Climate Audit

First, let me thank me thank Judy Curry for inviting me to make a presentation at their seminar series and for both spending so much time and energy showing me around the department and hosting me so hospitably. I was the guest at many interesting presentations by able young scientists and at splendid lunches and dinners on Thursday and Friday. I also wish to thank Julien Emile-Geay for his role in initiating the invitation.

Readers of this blog should realize that Judy Curry has been (undeservedly) criticized within the climate science community for inviting me to Georgia Tech. Given that the relatively dry nature of my formal interests and presentation (linear algebra, statistics, tree rings etc.) and that I’ve been invited to present by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, it seems strange that such a presentation to scientists should provoke controversy, but it did. Readers here should recognize the existence of such a controversy before making ungracious remarks to my hosts. I must say that I was disappointed by many comments on the thread in which I announced that I was going to Georgia Tech (many of which broke blog rules during a period that I was either too busy or too tired to moderate and have now been deleted.)

For critics of the invitation, I wish to assure them that neither Julien (nor Judy) ever explicitly or implicitly agreed with anything that I said and that I do not interpret a failure to rebut any particular point or claim as acquiescence. Quite the opposite. However, any climate scientists who stridently criticized Judy Curry for the invitation should also consider the possibility that she was one chess move ahead of them in what she was trying to do and how my visit was organized.

Right now I have two related but functionally distinct “hats” in the climate debate.

One role is that of conventional (or in my case, slightly unconventional) scientific author, with a few articles and conference presentations on millennial reconstructions. This role is, of course, made livelier both by my unconventional route to writing these articles and by the interesting events that followed them, not least of which was consideration by the NAS and Wegman panels and an appearance before a House of Representatives subcommittee.

The other role is that of proprietor of a climate blog with a big, lively and vociferous audience, arguably a distinct role by now. The emergence of blogs is a media phenomenon in itself, but, in the climate community, blogs are uniquely active. (This is interesting in itself and deserves a little reflection.) Within that community and even within the larger blog community, Climate Audit has established both a noticeable presence and unique voice. I don’t want this post to turn into a reflection on Climate Audit (we can reflect on that on another occasion), but there was little doubt in my mind that scientists at Georgia Tech were far more familiar with Climate Audit than with MM 2005 (GRL) etc.

I’m pretty sure that Judy Curry perceived that: because so much of my personal exposure to climate scientists has been through the dross and bile of the Hockey Team, this has affected the representation and perception of third party climate scientists at a popular blog and it would be beneficial to the portrayal of climate scientists at this new media form for me to meet sane non-Hockey Team climate scientists doing valid and interesting work. I’m sure that other presenters to the EAS Friday afternoon seminar are also treated hospitably, but I suspect that most of them don’t get to spend two days meeting such a wide variety of Georgia Tech climate scientists in small meetings or that their meetings were quite like mine.

On Thursday, I spent most of the day seeing interesting and substantive work in areas unrelated to anything that I’d written about – things like establishing metrics for aerosols using Köhler Theory or laboratory procedures for speleothems. And whatever other criticisms people may have of me, I don’t think anyone has ever criticized me for not finding interest in details and methods. On Friday, I heard an extremely interesting exposition on the physical basis of hurricanes and their role in the overall balance of nature. An interesting context here (and one that I was previously unaware of) is Peter Webster’s interest in monsoons and Bangladesh.

On Thursday, I was also guest at a seminar on climate and the media (including blogs); on Friday early afternoon prior to my EAS seminar, there was a short Q and A session with the Hockey Stick class. At 3.30 Friday afternoon, I presented to the EAS seminar. I didn’t count the crowd, but it looked like there were about 100 people there, including a couple of (non-GA Tech) CA readers from Atlanta. There was a short question period after the presentation and then a beer-and-wine reception.

Readers who were worried about protests and fireworks at the EAS presentation can disabuse themselves of such fevered imaginations. On the one hand, the audience was polite. On the other hand, it would be hard for a student or uninvolved faculty to think up a technical question that hasn’t been raised previously. So there were no fireworks at the seminar, or for that matter, about the Hockey Stick on any occasion. I’ll review the questions below, but I really wasn’t asked very much at any of the public sessions about statistics or proxies. I’m not going to report or discuss any one-to-one sessions since the line between private scientist and blog reporter was not clearly discussed at the meetings; I am therefore treating them as private, even if they were scheduled on-campus meetings – other than to say that there was relatively little specific discussion of the statistics and proxy issues that directly concern me. Not that there wasn’t much lively discussion – just not about partial least squares, spurious regression, bristlecones, data mining, etc. If any of the parties wishes to put any views on such matters on the record here (or elsewhere), they are welcome to do so. Below I’ll limit my discussion to matters raised at the public seminar or in a classroom setting.

Not everything was sweetness and light. There were a couple of rough patches, not about my analysis of MBH or proxies, but about some incidents here at climateaudit. I’ll discuss blog manners and perceptions on another occasion and mention only one point right now. I regularly discourage people from being angry in their posts for a couple of reasons – even if you feel that the angry outburst is justified, it never convinces anyone of anything; and it gives people an excuse to ignore non-angry posts. Regular readers tend to filter out the angry posts and pay attention to the more substantive posts. However consider the possibility that visitors have the reverse filter – they tend to pay attention to the angry posts and ignore the substantive ones. As people know, I’ve modified my attitudes towards comments over time and now try to delete angry posts when I notice them (and these angry posts are 99% of the time condemning climate scientists and the horse that they rode in on, rather than this blog). It places an unreasonable burden on me to weed out these angry posts and I re-iterate one more time my request that readers refrain from making angry posts as they are entirely counter-productive.

After that long preamble, I’ll review my presentation to the EAS seminar (which I’ve now put online) and questions arising at the seminar or in the classroom. Continue reading →