Data Canny Wow (anag.)

Ha ha, fooled you. I don't really have much to say about Cowtan and Way. Various people have said just about everything there is to say already; VV has a nice post dissecting JC's failure; to which I commented

> The main serious critical voice seems to be Judith Curry at Climate Etc

I think you're being overly generous here, if by "critical" you mean "careful reasoned analysis". I get the strong impression that she hadn't really read the paper. I think she skimmed it well enough to put up a few quibbles, and you've discussed those. But as the comments by C+W show, her comments are shallow and in many cases are answered by the paper itself.

Even those quibbles are too weak to justify her "doesn't add anything" sneer; that's really rather pathetic of her. She isn't brave enough to reject it, she's not inclined to accept it, so she's trying on an elder-statesman like distain. Which is what her followers want, and its good enough to get her quoted. But as a logical argument, its nothing but hole.

The other thing to say is that what C+W has done is in a sense obvious; and anyone could have done it. Well, not quite, because they did it carefully. NS has a cut-down version that is really rather similar, but probably without the original wouldn't have been convincing. Most climatologists wouldn't have done it at all, because the "pause" stuff is hard to take seriously in scientific terms; but it does make good PR (I'm not dissing C+W as PR-hunters, BTW. What they did makes sense, at the time they did it). The "pause" is shaping up to be the "but the satellites show cooling" de nos jours. Don't laugh; it used to be dead exciting; you could hardly talk to a septic without them talking about the satellite record.

Refs

* Mind the Gap!

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This entire episode is so depressingly stupid that I almost threw the post away. But, courage! As my title suggests, this is a morass of stupidity, of interest only to the navel-gazers within the incestuous world of climate blogs. Anyone with an interest in the actual science should steer clear.…
[Originally posted 27/7; updated a few times and now again (see end) so re-publishing with current date to push it to the top] It looks like it is finally time to announce Judith Curry's departure for the dark side, prompted by her comments at RC. I still think she has good intentions, at heart,…
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JC has been veering more and more to the dark side in recent years1. Or maybe not so recent? I find that all the way back in 2010 I wrote Hopefully Curry isn’t going to fall off that cliff, but she is teetering. And I managed to be nice to her soon after. But in August of that year I felt obliged…

Even if the C+W paper hardly changes the temperature record and in that respect is climatologically not that important, I already like the paper for the innovative method used to fill the Arctic gap, with uses the strength of the satellite and surface data and reduces their weaknesses. But then I am a sucker for methodological problems. And I guess the Arctic researchers are interested, in their region the temperature adjustments are significant.

Thanks for warning about my spelling errors before the readers poor in.

By Victor Venema (not verified) on 18 Nov 2013 #permalink

Better methods are always welcome.

By John Mashey (not verified) on 18 Nov 2013 #permalink

elder-statesman like dis(d)ain - that seems to me to be a fairly accurate description. The operating style seems to be one of "plausible deniability."

The ironic thing is Kevin and I submitted the paper long before any significant media attention to the "pause". Really the media coverage has come down to timing. It had a very long and rigorous review process and that placed it on this timeline.

By Robert Way (not verified) on 18 Nov 2013 #permalink

If you look closely at what they have done, using the method to find a better weighting form the various msu channels to construct surface temperature looks promising.

By Eli Rabett (not verified) on 18 Nov 2013 #permalink

As for Curry, of course rather than engaging in any meaningful debate, she's simply buried her ignorance under several more posts of irrelevant blather. There's not been much evidence of intelligent thought on that blog for a number of years now. But hey, she gets hundreds of appreciative comments, which is the new peer review of citizen science...

Come to think of it, one could say there is not a lot of evidence of intelligent thought on my blog recently, but at least that's mostly because I'm not posting! There's so little interesting stuff going on in climate science these days. (This C&W paper seems nice, not that exciting though.)

By James Annan (not verified) on 18 Nov 2013 #permalink

I read through the first couple of comments over at Curry's, and the stupidity is truly massive until the first comment of Mosher appears.

A sample:
"Or perhaps Cowtan and Wray found Trenbeth’s missing heat in Santer’s workshop?."

By Lars Karlsson (not verified) on 19 Nov 2013 #permalink

James Annan, sounds like you are getting old. :-) Maybe it is time to change topic? How about homogenization? It is fascinating.

By Victor Venema (not verified) on 19 Nov 2013 #permalink

I love Curry's blog. It's like professional wrestling: rigged via the choreography of the lowest common denominator.

When hot papers reinforce the thermodynamically obvious , Judy tends to take an agnostic view of thermo while her commentariat denounces radiative forcing as a system of religious belief.