| on Apr 9, 2008, 11:12 AM E.S.T.
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In America we have a saying, “Seeing the forest for the trees…”
which is used to suggest seeing the bigger picture. In Britain, the
similar saying is “Seeing the wood for the trees…”. I’ll explain this
in a moment, please read on.
Last week, when Basil and I posted Part 2 of our series on seeing a solar imprint in the HadCRUT temperature record,
it spawned a lot of interest, debate, replication, and criticisms. One
of the criticisms from Tamino surrounding the concluding results
presented in figure 5 showed how using a different statistical test
nullified the results. Thats good, falsification of results by
alternate methods is what science is about, and we are now reworking
our approach using some different data and methods to see if we can
create a robust conclusion that stands up to many different statistical
tests.
In the days following the posting of the essay, there was a lot of
unnecessary name calling, but out of all the negativity, I’m happy to
report that something very positive has emerged in the form of one Mr.
Paul Clark, an audio specialist and C++/Linux programmer in the UK.
Our essay gave him an idea, and he ran with it. He ran far and wide.
Basil and I have spent the last week helping him refine it. Mr.
Clark, like many people, had questions about climate science and data
analysis, and felt that sometimes it is just too complex for the layman
to get their mind around the way it is often presented.
I’ve often felt that “playing around” with something technical can
often be a useful learning exercise. Paul felt the same way and took
our idea of pulling signals from the noisy temperature data and turned
it into a splendid interactive signal processing website called WoodForTrees.org
Below, you can see it displaying the signal from our original essay, replicated via FFT and other steps. Read rest...
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