Batting back at Beenstock
Feb 6, 2013
Bishop Hill in Climate: Statistics, Climate: Surface

The Beenstock, Reingewertz, and Paldor paper that did the rounds before Christmas applied some whizzy statistical methods to the temperature and forcing trends and found that they were statistically independent of each other. There's a useful discussion of it here at David Stockwell's site. As Stockwell notes, this is not a debunking of AGW, but rather of the use of linear regression to "demonstrate" that something unusual is happening in the temperature records.

To that extent, Beenstock's paper should be entirely uncontroversial. I'm not sure that anyone really thinks linear regression is a suitable approach to apply to temperature records. Nevertheless there has been a rapid rebuttal posted to the journal in the shape of an article by two Oxford academics, D. F. Hendry and F. Pretis:

We demonstrate major flaws in the statistical analysis of Beenstock et al. (2012), discrediting their initial claims as to the different degrees of integrability of CO2 and temperature.

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