Right, the previous thread has spilled off a discussion of Jastrow, Nierenberg and Seitz and their representation of a Hansen et al. figure. I have the feeling that the JNS paper may have appeared in multiple places, but the one I have access to is:
There is a lot wrong with that abstract (culminating in the once-traditional but now discarded over-reliance on the S+C satllite record) but the bit that is of immeadiate interest (because it figures in the previous discussion) is their take on figure 5 from Hansen et al. Which is:
And which they “reproduce” as:
The “2″ after “Hansen et al.” is a ref to the 1981 Science paper, so we really are talking about the same thing. They don’t say which figure, but it has to be fig. 5 (but see-also below the fold).
So, is their reproduction fair?
[Update, and post pulled to top (original publication date 2010/08/26) to show it: I've now discovered something vaguely interesting, in reading the "original" Nierenberg report, chapter 5 (which I never got to in my "book club" series). That is, their fig 5.8. Which is - ta da - the Hansen 1980 figure, panel (a) only: ie, just the CO2. But it is a faithful reproduction of the original - same obs, same start and end times, and the model line isn't shifted downwards. So my guess would be that JNS got their fig from the Nierenberg report, rather than going back to the original. That doesn't excuse them, of course. But it interesting that fig 5 of the Nierenberg report makes similar claims to JNS: it notes that the figure doesn't match the temperature record very well (der, of course it doesn't), and it fails to note, in that section, the other panels of the Hansen figure. So, who wrote chapter 5? Gunter Weller, James Baker, W Lawrence Gates, Michael MacCraken, Syukuro Manabe, Thomas Vonder Haar. I don't know all of them, but at the very least Manabe and MacCracken cannot possibly be called "skeptics". So how did that figure and discussion got into a chapter with their names on? Aha, because that section is about CO2 asa causal factor. They go on to reproduce the other panels of Hansen's figure, including the combination-of-all-factors panel. So chapter 5 is OK; but JNS isn't.
Also: I knew I'd seen and discussed this fig before: and the answer turns out to be Chez Eli - where else? But it was nearly 2 years ago.]
No, it isn’t. Moving the zero line off the modelled response isn’t really fair – their reasons are not good, and it would have been more honest to reproduce the graph that Hansen et al. originally drew. Asserting that you can just align the two curves in 1880 is unreasonable.
Also, the JNS figure isn’t just a re-drawing of Hea, because the temperature record isn’t the same – JNS use a temperature record that is somewhat longer (whether it differs in other detail I haven’t checked). However, in this case I can’t really fault them: mostly, because the longer record actually puts in more warming and makes Hea better. And partly because if you read their text it suddenly becomes clear that what they mean is “(the global temperature record) and (model from Hansen)” not “(the global temperature record and model) from Hansen”. English really is a rubbish langauge.
But the main problem, of course, is the dishonest suppression of the rest of fig. 5 from Hea. JNS continue on to make much of the faact that the temperature observed doesn’t look much like the modelled response, and totally fail to mention that Hea already know this, and that it is expected, and that model results with more forcings taken from the same figure do indeed show a good fit. Now you can, perhaps, argue over who exactly is being dishonest. If you want to forgive N, then you can say that maybe J got the figure drawn up and N never saw the original. I don’t know. But unquestionable JNS considered as a joint author have been very dishonest here.
