Author Archives: Stephen McIntyre

Spurious Significance #4: Phillips [1986]

I will go approximately 50-50 for a while on posting statistical and non-statistical notes. Today’s another statistical note. It’s a bit technical, but some of the statistical findings from econometrics on autocorrelated series are highly applicable to climate and, while there is occasional citation of econometric literature in climate articles and occasional forays by econometricians […]

The 1992 Chavez Coup

The National Post has a big feature on Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, who’s much in the news as a result of a fatwa on him by Pat Robertson. This post has nothing to do with climate. I happened to be in Caracas during the Chavez coup attempt in 1992 and this is just a […]

Boston Globe on Ray Bradley

The Boston Globe has an interesting puff piece on Ray Bradley.

Spurious Significance #3: Some DW Statistics

Granger and Newbold [1974] provided examples of spurious significance in a random walk context. This has been extended by various authors to a number of other persistent processes. Granger and Newbold suggested that the DW statistic could be used to test the autocorrelation in the residuals, giving a test that could be used in a […]

A Transect of Gridcell Plots at 7.5 S

I think that there is too much preoccupation in the analysis of NH urban gridcells. As an exercise, I plotted the ACFs and gridcells for a transect at 7.5S from 177.5W to 177.5E. The presentation here is not very pretty but I think that the graphs are interesting taken as a whole. I draw no […]

New Nature Study on Peer Review

Nature has published a ground-breaking new study of peer review.

More on MBH98 Cross-Validation R2

I have previously discussed here and here Mann’s answer to the following question from the House Committee: "7 c. Did you calculate the R2 statistic for the temperature reconstruction, particularly for the 15th Century proxy record calculations and what were the results?" Mann stated: "My colleagues and I did not rely on this statistic in […]

Ian Castles on IPCC Economic Assumptions

Ian Castles, the well-known economist, has sent in the following post as a comment on another topic, which I have taken the liberty of posting up here. Ian writes:

Spurious Significance #2 : Granger and Newbold 1974

"Spurious significance" was a phrase used in the title of our GRL article. We regarded this as perhaps the most essential point of the article, but it seems to have gotten lost. This is the second of a planned series of notes on spurious significance, to give a sense of the statistical background. Granger and […]

Esper's G (Spot)

Sometimes the Hockey Team baffles me. I was at Esper’s website and noticed Esper J, Neuwirth B, Treydte K (2001) A new parameter to evaluate temporal signal strength of tree ring chronologies. Dendrochronologia 19, 93-102. Something that looked pertinent. As a component of his estimate of signal strength, Esper applied a statistical procedure Gleichlàƒ⣵figkeit G […]