Australian hockey stick – whatever happened to the Great Barrier Reef coral time series ?
May 22nd, 2012 by Warwick HughesWe have all heard now of the Gergis et al 2012 paper – “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium”. Dr Joelle Gergis participated in “Winning the guerrilla war on climate change…” as Science met Parliament in 2010.
Sceptic blogs including Anthony Watts, Australian Climate Madness and John Ray have run comment.
I too was taken by their graphics Figs 3,4,5 & 6 which looked to show the 20th C only just warmer than past warm peaks – but my main interest was caught by the complete absence of coral time series from the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) – see the map for yourself.
Now we all know that hundreds of millions of taxpayer $s over decades have been spent studying the GBR including coral cores and how can it be that Gergis et al neatly arabesque past all of that huge scientific resource.
I am hoping readers will have some insights as to why the large database of GBR coral timeseries has been ignored.
Before leaving – I noted on page 10 of 54 – line 225 this gem suggesting a rigorous cherry picking was going on. “Only records that were significantly (p<0.05) correlated with the detrended instrumental target over the 1921-1990 period were selected for analysis.” Note that “instrumental target” means HadCRUT3v see Fig 2 – so if a series did not agree with the UHI affected Jones et al temperature trend – it was tossed out.
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