Readers in the U.S. are doubtless aware of the “Deflategate scandal”, in which the NFL alleged that Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback of his generation, had conspired with an equipment manager and locker room attendant, to deflate a microscopic amount of pressure from footballs in the AFC championship game. The NFL seemed to be completely […]
Last year, a paper of mine (Lewis 2014) showing that the approach used in Frame et al (2005), which argued for using a uniform prior for estimating equilibrium (strictly, effective) climate sensitivity (ECS), in fact led to a unique, objective Bayesian estimate for ECS upon undertaking a simple transformation (change) of variables. The estimate was […]
A Scientific American article concerning Bjorn Stevens’ recent paper “Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol radiative forcing” has led to some confusion. The article states, referring to a blog post of mine at Climate Audit, “The misinterpretation of Stevens’ paper began with Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist.”. My blog post showed how climate sensitivity […]
A guest post by Nicholas Lewis In Part 1 I introduced the talk I gave at Ringberg 2015, explained why it focussed on estimation based on warming over the instrumental period, and covered problems relating to aerosol forcing and bias caused by the influence of the AMO. In Part 2 I dealt with poor Bayesian […]
A guest post by Nicholas Lewis In Part 1 I introduced the talk I gave at Ringberg 2015, explained why it focussed on estimation based on warming over the instrumental period, and covered problems relating to aerosol forcing and bias caused by the influence of the AMO. I now move on to problems arising when […]
A guest post by Nicholas Lewis As many readers will be aware, I attended the WCRP Grand Challenge Workshop: Earth’s Climate Sensitivities at Schloss Ringberg in late March. Ringberg 2015 was a very interesting event, attended by many of the best known scientists involved in this field and in areas of research closely related to it – […]
Rahmstorf et al 2015 Figure 5 shows a coral d15N series from offshore Nova Scotia (see left panel below). The corresponding plot from the source is shown on the right. Original captions for both follow. There’s enough information in the figures and captions to figure out Rahmstorf’s next trick. See if you can figure it out […]
The Rahmstorf et al reconstruction commences in AD900 even though the Mann et al 2009 reconstruction goes back to AD500. Once again, this raises the obvious question: why didn’t Rahmstorf show values before AD900? Are these results adverse to his claims? Once the question is posed, you can guess the answer.
In any article by Mann and coauthors, it is always prudent to assume that even seemingly innocent choices use up a researcher degree of freedom – to put it nicely. For example, Rahmstorf et al focus on their “AMOC index” in the period ending 1995 and show their AMOC index up to as shown below.
Jonathan Jones and Ruth Dixon have published (see Ruth’s blog here) a comment in Psychological Science on conspiracy theorist Stephan Lewandowsky’s Hoax article, much discussed at CA at the time. Although their statistical points are incontrovertible and clearly expressed, it took considerable persistence – see timeline here. Their first and longer original article was submitted to a different […]
Climate Audit 