McIntyre and McKitrick Help Confirm Greenhouse Hypothesis

One cannot help but be amused by the irony in this paper, in which Diego Rybski and others (one of the others being Hans von Storch) use Steve McIntyre’s paleoclimate reconstruction as one of a suite of six in a detection study, using the Hockey Stick Slayer’s work as evidence for human-caused warming:

Accordingly, the hypothesis that at least part of the recent warming cannot be solely related to natural factors, may be accpeted with a very low risk, independent of the database used.

The irony of the fact that the reconstructions of both Mann and McIntyre show strong detection signals (“early detection” meaning that it’s easier to detect the anthropogenic effect earlier in the 20th century) does not escape the authors:

An interesting detail is that the two fiercely arguing groups around Mann and McIntyre lead both to very early detections.

8 Comments

  1. that’s awesome…good find. AFAIK, you’re the only non-climate scientist blogger pulling AGU papers. come to think of it, do the RC guys ever pull papers not from Nature or Science?

  2. Kevin, a glance at the half dozen or so posts on the RC opening page finds several (GRL, EOS and some obscure Russian pub). But as we know people with hot breaking science seem to prefer to play with the Big Two, so RC tends to lean in that direction as well.

    TCO, I suspect Steve M. argued with von S. about that since he knew it would end up like this. But a reconstruction of a reconstruction can still be treated like one, it seems.

  3. Well, the difference is that it’s very much non-independant (since it’s a variant of MBH) and that it was a trial run (done to show the difference in a methology) rather then a definitive attempt to get best reconstruction.

    If he really wanted, he could have included all the Burger and Cubash MBH variants…

  4. I guess it’s ok, to show that the LTP is the same for different variants of MBH. Thus showing that various cited methodology concerns don’t change that part of the VS story. but that is the point, he should make. Not that he tried various reconstructions (as if they were different items).

  5. The other thing implicit in the paper is that the M&M analysis and the MBH99 analysis are similar in their robustness.

    Best,

    D

  6. huh? I’m not even disagreeing (yet). I don’t understand what exactly you are saying/why. And have you plonked the 9 bucks down?

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