John_Taverner wrote on Jan 31
st, 2016 at 6:41pm:
You think that dendroclimatology proxies were used for recent data that had perfectly good instrumental data?
Do you honestly think that, or are you just quoting that retarded (sorry, I mean retired) radio presenter?
You're further gone than I thought. You take my breath away.
Dear Breathless, How about Marcott?
'One author, Jeremy Shakun (currently at Harvard) weighed in via Skype for Dot Earth. When more questions came in, the group of authors wrote that they would respond more completely to questions about the work and now they have done so, on the RealClimate blog. Here’s a short excerpt and link to the rest:
Q.
What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?
A.
Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval.'
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/fresh-thoughts-from-authors-of-a-pa...And of course Mann did precisely that, marrying Dendro to "perfectly good instrumental data" to show it was only 20th century warming.