Steve Jewson is the statistician whose trenchant comments on climatologists' use and misuse of Bayesian statistics was discussed here some months ago.
This presentation he gave to a conference at the University of Reading is in similar vein, but goes beyond Bayes' theorem to areas such as the UKCP09 climate predictions.
UKCP
- unashamedly uses subjective methods
Includes subjective beliefs that go beyond the models and the data
Nic Lewis has analysed the impact of these additional subjective factors:
- And it seems that they push the rate of climate change higher than that suggested by the evidence
- If true, then UKCP predictions of future temperatures would be higher than their own models and data would suggest
- And should not be expected to be ‘reliable’
Oh dear.
His conclusion - that the Met Office could easily strip the subjectivity out of their predictions - seems to me to be of critical importance. Time, I would say, for the empanelling of the review that Nigel Lawson called for.