Kent Holsinger sends along this statistics discussion from a climate scientist. I don’t really feel like going into the details on this one, except to note that this appears to be a discussion between two physicists about statistics. The blog in question appears to be pretty influential, with about 70 comments on most of its entries. When it comes to blogging, I suppose it’s good to have strong opinions even (especially?) when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
P.S. Just to look at this from the other direction: I know next to nothing about climate science, but at least I recognize my ignorance! This is perhaps related to Kaiser’s point that statisticians have to be comfortable with uncertainty. In contrast, I could well believe that someone who goes into physics would find complete certainty to be appealing. The laws of physics are pretty authoritative, after all.
P.P.S. Further discussion here. (We seem to have two parallel comment threads. I’d say that we could see how long they need to run before mixing well, but this note has induced between-thread dependence, so the usual convergence diagnostics won’t be appropriate.)