Comment by frankmcsherry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankmcsherry | Hacker News Reader

I'm personally inclined to support the climate change folks, being a scientist and stuff, but it's a bit crap to claim that it was a one word typo when the original text apparently read:

> For predictor selection, both proxy climate and instrumental data were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period to avoid inflating the correlation coefficient due to the presence of the global warming signal present in the observed temperature record. Only records that were significantly ([pre]p<0.05[/pre]) correlated with the detrended instrumental target over the 1921–1990 period were selected for analysis.

That isn't a typo, it is just being wrong. I'm glad they re-did the work to confirm it was still true, but it's hard to argue with folks who didn't think the claim was supported by the data.

The one word typo was in the code, not the paper. It was setting DETREND to FALSE instead of TRUE. Their assertions were based on thinking they were working with detrended data instead of the raw data that they actually used.

In which case, one shouldn't write

> Instead of taking the easy way out and just correcting the single word in the page proof, we asked the publisher to put our paper on hold

Well, what you expect from people who happen to turn around in their (unverifiable) models 180 degrees (Amazon jungle net produces oxygen! No, it's a net consumer!) and who routinely produce models that use some physical value (heat capacity in greenhosue effect), but fail to account for major substances influencing the value (water concentration in atmosphere)?

I'm not an expert on the history of opinions on amazon oxygen, but

>but fail to account for major substances influencing the value (water concentration in atmosphere)?

is absolutely false.

OK. Now show me any study that accounts that the water in the atmosphere (0.4% on global level, after Wikipedia, not 1% on the sea level) has ten times higher concentration than methane (0.00018%) and CO2 (0.039%) combined, and almost twice as big heat capacity (75 J/(mol * K)) as each of those (36 J/(mol * K) for methane, 37 J/(mol * K) for CO2). To sum up, heat capacity of atmospheric water being twenty times bigger than CO2 and CH4.

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