Admin/GeorgeConstanza/Carl:
Tillman, thanks for adding so much to this page... I have some thoughts about the structure of this page, and it can actually turn out really nicely if proper research gets done. My plan for this wiki was, in addition to having it explain CA to laymens terms, to have it collate the state of knowledge in this debate.
While this wouldn't necessarily belong on the Statistical Analysis page, what I mean by "state of knowledge" would be something like...
"MBH98's temperature reconstruction consisted of the following series: {series1...seriesxx}, of which 14 were bristlecone pine series. MBH98 stated that their PCA using these series was centered from 1400-1820, but McIntyre discovered that it was in fact centered on the period XXXX-XXXX. The result of this error was that weights were improperly applied to series with unusual variance in the 20th century relative to their variance in the centering period. There is very strong evidence that this is due to trees in {seriesx, seriesy} that have recently had their bark stripped off, which results in a surge of tree ring growth relative to unstripped trees (cite evidence, "The Ababneh Thesis", etc). Furthermore, there is a relatively minor yet well known CO2 and N fertilization effect that increases tree growth; while CO2 is hypothesized to increase warming, it would be foolish to use a proxy that responds to CO2 in a significant way as a means of supporting this theory. As a result of CO2 fertilization and strip-barking(?) issues, the NAS panel has recommended that they should not be used as temperature proxies. Without these proxies included in MBH98, McIntyre has demonstrated that there is no longer any hockey stick shape to the resulting temperature reconstruction"
Ok... a lot of that obviously needs to be filled in, elaborated on, and fact-checked (some of it is definetely wrong). But that's the idea, actually, in my mind. Cite precisely what MBH98 did, what the data was, where you can get the data, and then include the work done on CA and the findings there (specified as proven, likely, or speculative on McIntyre's part), and also any responses (and counter-responses) by MBH.
Rinse and repeat for all the hockey stick papers.
Should such documents be compiled, they would serve as a base of knowledge for newbies and a nice summary for even the most experienced CAers. AGW proponents would read this eventually, find errors (in all liklihood) which we would then correct, and eventually there will be no argument on either side... which, in this case, will lead to MBH being discredited in all liklihood. Or maybe not.
In any case, this will take a while, but it will be "fun" for me to do it since I'll learn quite a bit about time series analysis (an area where I am severely lacking) in the process. Finally, the reason for reading this: I have no idea how the structure of this will eventually work out, but I just wanted to let it be known that a compendium of detailed information will prove far more useful than one would imagine.
George, this all sounds good to me — if quite a lot of work! I hope you continue to work on it, and I'll pitch in as time permits.
Cheers — Pete Tillman
