Article Tags: Doug L. Hoffman, Headline Story
While climate skeptics have gleefully pointed to the past decade’s lack of temperature rise as proof that global warming is not happening as predicted, climate change activists have claimed that this is just “cherry picking” the data. They point to their complex and error prone general circulation models that, after significant re-factoring, are now predicting a stretch of stable temperatures followed by a resurgent global warming onslaught. In a recent paper, a new type of model, based on a test for structural breaks in surface temperature time series, is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. This statistical model predicts no temperature rise until 2050 but the more interesting prediction is what happens between 2050 and 2100.
David R.B. Stockwell and Anthony Cox, in a paper submitted to the International Journal of Forecasting entitled “Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts,” have applied advanced statistical analysis to both Australian temperature and rainfall trends and global temperature records from the Hadley Center’s HadCRU3GL dataset. The technique they used is called the Chow test, invented by economist Gregory Chow in the early 1960s. The Chow test is a statistical test of whether the coefficients in two linear regressions on different data sets are equal. In econometrics, the Chow test is commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break.
Source: theresilientearth.com