Category Archives: Statistics

Re-Visiting RegEM: Rutherford et al 2005

Mann et al 2007 is a new RegEM version, replacing the RegEM calculations of Rutherford et al 2005. The logic is not entirely self-contained and so I re-visited some of our previous comments on Rutherford et al here here here here . I’m going to reprise two issues today: Collation Errors, a small but amusing […]

Emile-Geay and Verification r2 Statistics

Julien Emile-Geay from Judith Curry’s university – who, together with Kim Cobb, is teaching a course on the Hockey Stick – has joined our debate with a forceful criticism of Craig Loehle’s recent paper. While Emile-Geay seems to be a lively young man with some very cordial comments about CA here and his comments are […]

What other data series could be plugged in?

I recommend that CA readers visit UC’s blog for some interesting discussion. (BTW UC visited Toronto recently and we had a nice dinner.) UC posted the following interesting figure on Unthreaded as follows: BTW, got interesting result when I replaced Temperature PCs with solar in MBH98 algorithm. Similar RE values as in the original, and […]

Review Comments on the "IPCC Test"

In a recent post, I’ve indicated that IPCC authors seems to have invented a “test” for long-term persistence that is nowhere attested in any statistical literature and, if I’ve interpreted what they’ve done correctly, appears to be a useless test. Jean S and I have made a few references to the Review Comments on the […]

The New “IPCC Test” for Long-Term Persistence

In browsing AR4 chapter 3, I encountered something that seems very strange in Table 3.2 which reports trends and trend significance for a variety of prominent temperature series (HAdCRU, HadSST, CRUTem). The caption states: The Durbin Watson D-statistic (not shown) for the residuals, after allowing for first-order serial correlation, never indicates significant positive serial correlation. […]

Mannomatic Smoothing and Pinned End-points

We’ve had a couple of discussions of dealing with end-points for smoothing. Here’s a little note about smoothing algorithms, which I think is pretty funny. It’s hard to imagine a note about smoothing algorithms being funny, but see what you think.

Mann's New Divergence "Theory": A Smoothing Artifact

Over at realclimate, Mann has advocated a new “explanation” of the Divergence Problem raised by one of their readers in connection with IPCC AR4 Figure 6.10. Mann says that there is no Divergence Problem; he blames the reader for failing understand boundary constraints in smoothed series. Raising the Divergence Problem at realclimate was so blasphemous […]

Inversions from Partial Correlation Coefficients

Willis raised an interesting point about trying to invert series based on partial correlation coefficients with monthly temperatures. His post, together with UC’s response are collected here.

More on "Naturally Orthogonal"

I realize that not all CA readers are interested in multivariate methods and that dendroclimatologists want to “forget the math”, but I find it interesting to try to relate dendro and paleoclimate recipes to known statistical methodologies that you can read about in texts. I commented the other day on the form of Principal Components […]

Nature's Style: "Naturally Orthogonal"?

Wilson and Luckman 2003 observe: The first PCs from the RW and MXD PCA are naturally orthogonal (r = —0.006) over the 1900—1991 period suggesting the in’?fluence of different forcing mechanisms upon these parameters. They move on without pausing here, but this point should not be left without a commentary. The issue here is one […]