Last year, I presented a paper at the AGU Fall Meeting (December 2004) which was the core of our GRL paper. I’ve just submitted an abstract for the 2005 Fall Meeting for session PP-19 co-chaired by Hans von Storch.
Last year’s abstract is here.
The session is entitled Climate Change in the Recent Past: Integrating Meteorological, Proxy, Borehole, and Modeled Climate Reconstructions and is described here.
Here is the abstract that I submitted. Suggestions are welcome as I can edit it a little for a week or so.
Methodological Issues in Multiproxy Reconstructions
We review some important and under-discussed methodological issues in multiproxy reconstructions, applying insights from recent statistical and econometric studies and considering examples in the recent multiproxy literature. Issues include:
1) “spurious” (in a statistical sense) relationships between highly autocorrelated series, considering both regression and scaling methodologies. We discuss problems arising from proxies potentially affected by nonclimatic trends or factors and the related question of the robustness of multiproxy methods.
2) series selection and the potential problem of data mining. We show examples where variance attenuation arises without regression. The effect can be demonstrated when series are selected from a menu of persistent red noise examples and then averaged together.
3) non-linear and especially non-monotonic relationships with temperature.
Each issue will be related to the problem of calculating confidence intervals.
Climate Audit 
11 Comments
“Intimidation and the art of requesting scientific data from authors”
“You can’t have the data I used, because the authors are revising it for errors”
“Bait and switch – it worked for Enron and it can work for you”
“Yes, Senator, you can have my source code – why didn’t you ask earlier?”
Sorry, Steve – I’m not being helpful.
Looks fine. send it in.
I suppose that you are going to highlight some recently published papers intended for IPCC 4AR. If I have understood things correctly, the next report from IPCC will not recognize studies published after 2005. This is probably the ultimate reason for why most “accepted” climatologists are hiding their raw data and methods at least until 2006.
Meetings are fun and good. But need to keep churning out the real papers of course.
Looks good. Let ‘er rip.
àƒ’?anàƒËœ
Snip An applied economics article is only the advertising for the data and code that produced the published results.snip
I can’t help but think that your paper might be more productive if it includes a section on replication policy and practise, linked to the presentation of the pitfalls in statistical analysis. Murray
I think more division and disaggregation of issues is helpful. One concept, one paper. Unless it is a review paper. And in that case, you should have already done a bunch of one concept/one paper papers
You can read Steve Bloom’s recipe for informed scientific debate on the issues raised by Steve M here.
Cheers, — Jo
Just heard that this Abstract has been accepted for oral presentation:
Presentation Date: Friday, 9 December
Location: 3022
Starting Time: 09:15
Hans von Storch is one of the session chairmen and I will look forward to meeting him. He seems like an interesting character.
Very good! It’s also good that you’re scheduled for a 9:15 presentation. Some Monday through Friday gatherings lose attendees on Friday afternoon.
Steve, Very good indeed that you;ll be presenting to this meeting again. But why do the AGU place December in the Fall? They’re as parochial as the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, which has just announced that the Spring 2006 meeting of its GLOBAL Roundtable on Climate Change will be held in Iceland in June 2006. Or the British Government, which announced last week that the Stern review of the economics of climate change “will report to the Prime Minister and Chancellor by Autumn 2006.”
In these southern parts, we observed that Fall 2005 was well and truly over by last June, but climate would really be changing if next year’s Spring was upon us by June.
If only the Stern Committee could have finished its work by Autumn 2006, Southern Hemisphere time, it might have been available in time to influence the deliberations of the IPCC in their forthcoming Assessment Report. One of Britain’s most respected economists has told me that he puts the timing of the Stern reporting down to inefficiency but is “tempted to believe that [it] is deliberately designed to miss the boat!”