Over at ClimateAudit and WUWT they’ve broken out the champagne and are celebrating (once again) the demise, nay, the shattering into 1209 tiny splinters, of the Mann et al “hockey stick” graph, both the 1998 and 2008 editions. The occasion of all the rejoicing is a new paper by statisticians Blakely McShane and Abraham Wyner, entitled A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable? [PDF]. The paper, in press at the Annals of Applied Statistics, purports to demonstrate that randomly generated proxies of various kinds can produce temperature “reconstructions” that perform on validation tests as well as, or even better than, the actual proxies.
My discussion of McShane and Wyner is divided into two parts. First, I’ll look at the opening background sections. Here we’ll see that the authors have framed the issue in surprisingly political terms, citing a number of popular references not normally found in serious peer-reviewed literature. Similarly, the review of the “scientific literature” relies inordinately on grey literature such as Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick’s two Environment and Energy articles and the (non peer-reviewed) Wegman report. Even worse, that review contains numerous substantive errors, some of which appear to have been introduced by a failure to consult cited sources directly, notably in a discussion of a key quote from Edward Wegman himself.
With regard to the technical analysis, I have assumed that McShane and Wyner’s applications of statistical tests and calculations are sound. However, here too, there are numerous problems. The authors’ analysis of the performance of various randomly generated “pseudo proxies” is based on several questionable methodological choices. Not only that, but a close examination of the results shows clear contradictions with the findings in the key reconstruction studies cited. Yet the authors have not even mentioned these contradictions, let alone explained them.
Deep Climate 