Lavoisier Paper
Today my paper on the statistics of global average temperature was posted on the Lavoisier Group’s web site:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/science-and-policy/john-reid-2017-1.php
It is intended as a popular account of my paper in Energy and Environment which recently appeared on-line. Unlike that paper, it includes no equations or mathematical symbols. It examines the old-fashioned deterministic world-view of the applied mathematicians who run the climate models and compares it to the 20th century idea of “stochastic process” which more readily accommodates the scientific method.
The underlying assumption of the stochastic approach is that every state is dependent not on the time per se but only on previous states by a process known as auto-regression. There is also assumed to be an additional, unknown, random component called “the innovation”. This statistical approach allows the use of well established statistical methods to test for drifts and cycles in the data.
The conclusion? There is no significant trend in global average temperature and therefore no need to look for causes. At time scales of less than a millennium global temperature variations are just red noise.
Reference
Reid,J. (2017) There is no significant trend in global average temperature. Energy and Environment 28, 3, 302–315.
A copy may be downloaded here.