Middleground

Since you are such a fan of Real Climate, you will find this interesting!


Since a new ‘reconstruction’ of the last 2000 years from Craig Loehle is currently doing the rounds, we thought it might be timely to set out what the actual issues are in making such reconstructions (as opposed to the ones that are more often discussed), and how progress is being made despite the pitfalls.

The Loehle paper was published in Energy and Environment – a journal notable only for its rather dubious track record of publishing contrarian musings. The reconstruction itself is based on a network of 18 records that are purportedly local temperature proxies, and we will use those as examples in the points below. More discussion of this paper is available here (via the wayback machine).

RealClimate: Past reconstructions: problems, pitfalls and progress

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Guess what I don't care and don't believe dogs gas causes global warming. After all it is 40 degrees here in Florida today. --ptif219

cascadian

Are you using quotation marks around "statisticians" to try to raise questions on their background? pretty lazy attempt. 2 of the 4 statisticians are named, feel free to provide any information you have on their "suspect" background.

Do you feel the following bolded statement can be derived from the available data?

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"Fear is the mind killer."
~Bene Gesserit

Gill

no.

not necessarily.

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There is so much unforced variability in the system which we can’t predict — the chaotic component of the climate system — which is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically.
Gavin Schmidt, NASA GISS

alandoland

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.The case bedding that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four bed linens independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time."If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.Yet the idea that mattress things are cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, a BBC news story posted on the Drudge Report and in a new book by the authors of the best-seller "Freakonomics." Last week, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.