Australian hockey stick – whatever happened to the Great Barrier Reef coral time series ?

We 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.

6 thoughts on “Australian hockey stick – whatever happened to the Great Barrier Reef coral time series ?”

  1. The fraud and deceit in AGW junk science continues down under. We are all doomed to stupidity.

  2. It is quite obvious, if you contradict the meme your funding will be at risk:- a no brainer!

    Now if a change of government gives the opportunity to put Clive Palmer on the ABC Board, who could they get for GRMPA?

  3. It does seem on the face of it surprising that Dr J M Lough with a large body of work in GBR corals over many years is not on the list of authors – although her name is listed with 25 “contributors”.
    Precious few emails of hers have popped up in the Climategate collections, her tone seems IPCC friendly but perhaps could have irritated Phil Jones in 2008 by drawing his attention to uncertainties. By the way, if anybody wants some free entertainment, just read a batch of Climategate emails, entrancing stuff full of marvellous nuances, get better as time goes by.

  4. Have you noticed that Climate Audit has pointed out flaws in the Gergis et al data. That is after Joelle Gergis told Steve McIntyre in reply to his request for data;
    “…We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter…”
    Have to admire the certainty in youth.

    Now David Karoly her co-author has had to email SM and say.
    [Dear Stephen,
    I am contacting you on behalf of all the authors of the Gergis et al (2012) study ‘Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium’
    An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, which may affect the results.]
    They have apparently pulled the paper until they can bash it into shape again. Ah, the delights of IPCC scientists at work and all funded by us mug taxpayers.
    Sweet.

  5. My favourite is the discovery of a deep sea current by australian scientists in 2010. This was announced on the ABC, with the statement that “the current was flowing much faster than before”.

    That’s the sort of logic used by the ABC.

    The official report doesn’t say that, though it blames global warming.
    www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/Southern-Ocean-current-discovered.aspx

    But try www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/5048/full
    This July, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey found a dozen giant volcanoes rising from the seabed of the Southern Ocean not far from South Georgia Island, some up to 3,000 m tall. Nobody knew they were there….. two of the volcanoes rise within 70 m of the surface, one in an area where existing charts showed only deep water.

    It would appear that the scientists don’t know as much as they think.

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