Bishop Hill Celebrating Hurst
Dec 15, 2014 Climate: IPCC Climate: Statistics Readers may be interested in this presentation by Cohn, Lins, Koutsoyiannis and Montanari about the life and work of Harold Hurst, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon of long-term persistence (LTP) while examining records of the flooding of the Nile. The presentation seems to date from the end of last year.
Many of you will know that LTP is pervasive in geoscience datasets, so you will no doubt be amused by this bit about the IPCC's consideration of the phenomenon:
...the SPM does not mention LTP, although it speaks about the internal climate variability, e.g.: “Internal variability will continue to be a major influence on climate, particularly in the near-term and at the regional scale.”
It's pretty amazing, isn't it, that such a fundamental phenomenon should go unmentioned in the summary for policymakers?
There are also some interesting projections into the future using a statistical model, although to hear what was said alongside them would have made them more illuminating still.
Reader Comments (5)
Koutsoyiannis will give the Lorenz lecture this Wednesday at AGU:
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm14/meetingapp.cgi#Paper/5380
Thanks for bringing this up. I have been noodling with the idea, as to why in climatology the methods use to do research are never examined for their confounding effects on the research. This is de rigueur in other scientific endeavors. In climatology it seems a method is just what the researcher wants it to be. So one has no way of knowing what other methods were tried and did not produce the right results.
Wonder if Hurst is "unknown" in climatology because he does not give the right results. As climate audit indicated, Cowan and Way being encouraged by Gavin and Mann to just change their method and still call it a valid paper.
Off Topic Question for the Bishop:
What happened to the thread debating sea level rise as a threat to civilization?
It was getting interesting and no longer shows up as far as I can tell.
TIA,
Hunter - it is a Discussion thread - click the link above or Sea level rise - will we all drown before tea-time to go there directly.
Does Long Term Persistence help to explain the extended life of Global Warming Alarmism
?