The Holocene Deniers

I am currently investigating how to find errors in trend lines for autocorrelated data (and temperature data is often autocorrelated). A few months ago, I had never even heard the term 'autocorrelated' ...

Because if the physics of the measurement is false, one can have a perfectly normal set of statistics that won't give you the correct answer. I had that happen to me in one experiment I did. Everything looked normal statistically but we screwed up and didn't actually measure correctly what we thought we were measuring. Happens all the time.

Calculation and reporting errors can be large (changing the sign of a number and scaling it by a factor of 10 are both typical transcription
errors; as are reporting errors of 10C (e.g. putting 29.1 for 19.1)) but almost all such errors will be found during quality control of the data. Those errors that remain after quality control will be small, and because they are also uncorrelated both in time and in space their effect on any large scale average will be negligible.(Brohan et al.)

To interpolate the station data to a regular grid the methods of [Jones & Moberg, 2003] are followed. Each grid-box value is the mean of all available station anomaly values, except that station outliers in excess of five standard deviations are omitted.(ibid)

If you want to measure the temperature of the atmosphere and you put your thermometers next to furnaces. You would have a statistically gaussian distribution of error. But you wouldn't have measured the temperature of the atmosphere--only the temperature of foundaries.

You all think I am wrong to believe in natural variation as a major cause of the climate change over the past 40 years. New Scientist this week has an interesting article on a speech given by Mojib Latif, one of the IPCC authors. Note how he has to be sure to tell everyone he isn't a skeptic. I know why he does that--if people think you doubt the almighty God of global warming, they will quit listening to you.

"We could be about to enter one or even two decades of cooler temperatures, according to one of the world's top climate modellers."

"'People will say this is global warming disappearing,' Mojib Latif told more than 1500 climate scientists gathered at the UN's World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, last week. "I am not one of the sceptics. However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.'" Fred Pearce, "World will 'cool for the next decade'" New Scientist, Sept 12, 2009, p. 10.
...

OH my GOSH!!!!! He is saying something very close to what I have been saying!!!!!!

Difficulties remain in reliably simulating and attributing observed temperature changes at smaller scales. On these scales, natural climate variability is relatively larger making it harder to distinguish changes expected due to external forcings.(SOURCE)

Yet many now agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is less certain than once thought.(SOURCE)

It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two- you know- when the temperature cools- alright- relative to the present level- alright?


And then- you know- I know what’s going to happen -you know? I will get- you know- millions of phone calls- you know:
“Eh, what’s going on? So, is global warming disappearing?” You know? “Have you lied on [sic] us?”


So- you kn0w- and therefore this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.