There was some publicity this week on a paper by Young et al (Science Advances, 2015), which, according to Gifford Miller , whose work has been frequently discussed at CA (see tag), had supposedly put the “coup de grace on the Medieval Warm Period”, that had been so long wished for by the Team.
In today’s post, I’ll return to more typical Climate Audit programming. Upside-down Mann’s mentor, Raymond Bradley, has somewhat surprisingly published an article (Balascio et al 2015) that supports a longstanding Climate Audit criticism of varve proxies. Bradley and coauthors did not report that their interpretation of an important Baffin Island series is upside-down to the orientation used in PAGES2K and numerous AR5 vintage multiproxy reconstructions.
In today’s post, I’m going to discuss an important new 1000-year chronology from northern treeline spruce in Quebec (Gennaretti et al 2014, PNAS here). The chronology is interesting on multiple counts. This is the first Quebec northern treeline chronology to include the medieval warm period.
The PAGES2K (2013) Arctic reconstruction of Kaufman et al has attracted considerable attention as a non-Mannian hockey stick.
Kaufman and the PAGES2K Arctic2K group recently published a series of major corrections to their database, some of which directly respond to Climate Audit criticism. The resulting reconstruction has been substantially revised with substantially increased medieval warmth. His correction of the contaminated Igaliku series is unfortunately incomplete and other defects remain.
In a previous post on PAGES2K Arctic, I pointed out that they had used the Hvitarvatn, Iceland series (PAGES2K version shown below), upside-down to the interpretation of the original authors (Miller et al), who had interpreted thick varves as evidence of the Little Ice Age. A few days ago, Miller and coauthors archived a variety of series from Hvitarvatn, prompting me to review this data.
