iowahawk: Fables of the Reconstruction

What follows started as a comment I made over at Ace’s last week which he graciously decided to feature on a separate post (thanks Ace). In short, it’s a detailed how-to-guide for replicating the climate reconstruction method used by the so-called “Climategate” scientists. Not a perfect replication, but a pretty faithful facsimile that you can do on your own computer, with some of the same data they used.

Why? Since the Climategate email affair erupted a few weeks ago, it has generated a lot of chatter in the media and across the internet. In all the talk of “models” and “smoothing” and “science” and “hide the decline” it became apparent to me that very very few of the people chiming in on this have even the slightest idea what they are talking about. This goes for both the defenders and critics of the scientists.

Long story, but I do know a little bit about statistical data modeling — the principle approach used by the main cast of characters in Climategate — and have a decent understanding of their basic research paradigm. The goal here is to share that understanding with interested laypeople. I’m also a big believer in learning by doing; if you really want to know how a carburetor works, nothing beats taking one apart and rebuilding it. That same rule applies to climate models. And so I decided to put together this simple step-by-step rebuilder’s manual.

via iowahawk: Fables of the Reconstruction.