I’ve been re-visiting the various multiproxy studies with respect to scale and variability. In addition, as you know, one of my interests in these multiproxy studies is the non-robustness of MWP-modern levels to a very few non-independent proxies, used in multiple studies – in particular: bristlecones, Polar Urals and Thompson’s Himalayan dO18 series – each of which has problems as temperature proxies for different reasons. Obviously, a supposedly "robust" conclusion in multiple multiproxy studies should be robust to the presence/absence of a few potentially problematic series. Here’s an examination of Yang et al [2003] from that point of view. The composite series from Yang et al [2002] is the most heavily-weighted contributor to Mann and Jones [2003] and Moberg et al [2005]. The Yang composite and the North American PC1 (bristlecones) dominate the Mann and Jones [2003] reconstruction, making other series essentially irrelevant. Its contribution to Moberg is less marked, but it is one of only 3-4 series that provide a strong 20th century. Continue reading →
If any of you have young children and heavy unsecured television sets or the like, proceed immediately to ensure that they are completely secured or remove them.
American Thanksgiving weekend has been very black here. On Sunday evening, our 2 year old grandson, a bright, handsome and active child with a mass of curly blond hair, pulled over a dresser and a heavy television set hit him in the skull fracturing it in two places and breaking two ribs. He stopped breathing. My son revived him with CPR learned only from watching ER and from something he learned when he was 10. The CAT scans are clear, but one of the fractures is an indentation fracture and worrying. He has just been released from intensive care, but is under close attention at a fine hospital. We are cautiously optimistic today and the tension is receding slightly. Our 5-year old granddaughter, who is a great joy to us, is staying with us during the crisis.
A child died in Toronto in a similar accident earlier this year. My daughter-in-law agreed to an interview on CTV last night and was admirable. There is an article about the event in the Toronto Star today here. I am adding my limited voice to their concerns because my son and daughter-in-law decided that they wanted to publicize this easily avoidable risk.
My attention is obviously elsewhere. On the other hand, sometimes things are so chilling that you’re better off working as a distraction.
Some of you may have noticed how surprisingly high climateaudit ranks in google searches in topics not obviously connected to us. I did a google on "full true plain disclosure press release" and, lo and behold, there was CA at the top of the list. Here are few other rankings. Continue reading →
Spence has drawn attention to Hans von Storch’s comment at Roger Peilke’s, giving his take on the hockey stick debate here:
The debate about the hockeystick is techically not really relevant. We have achived our main goal, namely that the premature claims that the issue of millennial temperature reconstructions was mostly solved have been broadly rejected. One or two years ago it was hard to publish results which were inconsistent with the MBH reconstruction; now everybody agrees that there may be more to it. The jury is still out and I expect that consensus will settle on something with significant larger variations in the shaft of the hockeystick.
Having said this – the debate about the hockeystick is most significant when it comes to the culture of our science. Posting the hockeystick as key evidence in the SPM and Synthesis Report of the IPCC was simply stupid and evidence for what Bray calls post-sensible science – as science which is encroached by moral entrepreneurship. Or post-normal science. We have more cases of this type of claims-making, which is usually a mix of "good" political intentions and personal drive for the limelight. Have we, as a community, become better in rejecting such claims? I am afraid, we have not.
Pretty hard to argue with this. It’s interesting that even von Storch could feel that it was "hard to publish results inconsistent with MBH" only one or two years ago. While "variability" is back on the table, discussing the relationship of MWP-modern levels objectively is still an uphill battle.
It’s also worth re-reading his comments on the Barton questions, where he criticizes the questions to the scientists, endorses the questions to the institutions and even suggests adding the journals into the investigationhere. Here is a lengthy excerpt: Continue reading →
I never quite got to presenting an attempt to replicate Moberg before. Here’s a try. I’m still a long way off from being able to replicate his results. It is so infuriating to have to try to do such an amount of detective work prior to even atempting any analysis. I presume that has been Hockey Team strategy all along and, only the most intrepid and persistent, can even come close. I’ve provided a collation of Moberg’s data here together with a script showing my present emulation. The script is not very pretty and I’ll try to tidy it at some point when I return to this. I’ve also done a comparison of the archived Moberg reconstruction to actual CRU data with interesting results. Continue reading →
Yesterday I waded through a demonstration of a fairly egregious splice of the instrumental record into Crowley’s reconstruction as used in Crowley [2000]. Today I consider the use of the Crowley reconstruction in spaghetti graphs and, in particular, Mann’s statement at realclimate that:
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.
Mann and realclimate are obviously pretty quick to dismiss any opponents as simply being "industry-funded climate disinformation", but I grew up in era when people talked about "running dogs of the capitalist imperialists" so the mentality of such comments is easy to recognize, just as the Marcusian overtones of "false objectivity". Continue reading →
Update: See continued discussion here.
I’m working up some material for the AGU convention and re-visited some points in Crowley and Lowery [2000] which I’d not been able to figure out before. (One of Bruce McCullough’s strongest arguments for providing source code is that it reduces the cost of replication studies, since the replicator does not have to waste so much time doing detective work. ) Crowley used several different versions of his series and it’s taken quite a bit of time to disentangle the fishing-line. Here’s another installment, reviewing some points made a long time ago and adding some new perspective. Continue reading →
We’ve obviously spent quite a bit of time analyzing the effect of the weird and incorrect MBH principal components method on red noise series. We’ve not argued that doing the principal components calculation correctly necessarily results in a meaningful index, only that doing it incorrectly cannot result in a meaningful index. One thing that I noticed in earlier studies was that the eigenvalues for the PC1 for red noise series were surprisingly high even under centered calculations, but I never followed this up and I’ve never actually seen any discussion in the statistical literature of what happens when you apply principal components methods to noise. I did some experiments this morning in which I calculated variance on different scales from PC series from different red noise models with some quite provocative results. The PC series consistently generate low-frequency "signals" even when there is none in the underlying data. This is very preliminary but interesting (to me at least). Continue reading →
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program Workshop was the first such workshop that I’d been to. Sometimes the anthropology is as interesting as anything else. Continue reading →
I will write up some notes on the U.S. Climate Change Science Workshop, but I’d like to post up some information on a couple of interesting reports in the past few days on archaeological discoveries in a receding glacier on a high Swiss pass towards Italy, sent in by a reader. Glacier retreat in the hot 2003 summer exposed remains from several distinct periods: from ~ 2800-2500 BC; from 2000-1750 BC; ~150 BC-250 AD; and the MWP up to the 14th/15th Century. I’ve tidied some machine translations from the German to give a gist of the articles; I’ve not tried to figure out the details of the translation as the gist is pretty clear. The archaeologists say that summer temperatures were warmer in these past warm periods. When you see information like this, it really reinforces my doubts about Thompson’s dating of Kilimanjaro, which seems fragile in the extreme. Continue reading →
Climate Audit 