Author Archives: Stephen McIntyre

Regular and "Special Decisions"

A couple of months ago, as I mentioned at the time, Ross and I submitted a paper to International Journal of Climatology discussing Santer, Schmidt et al versus Douglass et al. I just checked the status of the submission at the journal website and learned that the submission is subject to a “Special Decision”. We […]

Back Online

Back in Toronto after two weeks in Thailand. One of my sons got married and my wife and I spent time traveling with my son and new daughter-in-law and my daughter. I left New York on Monday Mar 9 back to Toronto and left the next morning for Thailand, pretty groggy when I arrived on […]

Sudden Climate Change Syndrome

I arrived in Bangkok late Wednesday night local time – lots of travel. I returned from the Heartland conference to Toronto on Monday night, left Toronto early morning Tuesday for Bangkok, connecting in Tokyo with a two-hour layover in Vancouver. I’d looked at going from New York but surprisingly Air Canada’s prices from Toronto were […]

Travel Plans

I’m going to be away for most of the next two weeks – I’ll be in New York for a couple of days and then I’m going to Thailand with my wife and daughter to visit one of my sons. I’ll be spotty in internet connection and posting. I’ve asked a couple of regulars to […]

A Peek behind the Curtain

On Feb 26, Garth Paltridge, Albert Arking and Michael Pook’s report on a re-examination of NCEP reanalysis data on upper tropospheric humidity was published online by Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Upper tropospheric humidity is a critical topic in assessing the strength of water vapor feedbacks – knowledge that is essential to understand just how much […]

Gavin and the PC Stories

How many principal components to retain? Recent readers of Climate Audit may not realize that this was an absolute battleground issue of MBH and Wahl and Ammann. In one sense, it was never resolved with MBH back in 2003-2005, but that was before the existence of blogs made it possible to focus attention on problems. […]

When, after the agreeable fatigues of solicitation, Mrs Millamant …

While I’m often described as a “statistician”, as that’s a word that people understand (or think that they understand), I think of what I do more as “data analysis”. Academic statisticians are interested in different sorts of things than interest me. I have some styles, habits and practices for approaching new data sets, but they […]

Buell: ‘Castles in the Clouds’

CA reader hfl, who cited Buell’s documentation of the dependence of principal component patterns on shapes, has sent me a scanned pdf version now available here. It concludes by observing that analyses that fail to consider this phenomenon (and there is ample evidence that Steig et al falls into this category) “may well be scientific […]

Nierenberg re Schmidt re McKitrick and Michaels

Nicolas Nierenberg has taken a look here at Gavin Schmidt auditing of McKitrick and Michaels. He previously reported here on the analysis: Anyway I have written an analysis of spatial autocorrelation as it relates to S09 and MM07. My conclusion is that the primary result in MM07 was not affected by spatial autocorrelation, which is […]

Upside Down Tiljander in Japan

Some Japanese articles have been in the news recently. CA readers will be interested in the fact that CA was cited (thanks to a CA reader for the heads up). Here’s a graphic from their SI showing differences between Gaspé versions. As CA readers know, similar discrepancies occur for bristlecones between Ababneh and Graybill or […]