[palmer]

Peter deMenocal, an associate professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used sediment records off the coast of Africa as a proxy for ocean-surface temperatures. He says Mr. Soon and his colleagues could not justify their conclusions that the African record showed the 20th century as being unexceptional.

That's essentially what I said as well. Maybe it wasn't clear or maybe you just skimmed it and thought I used it to justify the conclusion that 20th century was unexceptional. No, I did not. Since his data is very coarse and at least 88 years old, it says nothing about the 20th century, exceptional or otherwise.

Well you are welcome to end this discussion without addressing my concerns about Mann. As for your suggestion for me to write a paper, I would accept Soon's with all its errors as far superior to anything I could put together. However since I have not made up my mind like you have, I am willing to keep researching the raw data and commenting on all of it whether it supports my view or not. The example above is just one case, Jones98 was another that could support the hockey stick provided I can figure out his normalization technique for 1960 onwards. Otherwise I must judge it to be inconclusive (or tweaked and therefore useless like the Crowley-Lowery dataset).

But you are also welcome to provide your own analyses of the data. I think it would serve your case better than simply pretending to scientifically review the Soon paper.

[Yelling]

That's essentially what I said as well.

Sigh, no, you did not. What you said is that the paper shows temperatures that do not support some aspect of warming during the MWP. What I am saying is that the paper can't be used for that since it doesn't measure that. What the author says is that the wind and current pattern shifted to cause cooler currents with more upwelling. This caused sea surface temperatures to drop. It is not a reflection of any surface temperature. You go to a beach on a very warm day with an offshore wind and the water is cooler than you expect. That is upwelling. nothing to do with temperature.

However, I do find it somewhat amusing that you are prepared to accept any aspect of what a paper says to support your ideas and yet you accuse me of being biased. Read what the paper says and then you will be in a much better position to comment on it.

Regarding CL, could you comment on how it was "tweaked" and therefore useless?

Finally, regarding Soon! Lets see. It was presented by WOSG and I showed how it is a very poor attempt. You then read it and seemed to feel that it was sound. So when I do a critical analysis of it you say that I am "simply pretending to scientifically review the Soon paper." So I would guess that you are simply pretending to admit that there are errors in it?

I am not leaving the debate, but I do feel that I have done more than my share of the research. I have had to dig out several papers, read them and try to understand what they show and then present and defend my point of view against people who don't wish to read the papers. While I find reading technical papers somewhat enjoyable it is time consuming. If you wish a real debate about this then post some real comments that I can look at and review.

One final comment - I think you sell yourself short. I feel that you could actually do better than Soon did on that paper. I am pretty sure I could even though I am an engineer, not a climatologist - but then again Soon isn't a climatologist either. That may explain something.

Regards,

Y.