Bryce Canyon Utah by Charles Rotter
Climate News Roundup
Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #470
7 hours ago
The Week That Was: 2021-09-11 (September 11, 2021
Quote of the Week: “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.” – Francis Bacon
Number of the Week: – 16
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: For the past several weeks TWTW has been reviewing some of the deficiencies in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021) by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), particularly its Summary for Policymakers (SPM) which includes a new hockey-stick with a little evidence supporting it. Comments by statistician Steve McIntyre were devastating. He traced that the assertions that temperatures have been stable up to the industrial revolution come from a set of studies by an international paleoclimatology group based in Bern, Switzerland, known as PAGES 2k (PAst Global ChangES with 2k referring to the past 2000 years). The data itself are maintained by NOAA in Boulder. The most devastating criticism is the deliberate omission of high-resolution, well-established proxy studies of alkenone deposits (produced by marine algae). These deposits include those in limestone beds and date back millions of years. McIntyre writes:
But most of all, given that the 60-30S latband [latitude band] is almost entirely (~96%) ocean, it seems bizarre that PAGES 2019 did not use any ocean core proxies, especially since there are physical formulas for estimating SST [Sea Surface Temperatures] from alkenone or Mg/Ca measurements. Any conversion of tree ring widths to temperature in deg C is the result of ad hoc statistical fitting, not a universal formula. Alkenone values have been measured all over the modern ocean and nicely fit known ocean temperatures. In addition, alkenone values for ocean cores going back to deeper time (even to the Miocene) give a consistent and reproducible narrative. So, there’s a lot to like about them as a candidate for a “good” proxy.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/09/13/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-470/
