The SI for MBH98 listed 34 tree ring series that were not actually used. This was acknowledged in their 2004 Corrigendum which provided the following implausible excuse: These series, all of which come from the International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB), met all the tests used for screening of the ITRDB data used in ref. […]
if Team methodological descriptions were correct? Mann says: All ITRDB tree-ring proxy series were required to pass a series of minimum standards to be included in the network: (i) series must cover at least the interval 1750 to 1970, (ii) correlation between individual cores for a given site must be 0.50 for this period, (iii) […]
Many of the good folks who write the papers and keep the databases seem not to use their naked eyeballs. By that I mean, they seriously think that you can invent some new procedure, and then apply it across the board to transform a group of a thousand datasets without looking at each and every […]
While we were in Italy this summer, my wife and I did the usual tourist things in Rome, visiting the Roman Colliseum and Forum and the Vatican. I noticed something at St Peter’s which is reported first here at Climate Audit.
It’s Sunday and I was just watching the sports reports while surfing financial crises. A trivia question only for people who do not know the answer and PROMISE to simply guess. The answer is easy if you know it and equally easy to find if you research it, so please don’t spoil the guesses. What […]
Both in climate blog world and the financial world, there has been much talk recently about the interaction of models and data distributions. Linear regression models assume normal distributions. What happens to models when the data distributions don’t meet the assumptions. Sometimes it doesn’t matter much, sometimes it does. But it seems like an important […]
On previous occasions, we’ve noticed some strange appearances of the Mann hockey stick under different disguises. In Inconvenient Truth, a splice of Mann’s hockey stick and CRU instrumental data is described as “Dr Thompson’s thermometer”. Today, I noticed another peculiar incident, where Esper and Frank (Clim Chg 2008), who one would think would know better, […]
Bob Carter sent me a link to the following interesting article and profile on Nassim Taleb. Taleb is a statistician with practical risk experience. We’ve talked endlessly at Climate Audit about weird and inappropriate statistical methods, with frequent mentions of Mandelbrot, fractals and odd distributions. So does Taleb. In a financial context, but Mandelbrot sought […]
The U.S. financial crisis should be on everyone’s mind. It’s a serious situation. A private investor simply can’t hold money market paper right now. So added to the mortgage mess is a liquidity crisis that’s never happened since the run on banks in the Depression. So you can’t do nothing. The liquidity situation has to […]
In my last post, I observed an interesting bimodality which almost certainly appears to originate in Mann’s pick two procedure on low-correlation tree ring networks. Some readers may recall the interesting bimodal distribution that we reported in MM 2005 (GRL); the introduction of bimodality into a distribution seems like a sure sign of a picking […]
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