Climategate Anniversary

[CliveH]

Hard to believe that it was a year ago the emails were released/hacked from the CRU at the UoEA – and the result has been a meltdown in credibility of alarmist talk of catastrophic Global Warming. In particular a while ago an important study on proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) in the Annals of Applied Statistics (one of the top statistical journals) looked at how accurate any predictions could be using the statistical methedology used by the Alarmists because statisticians have long criticised Climate Scientists for using suspect statistical techniques to get the Alarmist answers the Alarmists seem to want. The paper was:-

 

"A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?"

 

And it states in its abstract:

 

"We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago."

 

Now an Alarmist, Julien Emile-Geay, who has been very critical of we sceptics in the past, has produced a posting on the McShane and Wyner paper, which as previously said is a paper about multiproxy methods as seen by two professional statisticians.

 

I was most struck by this:

 

‘Finally, I agree with [McShane & Wyner's] main conclusion:

 

“the long ?at handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a re?ection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.”

 

"That being said, it is my postulate than when climate reconstruction methods incorporate the latest advances in the field of statistics, it will indeed be found that the current warming and its rate are unprecedented…the case for it just isn’t completely airtight now." ’

 

So in other words he “believes” but the science behind the “belief” is very dodgy indeed but they will keep looking for the evidence that proves they are correct.

 

This fits in well withy my favourite email released this time last year from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Sorry about repeating the F word. But it does make me laugh!!

 

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=356

 

"Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I

almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will

show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year

extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we

believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know f*ck-all about what

the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know

with certainty that we know f*ck-all)."

 

Dr. Edward R. Cook

Doherty Senior Scholar and

Director, Tree-Ring Laboratory

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

 

…………………………..

 

Happy anniversary CRU!