Type II Errors in Conclusions from Short-Term Trends
95% CI Envelope for HadCRUT4 in McKitrick's Paper In a recent post , I shared why making conclusions from short-term trends is misleading. It's the kind of mistake that people make on social media, but I didn't think that I would find it in the scientific literature. But in 2014, Ross McKitrick published a paper attempting to develop a statistical method for determining the length of the so-called "pause" in global warming through 2014. To do this, McKitrick calculated trends with 95% CIs through 2014 in 3 datasets - HadCRUT4, RSS and UAH. The lower bound CI overlapped 0 C/decade in 1995 for HadCRUT4, 1998 for UAH and 1988 for RSS. McKitrick then says these dates can give us the length of the "pause" in global warming. His words: I propose a robust definition for the length of the pause in the warming trend over the closing subsample of surface and lower tropospheric data sets. The length term J MAX is defined as the maximum duration J for which a vali...