Comments on: McShane and Wyner 2010

By: Screening Proxies: Is It Just a Lot of Noise? « Climate Audit

Screening Proxies: Is It Just a Lot of Noise? « Climate Audit — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 12:52:26 +0000

[...] Statistics to rebut criticism of their previous work by McShane et al (discussed on CA starting here) used pseudo-proxies generated from modeled temperature series with various forms or noise. The [...]

By: Doug Cotton

Doug Cotton — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:43:35 +0000

I really don’t know why linear trends are so often assumed when curved ones often fit better.

Trenberth himself plotted this nice curve of sea surface temperatures, now declining even more when recent data is added. See top of page http://climate-change-theory.com

By the way, does anyone know why NASA stopped adding sea surface data after October 3rd at http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/

Steve: satellite failure, I think.

By: 24 Hours of Climate Reality: Gore-a-thon – Hour 8 | Watts Up With That?

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:01:36 +0000

[...] proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) published in the Annals of Applied Statistics According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to [...]

By: Hu McCulloch

Hu McCulloch — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:05:36 +0000

I tend to lump the two together, but I see that there is a big literature on “data mining” as contrasted with “data snooping”. Hopefully the former isn’t just a high tech, white collar crime version of the latter!

By: DanQ

DanQ — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:33:08 +0000

You “guess something has to be done that is novel methodologically, even if it isn’t optimal”

Please, we have had enough of guesswork in this field. The Stat. journals are open to your perusal if you so desire.

By: Alan D McIntire

Alan D McIntire — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:38:46 +0000

QBeamus- I think you’re right- there’s either auto-correlation in both the independent and random series, else both are non- stationary. When I saw that figure 4 graph in the MW paper, I was astonished. I generated a few non-stationary random walks of about 25, ran correlations, and got unbelievably high numbers.

By: Peter D. Tillman

Peter D. Tillman — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:53:05 +0000

Eduardo Zorita has a number of criticisms of the McShane and Wyner draft http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/08/mcshane-and-wyner-on-climate.html" Here. Zorita thinks they need some professional climatology input. There are some interesting comments at Klimazwiebel. I hope some of his criticisms will be addressed when the paper is actually published.

By: Stan Plamer

Stan Plamer — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:30:45 +0000

M&W test a variety of model building tehnqiues and a) find that they have have about the same ability to predict the data in the hold out period and b) produce quite different backcasts

By: QBeamus

QBeamus — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:18:09 +0000

I believe that is mistaken. M&W find no model that has meaningful predictive power.

By: AMac

AMac — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:25:33 +0000

Re: AMac (Aug 22 08:17), Within the hour, my comment passed moderation, and was slotted into position #42 (the comment count is currently at 60). Not surprisingly, Gavin Schmidt has provided inline commentarry and rebuttal.