GWPF: How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There
I have a new paper with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (if you search for them on Google, that company does not give the url, lest you be corrupted by non-Expert opinion).
Here is their summary:
How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There
In his new paper, statistician William M Briggs surveys the field of climate attribution studies, in which changes in the weather are blamed on humankind. In particular, he looks at the recent pronouncements on that subject by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Sixth Assessment Report.
Briggs conclusion is that climate scientists are far too confident in their conclusions:
“There are multiple layers of uncertainty. There is the uncertainty in the events themselves, the uncertainty that arises out of the fact that the climate models used in these studies are imperfect, the uncertainty that arises from the statistical models used to reach the final conclusions, and finally the fact that any correlations between models and reality are weak and inconclusive.
Professor Briggs’ paper is entitled How the IPCC Sees What Isn’t There, and its publication coincides with the release of another GWPF paper, about the attribution methodology known as “optimal fingerprinting”. GWPF hopes that these two papers will start a serious debate on the reliability of climate attribution studies.
Download the report here.
One again, ladies and gentlemen, and you, too, Experts, the link is here.
Bonus!
Here is the other paper mentioned, and abstract.
Suboptimal Fingerprinting? A debate about climate statistics
Earlier this year, the economist Ross McKitrick published a new paper about an important methodology used in attributing changes in weather events to mankind. McKitrick observed that the so-called “optimal fingerprinting” methodology, which has been used in numerous studies and has been behind dozens of newspaper headlines about mankind’s influence on the atmosphere, was statistically erroneous. The implications of the findings are therefore potentially profound.
Today, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is publishing a new paper entitled Suboptimal Fingerprinting?, in which McKitrick explains in layman’s terms the problems he has uncovered (a more technical treatment can be seen here).
Myles Allen and Simon Tett, who developed the optimal fingerprinting methodology, have already given a short response to McKitrick’s criticisms.
McKitrick has now provided further comments, which can be seen below, alongside invited comments from Myles Allen and the climate economist Richard Tol.
In addition, we are today also publishing a new paper by statistician William M Briggs, which questions the credibility of the climate attribution statistics.
We hope that these papers will start a serious scientific debate about the credibility of attribution science, and of optimal fingerprinting in particular.
To that end we are inviting further comments from readers with expertise in statistics.
The debate
M.R. Allen and S.F.B. Tett (1999) Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting
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