Comment by bjourne
7 hours ago
Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors. The resulting time series fits a super-linear curve -> accelerating global warming.
> Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors.
No, it isn’t. You’re just rephrasing what I said with more words: they attempted to adjust for three of the biggest factors that affect temperature, then did a piecewise regression to estimate a 10-year window.
You can’t do it in a statistically valid way. Full stop. The authors admit this, but want you to ignore it.
> You can't do it in a statistically valid way.
They use an established methodology (https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-95 9326/6/4/044022 - the methodology retains the average warming rate over the period since 1970 while smoothing fluctuations) to remove predictable temperature variations so they can isolate the effect they are trying to measure.
Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.
Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".
Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.
They used a published methodology. That doesn't mean the methodology is uncontroversial, and it certainly doesn't mean that they used it in a way that makes sense in the current context. One can commit an almost infinite number of horrible abuses via bog-standard linear regression.
Even setting aside the dubious nature of the adjustments, doing a regression on a 10-year window of a system that we know has multi-decade cycles -- or longer -- is just blatantly trying to dress up bad point extrapolations as science. Then, when they don't get the results they want to see from that abuse, they start subtracting the annoying little details in the data that are getting in their way.
> Just because they don't know exactly what past global temperatures would have been in the absence of El Niño doesn't mean it's statistically invalid to try and account for it.
You can't go back in time, invent counterfactual histories by subtracting primary signals, and declare the net result to be "significant". This isn't even statistics -- it's just massaging data to achieve a goal.
> Besides, temperature data to 2024 already shows accelerated warming with a confidence level that "exceeds 90% in two of the five data sets".
https://xkcd.com/882/
> Add another year or two and it's likely we won't even need to smooth the curve to show accelerated warming at 95% confidence.
I guess we'll find out.