then rejoin us normal folk.

            Had some JW’s visit today, I just said “no thanks”and they left.

            The point about the zealots is an interesting one, I comment on blogs on the other side of this debate pointing out their nonsense as well (claims about imminent catastrophe, Antarctic ice all disappearing this century, Arctic sea ice soon gone, not just in summer, but in winter as well, devistating methane release from clathrate deposits etc, I’ve been accused of being a denier)

            The thing about the zealots (fanatics) is that they never, never acknowledge the crap other zealots on their side spew out, you seem pretty certain those supporting the IPCC are all wrong, and you don’t seem to have anything bad to say about the loonier loons on your side of the debate, so I’ll label you the zealot.

            And the shame is, it’s climatology, a new field that’s going to have many blind alleys and many breakthroughs and produce many new insights, and none of this had to happen at all. It got hijacked by a bunch of angry third-rate morons who played on the nuts in the ecology movement because of their own vanity, and now you have legions of blind paranoid followers who see the Koch brothers or big oil behind every tree.

            Out of the gutter, into the sewer.

            Do you really think everyone here but you is paid from some kind of secret bank account to say these things?

            Are you joking here? Do you really think I think people on either side are motivated to any extent by money? How about you? Do you think the climate scientists are in it for money?

            Do you really think that we just don’t know “the truth” and need educating? I read books on coupled atmosphere ocean dynamics for fun. I read through GCM source code for fun. I respond to people like you for fun, because it is fun.

            The problem is everyones damn sure they know “the truth” and most of those who DON”T have to face the testing of the scientific process (bloggers, journalists and blog commenters) don’t have to front with the science to support their claims (where are those multi-site proxy studies you promised??)

            So far you’ve been very short on fronting with data to support your position, lots of ranting, no data. So whose the zealot?

          12. SkepticalScience …

            You seem to be suggesting that, if George can only produce multiple results which conflict with your favored finding, yours must stand. That is, to put it lightly, bizarre.

            You might consider using a more reliable source. SkepticalScience is a poor quality blog run by adolescents which delivers a shoddy product. Its “science” is disingenuous when it is not outright, laughably wrong. The only people who reference it are those unable to think for themselves, but who want external validation of their biases.

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