Ross McKitrick is hosting a workshop entitled “Econometric Applications in Climatology” – see website here and here. A detailed program is online here.
Ross has attracted an enviable representation from the econometric community. Invitations were widely extended to the climate community without the response that Ross had hoped for, though there will be some prominent attendees, including Carl Wunsch who will be giving a keynote address.
I’m giving a presentation on Friday on proxy inconsistency at a session chaired by Hu McCulloch. I am consistently amazed at how long it takes me to prepare a new presentation and this has been no exception.
Climate Audit 
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Too bad the climatologists won’t be there–they might have learned something.
I am consistently amazed at how long it takes me to prepare a new presentation
There is some kind of of converse to “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.
Very impressive line up. I see that Dr. Peter Webster (President of the Atmospheric Sciences section of the AGU) is on the organizing committee. Wish I could manage to attend. Good luck on your presentation, Steve. I expect it will be a very valuable conference.
Peter Webster is a mentor and friend of Judith Curry. Close support systems are important, I suspect. ….Lady in Red
Ah, so that’s what you’ve been up to. Good luck with it.
Since the science is settled it’s hardly surprising the climate community will be under represented. They are the 97% after all.
And no mere econometric application can affect a fundamental constant of nature like that.
The phrase “the usual 97%” in the recent infamous paper had me genuinely LOL’ing at the miraculous depth of “wrongness” it achieves.
What symbol would represent it? Perhaps ≠ ?
Back at the workshop, are econometric methods accepted as having legitimate application in what you might call classic climate science?
I’d love to be at Does Laboratory-Scale Physics Obstruct the Development of a Theory for Climate? by Christopher Essex. All the very best with this Ross and Steve.
Hmm, having read the paper I’d beg to differ
Reading papers again. You really have to kick that habit you know 🙂
it was nice that they posted them. I was hoping steve’s was there.
Agreed, Steven, after reading the short version.
I’d like to hear about the talk on stationarity also.
There will be a number of papers taking different positions on various aspects of the stationarity issue. I expect it will be the first time a large group of capable time series experts will be brought together to debate whether climatic data should be considered nonstationary and how trends ought to be modeled. Given the implications it seems to me such a debate is long overdue.
This new paper may be of interest
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-013-1780-2#
Ross,
A Conference like yours has long been needed and I hope it filled your expectations. Thank you. Will there be a lifting of the embargos on papers at a known date?
Thank you also for the pointer to Hlinka at. al.
My mental problems start right from the beginning. In terms of purity rather than semi-quantitative practicality, I have asked a few people the basic question that follows, but no answer yet seems to satisfy. Perhaps readers could keep it in mind as they read the Conference papers.
………………………..
Some autocorrelation properties of Tmax differ from those of Tmin at a location, as I have shown by a short, rough, unfinished essay using daily lagged temperature data for Melbourne. http://www.geoffstuff.com/Extended%20paper%20on%20chasing%20R.pdf
It is common practice to create a Tmean from (Tmax+Tmin)/2. In routine practice, groups such as the Australian BOM create a CLIMAT report each month and send it to global bodies like Hadley and NOAA. Different ones of these use Tmax and Tmin to create their Tmeans.
The fundamental question is whether it is valid to use the Tmean created by combination of Tmax and Tmin, which have different properties, for further statistical work, such as further autocorrelation math.
Additional information. A private email from BOM notes “CLIMAT data feeds are not based on (min+max)/2, they are based on whatever the country supplies. I did a survey of this as part of the introduction to my 2004 paper and found that, roughly speaking, 40% of the world’s area uses (min+max/2) (mostly English-speaking countries), 40% uses the mean of evenly-spaced observations (the largest countries that do this being China and the former USSR), and 20% use more complex formulae which attempt to replicate a ‘true’ mean through weighted averages of temperatures at particular hours (mostly continental Europe and Latin America). “
I was reminded of a famous W. M. Briggs quote “Now I’m going to tell you the great truth of time series analysis. Ready? Unless the data is measured with error, you never, ever, for no reason, under no threat, SMOOTH the series! And if for some bizarre reason you do smooth it, you absolutely on pain of death do NOT use the smoothed series as input for other analyses!” http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=195)
Re: Ross McKitrick (Jun 4 13:18),
whether climatic data should be considered nonstationary
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It is irresponsible if this issue hasn’t been addressed by climate science. Climate is the statistics of weather. If weather is not stationary, then you cannot apply linear regression (trends) to the data directly, you must first difference the data. Thus, all the time series graphs of temperate we see with trend lines on them would be statistical nonsense. Which includes just about every graph on AGW ever published.
Given that it has long been known that tomorrow’s weather is more likely to be like today’s weather than otherwise, and that one can more often replace tomorrow’s weather forecast with today’s weather and improve accuracy, this would seem to strongly argue that weather is not stationary. Imagine you had a coin that was more likely to throw heads if the last toss was heads. If the percentage of heads is increasing over time, is it due to AGW, or is it simply due to the nature of the coin?
Then there is the issue of trying to average a chaotic system over time. The law of large numbers is not on your side with chaotic systems. The “noise” doesn’t average out to zero over time, because it isn’t noise it is chaos. What looks like an average is simply a local attractor, and over time you are likely to wander towards a different attractor, throwing your carefully built average out the window and rendering it nonsensical. Unlike a coin toss, your chaotic system will not converge.
As you increase the length of the series, the average will diverge. Over 60 years temperature has been increasing, over 6000 decreasing, over 60,000 increasing, over 60 million decreasing. All these series yield different average temperatures. Which one is the true average temperature of the earth?
“”Invitations were widely extended to the climate community without the response that Ross had hoped…””
As pretty as Guelph may be in June, it is in no way comparable to Bonn, Mauritius, Doha, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Cancun, Copenhagen, Bali, Nairobi, Montreal, Moscow, New Dehli, etc.
I ewnquired about whether they had taken into account Dr Bouldin’s critique of dendroclmatology….atill waiting to see it in the borehole
Two papers on Granger / cointegration
Polynomial Cointegration Tests of Anthropogenic Impact on Global Warming, Yaniv Reingewertz
Long-memory and the Sea Level-Temperature Relationship: a Fractional Cointegration Approach
<a href=http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Daniel+Ventosa+-+Santaularia&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C15&as_sdtp=Daniel Ventosa-Santaularia
For background, see: Beenstock, Reingewertz, and Paldor “Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming”
5 citations
D. Stockwell discusses cointegration including Beenstock et al. and
sea level
May the sparks fly!
mae culpa: see <a href=http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Daniel+Ventosa+-+Santaularia&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C15&as_sdtp=Daniel Ventosa-Santaularia‘s papers
hyperlink:
Daniel Ventosa-Santaularia‘s papers
Thanks
“There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.” - A.N. Whitehead, English mathematician and philosopher 1861-1947
Will VS be there?
Yes.
Best wishes to you Ross for a really successful — first of its kind — conference. And best wishes to Steve on his presentation at the conference. The topic chosen seems to be very interesting and right up his street. What better place to hold the meeting than at UofG — my o;d stomping ground.
Bart V?
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Wish I could be there to meet everyone and take notes. I will be with you in spirit… and in cartoon 😉
I am *so* pleased Carl Wunsch is becoming involved. I’ve been water torturing him for over a year with snippits from Climate Audit and Climate Etc., begging him to get involved, help the science regain honesty.
(Wunsch was lecturing at Oxford when the Peter Gleick mess exploded — and, in the middle of it all, Gleick was invited to speak there. I never heard a word about that from Wunsch, but….)
I am very happy. There are other impressive scientists, grey beards especially, who can be cajoled back to the light, advocacy of honest science. ….Lady in Red
Wunsch thus far has been a no-show. He says that he suddenly got food poisoning.
Damn. I sent him a thank you.
er, Durkin. I wonder how Carl feels about ‘An Inconvenient Truth’?
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Carl made a sincere effort to make it but he became ill just before the conference and did not improve during the week. We were very disappointed that he could not attend, as he was at missing the meeting.
The workshop went very well. The quality of presentations was extremely high, and the debates and discussions were fascinating.
Respect for truth making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic this weekend? Congratulations Ross.
Did you invite James Hansen to participate?
Lady in Red –
Carl Wunsch is one scientist I would like to have a beer with sometime. Though he seems to be sold on the CO2 as the devil and that global warming is a serious catastrophe we need to do lots to avoid, on one point I love his position. And that is the oceanic conveyor hypothesis.
I think that is one of the looniest ideas ever to gain wide support. I have written elsewhere how the idea is simply over-the-top stupid, on several fronts. I think the people pushing it (and they seem to be everywhere) have no idea about how currents are driven, how the Gulf Stream works, and how suction and convection work.
So when he writes this I feel vindicated:
Very strong words. I think I might post on my small blog about why this all is impossible. feet2thefire.wordpress.com But give me a while to put it up.
That last – I do truly HOPE that someone out there is fiercely disputing it. And I am glad that Dr. Wunsch is one of them.
Please keep after him. He actually seems like a scientist who recognizes at least SOME bad science when he sees it. Yes, as in “honest science.” Keep cajoling him. He would be a major coup to have him switch sides.
But Bill Nye said the thermohaline thingy was going to do something.
I hope he makes a speedy recovery from that which prevented him from participating in Ross’s conference. And when he does, I hope he will take a second look at a (non-scientific, to my eyes at least) “statement” he has endorsed (along with a number of less surprising names: e.g. Mann, Gleick, Hansen, Santer, Weaver, Karoly, Ehrlich and Suzuki) See:
Crisis of the week: the biosphere … new “Statement” percolated, circulated and endorsed
Perhaps “other forces” have been at work. I think his conscience is itching.
Pls keep, gently, after him, ….in the name of honest science.
it’s not a “skeptic” workshop. Most of the people are econometricians.
I know. ….smile.
Econometricians who like data, are probabilistically inclined to be deemed skeptics.
Look forward to reading your report from the conference Steve (if you have time) and also to the conference report from the organisers. Any chance of a guest post from Ross McKitrick summarising the highlights?
I’d love to be there, but since I am not on the gravy train, airfares and accommodation from Australia to Canada for a conference are beyond my means.
Econometrics is not a bad “proxy” for climate science, in the sense that it involves modelling complex dynamic systems. Definitely a worthwhile exercise.
Econometrics is also similar to climate science in that it is often not very successful at forecasting the future.
It would be interesting why the econometricians think about this:
‘what’ not ‘why’ 🙂
Ivan Jankovic.
Murry Salby is no longer at Macquarie Univeristy. Do you know where he is located.