[palmer]

It's a great time to see where we are. You have poked various holes in the science mentioned in Soon's paper. From there you have decided the paper doesn't pass muster. Your critiques revolving around the use of precip changes to imply support for warming and cooling was pretty good and you had some good specific critiques. Unfortunately nobody was really able to answer those since we all lack the scientific basis to evaluate proxies and especially to control for other factors, notably precip.

However, your decision that the paper has a "devastating" number of errors is meaningless. Unless you have suddenly become a scientific reviewer in the field which doesn't seem to be the case. The purpose of this thread is to attack the hockey stick. That has been successful as you have done little to defend it. You have (to reiterate) raised useful concerns about Soon and others who attack the hockey stick, but you have presented little to support the hockey stick except some repetition of Mann's statistics.

The "complexity" of those statistics (which you first used as a sword and then as a shield) makes it impractical to critique them. But there are two ways in which Mann has been critiqued here:

First you have cast doubt on the use of temperature proxies by everyone but Mann and Mann's use is the weakest of anyone's (let's not get distracted by the 98 paper, it only looks at LIA and the 99 paper is sorely lacking in data).

Second we have presented ample evidence from temperature oriented proxies that the MWP was at least as warm as today. You have poked a few holes in that assessment but have not come close to refuting it. You have yet to provide an indication that there was cooling during MWP to counterbalance the substantial warming observed in N America and Europe. That warming greatly exceeds today's climate and with the addition of other global warming evidence clearly breaks the hockey stick.

[Yelling]

However, your decision that the paper has a "devastating" number of errors is meaningless. Unless you have suddenly become a scientific reviewer in the field which doesn't seem to be the case.

I did not say it had a devastating number of errors. I did say that the errors it did have combined with poor methodology and a lack of understanding of what some of the papers were measuring to provide a devastating combination. Lets be clear. Any paper can have a small error. For example Soon classifies Mann'a 99 paper as a global indication when we have all agreed that it really is a reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere. That is a minor error.

However saying that a papers shows no climatic anomaly in the 20th century when the paper days that "the warming in recent decades is unprecedented relative to the past millennium." is beyond a minor error!

In regards to how we got onto S&B as opposed to the Hockeystick, again that was not me who changed the topic thread. S&B was presented as a solid piece of research by WOSG (and I believe you liked it the first read through). So I think it is fair of me to examine it.

The "complexity" of those statistics (which you first used as a sword and then as a shield) makes it impractical to critique them.

Impractical! Is that an appeal to ignorance as well? Now I don't feel so bad. However I can agree that we probably would not be able to go much further with Mann.

Instead I would like to address the concerns that you raised in post 140 by presenting the paper Climatic Fluctuations in the Central Region of Argentina in the last 1000 years by Marcela A. Cioccale. I have just given the paper a read and I have found nothing to support a MWP warmer than today. As I said, it has been only a quick read so I am interested in your review.