AMO+PDO = Temperature Variation: One Graph Does Not Says It All

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=2952 ^ | William M. Briggs

[mattstat]

Introduction

Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That?—incidentally, a blog title infinitely superior to “William M. Briggs, Statistician”—asked me to comment on Joe D’Aleo and Don Easterbrook’s new paper, “Multidecadal tendencies in ENSO and global temperatures related to multidecadel oscillations.” The title of this post is based upon Watts’s.

Before getting to it, and therefore delaying the pain which I’ll cause, let me head off a criticism sure to be leveled at D&E, one which is a logical fallacy. It does not matter that their paper has been released unto the aether and that it has not gone through the tempering process of peer review. That is, their results are not false because a hostile editor did not have a chance to reject them.

Anybody who thus shouts, “No peer review!” to reject D&E has fallen pray to the “I want it to be false, therefore it is false” fallacy. When we hear this argument, it tells us more about the person making it than it does about the thesis under consideration. A truth is true wherever it is spoken. I’m surprised at how often this has to be pointed out.

AMO & PDO

First some statistical truths. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is a function of sea surface temperature. The brother Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is also a function of sea surface temperature. They are called “mutidecadal oscillations” because these indexes have been found empirically to bounce up then down on something like a decadal time scale...

[Yo-Yo]

The ocean is sluggish in response to external forcing, the atmosphere responds as quickly as a cheerleader returning a text.

LOL!