His post CHERRY PICKING IN CLIMATE STUDIES can be found here
In this post Ball takes on Dr. Michael E. Mann's hockey stick claiming that Mann "rewrote climate history by eliminating a WARMER THAN TODAY period between 899 and 1300 AD"
Today as of this post is MAY 25, 2016 and May 2016 is the warmest May on record over 1 degree C above the 20th Century Average.
2015 was the warmest year on record by a significant margin as shown in the graph above and 2016 is shaping up July as of this graph as significantly hotter still. July and August have continued the 15 consecutive "hottest ever on record" months so it seems clear that Tim Ball is not capable of adjusting his thinking as the record grows.
The warmest years on record above compare to the Average warmth in the 20th century. But Ball and his Liar Denier friends are all in a tizzy over the "midieval warming period" back around the year 1000. Those records are more difficult to come by since they involve:
Reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution. Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data.There are several attempts to recreate the temperatures back around 1000 but none of them have anything like the accuracy of present day record accumulation. Some 6000 measurement stations around the globe are added to satellite data and other sources to get a very accurate worldwide average of temperatures expressed in the graph above and graphs like this one
There are no trees in many of the locations where we find land based temperature measurement stations today
 |
| TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENT STATIONS DIVIDED INTO RED AND BLUE PROXIMITY GROUPS |
Cherry Picking in Climate Studies
"A revealing comment about the corruption of climate science occurred before a Joint Congressional Inquiry. They were seeking to determine the claims by Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick about the scientific inaccuracy of Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick.’ The graph (Figure 1) appeared in the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report and became the poster child for the proof of human-caused global warming.
Figure 1 shows the graph Mann produced that rewrote climate history by eliminating a warmer than today period between 900 and 1300 AD called the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). They established an Ad Hoc committee under the chair of Edward Wegman to determine who was correct."
Ball claims Dr. Michael E. Mann's hockey stick "rewrote climate history by eliminating a WARMER THAN TODAY period between 899 and 1300 AD" But the figure he uses above barely reaches the year 1000
BALL goes on:
When questioned by the Congressional Committee one researcher, Rosanne D’Arrigo, made a comment that reflected naiveté and duplicity. When asked why data was narrowly and selectively chosen D’Arrigo replied:
“that you had to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie.”
Cherry picking involves picking the start and end point of a section of the temperature record to argue for warming or cooling with evidence. In teaching students about the dangers, I drew the “UP” portion of Figure 2 on the blackboard, then added two lines for a “DOWN” claim, and finally two more lines for a “UP” trend.
One of the first examples that confirmed my suspicions about what was going on with the corruption of global warming research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is shown in Figure 3. The top graph was presented in Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Report to support the claim that, Benjamin Santer lead author of the Chapter personally inserted the sentence to replace one that already agreed to by the other chapter authors.Benjamin Santer has addressed this load of excrement perpetrated by Fred "the old lone denier" Singer and his buddy Fred Seitz in detail with a reply to Seitz Wall Street Journal editorial. You can read it for yourself in this pdf
“While some of the pattern-base discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes.”
The bottom graph shows the longer record, which supports that conclusion. Dennis Avery and Fred Singer noted in 2006,
“Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The ‘discernible human influence’ supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world, and has been the ‘stopper’ in millions of debates among nonscientists.”
The two Fred's Singer & Seitz are old cold war physicists who worked on rockets and battled Nazi's and then Communists. Seitz died shortly after this and Singer is the poster boy for Liar Deniers with impressive credentials from fields not associated with Climate Science. Singer's oppositon is political. Based on a fear of regulation. Anyone reading denier posts needs to be aware the the use of Singer is a huge red flag.
Recently, reports of the warmest years in the record circulate to amplify the false stories about human-caused global warming. For example, The Guardian newspaper headline for 24 March 2014 says,
13 of 14 warmest years on record occurred in 21st century – UN
Of course they have! The global temperature rose from 1680, the coldest period of the Little Ice Age (LIA) to 1998. Since then temperatures levelled and declined slightly, in what is known as the hiatus. Figure 4 illustrates the situation for the period of the instrumental record starting in 1880. It is not surprising that the highest temperatures occur in the most recent portion, even though they have levelled off.
Here is where Ball hangs himself nicely on his own petard. As the NOAA chart at the top of this page shows clearly there has been no leveling of temperatures after 1998. 1998 was certainly a record hot year for the 20th century but it has been dwarfed by the temperatures in 2010, 14, 15, and 16.
Figure 5 shows the same graph as Figure 4, but now the temperature is extended back to the nadir of the LIA. The trend from 1680 was problematic for the IPCC because it showed the current warming was part of a longer natural trend.
We know the objective of the hockey stick to rewriting climate history was deliberate.
“During testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing on Climate Change and the Media in 2006, University of Oklahoma geophysicist Dr. David Deming recalled “an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change” who told him that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
The ‘hockey stick,’ or as some prefer the ‘hokey stick,’ achieved the goal. It replaced a graph that appeared in the 1990 Report (Figure 6) showing the longer trend warming.
It also showed the MWP was warmer than the current temperatures, something that is still true, despite the claims of the “warmest years on record”. All this confirms Disraeli’s observation about “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It is especially applicable to the deception about global warming."THE HOKEY STICK" of Ball's "Club of Rome" imagining is as bogus as his cherry picking.
The 15 consecutive months of warmest or hottest ever continues and we now exceed 1 degree above the 20th Century average. This is very dangerous territory since the IPCC and many of the qualified scientific organizations postulate that 2 degrees is a far as we dare go if we are to avoid major consequences from global warming.
Hard to imagine what Ball is about. Is is blissfully unaware of what is happening with the world's glaciers?
 |
| WEST ANTARCTIC GLACIERS LOSING MASS AT RECORD LEVELS |
For a complete and detailed takedown of this type of Denier illogic this Gavin Schmidt destruction of Judith Curry is illuminating