I am not sure I agree with this assessment. Admittedly, I could not find the code snippet from JeanS but using a boundary station in 2 or 4 grid cells averages seems perfectly reasonable as described here. Can you revisit your original analysis and describe why you think this is an error?

Assuming that I am wrong and it is reasonable assert that the measurement describes only one of the bordering cells– is the error really OBO?

1. Water contributes up to about 85% of the greenhouse effect.
2. Methane is one of the gases that absorbs outgoing energy from the Earth’s surface.
3. The human activities of burning fossil fuels and changing the uses of land results in an impact upon the Earth’s climate system.
4. The global mean temperature anomaly trend is up by .7 since the late 1800s.
5. The concentrations of long-lived well mixed GHG have gone up since the mid 1800s.
6. All else held equal, an increase in the concentrations of the non-water vapor GHG would result in an increase in reaction to outgoing energy from the Earth’s surface.
7. Some glaciers are receding or shrinking.
8. Models show a lowering of ocean pH levels.
9. Since the mid-1800s, carbon dioxide atmospheric levels have gone up from 280 to 390 parts per million by volume.
10. Since the mid-1800s, the planet’s population has risen from 1 billion to 6.5 billion.
11. Some plants and animals have become extinct or moved habitat in the last 3 million years.
12. If it were possible to keep the same atmosphere except for the removal of the long-wave infrared reactive gases, the probable outcome would be a reduction in the average temperature of the Earth.
14. The sky usually appears blue because the intensity of scattered light is the fourth power of its frequency.
15. Meteors or the results of them might have killed the dinosaurs.
16. The atmospheric pressure lessens the higher you move up into the troposphere.
17. Ozone absorbs incoming ultraviolet in the stratosphere.
18. Everything tastes better dipped in melted cheese, even cheese.

In pursuing any kind of scientific research, and in reaching any kind of firm conclusions based upon that research, it is perfectly acceptable and appropriate to step back from the lowest level of detail and to ask the question, “Do the conclusions of the research make any sense within some broader context of what we already know to be fact?”

If the conclusions don’t square with some broader knowledge of scientific fact, then it’s time to start asking deeper questions about the research and to follow those questions wherever they might lead.

In other words, “Does this dog actually hunt, however well-groomed he is?”

Auditing the climate research to some great level of detail doesn’t mean automatically rejecting the research if problems are discovered. But it does mean that hard questions will be asked and that appropriate issues will be raised as the specific audit findings indicate are necessary.

Moreover, standard procedure in Quality Assurance practice is to integrate the sets of individual audit findings into a broader picture of the overall situation, and to draw further conclusions about that larger picture based on the assembled evidence.

Concerning the pursuit of climate science itelf, as I see it, two general and competing perspectives exist concerning the broad nature and character of the earth’s climate, perspectives which greatly influence how their adherents believe climate research should be conducted.

One perspective views the earth’s climate as being predominantly a machine which operates in a predominantly deterministic fashion.

The other perspective views the earth’s climate as being something more akin to a living organism, one which exhibits greater inherent variability but also greater tolerance for changes in its driving physical factors.

The climate-as-machine adherents rely almost exclusively on mathematics and numerical simulation as their tools for examining climate data and for generating future climate predictions.

In contrast, the climate-as-organism adherents use mathematics as but one tool in their tool box, and tend to integrate their mathematics with other kinds of analytical tools and methods.

As I have observed them, the climate-as-machine adherents assume the earth’s climate to be fully capable of maintaining a stable temperature regime for thousands of years on end, in the absence of significant distubances to its key physical parameters.

In contrast, the climate-as-organism adherents assume the earth’s climate will tolerate some level of disturbance in its driving physics while at the same time exhibiting some greater level of internal variability. (In other words, Mother Nature is predictably fickle.)

The two perspectives affect not only the methods their respective adherent’s employ in pursuing their climate research, it also affects their decisions concerning which larger bodies of knowledge they will choose to include or to exclude while developing their conclusions.

OK, what point am I getting to here with this kind of analysis?

There are those who don’t believe Steve McIntyre’s work will have any impact on the course of public policy debate concerning AGW. I say it is much too early to make that kind of prediction, simply for the fact that serious anti-carbon measures have yet to be implemented, and so the policy debate over AGW hasn’t yet begun in earnest.

If carbon limiting measures result in serious economic dislocations, the public will begin demanding a much higher standard of quality assurance and quality control in climate science research, because it is then greatly in their interest to do so.

In my opinion, the warmers, by relying so heavily on mathematics and numerical simulation in pursuit of their brand of climate science, have effectively chosen to “go nuclear” from a quality-management / quality-control perspective.

Steve McIntyre is the first nuclear-grade auditor to show up on their doorstep; and if my assessment is accurate, he won’t by any means be the last.

Thanks Roman. By the way Oconnellc, you may have reason to disregard my comments, as I admit to being a grumpy old man who posts too much, but Roman is a professional statistician, who has taught statistics at the university and is deservedly respected at this blog.

Steve said this in post 74:

2) slight variations in proxy selection or procedure can lead to very different results. This was the style of conclusion in MM03, MM05 and I suspect that the same thing will apply here.

That is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find.

But that was not exactly what you asked in oconnellc (#31):

One, is Mann doing ‘good’ science? Two, is Mann’s temperature reconstruction correct?

You seemed to think that these were two separable questions. They are in fact one and the same. Mann’s specific reconstruction is the result of applying a series of decisions and techniques. It is a result of the methods (plural) used in its construction. Your first misimpression was that somehow a particular calculated result can be verified as being “correct”. Since that requires that it be directly compared to what actually happened in the past, this is impossible to do (as in many situations in the real world). Thus, the only remaining avenue is to look at what decisions were made and what methods were used (correctly and/or incorrectly) in the process – in your words, is it “good science”?

Much of what you said about methods indicated to me that you did not understand that statistical methods are not mere straightforward applications of mathematical equations. Properly derived and validated methods are ways of extracting certain types of information from the data. They are not “correct” or “incorrect” per se, but they are valid for a particular purpose if the assumptions for their use are satisfied and if they are correctly applied. There is no single set of statistical procedures which gives THE “correct” reconstruction, so your request for the Mann results to be “corrected” is unrealistic.

How do you evaluate the result? Many ways. The one you seemed to think was useful to you above is one – how do the results respond to the input data. But, that is an examination of the methodology used in the reconstruction. Are the results internally consistent? Were the methods applied properly and correctly interpreted? A statistician always provides “error bars” – estimates of how far the results might be expected to fall from the original temperatures. Are those meaningful and realistic? All of these answers come from an examination of the methodology of the reconstruction. Was “good science” used in the entire process?

Steve’s work is not simple arithmetic to see if the calculations are correct. It is a step by step search to discover exactly what the Mann team did. Getting past all of the unmentioned steps and undocumented changes is a real experience and I admire his ability to do so. Only after all of the steps have been nailed down, can you finally answer the “good science” question. This is done by evaluating the steps, finding technical errors and forming “opinions” about whether proper decisions were taken. Your statement “I keep wondering why everyone thinks that their opinion is of importance to something that is solved using math” is completely off the mark since that IS what a professional statistician does all the time when reviewing statistical results. It is not cut-and-dried and requires understanding and experience.

Finally, I think you are wrong in stating

I think people here got an impression of what they thought my point of view must be, mostly because my comments seemed as though they were attacking the status quo here.

IMHO, the somewhat negative response you may have received on this thread was not due to any perception that you were not in agreement with the general viewpoint that may be shared by many of the regular contributors. Rather, it was because of a continued troll-like repetition of a number of off-the-mark ideas. If you are open to the multitude of reasonable explanations you were offered about what is actually going on at this site, you might actually find you were given answers to the questions you should be asking.

I have been a fan of this blog and I have read in other place people complaining about treatment of anyone who seems to question the consensus here. I used to think those were sour grapes. Now I’m not so sure. If you disagree, just look at all the posts calling me naive when Steve said he actually hopes to produce exactly what I was hoping to see.

If you have been a long standing fan of this blog why have you not been more specific in referencing what it is that you seem to be questioning. Steve M does sensitivity studies with the reconstruction data, but I have not gotten the impression that he plans to do a “correct” reconstruction at this point or that he judges that one exists.

I called your approach naive and if that becomes the focus of our conversation then I think that would be because you are more interested in blog style here and taking the opportunity to give your opinion of the posters and postings than in what you could learn from your participation here. You seem to be aware of what the climate science consensus is in these matters yet naive on how one would go about analyzing a paper on it. Of course, post comments will sound more like opinions without a knowledge basis to you if you have little knowledge of what they are referencing.

When you asked me for a graph from my post (Re: Kenneth Fritsch (#3),) , that was either naïve or completely out of context. If you had a specific issue in mind vis a vis all the analysis that have been done here and what the consensus claims – fire away. In post # 3, I was pointing to the fact that Mann et al. uses new methods with old data and that I was throwing out my view that in doing this the authors were in this instance data snooping with methods and not data. I would be willing to discuss the statistical implications of that with you or any other poster here, but here is what you replied:

Ken Fritsch, do you have aplot that shows what the correct temperature reconstruction should be, compared to the reconstruction that Mann came up with?

That comment could be taken as one totally out of context with little or no importance to the discussion or one that is implying that one needs one’s own reconstruction to show the correct temperature before commenting/criticizing that of Mann et al. In light of the helpful comments that you have received in the meantime here would you admit that your comment was either out of context or naïve (I would accept smart-alecky if you were pointing to my propensity to post)?

You also said in your first post on this thread the following:

He goes into companies and sees the most crazy things… Reports on napkins, people just shrugging when asked “What happened to this $100000 expense?”. But, lots of times, the final answer is correct, even with all the mistakes that go into coming up with the final answer. I’m curious if we are not conflating two different problems here.

Now somehow you had taken a situation where the “correct” answer can be ascertained independently of the (questionable/incorrect) methods used by someone and have applied it to a case where you do not have an independently derivable answer and thus the correctness of the method becomes critical and limiting with reference to the “correct” answer.

Now that you have received a tutorial here on that matter, would you now admit that that statement was either out of context or naïve?

You went on in Post #62 (Re: oconnellc (#62),) to say the following:

This seems simple to me, so maybe I am missing something obvious, but if you assume a certain relationship between the proxies and temperature, then there is a ‘correct’ reconstruction. It is correct based on those assumptions. If the assumptions are wrong, then the reconstruction is not interesting. But, it is correct relative to those assumptions. So, it seems that the question of concern should be, is Mann’s reconstruction ‘correct’ relative to those assumptions? I don’t know the answer to that. I think Steve has said that he doesn’t know the answer to that question. It seemed that Kenneth said that he knows the answer and that the answer is that it is incorrect. I asked him what his reason/proof was for saying that.

Here you are generalizing away what goes into a reconstruction and attempting to separate parts of that are not separable – and in my view in order to continue your same line of argument.

You can assume a relationship between a proxy and temperature, but that is not what is done. Ideally you have some a priori science of the proxy that strongly suggests that something measurable can be related to temperatures and such that the relationship will not have changed over time. Now you must calibrate the proxy response against a reasonably accurate instrumental record that is sufficiently proximate to the proxy that both are responding to the same temperatures. Calibration usually takes a form of regression. Once that part is in hand you must validate the calibration by testing it against a withheld part of the instrumental record. Now there are really no assumptions made and more to the point there are critical selections and choices along the way that need to be guided by the “correct” proxy science and “correct” statistical methods. It is the “correctness” of that science and the statistical methods that are then critical and limiting, and that is what is being debated.

Now based on my, admittedly less than comprehensive, description of the process would you care to show me where you obtain this two part question and answer to which you keep referring?

Perhaps part of the problem here is the fine distinction between fact and opinion in this field. The reconstructions, whether Mann’s, Steve M’s, or anyone elses are all opinion. They are opinion drawn up in terms of math but still opinion. Tree ring measurements are fact, local temperature measurements are fact (though global temps are again opinion). Even those local measurements while precise may not be very accurate.

So it boils down to either making up your own model/opinion or doing enough work to decide to trust or not trust someone else. Steve has done enough work that I am comfortable not trusting Mann et al, but not so much that I am comfortable trusting his own reconstructions to have any particular relationship to the actual past.

even though I cannot understand why you apparently think that there must be an established means of knowing temperatures 1000 years ago so that we might conjecture that Mann et al. (2008) is using or could be using incorrect statistical methods to obtain the correct answer

That is not what I think. I have tried to avoid saying that at all costs. I think people here got an impression of what they thought my point of view must be, mostly because my comments seemed as though they were attacking the status quo here.

Despite what you think here, the rest of the world does think that, though. The UN, most ‘official’ government positions, mainstream media, etc., etc. certainly do think that it is possible to know the temperature 1000 years ago. And when they see a temperature reconstruction like Mann 08, it passes peer review, is published and has results similar to other papers on the subject. How often have you read that Mann’s method doesn’t matter because other people have gotten the same result? Outside this blog, the result matters. And inside this blog, what happens on the outside matters. I have never said that the discussions on this blog are a waste of time. What I said was a waste of time were the ‘my opinion is that this is wrong’. What I find interesting are the discussions that involve application of fact. An interesting discussion is one where you say “my opinion is that this is wrong because I discovered this resource and it states blah blah blah”. I’m sorry if that seems like a fine point to you, but it really isn’t. And I never really said anything about anyone stating their opinion until people started going out of their way to push their opinion on me when I asked a question that called for a fact. I never demanded that anyone answer my question, but I did mind when I asked a question and someone pretended to answer but instead took it as an opportunity to editorialize. I have gone back and re-read this thread. This all started because I just asked you if you a graph or something that demonstrated your statement in post 3.

Steve said this in post 74:

2) slight variations in proxy selection or procedure can lead to very different results. This was the style of conclusion in MM03, MM05 and I suspect that the same thing will apply here.

That is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find. Almost every other post by someone else has been someone stating that asking for that sort of thing is naive. I have been a fan of this blog and I have read in other place people complaining about treatment of anyone who seems to question the consensus here. I used to think those were sour grapes. Now I’m not so sure. If you disagree, just look at all the posts calling me naive when Steve said he actually hopes to produce exactly what I was hoping to see.

Here we are 90 posts later, with people upset at me for proposing something like that, and it turns out you have been doing it all along.

I am certainly not upset with you, even though I cannot understand why you apparently think that there must be an established means of knowing temperatures 1000 years ago so that we might conjecture that Mann et al. (2008) is using or could be using incorrect statistical methods to obtain the correct answer – but since it is only the correct answer that is important we are collectively wasting our time.

Others here, far more qualified than I, have time and again pointed you to the fact that we do not know what the “right” answer is and that to obtain a “right” answer one would have to use valid proxies and do the proper statistics. The debate then boils down to: Are the proxies valid and were they analyzed with the proper statistics? In analyzing papers on just about any related climate subject this is the essence of the discussion and that is why some here have been, not upset, but perplexed by your failure to get the point.

You may also not appreciate what Steve M and other statistical professionals are doing in preparation of testing Mann’s methods and that is what might appear to you as minutia, but it is critical to understanding the sources of all possible errors and the ability to carry out the calculations precisely as Mann et al. does. This avoids the wave off by the paper’s authors of any criticism by making exact duplication of the methods (and even the parts in error) a side issue. It has been done before.

I will make two more quick points and end my comments. Firstly, I am not so much interested in answering your queries as I am in putting in words my own understanding of what transpires here so that others can critique it if it gets too far off the track. Secondly, your underlying attitude comes through, load and clear, when you continue to reference the waste of time these discussions (of Mann’s paper, not the ongoing exchanges seemingly for your edification) appear to you. To that all I can say is that they push my buttons, but to each his own.

All the best,

w.