Met Office responds to Keenan

Doug Keenan's article about statistical significance in the temperature records seems to have had a response from the Met Office.

The text is here and there is a blog post here.

Comments

[Rob Burton]

I still don't understand how you can even have a basic model of climate when we have clearly unexplained ups and downs in temperature going back to just 1880. It isn't 'natural variability' it is 'Unknown causes'. We need to understand the unknown bits of the past before we can even start looking at the future. I don't think you can get very far statistically looking at wiggly lines of unknown origin.

[shub]

Apropos Lance Wallace's comment in the first page of this thread

Here's R code that''ll pull all Met Office climate data in a single shot. Please install packages 'installr' and 'XML' before starting off:

base<-"http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/indicators/"
url<-"http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/indicators/11keyindicators.html"
download.file(url, destfile="metoffice.html", quiet = FALSE)
tree<-htmlTreeParse("metoffice.html", error=function(...){}, useInternalNodes=TRUE, encoding="UTR-8", trim=TRUE)
links<-xpathSApply(tree, "//a/@href")
d<-paste(base, links, sep="");d<-d[3:79]
dwnldata<-function(x){
name<-file.name.from.url(x)
download.file(x, destfile=name, quiet = TRUE)
}
lapply(d, dwnldata)

My contribution.