When Moberg [2005] first came out, I posted up some first comments on it. I haven’t done anything on it since then, partly because of the amount of time responding to comment on our MBH articles, partly because I got stuck on some missing data sets. Hans Erren has a really neat method for digitizing […]
Although Science has nice policies on paper requiring data archiving, in practice, its climate authors are singularly poor about doing so. Esper et al [2002] has enough missing data to make it very difficult to get traction on it. Here’s a letter that I sent today to Science requesting that they take steps to get […]
What is the standard deviation (variance) of an autocorrelated series? Sounds like an easy question, but it isn’t. This issue turns out to affect the spurious regression problem, so I’m posting up a short note on the problem. These issues are well-known in econometrics, where they have led to “heteroskedastic-autocorrelation consistent” estimators. There’s an interesting […]
Miller et al. [2004] studied fossil evidence of forest levels in 9 locations in the western U.S. over the past 3500 years, including Whitewing Mountain and San Joaquin Ridge, Inyo Craters Chain in the eastern Sierra Nevadas, near the bristlecones of the White Mountains (about which I’m going to post an interesting graphic on their […]
I’ve modified the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for the Weblog Theme so that the comment box is no longer the width of the screen, but is 80% of it. I’ve also fixed the irritating look of the font size of the subcategories being bigger than the categories. Let me know in the comments below if […]
One of the reasons for my recent focus on Thompson is that he was one of the 20 "wise" [my term] men (and women) who wrote here to the Barton Committee deeply concerned about your approach and expressed their "hope that as a community, we can help your committee shape public policy in the light […]
It has been brought to my attention that Science has formal policies on data archiving. The author of the email, who requested confidentiality, argued that this disproved my statement: Having acknowledged that, the underlying issue is that Science does not seem to either have policies that require authors to archive data or administration practices that […]
I’va added a number of new categories in the frame at right and have indexed a lot of old postings. For example, I’ve indexed comments pertaining to Jones et al; Crowley; IPCC; bristlecones; geological proxies; modeling; satellite and gridcell temperatures and a few others. The format needs to be tidied a little.
It’s pretty hard to have a blog on climate issues and not comment on Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans and Mississippi. On the other hand, most comments to date emanating from climate circles seem very tasteless and suggest any comment from someone interested in climate will be pretty risky.
In the ES&T article, Jerry Mahlman, rather than using ad hominem techniques like discussing biases in principal components methodology, spurious significance of RE statistics or the validity of bristlecone pines as temperature proxies, described us simply as "quacks". We start our consideration of the use of the technical term "quack" in climate science through the […]
Climate Audit 
Von Storch and the Mighty Ducks
In the ES&T article, Jerry Mahlman, rather than using ad hominem techniques like discussing biases in principal components methodology, spurious significance of RE statistics or the validity of bristlecone pines as temperature proxies, described us simply as "quacks". We start our consideration of the use of the technical term "quack" in climate science through the […]