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Supplemental data

Let’s check your temperature

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The underlying mission of my job is to safeguard lives and property through climate change adaptation based on science. In other words, to help society to prepare itself for risks connected with more extreme rainfall and temperatures.

For many people, “climate” may seem to be an abstract concept. I have had many conversations about climate, and then realised that people often have different interpretations. In my mind, climate is the same as weather statistics (which I realise can be quite abstract to many).

To avoid miscommunication, I want to make sure that we are on the same page when I discuss climate. Maybe it helps if I talk about more familiar and specific aspects, such as the temperature, rainfall, snow, or wind?

[Read more…] about Let’s check your temperature

Labels for climate data

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metadata-fig “These results are quite strange”, my colleague told me. He analysed some of the recent climate model results from an experiment known by the cryptic name ‘CMIP5‘. It turned out that the results were ok, but we had made an error when reading and processing the model output. The particular climate model that initially gave the strange results had used a different calendar set-up to the previous models we had examined.

[Read more…] about Labels for climate data

Addendum to “A Mistake with Repercussions”

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1. What are “pseudo-proxies” and why are they useful?

Our only information from before the “instrumental period” (the period from which we have systematic measurements with thermometers, starting around 1850) comes from proxy records of climate (like tree rings, ice cores, corals, sediments, pollen etc.). Therefore it is important to know what the available kind and distribution of proxy records can tell us about quantities that we care about (like changes in the average temperature of the northern hemisphere). A typical question is: what accuracy for the northern hemisphere temperature can one expect, given the available number and spatial distribution of proxies? How much uncertainty arises from the non-climatic ‘noise’ in these records? How do the different methods for combining the proxies compare? And so on…

If there was sufficient length of good instrumental data, then we would be able to answer these questions simply by comparing measurements with proxy records. But the instrumental record is short – after all this is the prime reason why we have to rely on proxies.
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On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick

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McIntyre and McKitrick (MM), in one of their many false claims regarding the Mann et al (MBH98) temperature reconstruction, assert that the “Hockey Stick” shape of the reconstruction is an artifact of the “non-centered” Principal Components Analysis (PCA) convention used by MBH98 in representing the North American International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) data series. We already demonstrated the falsehood of this assertion here by showing (a) that the hockey stick pattern emerges using either the MM (centered) or MBH98 (non-centered) PCA conventions, but was censored by MM through an inappropriate application of selection rules for determining the number of Principal Component (PC) to retain, (b) that use of the correct number of PC series (5) to be kept with the MM (centered) convention retains the characteristic “Hockey Stick” pattern as an important predictor, and yields essentially the same temperature reconstruction as MBH98, and finally [Read more…] about On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick

Rutherford et al 2005 highlights

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The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al (1998) temperature reconstruction have recently been discredited by the following peer-reviewed article to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, “Journal of Climate“:

Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Methodology, Predictor Network, Target Season and Target Domain, Journal of Climate, in press (2005).

Key excerpts from the article are provided below: [Read more…] about Rutherford et al 2005 highlights