Marcott: Another Gergis moment

Search for "Gergis" on the ABC site through Google provides 2 pages of results. The first story is:
"Last 50 years were Australia's hottest: study". It's not until the very end of the article that the following editorial note appears in a smaller font:
Editor's note (June 21): Since this story was originally broadcast, errors have been identified in aspects of the data processing which may affect the results of this study. As a result, publication has been delayed and the research has been withdrawn from online publication. Professor Karoly says the data will be recalculated, peer reviewed and published in due course.

The world is still waiting for this deeply flawed study to be published. ABC ignored reporting on the manner in which the paper was found to be flawed. Those interested might like to re-visit relevant posts at Climate Audit. 

In the meantime in early March ABC uncritically re-published an AFP article that reported on a new study proclaiming:

"We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years," said Shaun Marcott, the lead author of the study, which was published in Science.
"Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years."

Through the tireless efforts of Steve McIntyre we now know that the specular uptick at the end of Marcott's temperature graph that lead to the alarming claims, is an artefact of an inappropriate statistical methodology, It seems the dates of sediments from cores used in the study were shifted in time up to 1000 years. This effectively shifted warming of the Medieval Warm Period into the modern period. Results that showed cooling were truncated from the period of the uptick. Anyone smell the cherries?

How long now to wait for the ABC to comprehensively report on the issue? 

Perhaps this time around rather than adding a footnote, ABC's "journalists" might take the time to fully investigate and report on the matter. However with activists in charge, we won't be holding our breath.

Gergis Update

ABC is yet to formally cover news that a paper it widely reported on and promoted was flawed and withdrawn from publication by its authors. The only mention that the paper was withdrawn is in editorial notes posted discretely at the end of articles such as this one: EDITOR'S NOTE: Since this story was originally broadcast, errors have been identified in aspects of the data processing which may affect the results of this study. As a result, publication has been delayed and the research has been withdrawn from online publication. Professor Karoly says the data will be recalculated, peer reviewed and published in due course.

They provide the following response to a query we made regarding missing editorial notes from a number of ABC reports, including one on its ITunes site.

Thank you for your email of 21 June. I apologise for the delay in responding; it took a little longer to sort out iTunes than it should have. The segment on the Radio National website now has a prominent editor’s note and the podcast is no longer available on iTunes.

At this stage, neither Radio nor News propose to do any further broadcasts or stories on the subject. If or when the scientists re-release their research, the story will be reassessed in the normal way taking account of editorial priorities at the time.

Thank you for taking the time to write; your feedback is appreciated.

Audience & Consumer Affairs

Received 19/7/2012

Score +1

ABC's Gergis update - a poor excuse for journalism

It seems ABC's total coverage of important news of the withdrawal of a scientific paper following the discovery of errors in its methodology uncovered by Climate Audit is as follows:

Editor's Note: Since this story was originally broadcast, errors have been identified in aspects of the data processing which may affect the results of this study. As a result, publication has been delayed and the research has been withdrawn from online publication. Professor Karoly says the data will be recalculated, peer reviewed and published in due course.


If not for our request of an update even this meagre offering would not have been undertaken. However mainstream, actual coverage of this important news by the ABC remains MISSING. One wonders if it plans to use editorial notes as a reporting tool for other important stories. Perhaps the following is an example of what we can expect from ABC news in the near future (you'll have to read the fine print). Perhaps this would save on costs?

Coverage of the withdrawal of the paper in other news outlets included the following:
Sydney Morning Herald/ The Age: Climate warming study put on hold
The Australian: Climate paper flawed, Blog scrutiny forces reappraisal
New York Times Dot Earth: Australian Warming, Hockey Sticks and Open Review

In contrast here are the ABC reports that announced the publication of the erroneous study back in May. Something does not appear to add up. But who are we to expect balance from the ABC?
5 major reports
AM 1000 years of climate data points to a warming Australia
The Science Show RISING TEMPERATURES ACROSS AUSTRALIA

AM Last 50 years were Australia's hottest study

Radio Australia Climate study shows Australia hotter

Radio National Breakfast 1,000 YEARS OF AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE DATA CONFIRMS 'UNPRECEDENTED' WARMING (this one yet to contain the update)
Not to mention an appearances on ABC News 24 and ABC Local radio

SCORE +1

Blog review beats peer review

A few weeks ago ABC breathlessly reported on a new paper...
AM 1000 years of climate data points to a warming Australia
The Science Show RISING TEMPERATURES ACROSS AUSTRALIA

AM Last 50 years were Australia's hottest: study

Radio Australia Climate study shows Australia hotter

Seems the authors of that study are now wearing some egg on their faces as the paper is withdrawn from publication following the identification of errors by Steve McInyre and others.  See Climate Audit for more details.

Bloggers: 1 Peer reviewers: NIL

Print publication of scientific study put on hold

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Stephen Phipps, Ailie Gallant and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.

We are currently reviewing the data and results.

We have requested ABC update their news.

UPDATE: ABC reply: Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 9:17 AM
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.


Clearly, given that we have reported on the study, we would want to be across any material changes to it. I have brought this to the attention of the reporters who filed the original pieces, so that we can track the process and take account of any updated or changed information.



Alan Sunderland

Missing News: Hockey Stick smashed (yet again), McIntyre and McKitrick vindicated

Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.

Missing News: ABC are yet to cover an independent statistical analysis of multiple temperature proxies undertaken published in the peer reviewed journal "Annals of Applied Statistics" that finds:

"We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago."

From the conclusion...

Research on multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the earth’s temperature is now entering its second decade. While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with universitylevel,
professional statisticians (Wegman et al., 2006; Wegman, 2006). Our paper is an effort to apply some modern statistical methods to these problems.
While our results agree with the climate scientists findings in some respects, our methods of estimating model uncertainty and accuracy are in sharp disagreement.
On the one hand, we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data. The fundamental problem is that there is a limited amount of proxy data which dates back to 1000 AD; what is available is weakly predictive of global annual temperature. Our backcasting methods, which track quite closely the methods applied most recently in Mann (2008) to the same data, are unable to catch the sharp run up in temperatures recorded in the 1990s, even in-sample. As can be seen in Figure 15, our estimate of the run up in temperature in the 1990s has a much smaller slope than the actual temperature series. Furthermore, the lower frame of Figure 18 clearly reveals that the proxy model is not at all able to track the high gradient segment. Consequently, the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model. 

Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite 

large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature  

are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many  

centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only  

one source of evidence in the AGW debate.

The paper is titled 

A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE TEMPERATURE 

PROXIES: ARE RECONSTRUCTIONS OF SURFACE 

TEMPERATURES OVER THE LAST 1000 YEARS RELIABLE?

BY BLAKELEY B. MCSHANE AND ABRAHAM J. WYNER

Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania

ABC provide the following response 20/8/2010:
Thank you for your email.

The team responsible for the timeline have advised me that the climate change timeline records events in climate change history that can be described as: a significant geophysical or climatic event; a human event that can be understood in the context of climate history; a hypothesis or discovery that has contributed significantly to our understanding of climate science or that has provided social context around the debate over climate change.

The paper that you refer to, while no doubt contributing to the debate over the accuracy of climate modelling, has yet to have made any significant impact in any of these areas.

The climate change timeline was developed as a feature for the launch of
the ABC environment portal in the lead up to December 2009 Copenhagen conference. The team responsible for the timeline have also advised that they are not currently adding to or amending any of the data.

Thank you for contacting the ABC with your concerns.
Yours sincerely,
ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs


To which we replied:

Sadly that ABC Science have deliberately chosen to ignore the paper reflects poorly on their capacity to recognise significant develops in science as they arise. I feel ABC Science may benefit from the following quote by Karl Popper:

“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve”

Please pass this on.

 

Thanks for your time