My video that went viral!

I address the criticism.

Wow! Well that was unexpected! My little 2 minute video parody of Skeptical Science's "step-wise graph" went viral.

I only advertised it once with a single tweet:

 

 (I called it bad as in lousy, but people loved it!)

I only had 14 twitter followers at the time, yet somehow it went "viral" as they say. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before; it's weird and exiting all at the same time! I have a similar 6 min parody video in the works. I guess I'll have to make it a top priority with this reaction!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uif1NwcUgMU

10,000 views!? What the!? I thought it would get just 15!
 

From what I can tell, a cartoonist called Josh, who would be familiar to WUWT readers like me, picked up on it and sent it to Anthony. So there I am reading my favourite climate website WattsUpWithThat and I'm gobsmacked to see my own video on it.

I didn't mind at all that some  people thought it was the work of Josh, I was just amazed to see it there! In fact I quipped in the comments all the better if they think it's Josh's! He's a good cartoonist after all.

I've also come in for some criticism over it, something which was also unexpected by me.  The mods at WUWT tried to shield the video from such criticism snipping some critical comments and saying the video is just a satire. It is a satire but it's also meant to be 100% factual. If I've made a mistake I'd be upset, and I welcome the criticism.   So far though I can't see anything that negates the validity of the video.

One criticism is that the temp scale on the left of the Greenland ice core data is centred around -33C. True, but more important is the relative temp change and the magnitude of that difference. We use polar ice sheet data because the poles are where the ice is. If I could use the Mississippi ice core I would, but unfortunately no such thing exists.

So, the temp data in Greenland is -33C, whereas it would be warmer in the rest of the world. The important thing is the ups and downs of the temp and how they don't correlate to CO2.

Another criticism that I would make (didn't see anyone else making it) is that the CO2 data was fairly low resolution, especially in comparison to the Greenland ice core temp data.

Another criticism may be that the CO2 data comes from EPICA in Antarctica while the temps are from the other side of the world in Greenland. Still, though there should be globally noticed signals and a correlation between temp and CO2 if the IPCC CO2 warming claim was true.

I tried to make the data show that there is no correlation between CO2 and temp over the Holocene (last 10,000 years). In a sense you could say I "cherry picked" the data I wanted, in order to show what I wanted it to, although not in an underhanded way, but in a way that hopefully leads to the truth.

I welcome the negative criticism as well as the positive.  It would be embarrassing if I was wrong, but I would much rather be wrong if it meant coming closer to the truth. So far though, I don't see any reason to back down on the content of the video.

 

A further criticism is that I stapled a thermometer record over an ice core record, a la Mike's Nature trick where he put the thermometer record over the proxy record to hide the divergence. But I don't see that as problematic in this case, especially as there isn't a divergence between ice core and thermometer.

It's true that thermometers are different to ice core proxies of temp, which would use something like a ratio in oxygen isotopes to measure temperature. The main thing in tacking the instrumental record onto the ice core proxy record was to get the proportions right. Today's slight warming of 0.6C or so was not as big as past temperature changes according to the proxy.

Temp data from here:

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553

It's from the Central Greenland ice core, which I failed to specify on the above graph I used in the video (another criticism that was made).

CO2 data here:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html

== >

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/domec/domec_epica_data.html

== >

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/dc_co2_hol_fl02.txt
 

And there's already been a rebuttal blog post from a Swedish blog -- a negative criticism -- which I was happy a critic brought to my attention, highlighting the comedic nature (or not) of my video:

http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.se/2013/12/sa-dumt-att-det-blir-kul.html

Rather poorly translated by Google translate. I think the title should say something like: So stupid it's funny.