While I think that Bob Koss’ detective work was commendable and that my interjection of the post on trend differences between GISS 1200 km and GISS 250 km for 20S to 20N for 1979-2009 could be considered butting in, I continue to wonder why there should be a statistically significant difference in these two GISS trends and amounting to, on average, about 0.2 degrees C per century.

Is it true that the short term “hot” anomaly caught by Jean S is an artifact of the map presentation and is not used in the data series?

I started with this post by cleaning up and heavily commenting a CPS signal search demonstration in R.

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/hockey-stick-cps-revisited-part-1/

I made it turnkey and put a comment on nearly every line to make it as clear as possible.

Obviously my familiarity with proxy data and methods is much greater than my familiarity with the data in other areas – a caveat that I’ve expressed on many occasions. The link in question has nothing to do with Mann 2008 or other proxy studies. I remain mystified by exactly what I got wrong about Mann 2008 – does DC think that the Tiljander proxies were used upside-up Mann’s making code available enabled us to determine that he used these proxies upside-down, but it doesn’t excuse him doing so in the first instance. And yet Mann’s use of upside-down proxies doesn’t seem to warrant notice in Team world.

TCO,
Besides coherent discussions of specific issues and papers, RC has a lot of excellent background material on the basics of climate, climate models and so on.

CA and Lucia’s Blackboard, on the other hand, are sloppy, disorganized and full of blind alleys and faulty (but detailed) analysis. For example, McIntyre got a lot wrong in his meanderings on Mann et al 2008 PNAS reconstruction. There was no excuse as he had a detailed SI and full source code to work from.

I agree that Ryan O is the best of that lot, although he does occasionally stoop to the same sort of snide innuendo that is McIntyre’s trademark. (And his analysis of Antarctic temp trend is definitely not ready for publication – not yet, anyway). But Ryan did correct the CA hordes when he showed that historical SST (sea surface temp) did not incorporate modeled “hindcasts” as historical data, as claimed by McIntyre, Jeff ID and Craig Loehle.

He’s right that I misinterpreted the meaning of the paper but it wasn’t terribly clear. The funny thing about this is that the point Ryan makes about including data in modeled information prior to verification is the same accusation Mann and Steig had against Ryan in his improved reconstruction. The difference is again that Mann and Steig did it despite repeated clarifications that using the unmodified satellite data in Ryan’s verification produced the same result — they could not admit it and closed the thread.

No more discussion.

Sorry, I just realized how far OT this is. Please snip this if it’s too off topic. Apparently, I need a nap.

It doesn’t appear to be something Tamino said, but Deep Climate commenting on Tamino’s site. Comment link:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/its-going-to-get-worse/#comment-32115

DC references a CA post where Steve was investigating a hunch, which Ryan O solved, and Steve then recognised in the head post Ryan’s observations. DC takes Steve to task on it for getting his initial hunch wrong.

What DC doesn’t seem to “get” is that an important part of science is looking into ideas and hunches, weighing up the evidence and then changing your mind if the evidence requires it. This concept of objectivity, and following the evidence, is entirely alien to the likes of DC, Tamino, RealClimate, and they don’t recognise or understand the importance of it (even when Ian Jolliffe drops by and spells it out to them in crystal clear baby steps).

I’d like to see that one too. The code is basically replicated with plenty of questions. Keeping the conversation PC, Tammie makes a few mistakes himself… ‘got a lot wrong’ could use some explanation.

There is no basis for the assertion that I “got a lot wrong” in my analysis of Mann’s PNAS paper. Ross and I published a comment on Mann et al 2008 at PNAS and every point in our Comment stands up, including the assertion that Mann used the Tiljander data upside down. Mann’s Reply to our comment, on the other hand, is absurd.

In the case of Mann et al 2008, he provided a lot of data and code. Most of the code is horrendous, but we were able to wade through the CPS portion eventually. The situation was quite different than MBH98 where Mann provided code only after a request from the House Energy and Cmmerce Committee. Even with code in hand, it’s not as easy as all that to decode what was done in a first pass. The commenting and documentation of the methodology is extemely poor and the code is very hard to follow. I’m sure that somewhere in the various threads I made a mis-step or two in trying to decode obscure Mannian methodology. I post on such matters so that interested CA readers can chip into the detective work and I welcome their contributions. There are many highly qualified and able CA readers who have figured out obscure Mannian methods that eluded me in a first pass – that’s one of the strengths of the site. Indeed, the obscurities and problems are so severe that other sites (e.g. Jeff Id particularly) are working on similar problems in a very cooperative way with CA.

Our efforts at the time were restricted to trying to understand the variations to CPS methodology in Mann 2008. We didn’t even try to sort out the RegEM code at the time. With the work on Steig et al, the RegEM diagnosis is far more accessible than it was before.

Where can i find this Tamino quote and the reasoning behind it?

I’m aware of Mann’s entirely inadequate response, based in part on data made public only after Steve’s letter was submitted.

Is there some other basis for this? I can’t find the Tamino quote by googling for it.

Alas, any reasonable answer would be snipped.