CCQA1 Presentations Available

Nice work, Barry. Didn’t know you were doing a series up public lectures – will pop in to town for the next few.

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Barry,
You cannot duck these questions, because you exhibited the discredited hockey stick diagram several times in your slides referred to above. The errors have been exposed by papers by McIntyre and McKittrick, Von Storch etal., Burger and Cubasch and others. A team of expert statisticians led by Edward Wegman found that “In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling”, and confirmed that the ‘hockey stick’ could be reproduced by feeding random noise into the MBH method. The ‘refutations’ at the alarmist web sites you refer to are pathetic in comparison with the analysis of McIntyre, and repeat the blatant falsehood that all the reconstructions show the MWP cooler than today.

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Professor

I assume from the fact that you are no longer discussing the papers you linked to earlier, that you are tacitly admitting that they don’t in fact refute anything I wrote.

You then take issue with my understanding of the peer review process. Are you really suggesting that it is normal for a scientist to refuse access to key data behind one of their papers? Do you support Wahl and Amman’s actions in doing this? Do you do it yourself?

And what about the relegation of the key statistical argument to the Supplementary Information – unavailable to peer reviewers. Do you think this was acceptable? Normal? Have you ever done this yourself?

And now the SI is available, I’ll ask again: Do you think it is acceptable to publish an RE benchmark of zero in the main paper, while actually deriving one of 0.5 in the SI? Should I assume from your silence that you find this indefensible? And while we’re on the subject, do you think that a set of results with an R^2 of zero (or so close to zero as to make no diference) are significant?

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Thank-you for replying with such thoroughness.

1. You pointed to some articles that you said refuted my posting. I said that they were actually on a different subject (PCA) to the one I had written about (validation statistics). You would not have needed to repeat yourself to respond to my point.

2. We agree that withholding key data is not normal and you don’t do it yourself. But what I also asked was your opinion on withholding data. Do you find it reprehensible?

3. I think I’m right in saying that relegating key argument to the SI is most unusual. It seems most unlikely that the SI was available to the peer reviewers because Climatic Change was unable to locate it when asked.

4. (a)Let me set out my understanding and you can put me right. M&M agree with Huybers that with a univariate model you get an RE benchmark of zero. But the proxies are not univariate, they are multivariate. With a multivariate model you get an RE benchmark of 0.5. W&A sought to refute this. In WA2007,they restate Huybers’ already refuted unvariate position, claiming that this shows M&M are wrong, while showing that the multivariate case does indeed require a benchmark of 0.5 in the SI. Am I right? And if so, doesn’t this make a nonsense of W&A’s purported refutation of M&M?(c)OK, but if the sample size is not small then R^2~0 means no correlation between temperature and tree rings, which is to say the hockey stick has no meaning, no predictive power. I don’t understand your point about relative value. You can’t get a lower R^2 than zero. Nothing else can be worse, can it?

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Barry, I am puzzled. I refer to a report by expert statisticians and several scientific papers and all you can do is refer to another alarmist blogger. Which of us is the professor of climate science and who’s the amateur?

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