Watsisname wrote:Source of the post True! But counter-intuitively, not as big of a problem as you might think.
The size of that problem varies. The basic problem is that you add layers of assumptions. Without sending probes we determine the masses of distant binary stars, and even figure out what kind of molecules they have in their atmospheres, which, when you think about it, is magic. Because we can be fairly confident about the assumptions made. How solid are the assumptions needed to measure how SH temperatures differ from NH temperatures in Finnish sediments? It sounds like a fair question to ask, if climateaudit got the underlying data right.
Watsisname wrote:Source of the post Do you remember on the old forum when I showed how Antarctic ice cores reveal information about the atmospheric dynamics very far away?
The Earth is a single system, so events in one hemisphere will affect the other. The attribution, however, is hard, and this indirect methodology is prone to confirmation bias, ad hoc reasoning and will easily miss the unexpected. And as I've said many times, climate science suffers from the compulsive thought that if observations are missing, there simply has to be a way to derive them otherwise. I think this is to work things out from the wrong end.
Watsisname wrote:Source of the post But it actually takes a surprisingly small number to get an image and do good science.
You can do the maths and figure out the upper resolution. The assumptions aren't that many. But a temperature proxy serving as another temperature proxy? Is it "settled science"?
Watsisname wrote:Source of the post But do these problems imply the Hockey Stick should be rejected? No. You have a lot of sources of confidence for concluding that it is essentially correct.
I have the impression that the hockey stick has been significantly downplayed by the science (or IPCC) in recent years. Steve McIntyre apparently calls it spaghetti instead, but if that better shows differences, it's a more honest picture. How much warmer or colder was the SH in, say, the 6th century than the past century, and what was its variability? Well, we don't really know for sure. That seems to be the primary answer.