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Sep182011
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Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Inspirational Josh
Sep 18, 2011 Sui generis This just in from reader Anoneumouse, inspired by Josh's recent tour-de-toon.
Sep 18, 2011 Sui generis 
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Reader Comments (9)
Ah the symbolism... Anoneumouse shoots.... HE SCORES...
Listen - strange menn lying in ponds distributing hockey sticks is no basis for a scientific theory. (apologies to Monty Python)
You can't claim supreme executive power by lobbing a stick at us?
Can you?
Brilliant! Fundamentally, a hockey stick - field or ice - is a basic boomerang and follows the shape of one of the many types used by Australian Aborigines. It's no surprise that Mann's is coming back to clobber the Team.
I love the word EX-CALIBER emanating from Theo.
As GK Arnold says, great symbolism as the blade of the great mythical sword of YORE is once again rescued from the depths to guarantee the victory in forthcoming battles.
"With this we shall triumph" cries the great GO-re-D and leader of the free world, inventor of you know what and generally great (or not so) all round good guy.
Excellent one Josh.
oops, great one Anoneumouse
After re-reading THSI, wouldn't it be great to construct a web page called "how to disprove the hockey stick" where using basically Excel (or the OpenOffice version) you get step by step instructions on how to do the centering, PC analysis etc arriving at both the Mannian version (via short-centering, and truncation/elongation of datasets) and the proper correlated version. Also removing bristlecones etc to see the effects of the small but influential data series)
The only problem with it I can see is that spreadsheets are not the best tool for PCA analysis, and this step could involve a lot of work - perhaps do one subset of a series to explain the process, then introduce a macro which does the rest.
I have a lot of mathermatically literate friends who buy into the hockey stick because it appears on the surface to be too technical for them to understand. But the analysis, while lengthy if done by hand, is not that complex for intelligent people to understand that a method change can change the graph at the end.
Just a thought.
Now we just need a Ministry for Funny Climate Theories...
"I've got this theory and I'd like to develop it.."
If all you can do is to keep going back to the hockey stick business, you know you have nothing to say. Mann's work has nothing to do with the mechanisms of climate, or with how additional CO2 affects weather and climate. Tabulating temperatures is not science, any more than keeping a record of temperatures at your house is science. It's bookkeeping, not science.