Truth, Lies and In Between

I had to chuckle at the cacophony of Twitfests going on today over this new study from Marcott et al. I especially liked the Mother Jones headline being Tweeted: “The Scariest Climate Change Graph Just Got Scarier”.

It rather reminds me of some people being fearful of certain religious icons.

Yes, be afraid, very afraid, of that “unprecedented” (there’s that word again in the abstract) 0.7C temperature rise is the message I suppose. While the MSM will trumpet this I’m sure, we’ll get down to finding out just how good the science is. One potential problem is that the pollen data median sampling of 120 years, which is 4x the 30 year climate normals periods used today. That’s pretty low resolution for a study that is focusing on 2000 years and leaves lots of opportunity to miss data. Further, when they say the last 100 years was the warmest…

Date: March 4, 2013

Subject: Upcoming NCADAC Climate Assessment Report

From: Bob Tisdale – Climate Observations

To: Lead Authors of NCADAC Report

Dear Lead Authors:

The draft of your upcoming NCADAC Climate Assessment Report was recently released for comment. Thank you for the time, effort and taxpayer dollars you’ve expended preparing that document. Unfortunately, in many parts, it appears simply to be a rehashing of your previous reports. And it contains numerous problems and inconsistencies.

MODEL-BASED SPECULATION IS CONTRADICTED BY DECADES OF DATA-BASED RESEARCH

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, NOAA created educational webpages that explained how weather patterns were linked to El Niños and La Niñas. They were supported by decades of data-based research, including Newell and Weare (1976) Factors Governing Tropospheric Mean Temperature, Angell (1981) Comparison of Variations in Atmospheric Quantities with Sea Surface Temperature Variations in the Equatorial Eastern Pacific, Pan and Oort…