The battle of the graphs provides a learning opportunity says “American Elephants”, and indeed it does, though possibly not in the way they’re thinking.
I haven’t been able to clearly identify the source of this image (which is the reason for this post: I’ll show you how far back I’ve managed to go, and your job is to go further, or find a reason why my answer is right). The top pane is clear enough; its a borked-up version of MBH from IPCC 2001 or similar. The lower pane is similar to the famous fig 7.1.c from the FAR in 1990. Wiki’s [[Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports]] has a nice set of pix.
The Manchurian Candidate
My candidate for the source of this nonsense is Monkers, in the Torygraph, with a copy of Photoshop. That’s from 2006, and I can’t find anything earlier. That article includes the pic I’ve inlined above, and the text “The UN’s second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today.” There is no such graph; the 19951 IPCC report used a northern hemisphere summer temperature reconstruction (fig 3.20) from 1400 to 1979 by (Bradley and Jones 1993) (text ripped shamelessly from wiki, but anyway I wrote it).
That’s the source of the combined image. The borked-up thing resembling IPCC ’90 but which Monkers erroneously sourced to IPCC ’95 has a long history that I ought to remember; I’m hoping someone will remind me.
[Update: K points to http://www.visionlearning.com/en/library/Process-of-Science/49/Using-Graphs-and-Visual-Data-in-Science/156 which says that the Torygraph article is indeed the source of the pic, in that graphical form. I may have been wrong about the “long history” of *that* image; its the multiple versions of the real 7.1.c that have the history.]
[Ha ha. another update: the text on that page has mysteriously changed, removing the graph. Isn’t that just a bizarre co-incidence? And yes we all believe in fairies. Here’s a cite of a wayback if you want to see the original -W]
BTW, if you’re wondering why the “skeptics” want the pic from IPCC ’90 to be part of IPCC’95, the answer is that they want the IPCC to have “suddenly” thrown out the One True MWP as revealed in Holy Writ by Lamb, and replaced it by MBH. Adding in an extra 5 or 6 years rather spoils that picture.
Enter the Void
Enter BIG NEWS VIII: New solar theory predicts imminent global cooling (yes, they really are up to 8 posts now) which presents – somewhat gratuitously – a fig 5 which I’ll include below:
captioned “Figure 5: From the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC, 1996, via here” where “here” is a link to http://junksciencearchive.com/Hide_the_decline.html. You won’t be surprised to find that is, indeed, junk (arf arf) and includes the same pic, introduced by “the IPCC maintained the warming in its Second Assessment Report as follows”. So JoNova (actually its DE) has (to their credit) actually sourced the image, but the source they’ve chosen to rely on is, ermm, junk. And doesn’t source its image. But it looks very much like the bottom half of the Torygraph image cut out. In which case its obviously not from any IPCC report, and has got the provenance of the pic wrong.
Your mother was a hamster
I kindly pointed out DE’s error. After a round of ritualised insults, someone actually dared to agree with me, which was a pleasant surprise. After that its gone rather quiet.
Stonewall
So, it looks like DE has been rather careless with his sourcing. Which is a bit embarrassing for him, as he is trying to be all science-y; look, he’s even got falsifiability criteria, it must be science. And so on. The question then becomes, what is he going to do about it? My best guess is stonewall: pretend that nothing is wrong, and rely on the denizens to just lap it up. That would be petty of him; simply fixing it up would be better and much easier.
[Update: they’ve done the right thing for the pic and updated the graph to the right one, for which I give them some credit. However, the problem now is that they’ve got an updated figure, for which the text makes no sense (see my comment). So, only partial credit.
Refs
* More use and abuse of IPCC 1990 fig 7.1(c)
* The Medieval Dumb Period by Russell Seitz
* About that graph…
Notes
1. The IPCC Second Assessment Report (SAR) is variously known as IPCC ’95 or ’96. Take your pic.
wmconnolley: scienceblogs.com/stoat archive 
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/take-notes-mr-steyn/
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And, of course
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/the-church-of-monckton/
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Sorry – last comment got truncated somehow – meant to ask if anyone knows if there’s a more text manageable version of Abraham’s slideshow available.
WC writes:”The WUWT thread has degenerated, as these things are wont to…”
Yes, I spent my day (the 4th, a holiday) in the dungeon trying to swat the unlearned flies away, but it is filled with such dim bulbs it’s hard on the eyes. So far I have resisted the temptation to revisit.
I did forget one non sequitur reply I intended to use: “I never said Monckton is a churlish cretin who makes dung beetles look savory.”
I think instead I will write something to make Monckton’s views on science and religion better known. His SPPI essay What is science without religion? includes this gem:
“Perhaps, therefore, no one should be allowed to practice in any of the sciences, particularly in those sciences that have become the mere political footballs of the leading pressure-groups, unless he can certify that he adheres to one of those major religions – Christianity outstanding among them – that preach the necessity of morality, and the reality of the distinction between that which is so and that which is not.”
Which segues nicely into his diatribes against the banning of DDT and his claims to have a cure for Graves disease, malaria, HIV, MS, and the common cold. What moral man could withhold a cure that could save thousands, millions of lives? Monckton of Brenchley, of course.
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Agaiin, I’m no clinical psychologist, but t this old joke may well apply to some in the blogosphere:
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Ah well, we’ll just have to wait for the court reports.
One amusing piece of legalese from the Wotsup excuses post: Monkers shows images of the famous 1990 FAR fig 7.1.c schematic (leaving out the Years Before Present line) and the fake version he used in his pdf, “mistakenly captioned as 1996 rather than 1990”. In response to earlier challenges that this was “not the same graph”, he writes “There seem to me to be no material differences, and I think it would be hard for the defendants to convince a court that there were any.”
Strange that minor differences don’t matter when he publishes fakes, when in that very article he was pushing attacks on the MBH99 graph over minor issues of statistical techniques which don’t make any material differences to a reconstruction.
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The Barclay brothers are the lesser known pox on the face of british journalism. Previously owners of the Scotsman, which they made into a boring mainstream ‘newspaper’ with nothing interesting or particularly scottish about it.
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dave s – Monckton wants the respect of a peer-reviewed scientist or academic, but he doesn’t want to actually be held to their standards.
Other than money and family connections he has no credentials to be pontificating on science. His opinion should carry no more weight than any random blogger on the web; less since he’s been shown to be wrong, ignorant, and/or deceitful in virtually every area he chooses to spout an opinion.
But anyone that’s spent 10 minutes researching his claims knows that.
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Any claim of 1995/1996 is a false citation:
a) at the very best, it is such incompetent scholarship that people would be advised to distrust anything said further.
b) At worst it s deliberate falsification to support the semblance of believability for the Deming quote and idea that the SAR still supported Lamb, and MBH99 had to be created to eliminate that.
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Again quoting Monkers:
“So I am going to court. My lawyers say the libels are plain and indefensible. They comment additionally that no judge would regard the schematics in the Telegraph (whoever had drawn them) as significantly misrepresenting the difference between the 1990 and 2001 reports’ images of the past millennium’s global temperature anomalies. As far as they can see, there is not a lot wrong with the graphs in any event.”
Why should the “Battle of the Graphs” figure (oops, they meant schematics) have anything to do with 1990? Nothing I can see in his Torygraph article about 1990, he specifically comments about “The UN’s second assessment report, in 1996”.
The second fake graph is clearly labelled “Climatic changes in Europe”, there was no graph or schematic in the TAR showing Europe over 1,000 years, and while the fake has some resemblance to fig 7.1.c it has a couple of extra wiggles as well as the spurious 20th century average line. Of course, his lawyers can’t see these problems.
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oops, meant to say “no graph or schematic in the FAR showing Europe over 1,000 years”, don’t think there was one in the SAR or TAR either but this argument is really about the 1990 FAR.
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Just realised another bit of fakery in the fake “IPCC ‘Hockey Stick'”, the zero line (relative to 1961–1990) has been moved down so far that the curve around 1170 actually goes above it, when in the original 2001 TAR the smoothed curve keeps well below the line until around 1950.
Looks like a material difference to me, but Monkers and his lawyers can’t see it.
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dave s:
I question the statement “and his lawyers can’t see it.”
Is there any evidence that his lawyers are involved?
(Does anyone know who any identities of lawyers? I’ve kept an eye out for letters from lawyers to the many people out there, but have yet to see one.)
This seems akin to: Monckton’s comments years ago:
”
“Dr.” Mashey says Mr. Schulte plagiarized my research. He did no such thing. It was he, not I, who conducted the research. “Dr.” Mashey was told this.
“Dr.” Mashey submitted his over-long complaint formally to Mr. Schulte’s academic institution, whose investigator rejected it on all counts.
“Dr.” Mashey is now himself under investigation for circulating his complaint publicly, in a form in which which inter alia he breaches doctor-patient confidentiality. For this reason, please remove all links to “Dr.” Mashey’s document.
One realizes that the news that the scientific “consensus” no longer believes in climate alarm (if it ever did) is unwelcome in certain political circles. But the science is the science.
Perhaps it would be better if “Dr.” Mashey were to write a peer-reviewed rebuttal of Mr. Schulte’s paper, rather than interfering in an unlawful manner on the blogosphere, which is not the best place for serious scientific discourse.”
A bit later, Richard Littlemore wrote:
“Our experience with lawyers suggests that they discourage bullying actions when their client is entirely in the wrong, and when the evidence of their perfidy is a) freely available and/or b) already in the hands of the proposed “defendant.”
But if Monckton wants to rattle a his weapon, I’ll be happy to provide the coordinates of our own lawyer, who gets great entertainment from answering insincere letters full of belligerence and bluster. ”
Nothing happened,
People may find my later comments in that thread amusing, Monckton’s comment had indeed confirmed that he was a patient of endocrinologist Schulte.
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Yep, the “Battle of the Graphs” graphs aren’t graphs, one has no known factual basis but seems to be a doodle by the late Daly, the other is to different scales in both x and y axes, is squished in the y axis and has a fake baseline.
And Monckton may be fantasising about “his lawyers”. Time to call in Scrotum, his wrinkled retainer.
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John #212 – hey, I’m in that thread as well. My I did get around, despite at that time feeling rather ill from glandular fever.
That’s the fun thing about the internet, it brings you closer to all sorts of protagonists.
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guthrie: yes, that was an interesting start to Monckton’s US career, and investigating that was what got me started chasing the social networks, funding flows and use of the Internet for propagation of misinformation….
Monckton must be thanked for getting me started!
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An actual libel suit would be interesting just for the discovery process. When MoB wrote, “…in whose selection, drafting and publication I played no part whatsoever.” Does anybody believe he’s *NOT* prevaricating? For instance, he’s not denying that he discussed it with the Telegraph. He’s not denying the Telegraph based it on materials he provided them. He’s not denying he knows who made it. He’s not even denying whether they ran it with his approval. Any examination of Monckton’s prior actions shows he uses legal semantics to avoid telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Likewise the graph in the reference materials, the knock-off 1990 FAR, mis-captioned as ‘From UN 1996’ is of unknown provenance. MoB has said that it was sent to him by “an eminent professor”, obtained from “a reliable source” or alternatively he reproduced it based on the 1990 FAR.
We know Monckton didn’t reproduce it because he didn’t have the FAR. So, who was the eminent professor/reliable source that sent Monckton the knock-off instead of the real thing? That might be an interesting revelation.
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FWIW, I have long suspected that Monckton is his lawyers, which would explain why they can’t see the differences.
And why shouldn’t he be his lawyers? He’s his own expert(s) in so many other domains.
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One thing I’ve not seen mentioned here is this statement by Watts.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/03/about-that-graph/
Strange that Watts would not know that
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton
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Monckton’s document was published in two parts and distributed with the Sunday Telegraph. A somewhat shocking decision for a “quality” newspaper to make.AC
I have a memory of His Lordship saying his interest in climate was piqued by a City Fund Manager friend asking him if there was anything to worry about (profit-threatening) in this whole ‘global warming thingie’ and on investigation found out the IPCC were a load of charlatans and there was no need for any kind of economy-chilling action. Now somebody more suspicious than I might infer a link between Rosa Monckton, Chris’s sister, who is married to Dominic Lawson (son of Nigel of the GWPF), who edited the ST up until the year before the piece was published.
Maybe Chris got Sis to pull a few strings in the Old Boys Network to get his critique published in the (city-friendly) ST.
Some might find that a credible scenario. I could not possibly comment.
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Phil Clarke:
you might take a look at Monckton/Schulte/Oreskes, especially p.11, where detailed chronology starts, including earlier events.
That includes the 11/05/06 Monckton article, but also some earlier relevant items, such as:
12/03/04 Oreskes[1] Published in Science
01/04/05 Peiser[2] Letter to Science
06/21/05 Ferguson Posts Peiser Attempted Rebuttal vs Oreskes
sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000461the_good_explanation.html
02/28/06 UK Conservative David Cameron Starts Talking Greener, “Built to Last”
http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=party.builttolast.page
This is not welcomed by all UK conservatives. Some have speculated that Monckton was especially unhappy with this, and that his 2006 interest in climate change dates from this time.
(more) Note that Ferguson runs SPPI (Monckton’s virtual home in US, really a front for Idsos’ CSCDGC, Fergsuon is/was highest-paid employee), PDF at Fake 2 p.78 has some of the money flows. Frontiers ofreedom was getting regular money from the Claude Lambe Foundation (i.e., Charles Koch), 2004-2007, then Ferguson left, started SPPI.
But $25K Was given in 2007 via Lambe to CSCDGC … but at Ferguson’s Haymarket, VA address.
Also, read pp.12- on Manthorpe’s 05/07/07 “Monckton Saves the Day”, on long interview with him:
“This confidence is never more apparent than in Monckton’s analysis of the subject on which his mind is now engaged pretty much constantly, the science and politics of climate change…”
“When I mention Naomi Oreskes’s famous evaluation of 928 articles referencing ‘climate change’ that ‘proved’ the consensus of catastrophe among scientists, he announces not only that he has read the 928 articles in question and would argue ‘only 1 per cent explicitly predict doom, while 3 per cent are specifically sceptical of apocalyptic ideas’, but also that he has sent a further 8,500 related articles to be evaluated by a team of two dozen scientists across the globe.“
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Thanks, John. That interview was the source of my half-remembered connection to the City …
in the years since, and in particular in the last year, he has continued to look at the question, has done the maths (‘Radiative transfer calculations I can do standing on my head’) and formed his own conclusions. These conclusions were first made public after he received a call from a fund manager from the City: ‘Monckton, climate change. What d’you think?’
Monckton told him. ‘I said basically I think there is very little for us to worry about at all,’ he says, brightly, which no doubt comes as a great relief to the anxious majority of the world’s population. […]
He sent the man from the City the conclusions he had drawn from ‘the back of an envelope’ and more extensive calculations he had done (outsmarting at a stroke thousands of the world’s scientists). The man was so impressed he apparently passed them on to Patience Wheatcroft, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph. She decided to publish them under the heading ‘Climate chaos? Don’t believe it’.
Or that’s the peer-reviewed version, anyhow,
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219 Phil,
From http://o.b5z.net/i/u/10152887/f/warm-cv_V2.pdf
[Wow. Was that CV written by him, or one of his enemies? -W]
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Another gem from that same PDF.
I wonder who those journos could be? Do they know?
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MoB “To those who say it is unwise to go to law, I say that I have never yet entirely lost a libel case. I only pursue them rarely, and only when the libel is particularly damaging, particularly persistent, particularly widely circulated, demonstrably false, and not retracted or apologized for upon request. In such cases, it is not likely that one will lose, particularly in the Scottish courts, which are very businesslike and down-to-earth in their approach and will have absolutely no patience with the various evasions and circumlocutions that are the stock-in-trade of the climate communists.”
What libel cases has MoB won, not entirely lost (if any)
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222 W,
Sorry, should’ve mentioned that the PDF is linked from http://www.lordmoncktonfoundation.com
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“Lord Monckton’s two articles on global warming in The Sunday Telegraph in November 2006 crashed its website after attracting 127,000 hits within two hours of publication.” Hmm. Unlikely but which form of publication do we mean? The Telegraph website tends to put tomorrow’s main stories on its website about 9pm. The physical paper is available at some London newsstands (often at railway stations) by about 11pm. Certainly that was what it was like about ten years ago. So crashing the website happened between 11pm and 1pm the night of publication. Don’t think so.
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Ahh, I see he mentions the 2008 APS FPS affair in which I was involved:
Monckton:
‘The commissioning editor who had asked for the paper and the review editor – an eminent Physics professor – who had reviewed it were both dismissed for publishing it. The new editors then pretended it had not undergone any scientific review, leading several dozen fellows of the American Physical Society to protest, and to demand that it should revise or abandon its official statement on global warming.’
False. There was no peer review and not even any scientific review by the editors, neither of whom knew this topic.
Here’s how all this happened: the editors were looking for pro- and con- articles by physicists aboutt AGW science. They asked around, and as I understand it, an APS member Gerald E. Marsh
who participated at FPS gave them half a dozen names, ending with Monckton.
It turns out Marsh spoke at the 2010 Heartland ICCC and he had lots of earlier history. They ended up with Monckton, assuming he was a British physicist they didn’t happen to know. Oops.
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I’ve posted a little screed around the Heartland’s ICCC event in Vegas and featuring Monckton at Daily Kos. It’s sitting at #3 in the Community Spotlight right now which ensures it front page visibility for a little while. It’s titled Hobby Lobby? Does the GOP and Tea Party Want Climate Scientists to Pass a Religious Test Next?
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“Threatening Those Who Disagree With Him” in Barry Bickmore’s Lord Monckton’s Rap Sheert is a enumreation, although he may be missing one or two. If you run accorss more ,send them to Barry, he does update this.
[I’ve corrected your Freudian slip 🙂 -W]
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“Lord Monckton’s Rap Sheet” – so there appears to be lots of threats of libel, but no action.
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W, I see that over at Watts’s Home For The Terminally Deluded, ‘dbstealey’ (who I think is also a moderator) has once again told lies about you, repeated by incorrigible liar Richard Courtney. You will, of course, follow Lord Munchkin’s example and threaten to sue both unless they retract those false claims? 😉
[Somewhat weirdly, my replies on that thread are actually making it through, albeit strongly delayed in moderation. My comment of July 9, 2014 at 4:52 am still hasn’t appeared (I’m tracking my replies at http://stoat-spam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/about-that-graph.html if you want to play along). I’m pretty sure that the delay is because the monkeys they employ as mods need to check back with the organ grinder before they allow anything from me through -W]
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dbstealey aka Smokey = Dave B Stealey is indeed one of the most enthusiastic moderators.
See picture of Team WUWT, 04/01/12.
“Left to right
Charles Rotter, Alec Rawls, Dr. Ryan Maue, Tom Fuller, Dave Stealey, myself, Steven Mosher, Dr. Leif Svalgaard, and Willis Eschenbach.”
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232 John,
Oh, I see. I did wonder what had happened to ‘smokey’, one of the stupidest *and* nastiest creeps to be found in the deniosphere.
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231 W,
More comments are getting through at Watts, including a nice one from JBL nailing Courtney.
(I’d join in there as well but I really don’t want those disgusting creeps having my email address.)
[FWIW, don’t worry about email addresses – they don’t get verified – worry about leaking your IP address -W]
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> having my email address
‘oogle “free forwarding email” and use a different one for each site that wants one — then when a wave of spam addressed to that address comes , you know who sold it and you can cancel that one so further email to it bounces.
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p.s.: yes, caution is appropriate:
how else would a reasonable person deal with a government that is led by “traitors” and under the control of Satan?
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re: W in #232
Mark Knopfler has a song that might apply.
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Looks like the censorship curtain has come down again at WUWT, the noise to signal ratio got a bit too low, what with myself, Margaret Hardman, JBL and J Murphy representing the concerned community. And Stealey went into meltdown – 4 posts in 10 minutes and my last two ended up in the bitbucket.
Hey Ho.
About time somebody reminded Courtney of his fake self-awarded Doctorate, of a piece with Monckton’s seat in the legislature…. 😉
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FWIW, I don’t use my usual e-mail addresses when posting there. It’s interesting if discouraging that Courtney can’t get over the idea that I might be a sock puppet to reach deep enough to wonder about the content of what I’m saying.
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239 JBL,
You’ve done it now: by appearing here you’ve proved Courtney’s assertion that you are, if not a Connolley sock, a Connolley minion. 😉
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🙂
(Actually I even ‘fessed up to it there; odd that my “admission” isn’t sufficiently damning and he needs to make up weird stories.
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231, 232
dbs also goes as “D Boehm Stealey” or “D Boehm” or variations thereof with umlaut like “D Böehm”.
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[Spammed -W]
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dbs tries to defend his position using Easterbrook style plots of GISP2. Here’s a comment WUWT tells me can not be posted, seems to be testy about the links contained. If anyone wants to copy the info over to WUWT feel free to do so (verbatim or not).
Anyone care to explain, why dbstealy is happy to link to a graph that labels the 1790-1850 uptick in the GISP2 data as “Mann Hockey Stick”? The MBH99 uptick starts in the 1920ish era. It is also known, that the Greenland temperature shows a variability that is about a factor of 1.6 larger than the variability of the Northern Hemisphere mean (see Box et. al. 2009. Furthermore we have temperature reconstructions for the GISP2 site spanning the time period 1840-2009. If you plug that into the graph it looks like this: http://i2.wp.com/hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GISP210klarge.png
The 2000-2009 average eclipes all prior max temps in the GISP2 dataset.
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