A comment on M+W10 submitted to RealClimate.org

I submitted a comment to the RealClimate.org post Doing it yourselves (20 August 2010), as the author makes some interesting remarks on the intersection of McShayne and Wyner (2010) and the Tiljander proxies. My comment entered the moderation queue last night after position #41, and wasn't among the ten comments that have been released in three batches this morning. Perhaps it has been failed, or perhaps it's being delayed. If does make a belated appearance (accompanied with inline commentary?), I'll note that in an update.

[ UPDATE 22 Aug. 2010 3:20 PM EDT -- In the past hour, my comment passed moderation, and was slotted into position #42 (the comment count is currently at 60). Gavin Schmidt's inline commentary is reproduced at the tail of this post. -- AMac ]

The Tiljander Data Series: Data and Graphs

I have compiled the information from the Lake Korttajarvi borehole varved sediments record that was characterized in Tiljander03, and then used in the multiproxy paleoclimate reconstruction Mann08.

The Excel file containing this data can be downloaded from this BitBucket.org archive. The name of the 1.5MB file is Tiljander-Mann08-proxies-data+graphs.xls. The name of the 1.8 MB file is Tiljander_proxies_dataset_graphs.xls .

Some observations and some graphs follow.

Part 2: Synopsis of some Tiljander-related arguments

This post is the continuation of a discussion on the Tiljander proxies that took place in the comments thread following the Aug. 1, 2010 Climate Audit post The No-Dendro Illusion.

Part 1 is here. As with that post, I may clean up formatting and grammar here, without notice.

Unthreaded post

This is a post for comments that don't fit anywhere else on the blog.

Please be civil, etc.

Synopsis of some Tiljander-related arguments in a recent Climate Audit thread

This post is a placeholder that will hopefully be superseded by a more careful and thorough description of a discussion of the use of the four Lake Korttajarvi lakebed sediment series (the "Tiljander proxies") in Mann08 (PNAS). This discussion was largely between two pseudonymous commenters at Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit post The No-Dendro Illusion.

I'm putting this together to respond to this recent comment by DeepClimate, at his blog.

MikeN weighs in on Mann08's use of the Tiljander proxies

One thing that I can't do is evaluate the MatLab code that Prof. Mann placed online when PNAS published Mann08 in September, 2008. I can't even make heads or tails of Steve McIntyre's "R"-based emulations of Mann08... when it comes to running even simple programs, I'm an illiterate (gasp!).

MikeN is a frequent participant at technical Climate Audit discussions. The latest has been The No-Dendro Illusion. He has offered considerable insight within the threads at Arthur Smith's posts at Not Spaghetti considering the use of the Tiljander proxies in the Mann research group's recent efforts: Where's the fraud?, Michael Mann's errors, and Open Thread.

Via email, he offered a summary of his views of Mann08's use of the Tiljander proxies. With minor edits, his remarks follow.

Two views of Tiljander

On Aug. 4 at Collide-a-scape, Keith Kloor presented an e-mail interview of Gavin Schmidt, the NASA climate modeler and RealClimate.org blogger, Gavin's Perspective. It's a generally interesting read. After the post went up, Gavin stayed around to field accodades and brickbats from readers. After some questions about the Tiljander/Mann Affair went unanswered, I penned a Tiljander For Beginners essay at #127, and invited Gavin's thoughts. He duly responded with his view at #188.

The two perspective pieces are side-by-side, below.

Backgrounder on Analysis of Freshwater Lakebed Varved Sediment Cores

Deep in the thread following the Climate Audit post The No-Dendro Illusion, "Ianl8888" made a series of remarks that provide valuable context to the 2003 Boreas paper by Mia Tiljander et al.

His (or her) remarks follow, with minor edits for style.