The "alarmist" label is tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the corresponding "denier" rhetoric. Sorry for any confusion. Marcott 2013 was cited in a lot of newspaper

The "alarmist" label is tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the corresponding "denier" rhetoric. Sorry for any confusion. Marcott 2013 was cited in a lot of newspaper claims that the 20th century was "the warmest of the past 10,000 years" or something to that effect. It turns out they only kept a few proxies all the way through the 20th century to generate the uptick, removing the ones that did not contribute, and eventually had to concede that their study was not a reliable basis for any conclusions about the past century: > 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.[0] The claim they opted to make instead is that the temperature estimates from their proxy study can be compared with thermometer readings and that the thermometers indicate higher values in recent years, a much weaker conclusion for a proxy study. Given the history of problems with every high-profile proxy study that comes along, and considering that they are the cornerstone of any logical reasoning connecting modern temperature data to measurable long-term climate-scale trends, I suggest that the conclusions about temperature anomalies (going back more than a few hundred years) are a lot less robust than many believe. [0]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/respon...