An Important Paper

I know, I know, it's been awhile. So sue me. This just came up a few days ago and it shouldn't be missed. Here's the link to the story at "Watts Up With That"

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/14/breaking-new-paper-makes-a-hockey-sticky-wicket-of-mann-et-al-99/#more-23450

and a link to the actual paper is available there as well. What makes this paper particularly useful is that it is written by statistical experts who show, in a nutshell, that the Mann et. al. methodology will inevitably produce hockey sticks, even from random data. In fact, this appears in the abstract:

We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature.

Note: For the sake of the analysis, the authors actually accepted Mann's proxy data as correct.

I haven't read the paper yet myself, but Watts says "the paper is highly readable, written in a sensible style that most laymen can absorb, even if they don’t understand some of the finer points of bayesian and loess filters, or principal components."

Take a look if you're interested. I've put global warming issues on the back burner, but I still want to check this paper out ASAP.