Whoop!!! Mikey Mann At It Again!!! Quoting Nonsense!!

Good heavens!  The Mann simply can’t learn, or can he?  From HuffPo, written by Mikey ….

Pacific Ocean Warming at Fastest Rate in 10,000 Years

It’s all about a paleo study of the Pacific and Antarctic. 

Just how rapid is the current rate of warming of the ocean? There is an interesting new article by Rosenthal and collaborators in the latest issue of the journal Science entitled “Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years” that attempts to address this question. The article compares current rates of ocean warming with long-term paleoclimatic evidence from ocean sediments. So how rapid is the ocean warming? Well, for the Pacific ocean at least, faster than any other time in at least the past 10,000 years.

It’s hysterical how the lunatics set themselves up, over and over again.  Let’s see……  making like comparisons?  Nope, that’s not what they’re doing.  Rate?  Over what time span?  Oh, wait, you have to make like comparisons to know that.  Can we?  Absolutely not.  Of course, the first question which pops in my head is at what resolution?  Which relates to the time span. 

Okay, we’re warming at a rate faster than evuh!!!  So, what’s the velocity?  How many degrees/time?  Let’s see if they answer the question, shall we?

The study finds, specifically, that (to quote Columbia University’s press release) the “middle depths [of the Pacific Ocean] have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000“.

Wow!  Okay, 15 times faster.   That’s a lot!  But, consider the implications here.  “Over the last 60 years”.  This states that we can make proper comparisons of our recent history to the past of 10,000 years ago.  By now, alarms should be going off in any rational head.  We’ve been down this road so often.  Mann actually mentions this, but, in the process invalidates the study he’s referencing.

One complication with their comparison is that the dramatic warming of the past half century is not evident in the various sediment data analyzed in the study. “Modern” conditions conditions are typically defined by the “tops” of the sediment core obtained by drilling down below the ocean bottom. But sediment core tops are notoriously bad estimates of “current” climate conditions because of various factors, including the limited temporal resolution owing to slow sediment deposition rates, and processes that mix and smear information at the top of the core. Core tops for these reasons tend not to record the most recent climate changes. Thus, the researchers’ data do not explicitly resolve the large recent increases in temperature (and heat content). But if the warming of the past half century is not resolved by their data, then the assumption that those data can be registered against a common modern baseline (the authors use a reference period of 1965-1970) too is suspect. That registration is critical to their conclusion that modern heat content has not exceeded the bounds of the past two millennia.

This is deplorable.  In terms of modern measurements, we have absolutely no idea what the temps or OHC were in 1965.  None.  It’s preposterous to even try to make such a lunatic assertion. 

Then we see Mikey suddenly remembering what a scientist is suppose to do ……

There are also some puzzling inconsistencies between the authors’ current conclusions and other previously published evidence implying a very different pattern of global ocean heat content changes over the past two millennia. ……

He goes on to discuss thermal expansion and how this doesn’t jibe with what the authors are saying.  But, later, we see why he suddenly decided to pretend to be a scientist…..

Finally, we need to maintain a healthy skepticism about broad conclusions …..

LOL!!!!  Did Mikey really write that?  Really?

…….It is surprising in this context that the article didn’t mention or cite two studies published in the same journal (Science), a few years ago: Mann et al (2009) …

OIC.  Did they get your dander up Mr. pizzypants? 

There a few other minor, odd things about the study. In a figure comparing the sediment records with proxy reconstructions of surface temperature, the authors attribute one of the curves to “Mann 2003” in the figure legend. This would appear to be a reference to a rather old reconstruction by Mann and Jones (2003), which is supplanted by a newer, far more comprehensive study by Mann et al (2008). The authors indeed cite this latter study in footnote of the figure caption. So it is unclear which reconstruction is actually being shown, and the comparison is potentially inappropriate. The authors, in a different figure, show a recent, longer albeit somewhat more tenuous reconstruction of global temperature over the past 11,000 years by Marcott et al (2013), published in Science earlier this year. That reconstruction was observed to be consistent with that of Mann et al (2008) during the interval of overlap of the past two millennia.

Mann finishes to say this …..

….. However, there are a number of inconsistencies with other evidence, and debatable assumptions and interpretations, which will require sorting out by the scientific community. …..

It does seem that Mann has learned something.  How bad is it though, that Mann would easily pick out these things in the paper?  Clearly, he wasn’t a reviewer or a couple of questions he had would have been answered.  We don’t know exactly how bad it is because it’s behind a paywall, but, here’s the abstract.

• ABSTRACT
• EDITOR’S SUMMARY

Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4°C and 1.5 ± 0.4°C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9°C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65° warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large.

I’ll have more to say about this if the lunatics have more to say.