Last year, I wrote a blog post covering Rosenthal et al 2013 – see here. It reported on interesting Mg-Ca ocean cores in the western Pacific from the foraminfera H. Balthica, which is believed to be a proxy for “intermediate water temperatures”.
The press release stated that the middle depths were warming “15 times faster” than ever before:
In a reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures in the last 10,000 years, researchers have found that its middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000.
However, the situation was much less dramatic if one parsed the actual data, as shown in the graphic below (taken from my earlier post) redrawn from Rosenthal’s information. Rather than the modern period being “unprecedented”, on this scale, it looks well within historical ranges.
Figure 2. From Rosenthal et al 2013 Figure 2C. Red- temperature anomaly converted from NOAA Pacific Ocean 0-700m ocean heat content. Cyan – Rosenthal Figure 3B reconstruction (my digitization). Orange trend line shows third comparison from Rosenthal SI, taken from first row in Table S3.
In the course of doing the analysis, I observed that Rosenthal’s Table S3 seemed to be screwed up in multiple ways – as I observed in my post.
In addition, Rosenthal had not archived his data (though he has a pretty good track record of archiving data from previous studies.) I asked him for the data and got fobbed off a number of times. I notified Sciencemag of the problem but got no response. The other day, I noticed that Rosenthal had issued a revised SI at Sciencemag and that the requested data had been filed there. Rosenthal discourteously failed to notify me that he had done so.
Rosenthal’s revised SI also included substantial changes to the Table S3 that I had previously criticized, but did not issue a Corrigendum notice. He said that the “errors
have no bearing on the main conclusions of the paper”. In making these corrections to Table S3 (which still has some puzzles), Rosenthal did not acknowledge Climate Audit’s criticism of this table.
Rather than reviewing the analysis, I’ve posted up the revisions as an update to the earlier post here.