Clouting the consensus

I have a briefing note out at the GWPF, updating my earlier report on the Cook 97% consensus study with all the interesting new details that have emerged in recent months. Here's the press release.

London, 8 September: A new briefing note published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation examines claims made by a great many commentators across the world, including President Obama and Ed Davey, of an overwhelming consensus on climate change. These depend on research that has been subject to public and entirely unrebutted allegations that it is fraudulent.
 
Although the authors of the research claim to have shown that most climate change papers accept that mankind is responsible for the majority of recent warming, in fact the underlying study shows no such thing.
 
One senior climatologist described the paper as ‘poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed’. Another researcher called it ‘completely invalid and untrustworthy’, adding that there was evidence of scientific fraud.

Andrew Montford, the author of the note, said: “It has now been shown beyond doubt that the claims of a 97% consensus on climate change are at best misleading, perhaps grossly so, and possibly deliberately so. It’s high time policymakers stopped citing this appalling study.”

You can read the note here.

Comments

[Glebekinvara]

EM
It is most unlikely that insolation was 80 W/m2 less than now in the late Proterozoic when the Sturtian Glaciation commenced.

Schwarzschield (1958) proposed that luminosity or Brightness of the Sun had increased over the Earth’s history. In the earliest history of the Earth (about 4.5 Ga), the Sun’s luminosity was 25% less compared to the present value.

Between 4 and 1 billion years ago solar radiation was 5% to 20% lower than at present, and, other things being equal, this should have decreased the mean air temperature by 7 to 28 °C, compared with the present epoch.

At present the solar constant is about 1395 W/m2. At most it was probably 40W/m2 lower in the late Proterozoic .This would translate to a reduction from 395 to 383 W/m2 a reduction of about 12W/m2 at the top of the troposphere .

In the beginning of the Phanerozoic (about 600 Ma), the Sun’s luminosity was almost 3% less than its modern value.

[Entropic man]

Glebekinvara

References, please.

[Entropic man]

The trouble with multiproxy studies is the statistical methodologies used to seperate (predetermined) "noise" from the (preordained) expected signal.

Sep 11, 2014 at 1:01 AM | Unregistered CommenterWFC

Why do you think that the noise is predetermined and the signal preordained?

[Glebekinvara]

EM

Good summary and bibliography here:-

Heliophysics: Evolving Solar Activity and the Climates of Space and Earth
 edited by Carolus J. Schrijver, George L. Siscoe

Cambridge University Press 2010

[lapogus]

Beware of reading too much into a single core such as Vostok. They suffer badly from internal variation and local effects so it is easy to see spurious patterns in what is actually noise Better an ensemble such as Marcott et al 2013. Multiple proxies give a clearer appreciation of what is signal and what is noise. In the Vostok core, much of the large and rapid variation is noise.
Sep 11, 2014 at 12:12 AM | Unregistered Commenter Entropic man

Can you cite some references for the Vostok variations being mostly noise, and/or local effects? It is interesting that the GISP2 proxy data for the Holocene Optima peaks are corroborated by other cryo, paleo, geological and archeological evidence, not to mention the later historical accounts of the warm periods in the later Roman and Medieval periods. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a leading academic archaeologist on Iron Age Scotland, I asked if the climate was warmer a few thousand years ago - 'oh yes, it was Mediterranean'.

I also find it significant that there appears to be a good correlation between the Vostok and GISP data, which does not square with your assertions of the ice core data being susceptible to 'internal variation and local effects'.

Close correlation between GISP and Vostok ice core data proxies (Modified from Bender, et al., Nature, 1994).

As for your continual promotion and devotion to the Marcott and Shakunreconstruction fiasco, I tend to agree with WFC that such multi-proxy studies are more susceptible to statistical shenanigans and as such are of dubious value:

Marcott hockeystick graph - rebuttal

More Mannian bollocks?

As the authors themselves had to admit:

" ... the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes ..."

Source: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html