Hockey Stick 101

clipped from iowahawk.typepad.com In short, it's a detailed how-to-guide for replicating the climate reconstruction method used by the so-called "Climategate" scientists. Not a perfect replication, but a pretty faithful facsimile that you can do on your own computer, with some of the same data they used. Why? Since the Climategate email affair erupted a few weeks ago, it has generated a lot of chatter in the media and across the internet. In all the talk of "models" and "smoothing" and "science" and "hide the decline" it became apparent to me that very very few of the people chiming in on this have even the slightest idea what they are talking about. This goes for both the defenders and critics of the scientists. Long story, but I do know a little bit about statistical data modeling -- the principle approach used by the main cast of characters in Climategate -- and have a decent understanding of their basic research paradigm. The goal here is to share that understanding with interested laypeople.