Insufficient data used as an excuse (again) for fakery.
Gavin Schmidt acknowledges in a comment to RealClimate’s Marcott defense of teh the new hokey stick that there wasn’t enough paleo data to reconstruct 20th century temps — so Marcott grafted on the instrument record, instead of simply reporting the decline up to the 20th century.
Makes you wonder: if had Marcott continued the paleo reconstruction through the 20th century, would the decline would still be occurring? If so, such a decline would obviously discredit the rest of the reconstruction.
Without the instrumental, higher-than-Holocene-frequency-precision-accuracy splice, the paper would have simply shown that there has been a substantial temperature drop since the sudden end of the last ice age. A troubling NATURAL shift of unknown origin following a sudden, NATURAL warming shift of unknown origin.
The general community does not understand the apples-and-oranges problem of comparing modern records with historical records. The “unprecedented” warming is false in that the short-term range of today has no historical equivalent data-wise. The 300-year smoothing expresses today in exactly the same terms as long ago (except for the increase in uncertainty as we go back). As all and any climate reconstruction careers and grants must be policy-relevant these days, Mike’s Nature Trick had to be added. The rest of the “tricks” are part of the benefit-of-the-doubt jobs that come from confirmation bias.
Without the add-on, Marcott et al would have been telling us that we have been in a 10,000 year cooling period. One question would then have been whether the world is a better environment for life under the early Holocene temperatures or those of 1950.
Climate science is a self-referencing world. Use of the IPCC models creates the graph that the IPCC will later use as “proof” that the IPCC models are reflecting other research done on the subject.
So it appears that Marcott spliced instrumental measurements onto the end of his record. As I recall, thats what Mann did. Marcott admitted that it was not a robust reconstruction of 20th century trends. I wonder when Mann will admit the same (not holding my breath on that one though)…
Every time that anyone has applied any degree of rigor to the AGW system — the data, the reconstructions, the models, the physics — it’s failed. Sometimes the application of rigor seems to turn up actual fraud, as this case seems to be. How in heaven’s name does this claptrap maintin its status?