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Re: [Phys-l] Mike Mann _The hockey stick and the climate wars_



I will Bcc to a friend (a prominent academic statistician) your stat. methodology paragraph for comment. (penultimate below)

bc



On 2012, Feb 18, , at 11:52, David Marx wrote:

John,

Normally, I respect you and enjoy your posts on this list. But your response to my post was simply
dismissive to which I say, "Hogwash!" You are as guilty as all of the "true believers" of never
addressing valid scientific questions.

I am one that has tried to track down the answers from climate scientists to these claims. It is an
endless circle of hand-waving, excuses, and ridiculing statements. I demand more of scientists,
regardless of their field of study. I thought you did too.

David




On 2012, Feb 18, , at 09:41, David Marx wrote:

The description of the book doesn't make me want to read it. His argument is that all "deniers" are
funded by powerful interests or simply naively helping those powerful interests. I wonder if he actually
addresses the short-comings of his methods in the book.

The trouble with the hockey stick is that both the historic and modern temperatures are not consistent
with most other data available in the peer-reviewed literature (for historic data) and for satellite data for
global temperatures (available since 1979). For example, the medieval warming period seems to be
absent from the data. A literature review finds 200 peer-reviewed articles that discuss the MWP by
660 different scientists from 385 separate institutions. Of those, 66 articles give quantitative data: 56
indicate MWP temperatures greater than today, 8 equalling today's temps, and only 2 indicating less
than today's temperatures (this is consistent with Mann's work).

Mann and his co-workers have not adequately addressed the issues with their statistical methodology,
which were studied by a distinguished panel from the American Statistical Association commised by
the National Academy of Sciences. That panel was not to judge the conclusions of the research, only
the methods. They found that they had violated numerous rules of statistics.

They also failed to explain why in their methods that they included a weighting scheme that heavily
weighted tree ring data that showed a substantial warming trend over data that did not.




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_______________________________________________
Forum for Physics Educators
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https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/mailman/listinfo/phys-l