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Scientist Sets Record Straight on Medieval Warming Research

Posted on 31 March 2012 by greenman3610

This is a re-post from Climate Crocks regarding the myth that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than present. 

daily fail

Yesterday I reported that the newest bogus climate denial meme rocketing around the Foxis of Evil had been disavowed by Geochemist Zunli Lu. At first all I had was a short message indicating that the Daily Mail Newspaper, and reporter Ted Thornhill had deliberately decided to publish a piece that Dr. Lu told them contained the wrong ‘angle”.

Now we have Dr. Lu’s more complete statement.

Syracuse University:

Recently published climate research by Zunli Lu, a geochemist in the Department of Earth Sciences in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has gone viral across the Internet by bloggers. A number of media outlets, including theDaily Mail and The Register, which are published in the United Kingdom, claim this research supports arguments that human-induced global warming is a myth. The claims, Lu says, misrepresent his work and the conclusions in the study. The statement below is an effort to set the record straight. The original news story about the research is posted on Arts and Sciences News.

Zunli Lu:
“It is unfortunate that my research, “An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula,” recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets.

Several of these media articles assert that our study claims the entire Earth heated up during medieval times without human CO2
emissions.  We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about climate conditions across the entire globe. Other statements, such as the study “throws doubt on orthodoxies around global warming,” completely misrepresent our conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend.”

Fake Science, Deliberate Distortions for Tea Party Yokels

In one of the clearest demonstrations in memory of the gullible and credulous nature of the the pathetic yokels that frequent such sites as Wattsupwiththat and Climatedepot, this obviously distorted meme was picked up and broadcast uncritically (remarkable, considering the source) around the world.

For more contextual information, see my post of yesterday.

If you are going to write about fiendishly difficult and involved matters of science and technology, it is not necessary to be an actual scientist, although that helps.  What IS necessary is to scrupulously refer back to real science, real scientists, and primary sources. I’ve built the reputation of this blog and  this video series on that premise, and that is my commitment to my readers.

Climate Crocks eviscerated a similarly bogus meme some time ago in a video entitled “Birth of a Climate Crock”. Watch that and compare to see how the technique works, and who the players are.

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Comments 51 to 55 out of 55:

  1. Note by the way, that in Realclimate's "doing it yourself" article, it pointed to M&W excellent collection of code and data which allows you to run "no Tiljander", or "no tree ring" etc runs yourself. I'm lost to see Brandon's point about these being key to signal. Gavin notes "it's worth pointing out that validation for the no-dendro/no-Tilj is quite sensitive to the required significance, for EIV NH Land+Ocean it goes back to 1500 for 95%, but 1300 for 94% and 1100 AD for 90% "
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  2. shoyemore @49, based on your example, the controversial part of Lu et al's finding should have been stated as:
    "Our most recent crystals suggest a warming relative to the LIA in the last century, possibly as part of the regional recent rapid warming, but this climatic signature is not yet as extreme in nature as the MWPMCA . The resolution of our record is insufficient to constrain the ages of these climatic oscillationsvariations in the Southern hemisphere relative to their expression in the Northern hemisphere, but our ikaite record builds the case that the oscillationsimpacts of the MWPMCA and LIA are global in their extent and their impact reaches as far South ashad temperature variations had the same sign in the Antarctic Peninsula as in Europe, while prior studies in the AP region have had mixed results."
    (deletions struck through, additions in bold, quoted from WUWT) The point here is that as originally written, whether intended or not, the amended passage carried the implication of increased warmth in all regions in the MCA relative to the early 20th century. That implication just cannot be sustained by the evidence presented. Eleven temperature datums at just one location cannot establish the prima facie case for global warmth that would be needed for that statement to be valid without severe qualification. (Note: if anybody thinks I am contradicting my earlier claims, they need to revise their understanding of just how weak is the relationship, "is evidence of".) To see this clearly, consider the actual evidence presented in the paper: The ikaite proxies are the eleven dots shown against climate proxies from the nearby region, two from the eastern Antarctic Peninsular, one from the western Antarctic Peninsula, and one from East Antarctica. Note that the temperature equivalence is inverted for part (a) compared to the other three. The original caption reads:
    "Fig. 6. δ18Ohydra profile (in green) plotted with other climate records, assuming sedimentation rate of 0.96 cm/yr and ikaite formation depth of 3.04±0.57 m. δ18Ohydra variability among different crystals found at the same depth is about±0.33‰. A–B: Magnetic susceptibility and TOC of JPC2 are plotted against age. C: SST at Palmer Deep, the line represents a five-point moving average (Shevenell et al., 2011). D: δ18OEPICA data are smoothed by a ten-point moving average. E: Timing of climatic events summarized for the AP region and citations (1 — Pudsey and Evans (2001); 2 — Jones et al. (2000); 3 — Brachfeld et al. (2003); 4 — Khim et al. (2002); 5 — Hall et al. (2010); 6 — Domack et al. (1995); 7 — Liu et al. (2005))."
    (quoted from WUWT) The dates of the eleven samples are approximately: Modern Era: 1920, 1885, LIA: 1630, MCA: 1465, 1325, 1150, Other: 855, 770, 665, 370, 215 All dates are plus or minus 60 years. Further, I have assumed the "present" is 2010 for calculating years before present. By convention it is often 1950, but may be as late as 2012. In any event, it is very clear that "our most recent crystals" whose "climactic signature is not yet as extreme in nature as the MWP actually comes from the late 19th century to middle twentieth century, and is not representative of late twentieth century temperatures. So the evidence in the study neither supports nor contradicts the claim that Antarctic Peninsular temperatures in the MCA where greater than they are in the late 20th and early 21st century. It has no comparable temperature proxy in that period to make the comparison.
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    Moderator Response: [DB] Note that the strike hash tag command is currently not operative.
  3. scaddenp @51, but didn't you know? A significance of 94% means the evidence does not exist, and even supports the contrary hypothesis if you don't like what the evidence appears to say. Deniers are quite aware of this fundamental principle, and use it all the time. / sarc
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  4. Update from Syracuse available here: “It is difficult for the lay public to make informed decisions about contentious issues — particularly those concerning climate change, conservation and preservation — which require objective, scientific research and discovery when news reporters fail in their duty to write accurately about the science behind the issues.” Failure to write accurately about science is a job requirement in some camps.
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  5. Excellent study on the European MWP Here "A gridded reconstruction of spring-summer temperature was produced for Europe based on tree-rings, documentaries, pollen assemblages and ice cores. The majority of proxy series have an annual resolution. For a better inference of long-term climate variation, they were completed by low-resolution data (decadal or more), mostly on pollen and ice-core data." Using a number of different proxies they mapped temperature anomalies giving a detailed regional view of the warming.
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