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To: koan who wrote (36973)

1/4/2013 12:53:48 PM

From: longnshort

3 Recommendations Respond to of 85487

AGW Bombshell? A new paper shows statistical tests for global warming fails to find statistically significantly anthropogenic forcing

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Anthony Watts

From the journal Earth System Dynamics billed as “An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union” comes this paper which suggests that the posited AGW forcing effects simply isn’t statistically significant in the observations, but other natural forcings are.

“…We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcing might have had a temporary effect on global temperature.”

This is a most interesting paper, and potentially a bombshell, because they have taken virtually all of the significant observational datasets (including GISS and BEST) along with solar irradiance from Lean and Rind, and CO2, CH4, N2O, aerosols, and even water vapor data and put them all to statistical tests (including Lucia’s favorite, the unit root test) against forcing equations. Amazingly, it seems that they have almost entirely ruled out anthropogenic forcing in the observational data, but allowing for the possibility they could be wrong, say:

“…our rejection of AGW is not absolute; it might be a false positive, and we cannot rule out the possibility that recent global warming has an anthropogenic footprint. However, this possibility is very small, and is not statistically significant at conventional levels.”

I expect folks like Tamino (aka Grant Foster) and other hotheaded statistics wonks will begin an attack on why their premise and tests are no good, but at the same time I look for other less biased stats folks to weigh in and see how well it holds up. My sense of this is that the authors of Beenstock et al have done a pretty good job of ruling out ways they may have fooled themselves. My thanks to Andre Bijkerk and Joanna Ballard for bringing this paper to my attention on Facebook.

The abstract and excerpts from the paper, along with link to the full PDF follows.

Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming

M. Beenstock1, Y. Reingewertz1, and N. Paldor2
1Department of Economics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel
2Fredy and Nadine Institute of Earth Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Edmond J. Safra campus, Givat Ram, Jerusalem, Israel Abstract. Continue reading ?