There was a post on TWTW that did some follow up on the paper published on Tropical Hot Spot model failures that had a commenter that challenged the ramp step regression that he thought was used. The author has responded, correcting the commenter’s errors, in an email titled Errors, shown below.

ERRORS (in comment not in the paper)
Jim Wallace:

First, I never used the words “ramp step regression” in my discussions with you or in the paper; where did that come from? As the report clearly states, the first step in the analysis is called Time Series Decomposition which was used to determine which functional form best represents the underlying trend in the data. That might or might not be a Ramp Step.  Moreover , unlike what you stated, it frequently was not a Ramp Step. See pages 22 & 23, which include the following:

“Section VIII.  Tropical Upper Troposphere Balloon Data

The analysis results are shown first for Tropical Upper Troposphere Balloon (1959-2015) data in Figures VIII 1-4 below. In this analysis, for each temperature time series, the first step was to determine via “time series decomposition” the “best fit trend line” among standard functional forms such as Linear, Ramp Step, Step, Multiple Step, etc.  The selected trend lines were best of those tested in the sense that they had the maximum R Bar Squared value.----”

And, second to my knowledge, there were no errors in any of the graphs - only 2 mislabeled Figure numbers and one Table number - all three of which were missed by our 7 reviewers and 3 authors! It was easy because the 2 Figures and one Table were right below the text which so stated.

Finally, again to my knowledge, only one person had a problem with charts and Joe responded to him by email as well the 22 people that were copied on his original email. There was nothing wrong with the chart. The commenter did not understand the time series decomposition analysis that was carried out. Furthermore, I seem to recall telling you about this situation.

As an important aside, you stated the following:

“For purposes of government regulations, it is not what the science demonstrates, but what the courts believe. And the courts believed the EPA.”

As I have indicated to you before, EPA won the Endangerment Finding case before the D.C. circuit because our side allowed itself to be in an “Our Paper Vs Their Paper” situation in which case, as a matter of (CAA) law, EPA is deemed the expert and wins - period. That did not have to happen. An empirical evidence based attack on each of EPA’s 3 Lines of Evidence was not made by the plaintiffs.

Ken, in my view, your comments regarding our paper were highly misleading. You might find interesting Alan Carlin’s comments (below)) on our paper. At his request we are adding his name to our list of reviewers.

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The Importance and Unique Aspects of the New Wallace et al. Report
Alan Carlin

Although the very new Wallace et al. report focuses on a new approach to showing the critical absence of a tropical hot spot, which indeed has an important inference of invalidity for USEPA’s principal “line of evidence” in their GHG Endangerment Finding, the report has even more interesting findings about other aspects of climate science. The absence of the tropical hot spot has been discussed for several years, and been ignored by climate alarmists despite the implication of this new finding that CAGW is invalid scientifically. I discussed some of these more interesting findings last week. The report provides considerable support to several of the new hypotheses highlighted here.

The importance of this new study is that the authors very carefully specified multiple simultaneous functional relationships between the most important climate science variables including the critical (in terms of alarmist science) possible dual relationships between CO2 and global temperatures and then allowed the available data to determine the importance of each variable. The report ends by asking why alarmists have apparently never used this approach to determine or assess their “science. Most of their “science” is based on alleged relationships between the variables based on their interpretations of physical science and particularly various computer models of their creation using these interpretations (despite the inherent inability of such models to accurately portray future climate due to the chaotic nature of climate).

The Wallace et al. 2016 study represents a new and interesting approach to climate science research which should yield very interesting and much more valid results since the weight given to each likely variable is determined by available evidence rather than the guesses of carefully selected “experts” and incorporated into their largely arbitrary computer models. As Wallace et al. 2011 said:

The simplest model that can characterize the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration levels and temperature levels must contain at least two simultaneous equations, one for each of these two state variables. Therefore, the climate system must be analyzed using simultaneous equation estimation techniques. Otherwise the parameter estimates of any structural equations will be both biased and inconsistent, which implies they are useless for policy analysis purposes. The existence of a robust atmospheric CO2 equation has been amply demonstrated, thus guaranteeing that ANY modeling system designed to forecast temperature must include at least two equations.

The much more appropriate simultaneous equation approach used in the Wallace et al. 2016 report is notable by its apparent absence (to my knowledge) in alarmist climate science despite the contribution it could and must make if climate science is ever to have any validity.