A recurring question which was asked again on at Eurotrib: in the Wikipedia spaghetti graph, how many of the spaghetti strands are from the Hockey Team? I guess it depends how you define the "Hockey Team". Almost exactly one year ago, I posted up the following listing http://www.climate2003.com/blog/hockey_team.htm of who I thought was on the Hockey Team (without prior reference to the Wikipedia spaghetti graph) and virtually every spaghetti strand is from authors who appeared to me as part of the Hockey Team. My perception was based on direct connections through coauthorship with the strongest weight being given to coauthorship of a multiproxy study and secondary weight to coauthorship of other articles (without attempting to make an exact formula).
Here is a listing of Wikipedia reconstructions with comments. Continue reading →
I’ve got something that’s a little bit amusing today. In MM03, we pointed out collation errors in pcproxy.txt (which I’ve recently hypothesized was used in the version of Rutherford, Mann et al [2005] submitted in July 2003 and was laundered after MM03). We pointed out that the PC series all seemed to start one year too early (1799 instead of 1800) and then the missing 1980 values (the last year in the matrix) were filled from left to right, so that, in some cases, 8 series had identical 1980 values. Rutherford, Mann et al [2005] said that these criticisms applied only to the "wrong" data set (while not mentioning that we were directed to this dataset at Mann’s FTP site by them). After MM03, they fixed the problems in their collation of the PC series for Rutherford, Mann et al [2005] (without thanking us). But they made the very same goof in their collation of the instrumental series into their composite matrix. It’s too funny for words. Continue reading →
Over on Warwick Hughes’ blog, a new article by Lars Kamél on the GISS adjusting temperatures for an apparent “urban cooling effect” that mysteriously happens to some small Swedish towns but not others nearby.
I wonder how deep this “adjusting key data for unlikely causes” rabbit hole actually goes…
This is pretty much the one-year anniversary of our two 2005 articles in GRL and E&E. There’s a very interesting assessment of the status of the debate at Europa Tribune here.
About one year ago, January 2005, an article of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick was published in the Geophysical Research Letters with harsh criticism on the symbol of our changing climate: the Hockey Stick graph. It was a defining moment: after an uphill struggle their work had at last been accepted in a well respected science magazine for climate research. Although I’ve followed the ensuing debate with a half eye throughout the past year, I’ve been curious to where it was going and how well the Hockey Stick of Mann et al. would fare. The briefest synopsis: it’s a trench-war out there.
The author hasn’t been convinced by Hockey Team huffing and puffing. It will be interesting to see the comments.
There is an interesting dispute going on at Benny Peiser’s CCNet among some eminent scientists about the date of the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary. It’s not an issue that I’d ever thought about very much – although my 5-year old granddaughter has gotten interested in dinosaurs and asked me why they are “extincted”. (She’s the one that thought that Bon Appetit would be a good name for a restaurant for dogs.) The dispute caused one party, Jan Smit, to propose that the other party, Greta Keller, send thin sections of her critical sections to an independent analyst. Keller thought that this was a ridiculous proposal, saying:
Instead, Smit has called for “testing” Keller’s forams to demonstrate that they are dolomite crystals… If Smit wants to carry out such a foolish “test”, I say go ahead and use your own slides.
Without knowing anything of the debate, Keller loses me here. If an exploration geologist responded in an equivalent way to a request for an independent analysis of a drill core, you should call your broker instantly and short the stock. Now in fairness to Keller, there seems to be a lot of ingrained academic expectations of immunity from ongoing due diligence and it might be a little early to short the stock. However, to a draw a more general moral, surely Smit’s request can be construed as a form of ongoing peer review. If Smit doesn’t get anywhere with Keller, I think that the next step should be writing the journals involved and asking them to intervene.
Here is some of the recent correspondence at CCNet (and there are some other interesting comments there as well.) Continue reading →
It’s warm today “¢’¬? only minus 12,” my guide says. “What’s cold?” I ask. “Minus 50. Then we stay inside.”
A little shout out to my enterprising 82-year old mother, who has a travel article in today’s Globe and Mail. Next she’s off to Costa Rica.
I’m trying to use "hissy fit" purely descriptively and not in an ad hominem sense. I can’t think of any other way to describe today’s postings at Daily Kos – scroll down. A reader posted up a pretty sensible and mundane question about RegEM – the new magic bullet from the nomadic Hockey Team.
I understand that MBH98 is out of date. Assuming now that RegEM is still up to date, it is, like MBH98, a parameter-intensive scheme with no defined error model (cf. Schneider 2001). Why should it be immune from the data processing and extrapolation issues raised by BàÆà⻲ger and Cubasch?
Which proxy study proves that RegEM is superior to EOF based approaches? Certainly not Schneider 2001 himself: “Hence, any claim that the regularized EM algorithm or any other technique for the imputation of missing values in climate data is “optimal” in some general sense would be unjustified. The performance of the regularized EM algorithm must be assessed in practice.” – I am unaware of such an assessment.
What is the agenda behind BàÆà⻲ger and Cubasch? [referring back to allegations from S&M that critics have “Agendas”]
Look at the outburst from Mann and Schmidt. Continue reading →
Over at Daily Kos, Mann says that the Nomads (this is a new candidate name for the Hockey Team) have moved on and that RegEM, as in Rutherford, Mann et al [2005], is the new sheriff. At the end of the day, it’s hard to see how the RegEM method avoids any of the BàÆà⻲ger and Cubasch criticisms as a Daily Kos reader has pointed out (and Mann has yet to answer).
But today I’m going to visit another curiosity about Rutherford, Mann et al [2005].
Continue reading →
For your reading pleasure, here is our Reply to Ammann and Wahl (GRL). as submitted on Jan. 29, 2006. You don’t have access to the A&W Comment itself; [update: now here ] but if you re-read the Huybers article, it has the same points without all the mischaracterizations and misrepresentations of A&W.
A&W also have a longer article that has been submitted to Climatic Change, which they say has been"provisionally accepted". The list of misrepresentations in the GRL article is pretty amazing, but it’s even worse in the longer Climatic Change article. We will henceforth refer to the two articles as the Big Whopper and the Little Whopper .Too bad there’s no root beer and fries on the side. Continue reading →
I quickly mentioned BàÆà⻲ger and Cubasch [2005] which was published in December and meant to post up some further comments at the time, but forgot to do so. I was reminded of this by the question of a reader at Daily Kos . Let me mention first that BàÆà⻲ger and Cubasch is a really interesting and well-conceived paper and that Cubasch was an IPCC TAR heavyweight. Here’s a tease -the following diagram is in their Supplementary Information and is explained later in this post.
Anyway, Jack asked Mann at Daily Kos:
Response to Burger and Cubasch 2005 needed
Thanks for the response here and the direct response on RealClimate! I have just posted a reply on RealClimate that is summarized in the Subject line of this post. Outdated? Not when a critical (i.e., important) paper was published two months ago.
Continue reading →
Climate Audit 
Adjusting for urban cooling in Sweden
Over on Warwick Hughes’ blog, a new article by Lars Kamél on the GISS adjusting temperatures for an apparent “urban cooling effect” that mysteriously happens to some small Swedish towns but not others nearby.
I wonder how deep this “adjusting key data for unlikely causes” rabbit hole actually goes…