Yesterday's News Today

Study Confirms Past Few Decades Warmest On Record by Juliet Eilperin is a story that works against itself, mainly because Eilperin is faithful enough to record some of the uncertainties buried in the National Academy of Sciences report that the story is based on.

But before I get to that, how very odd that the Post reproduced climatologist Michael Mann's famed "hockey stick" global warming graph that, despite press reports, has in some important ways been undermined.

The Famed Hockey Stick supposedly shows a unique and recent global spike in temperatures. The NAS graph at right, available here in its report (pdf), combines a wider variety of data. To my eye it also casts some of the hockey-stick data in a different light.

The NAS graph suggests relatively higher temperatures a millennium ago, then falling temperatures, then rising temperatures.

It came out yesterday. But we're publishing the old hockey stick.

Yesterday's news today I guess.

As to the story, it zigzags because the report does. And Eilperin probably pushes its conclusions farther than the report justifies because proponents of the NAS study do, as predicted yesterday by NRO's Ian Murray. The report says it is "plausible" that we are experiencing the highest temperatures in 1000 years. NAS panel member John Wallace said it was likely, and panel member Kurt Cuffey said it is "essentially validated." A few more panel members and we'll be smoking embers before the next deadline.

What's missing are contradictions buried in the report--and how many reporters are going to read it, or be allowed the time by their editors to do so. Here's are just two examples of what Steve McIntyre, a chief skeptic of the hockey stick, describes as the report's schizophrenia:

They do not clearly discuss biased data selection, but concede that strip-bark samples, such as bristlecones, which we had strongly criticized, “should be avoided in temperature reconstructions”. However, they then proceed to rely on studies that rely on strip-bark bristlecones...

They do not grasp the nettle of reporting on previous data and method availability, but do endorse the principle that sharing data and methods is a good thing in paleoclimate. Schizophrenically, their graphics and conclusions rely heavily on studies where data and/or methods are not available.

Which I don't get at all. I thought the Holy Scientific Method was about independently verifying data.

The bottom line of the report seems to be that it looks like temperatures have been rising for the past 400 years. Establishing what happened before then is much more difficult. Computing man's effect on the trend isn't the charter of this report, not that most of mainstream media will go out of its way to tell you. Eilperin at least gives it a shot:

The new report provides ammunition to those who say the evidence is overwhelming that industrial activity is transforming the planet by spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as to those who see it as confirmation that significant uncertainty still exists in climate change science.

Comments

[Lubos Motl]

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/06/nas-schizofrenic-climate-report.html

The Washington Post article may be tendentious, but you should read my text above (link). It contains one link to another blog in Minnesota that shows how the Washington Post article was butchered and the remaining paragraphs that could be viewed as critical towards the hockey stick have been erased.