That’s not a correction Dave.

Oooh! Doesn’t that just frost my butt! “unwanted pollutant”! Oooh!

Dave, get a grip; carbon dioxide is necessary for life. It doesn’t matter at all where it comes from.

Now, do I need to repeat the instructions about “creating a meme that’s humorous”? You’re not really holding up you end here. Your position is laughable, but not in a good way.

Natural Dave? Can we infer you consider yourself and fellow humans “unnatural”? And you call me dense?

Dave, I need a break here. Your self-destructive urges are very hard to absorb in such quantity over such a short time. You and I are both “natural”. There is no scientific evidence at all that we’re harming the environment with CO2 (your preferred notation). None at all. You’ve got your shorts in a twist over a fantasy.

When I say scientific evidence, I mean exactly that. Not conjecture on the part of scientists. I’m a scientist myself and my opinion is as valid as any other. I mean evidence. Data. Numbers. Measurements. Real ones. Not tree rings. Not thermometers from 1880 read by old men in bathrobes in South Dakota wearing bifocals in blowing snow. Real data, precise to the .01C the IPCC claims.

I know the global climate is warming. Everyone knows that. As I mentioned, it’s been going on for 10,000 years. You claim people did it. That’s a very speculative claim and there’s no evidence at all to back it up. Anywhere. I hope we understand each other?

Dave, it’s nonsense like this that forms an opinion of the general intelligence of KQED’s readership. We live in the Holocene epoch, an interglacial period. The climate of our planet has in fact been warming for 10,000 years, which is exactly why the state of Wisconsin is no longer under a permanent ice pack a mile thick.

That absurd (and tiny) graph you show is nothing at all but random variation. And the crazy part at the end? Where you switch from some fantasy reconstruction to actual instrument data? If you can’t figure that out Dave (and I know you can’t) there’s no help coming for you. As I mentioned, you’re what we call a “Believer”. Good luck. I’m certain you also believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and cavemen rode dinosaurs.

Dave? That chart of yours is an inch and a half across. The axis labels are unreadable. The description of the chart values are unreadable. It’s noise. I have no idea where it comes from but I know it’s junk. Either find some credible source or shut up. Please stop wasting everyone’s time with this stuff (a polite term). You’ve already published it twice. It was no more convincing the second time. It is, without doubt, some form of “reconstruction”.

One of my many fields of expertise is statistical modeling and design of experiments. I have seen, personally, climatologists simply fabricate data in reconstructions. Rarely, if ever do they quote the sources or methodologies used in these “reconstructions”. Don’t expect you can present convincing evidence in the form some tiny little graph made up by a couple of French grad students in Nature Climate or some other pal reviewed rag.

Yes, I have. It wasn’t at all clear what the source of the graph was when it was published in miniature form. See my criticisms above under the original subject.

David? Stop it. This junk you keep posting over and over isn’t data. You’re a physicist right? You should know that. No, I have no instrument records from 10,000 years ago. No one does. You don’t. Would you like me to present you with my made up numbers? I can’t do that Dave, I specialized in measurement theory, statistical methods and design of experiments for the last 20 years of my professional career and I wouldn’t stoop to what you’re doing. It’s wrong. It’s bad science. It isn’t actually science at all.

So stop with this. Deal with the fact that No One Knows what happened over the past 10 to 20 thousand years with any precision, certainly not four tenths of a degree precision. What I said is the Earth has been warming for the past 10,000 years. The only supporting evidence anyone has is geologic, not instrumental. We have evidence there were large sheets of ice covering parts of the planet back then, and those sheets of ice are gone. We may conclude from that (via inference) that the climate has warmed since then, hence my assertion the planet has been warming for 10,000 years.

What are you thinking? Do you honestly expect anyone at all to believe someone, anyone, is capable of accurately measuring temperature over the past 10,000 years with 0.2 degree precision? 0.4 degrees? Are you smoking the good stuff? Where does that belief come from? Can you support it? Because this junk you keep yammering about and continuously re-posting isn’t data,. It’s a completely fabricated fantasy and the authors openly admit that in the paper you keep citing endlessly.

Dave, you’re boring and uneducated. Look it up, it isn’t a secret. Neither is the well established fact plants respire carbon dioxide. Go away kid. Take a hike.

That must be it. The Holocene, a previously unknown phenomenon, is the pure (and very personal) fabrication of my demented and deceitful ego. Yeah. That’s the ticket! You know, I invented the Holocene! In fact it was my uncle Lou who discovered the first Dinosaur!

You’ve now gone beyond the merely uninformed and ventured into “willfully ignorant” territory Dave.

There’s just oodles of data on the interglacial warming we call the Holocene epoch Dave. Ooodles and oodles of it. It’s everywhere. I don’t do research for “PhD’s” Dave, I figure they can do that themselves, it’s what they live for.

BTW, I enjoyed the trash you claim to have written about why the sun isn’t causing warming, along with the graph you used that explains why the planet has experienced warming for the past 100 years (the Sun of course) and why it began to cool 18 years ago (the sun of course). Talk about a classic candidate for the Journal of Irreproducible Results? I don’t believe I’ve seen a better contemporary example. Your “source” plots both the Maunder and Dalton minima, the contemporary maxima, which coincidentally occurs around 1950 when ground temperature measures peaked, falls sharply through the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (when ground temperatures were at their nadir and climatologists were screaming “Ice Age! WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER ICE AGE!” Then began to rise again in the 80’s and 90’s, peaking in 1998, when warming stopped. Temperatures have been flat to down for the past 18 years, just as one might expect if the cause of warming was in fact the sun. Here’s a clue by the way; you need to integrate solar activity. The Earth has something we call “thermal inertia” (that’s a term from Physics Dave) and it doesn’t just change like you were turning a light on and off.

Do you believe everything you read Dave? Practice “reading for comprehension”.

Let’s see your data to prove it Dave. And yes, it is about the Holocene. So is your “data”.

The planet has warmed since the last ice age. We call that boundary “the Holocene”. It’s the time period your chart above purports to represent. I’ve written a fairly detailed critique of it and I won’t repeat it here. The planet has warmed since the last ice age. That’s what I said, it’s what I meant and it’s obvious to everyone (but you apparently). That’s data Dave. Going outside. Not seeing ice everywhere. Data you can almost smell. The real deal.

What you’re actually supposed to do is engage critical thinking (remember, you accused me first) before accepting the nonsense you cite as proof.

The only “proof” I have is the proof I’ve already cited. Rumor has it there was an ice age 10 to 20 thousand years ago. Current observation suggests the extent of that ice, formerly present throughout Canada and the Northern US, no longer exists. This tells us that the planet has been warming since the end of the last ice age. That’s proof Dave. Oshkosh isn’t under an ice pack. You can ask them. Or, you can check the Weather Channel.

You keep citing Marcott. I believe I’ve outlined my criticisms of that paper (and the graph above) in great detail. I don’t believe high resolution data exists. I can’t accept fabricated guesses as “data”. I don’t understand why you would, but it’s your funeral. I can say it isn’t science.

“Current observation suggests the extent of that ice, formerly present throughout Canada and the Northern US, no longer exists. This tells us that the planet has been warming since the end of the last ice age.”

Irrelevant — you claimed the Earth has been warming for “10,000 years.”

Yet you can provide no data to support that. Strange, isn’t it?

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4d31bd42db08cc93aeecc15fbad3210d84d619f9b64ee8462c45194042740308.jpg

I tacitly reject any publication that claims to have reconstructed a temperature record with .1 degree precision 10,000 years ago.

Oh no. Not again. This is (I think) the fourth time you’ve posted this absurd graph.

¹⁴C dating methods simply don’t have the requisite resolution to accurately join previously disjoint data sets “”
Dave, have you really read this paper you keep spamming this conversation with? Here’s a few quotes from it:

1: “The 73 globally distributed temperature records used in our analysis are based on a variety of paleotemperature proxies” (emphasis mine).

2: “We account for chronologic and proxy calibration uncertainties with a Monte Carlo based randomization scheme ” (emphasis mine).

3: “Although some differences exist at the centennial scale among the various methods (Fig. 1, C and D), they are small (<0.2°C) for most of the reconstructions, well within the uncertainties of our Standard5x5 reconstruction, and do not affect the long-term trend in the reconstruction.” (emphasis mine).

4: “Because the relatively low resolution and time uncertainty of our data sets should generally suppress higher frequency temperature variability, an important question is whether the Holocene stack adequately represents centennial or millennial scale variability.” (emphasis mine).

This is your source Dave. This is what you would like the world to believe is absolute proof that the Holocene does not represent a warming trend and that the whole planet is in danger of becoming a burnt out husk in the next 80 years.

So let me explain why this is nonsense and I’ll do it by the numbers.

1: Paleo temperature proxies suffer from a lack of precision and a lack of statistical validity. They also suffer from dramatic uncertainties in temporal resolution that prevent the joining of multiple data sets (75 in this example) with any reasonable accuracy. ¹⁴C dating techniques simply don’t have the requisite precision to allow the joining of disparate data sets over the time scales used in this study (which are regardless of commentary to the contrary, centennial). For an explanation of ¹⁴C dating limitations and standard error see: http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal13%20files/intcal13.pdf. This is why we’re unable to precisely join these data on a centennial scale; the dating technique doesn’t allow for it. This adds an unknown amount of error to the already unknown error produced by a proxy estimation of temperature.

Temperature proxies are based on many different empirical (and occasionally theoretical) relationships between fossil evidence and atmospheric temperature. These are not instrument measures. In the “paper” (all three pages of it) these uncertainties aren’t revealed either in the text or through reference. It’s been my fairly consistent experience that these uncertainties are not discussed in literature, or if they are the discussion is not well publicized. As a result, I can’t give proxy based “reconstructions” of temperature any credence at all.

In closing on this topic, the authors present a blatantly misleading graphic showing temperature anomalies measured in tenths of a degree centigrade. No proxy is precise at that level. The disingenuously imply that a graph showing a +/- .4 degree C range is actually extracted from the “data” they’ve fabricated. This is pure nonsense. You cannot produce results with a precision greater than the precision of the inputs. That’s called noise. They’ve measured and reported noise. This is classic junk science. Real scientists know better than to do this. The paper should not have been accepted for publication.

2: Monte Carlo simulations are very familiar to me. This statement sounds very scientific, but it isn’t. You can’t add information to low information content “data” by rolling dice with it. In general, it’s safe to say you cannot add information through any statistical procedure. If the information is already present, a statistical method may be used to extract or reveal it, but this assumes the information is already present. You cannot remove uncertainties by performing statistical operations on data.

3: This assertion simply isn’t supported. There’s no relevant reference for it, it’s just another case of “trust us”.

4: The authors never answer this question directly and this is the problem isn’t it? The entire field of climatology is attempting to convince the world instrument observations over the past 100 years (centennial scale) are anomalous and worthy of dramatic, concerted, coordinated and very expensive effort. Yet this “paper” openly admits it provides no reasonable evidence that these centennial excursions are either unique in history or anything to be particularly concerned about.

It’s nothing but chicken little nonsense Dave. It’s an opinion piece that lacks any evidence. A fabrication. It’s very sad to see this sort of thing but in truth it’s been going on for centuries. That it’s been picked up by the media should be no surprise; what bleeds leads and that’s always been the credo of newspapers. It shouldn’t be surprising politicians have rallied to this cause; politicians are always interested in leading people from a perceived threat and they’ll use any means available.

But you Dave? You claim to be a scientist and you should know better. My guess is your daily bread comes from writing for pop-sci media, so you fall into the “what bleeds leads” category, which is also very disappointing. Unfortunately you share company with thousands of other scientists who’ve been reduced to begging at the political table, which has exactly the same goal shared by the political class.

I on the other hand no longer depend on the support of the media or the government and so, within limits, am allowed to speak my mind on these subjects. Marcott is a fool, and this is not science. It’s scientific mumbo-jumbo and it truly disgusts me.

I’m 98% water, just like everybody else.

You’re only 60% water? Perhaps that explains your obsession with density…

That’s what I wrote: CO2. Everyone knows what that means.

Dave, you’ve already made a complete fool of yourself, it’s not going to get any better by digging the hole deeper. But don’t let me stop you. You just keep doing it and I’ll watch. I had to let you know though. A “moral imperative” as they say…

Dave? The only data anyone has is that we were in an ice age and we aren’t now. We don’t even know when that happened exactly, but we guess it was between 10 and 20 thousand years ago. We have a rough idea (from geologic records) that there were extensive permanent ice sheets covering all of Canada and much of the Northern US. We know those ice sheets have melted (because they aren’t there now) and that tells us that it got warmer. Therefore it’s safe to say the planet has been warming for the past 10,000 years. Maybe 20,000 years. Maybe 18,000 years. Somewhere in there.

How much? Well, we can’t really say because the thermometer wasn’t invented until the mid 18th century. No one was around 10,000 years ago to record the temperature and take notes. So we don’t know. There is no data. You don’t have any data, I don’t have any data. We only have inference; the ice sheets are gone. From this, we may conclude it’s warmer now than it was 10,000 years ago. We also have written records going back a couple thousand years that tell us it was warmer then (relative to the last ice age) too.

I hope that helps.

Oh horseshit Dave. Pure horseshit.