As I noted over the weekend, kudos to NBC for firing a producer who lied through omission. The person was fired for snipping out audio that totally changed the story line. A quote was transformed from a response to question on the race of somebody seen to the person apparently being obsessed with blacks. It was a propaganda trick that probably had Joseph Goebbels smiling from Hell.

What this incident showed was how the omission of KNOWN information could twist the facts to the point of being in opposition to reality and the truth. And of course, every kid knows deliberately hiding of the truth is called lying.

So when this post went up on WUWT I felt the importance of it had been buried in techno-babble (something I speak with ease).

Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy!

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Willis Eschenbach

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Before we get to the details, let me set the stage for those less familiar with the science of paleoclimate. It is the estimation of ancient climate conditions through ‘proxies’ – items whose quantity change with temperature, usually due to chemical or biological responses to warm and cold seasonal temperatures. But too often these responses are muddied by other factors (e.g., amount of direct sunlight, annual precipitation levels, food  quality/quantity, etc). The problem with all these proxies is their uncertainty is huge. Processes we see today may not be exactly the same in the past. In fact for biological proxies, the odds are they are not the same given the march of evolution, etc. So take all the following data with large amounts of salt, and remember to look at the data point spreads – which are a clear indication of the ‘precision’ of the data. Lots of data can generate a trend, but not precision in many cases.

The study in question came out recently to boost the IPCC, CRU and EPA theories that CO2 drives global temperatures. The study’s case is incredibly weak, in that you cannot tell whether CO2 precedes or lags temperature increases. All the data shows is atmospheric CO2 content rises with temperature, as seen coming out of the last major Ice Age 15,000 – 9,000 years ago [click to enlarge]:

The black dots are the CO2 proxies, the green dots the temperature proxies. All anyone can claim is they both increased at the end of the last ice age. But basic chemistry can address that (e.g., when ocean and fresh water bodies warm they release more CO2 into the air – and since they represent 75% of the Earth’s surface this alone could account for the CO2 rise as temperatures rose).

One thing I notices is we have THOUSANDS of years to see the temperature increase from Ice Age to Holocene “normal”, not decades as the IPCC claims.  It took 5,000+ years to go from -1° C to +1.5° C.

That’s 2,000 yrs/degree C! Apparently, if you assume the conclusions are right (which I don’t), we have some time to work this out.

What Willis Eschenbach noticed was something else – hidden in plain site. If you look past the transition from Ice Age to Holocene, you find something missing. First off, look at the green cloud and notice how after the warming ended we have been in a downward cooling trend. That may surprise a lot of people to realize we are now cooler than right after the end of the last Ice Age. But then also realize that CO2 has been increasing all thsi time, as Willis Eschenbach noted:

Dang, I didn’t expect that rise in CO2 that started about 6,000 BC. I do love climate science, it always surprises me … but the big surprise was not what the ice core records showed. It was what the Shakun2012 authors didn’t show.

I’m sure you can see just what those bad-boy scientists have done. Look how they have cut the modern end of the ice core CO2 record short, right at the time when CO2 started to rise again …

I have updated Willi’s chart to show notional trend lines in temperature (yellow) and CO2 (black) (Click to enlarge).

(BTW, these are eye-balled trend lines since the CO2 data is missing). As can be seen, CO2 has been rising for 7,000+ years and temperatures have been falling for 10,000 or so years. This study proves that CO2 levels are decoupled from global temperature with more confidence than any other claim the authors made.

Stick a fork in the IPCC – it’s done.