<b>"The Independent" doubles down: Hockeystick revived</i>

<i>"The Independent", known to irreverent people as "The Subservient", is a struggling British broadsheet newspaper which has now gone online only. In its struggle to differentiate itself the newspaper has set itself up as the British Greenie newspaper. They have hitched their wagon to the global warming star. Scarcely a day goes by without them promoting it. Their latest is a heavy cannon in that war.

It is based on a recent statistical study called <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201788">"A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era"</a> and the star finding from that work is that Mann's "hockeystick" pops up again. It revives the "hockeystick" picture for temperatures over the last 1,000 years. What glory!

But being the naughty boy I am I did my usual trick and took a look at the original data. And there is much there to laugh at. The thing that grabbded me most was this statement:

"We do so via correlation analysis, which makes the common assumption that the relation between the proxy value and temperature over the twentieth century is representative of the entire record"

and

"The majority (59%) of the records are based on tree rings"

and

"We use the Cowtan & Way version38 of the dataset, which corrects for missing values and incomplete post-1979 Arctic coverage via the use of satellite observations. Even with the correction, the HadCRUT4.2 dataset is incomplete, with about 60% of the monthly values missing, so the remaining missing values were infilled"

So what is funny about that? What is funny is "Mike's nature trick", the fact that Michael Mann had to DELETE his Northern hemisphere tree-ring data for the 20th century because it showed FALLING temperatures over the 20th century.

Yet the current work assumes that 20th century tree ring data PROVES that tree ring data tells us all about the temperature of the whole of the last 1,000 years. But Mann concluded the opposite to that. He concluded that the tree ring data was UNrepresentative of temperature during the 20th century.

The work of both Mann and the present authors is primarily a reflection of tree ring data; in particular Northern hemisphere tree-ring data. So their revered predecessor had essentially the same tree-ring data showing a DECLINE in temperature but they somehow have managed to get it to show a RISE in temperature. Lordy, Lordy!

So how come? Because of the poor quality of their data. The third quote from them that I have given above gives you the feel of that. 60% of their data was "infilled" or made up. You can get any result you want that way. And they did. It is rubbish science.

The newspaper makes a variety of other assertions about extreme weather but they are equally unfounded. Roger Pielke, Jr. actually wrote a book detailing the fact that there is no trend in virtually any extreme event (including tornados, hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc.) with some actually decreasing. Even the UN’s IPCC acknowledges that there is no basis for attributing such events to anthropogenic climate change.</i>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Planet Earth is warmer than it has been for at least 2,000 years, according to a study that took its temperature from 692 different “natural thermometers” on every continent and ocean on the planet.

In the most comprehensive assessment of how the climate has changed over the period to date, researchers looked at a host of sources of historic information, including tree rings, ice cores, lake and sea sediments, corals, mineral deposits and written records.

What they found confirmed the famous “hockey stick” graph, showing an undulating, but broadly flat, line followed by a sharp uptick that begins at around 1900.

The only plausible explanation for this sudden change is fossil fuel emissions, which have increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million in the 19th century to more than 400 today.

Antarctic turning green as global warming triggers moss explosion

Many Americans think climate change will lead to human extinction

Trump’s stance on climate change is ‘sociopathic', top economist says

Macron still wants to change Trump's mind on climate change

The warming effect was predicted by the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1895.

Writing in the journal Scientific Data, a team of nearly 100 researchers described how they had created a database of 692 records from 648 different locations in “all continental regions and major ocean basins”.

Some of these natural thermometers covered the entire 2,000-year period, with an average length of 760 years.

The original hockey stick graph, which spanned 1,000 years, was widely praised when it was published in the journal Nature 20 years ago, but also came under attack from climate change sceptics and deniers. Professor Michael Mann, one of the paper’s authors, was abused, made the subject of hostile investigations by US politicians, and even sent death threats.

The original 'hockey stick' graph, published in 1998, showed the global average temperature remains about the same from 1,000 years ago until a sharp rise in the 20th century (Mann et al)

In a blog post about the new study, one of researchers, Professor Julien Emile-Geay, wrote that it essentially confirmed the hockey stick graph was accurate.

“As a scientist, you have to go where the evidence takes you,” he said.

“You can only be smacked in the face by evidence so many times and not see some kind of pattern. (You will never guess: a HOCKEY STICK!).

“The hockey stick is alive and well. There is now so much data supporting this observation that it will take nothing short of a revolution of how we understand all paleoclimate proxies to overturn this pattern. So let me make this prediction: the hockey stick is here to stay.”

Mr Emile-Geay, of the University of Southern California, said any argument about the basic pattern of warming was over.

31 scientific bodies tell US Congress: Climate change is real

“In the coming years and decades, the scientific community will flesh out many more details about the climate of the past 2,000 years, the interactions between temperature and drought, their regional and local expressions, their physical causes, their impact on human civilizations, and many other fascinating research questions,” he said.

“But one thing won’t change: the 20th century will stick out like a sore thumb. The present rate of warming and, very likely, the temperature levels are exceptional in the past 2,000 years, perhaps even longer.

“The hockey stick is alive; long live the hockey stick. Climate denialists will have to find another excuse behind which to hide.”

<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-natural-thermometers-global-warming-world-temperatures-rising-warmest-ever-hockey-a7837881.html">SOURCE</a>