IRREPRODUCIBLE RESULTS IN THOMPSON ET AL., "ABRUPT TROPICAL CLIMATE CHANGE: PAST AND PRESENT" ("PNAS" 2006)

In a prestigious and influential article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Thompson et al. [1] put forward a Tropical Composite Zscore series (TCZ), purportedly computed from ice core d¹⁸O ratios, as evidence of tropical warming over the past 2000 years. This note demons...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Energy & environment (Essex, England) England), 2009, Vol.20 (3), p.367-373
Main Author: McCulloch, J. Huston
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climatology. Bioclimatology. Climate change
Coefficients
Composite indices
Datasets
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
External geophysics
Geophysics. Techniques, methods, instrumentation and models
Global warming
Ice cores
Isotope ratios
Meteorology
Regression coefficients
Series convergence
Tropical climates
Viewpoints and Technical Communications
Websites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In a prestigious and influential article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Thompson et al. [1] put forward a Tropical Composite Zscore series (TCZ), purportedly computed from ice core d¹⁸O ratios, as evidence of tropical warming over the past 2000 years. This note demonstrates that it bears no replicable linear relationship to the seven series on which they claim it is based, as archived by the authors themselves on the PNAS website. Although TCZ does equal the average of the two Himalayan and Andean component series (HCZ and ACL) to within rounding error, HCZ cannot be constructed linearly from the four Himalayan isotope ratio series with an error less than 100 times the expected rounding error, and ACZ cannot be constructed from the three Andean isotope ratio series with an error less than 30 times the expected rounding error. The authors should provide PNAS with corrected and internally consistent data sets and figures for these series.
ISSN:0958-305X
2048-4070
DOI:10.1260/095830509788066420