1 – Historic temperature reconstrucitons are critical for determining how much energy to put into the all important CO2 mitigation effort. Advocates like to redirect this point when a reconstruction fails quality control.
2 – There are no verified temperature proxies. NOT one proxy for thermometers has been verified to be associated with temperature in an engineering style test. Ice cores, speleothum, tree ring widths, tree ring latewood density, boreholes, pollen, sediments, mollusk shells or historic records. They are un-calibrated and completely unverified and several may be completely unrelated.
3 – Not one reconstruction uses an egineering style verification of method to determine if the math is extracting the signal it’s supposed to. Instead odd and unique methods are created and implemented completely without verification in paleoclimatology.
4 – Historic records show temperatures were warmer in the recent past than today. LINK
5 – Many reconstructions are verified using r correlation values. These only verify the correlation to the most recent actual thermometer based temperature records. Since there are non-stationary variances created by correlation based sorting of proxies, the calibration range has different scale than the historic reconstruction temperature range. This means correlation can only tell if the shape is similar, not whether the scale is similar.
6 – Some papers have estimated that the historic pre-calibration range temperature variance is less than half of the calibration range due to the math used rather than the data. My own work estimates Mann08 historic sigal is 30 percent of actual – we can multiply everything pre-1850 by 3 and get a more reasonable approximation of historic temps.
7 – The point in #6 assumes proxies are perfect and makes no correction for reductions in variance due to some proxies being unrelated to temp. As they are 100% unverified, there is a high degree of certainty that some if not all proxies are actually not temperature related. Still like most, I do believe most have a temp component to them under the massive noise.
8 – Borehole proxy temperature data is taken from actual measurements of the rock temps. The temperature of the rock is assumed to be created from air temperatures over thousands of years. The fact that they are water filled and part of active hydrological systems which carry heat away WITH WATER is completely ignored. Therefore, to use a borehole for historic temp you must first accept that flowing underground water has no effect on the temp data for thousands of years. I suspect it’s a leap of faith that even a suicide bomber would have trouble with.
9 – Proxy linearity to temperature is assumed, again without validation. For instance tree ring widths are first matched to temp in recent times and the whole pattern of growth for the tree is assumed to be linear with temperature for thousands of years. No verification of any kind is made.
10 – Few of the above points are actively disputed in peer reviewed literature. Proxy folk are creating paper after paper with the same methods that caused unprecedented temps, ice, hurricanes and whatever else the authors need to be unprecedented. In blogland AGW advocates refute claims against the hockey sticks by saying so many other studies got the same result. We the non-sheep are stuck saying, um….. they used the same kind of math.
All these papers saying ‘whatever’ factor is unprecedented, and completely without verification.
Crazy world.