John McLean
tlambert | April 3, 2010John Mclean has a reply to Lewandowsky at the Drum where he proves once and for all that he has no clue, with comments like:
If the SOI accounts for short-term variation then logically it also accounts for long-term variation.
and
We show a relationship going back to the 1950s. Isn't that long enough for your "long-term" ?
Despite being challenged to post the reviewers comments on his Reply declining publication, Mclean hides the declines. Where's the transparency?
Below I plot UAH temperature data and the differenced UAH data to show that taking differences removes any long-term trend.…
tlambert | March 21, 2010James Annan writes that their paper debunking McLean, De Freitas and Carter has been published and:
Amusingly, the comment will be published alone, without the customary Reply. Why? Because...McLean et al couldn't muster a reply that was publishable (and not for want of trying, either - it was simply rejected).
I'm sure Energy and Environment will publish it quick smart.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is less kind:
1) Will McLean et al. retract the paper (and will Bob Carter admit fault or even discuss the errors publicly)?
2) Will the denial0sphere and the MSM give this story (a climate change scandal…
tlambert | August 6, 2009It's only taken two weeks to go from the blog posts shredding McLean et al to a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The authors are G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth and the abstract says:
McLean et al. [2009] (henceforth MFC09) claim that the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as represented by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), accounts for as much as 72% of the global tropospheric temperature anomaly (GTTA) and an even higher 81% of this anomaly in the tropics. They conclude…
tlambert | July 28, 2009John McLean, the guy who kept guiding Andrew Bolt off cliffs, has this time taken Bob Carter and Chris de Freitas with him. As tamino explains, they say that recent warming trends can be attributed to natural variation, but their analysis removed the trend from the data. See also McLean's defence and Robert Grumbine's lucid post. James Annan exposes another error - they fit a step function to that data and conclude that there is step in the data merely because there is a step in the fitted step function. John Lott made the same mistake in his "more guns, less crime" argument, as I showed…
tlambert | May 7, 2009Wednesday was an unusual day at the Australian, with two pro-science pieces published. First, Leigh Dayton, their science writer, raises some scientific objections to Ian Plimer's book. Plimer will, no doubt, continued to deny the existence of these problems:
Plimer also repeats the inaccurate "fact" that the global warming peaked in 1998. Yes, it was a global scorcher, thanks to a heat-inducing El Nino. But after a dip in 1999, data collected by US and British climate centres shows an upward trend, despite year-to-year variations.
She also corrects Greg Roberts' misleading stories:…