If he did it the standard way, then he simply took the data and calculated the probability of obtaining the same trend, or a more extreme one, if there was no warming - i.e. if temperatures really did follow a random walk. That's called a p-value. He found that if you only consider the last 14 data points, a completely unbiased process would have a bit more than 5% probability of producing a similar (or more extreme) increase. Ergo, the trend is not significant "at the 95% level" (the professor misspoke a bit here, people would rather say "at the p=0.05 level", but presumably that's what he meant).

Of course, the doubters understood this as "Phil Jones sez warming has stopped OMG!", when what he really said was that the observed data had a bit more than 5% chance of occuring if there was no warming. Tellingly, the more educated "skeptics", who could easily have corrected this misperception, did not.

But much more than 5% of the global spending power.

1934 is (almost) the hottest year on record in the (contiguous) USA .

The hottest year on record globally is 2005. 2009 is a statistical tie with 1998 (and a couple others in the noughties) as second-warmest. 1934 doesn't come close. The last decade is the warmest on record.

All relevant graphs are conveniently located there.

Then it has crap all to do with the existence of trends that can only be detected over more than 20-30 years, as Phil himself points out in the bit that you blanked out of your mind, right?

Hm. OK. Never mind.

Apparently not.

"There has been an uptrend that is not significant" is more properly interpretable as "there has been no warming" than anything else.

Actually, no. "There has been no warming" is a positive statement, one that would need its own significance test. "No significant trend" means "the data over the last 14 years, taken in isolation, cannot provide conclusive evidence for or against warming." Which is quite different.

Now if you look in the previous record, you see that 14 years is simply too short a range to reliably detect significant trends, even when they are really there (as verified by using longer timespans). That's what Jones says in the bits you conveniently left out.

If the record was such that 14 years trend could predictably detect trends, then the absence of a significant trend in the last 14 years would be evidence against GW. Since they can't, it isn't. OK?

Now if the last 14 years' data cannot speak conclusively for or against GW, we need to ask the second best question, namely relative likelihood: given the recent record, even though no hypothesis reaches significance level, which is more likely than the other - warming, or no warming ? The "nearly-significant uptrend" is a coded way of saying that, even over the last 14 years alone, warming is "more likely" than non-warming, in the sense that if there was no warming going on, there would only be about 1 chance in 9 of getting similar or more extreme results.

If we add in prior knowledge, the overall long-term data says that warming is going on. The last 14 years of data, alone, cannot prove it, but they support previous data, rather than contradicting it, as you seem to imply.

tl;dr: "no significant trend over last 14 years" doesn't mean "no warming", it means "14 data points is not enough to establish significance in trends for noisy timeseries" (duh!).

Once again, a /.er fails to notice the distiction between production costs and reproduction costs.

Hint: if there is virtually no cost/scarcity in the creation of new desirable books (as opposed to the reproduction of existing ones), then why isn't everybody a best-selling author?

From Galileo's recantation letter:

I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture [...] I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Also, for some reason you fail to discuss the prelude to the whole debacle, when the Church officially condemned the Copernician doctrine, and notified Galileo of the fact.

They explicitly threatened to burn him alive if he did not recant, specifically because his theories contradicted the official interpretation of scripture (that's the official justification as set out in the documents, including the letter above). Under what definition of "suppress" does this not count as "suppressing science"?

That describes you to a T.

Actually it doesn't. There is no plausible etymology from choir ("to fall", from latin cadere) to "chouart". Rather, the term "Rochechouart" comes from "Cavardus' rock", referring to the man who built a fort in the area.

It's difficult to be sure since you don't provide any references, but apparently you are referring to the publication of a bogus review paper by the Climate Research journal, and the resulting debacle.

Just to let you know, in the real world, no editor was "removed". Half the editors, including the hastily appointed editor-in-chief, resigned in disgust. The reason why people were upset is that an obviously flawed paper was published by exploiting a non-standard review process. If the Time Cube guy managed to publish an article in some journal, you bet people would become wary of being associated with it. Wait, no, actually you would regard this as an obvious conspiracy by the entire scientific community to suppress the very real cubicity of the universe.

See, that's one reason why people call you "denialists" instead of "skeptics". When faced with a difficult problem that they don't fully understand, real skeptics will look for more information, rather than just confabulate their conspiracy fantasies into an alternate reality.

The advantage of pulling stuff out of your ass is that you can post quickly.

The problem with pulling stuff out of your ass is that you often end up being wrong.

Sea level changes from 1970 to 2009, compared with IPCC predictions. (from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Tim Lambert on Scienceblogs).

Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?

I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.

Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:

1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .

2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).

3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.

Rinse. Repeat.

To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.

Except for discovering / inventing information theory, the transistor, the cosmic radiowave background, Unix and the C programming language. Among other trifling, Nobel-prize winning discoveries.
No private company has given more to the world than Bell. Bell Labs defined the Golden Age of American science and engineering. Reading that there was "no innovation" at Bell in a /. comment is pretty depressing.

Some encryption algorithms that were predicted to take forever to crack with today's technology, may in the long run end up taking the logarithm of forever.

Why was this modded funny? Taking the logarithm of something is enough to take it from "practically forever" to "actually quite feasible".

The log-10 of 100 is just 2. The log-10 of 1000 is 3. The log-10 of one billion is 9. Etc. Logarithms essentially negate the exponential explosions that are the source of practical impossibilities.

If someone found a way to logarithmically reduce the cracking time of a given algorithm, this algorithm would become essentially useless.