re: Climate Change is a scam designed to pick your pocket.

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Say you are right, climate change is real and caused by man

What are your proposed solutions?

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He won't even acknowledge the problem his side has - they can't say what the "right" temperature should be (He'll say, "Right temperature for what?" and think that's ever so clever) - or what CO2 concentrations "ought" to be - just that they need to be lower than they are now.

Okay. How much lower? And how much will that cost? And if we agree to pay that cost, will China? If we do and China doesn't, what does that mean?

Even when you concede for purposes of argument (I do not concede more than statisical insignificance, if any, of human activity on recent - i.e. past 100 years - of warming, if there has even been any warming - the data has been tweaked and massaged so much to meet a specific conclusion, I don't know what data is real, what is fudged and what is outright faked anymore) - they refuse to tell you anything other than, "Cap and trade - that's a market solution to solve it." Solve what? And to what end? At what cost?

(And who benefits? That's the real $64,000 question.)

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good advice for yourself

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I'll put my academic credentials on the table next to yours any time.

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Tell me fake scientist, he posted his methods, what do you have an issue with statistically?

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For a start, his definition of J aspires to a precision that isn't possible with the dataset. He wants to pick out a precise year for "the pause," but that's obviously not going to be possible with mere math. The fact that his method arrives at 1998 for UAH and 1988 for RSS (both of which measure TLT) is proof of its inherent worthlessness. If you were wanting to tease out the onset of some long-term shift in forcings or feedbacks causing the hiatus, you'd be looking at rolling averages, not individual years. McK, of course, isn't interested in this, he's interested in manufacturing mathematical-sounding ammunition for skeptics.

This can also be seen in his statistics. Let's look at what J purports to do:



Now let's look at what J actually did, in context, using his own graph generator on woodfortrees.org and scaling the view of HadCRUT back to 1979:



That starting point looks a hell of a lot like an artefact of pseudo-cyclical behavior to me. (Which, again, is why you use rolling averages and not single years when determining trends. Unless you're a "skeptic.")

It's one thing to say your process does something, it's another thing to actually do it. But as before, McK knows the audience for this paper isn't actual statisticians, it's people who want ammunition, who will wave this paper in front of other people who probably also aren't actual statisticians, and go "LOOK, MATH!"

But you don't need to be a statistician to see that this is a complete farce. He wrote a program that might as well have been called cherrypick.r and explained why it isn't a cherrypick.

Using a highly technical alternative method I will call "the eyeball test," it's pretty obvious where the "pause" begins in the HadCRUT record: 2008-2009. That's when the last maximum was, that's when you see the double dip followed by the double La Nina in 2011 and a generally flat trend.



I'm sure if I could be arsed to learn R, or re-learn C, I could "prove" this by, oh, I would guess taking the inflection point of a five-year rolling average would do it. Or maybe formalize what I did in the graph above and plot the maxima and minima of five-year periods. But I'm not going to do that, because it wouldn't be real science. It would be taking my preferred conclusion and tuning the parameters of a program to prove it in advance. Plus I'd just get a "squirrel!" in response and people will start talking about Al Gore or China or whatever else is on the bingo card.

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What should CO2 concentrations be? What should the global average surface temperature be?

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The fact that you think this is a "gotcha" question means you either don't know much about climate, don't know much about economics, or you're a Richard Tol type who knows about them but is pandering to those who don't. In any case, it's not a matter of "they should be X," where X is some set integer. Everything is a sliding scale of more CO2 -> more warming -> more costs. Asking for an "objective" answer is like asking for an "objective" cost-benefit analysis for the thermostat level in your apartment, only approximately six billion times more complex.

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The fact that you think this is a "gotcha" question means you either don't know much about climate, don't know much about economics, or you're a Richard Tol type who knows about them but is pandering to those who don't. In any case, it's not a matter of "they should be X," where X is some set integer. Everything is a sliding scale of more CO2 -> more warming -> more costs. Asking for an "objective" answer is like asking for an "objective" cost-benefit analysis for the thermostat level in your apartment, only approximately six billion times more complex.

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Translation: "I'm too stupid to answer your question."

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McKitrick

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Mr. McKitrick, I think your new defense system sucks..

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it is, and he describes how with the null set the model determines this point as the trend where we see a slope that includes zero in some subset of the data. Equations 2 and 3 of his paper.

Actually all three datasets he analyzed show different points for J, however when accounting for the autocorrelation of lag one that was only included in some of the models the hiatus stabilizes to 14, 14, or 20 years. He even cites three other papers that further suggested that accounting for larger lags beyond the first order would likely standardize the results even further.


BTW, you really have no idea what you're talking about...the equation 3 he used to determine J, is based on a parameterization of Beta. he isnt using individual years, but plotted the results in that tabular format for ease of use. Sadly, you dont realize that the trend actually encompasses all temporal spaces in between years. Moreover, his use of the lowess smoothed data in construction of the model parameters makes your point not only wrong, but flat out stupid.

That;s one opf several conditions he is AVOIDING in his methodology, not what it purports to do!

I suggest you read the actual paper, and not some blogger

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This is the most bizarre part of AGW debates, the projection. Clearly if I'm taking screenshots and referring to the hiatus as J, I'm going off the actual paper and not Watts' blog entry. Yet this is the response I get.

Do me a favor and show me where he uses lowess smoothed data in the construction of the model parameters. Not in FIG. 1-3, which as far as I can tell are strictly for display, but in the model itself, described in Sections 1 or 2.1. Imahanguppenlisten.

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his is the most bizarre part of AGW debates, the projection. Clearly if I'm taking screenshots and referring to the trend as J, I'm going off the actual paper and not Watts' blog entry. Yet this is the response I get.

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In the paper he expressly points out that "J" isnt condition a), b), or c), and that the equation for J is very VERY clearly spelled out using the correct notation as equation 3. 2 pages before your little quote out of context...

On page 529, there is actually a section that begins "DEFINITION:" where he clearly defines "J" in light of those caveats. Either you didnt read the paper, or you dont know how to read.

Climate change is a scam......Research geologic history of the earth and you will answer your own question. It was started by Al Gore who was on the board of directors for many companies......He did what he needed to do for who he served.......Don't take the pill or drink the kool-aid.....I am a geologist...