George Mason University
CDS/CCDS/Statistics Colloquium Series
Seminar Announcement


20 Questions a Statistician Should Ask About Climate Change

Edward J. Wegman

Department of Computational and Data Sciences and
Department of Statistics
George Mason University


Research 1, Room 301, Fairfax Campus
George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030

Time: 10:30 a.m. Refreshments, 10:45 a.m. Colloquium Talk
Date: November 5, 2007



ABSTRACT

The American Statistical Association recently sponsored a Workshop: A Statistical Consensus on Global Warming held at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The workshop was aimed at understanding what are the areas of agreement from a statistical perspective. In light of the issuance of the IPCC 2007 report this year and the general lack of success of the Kyoto Accord to stem greenhouse gas emissions, this workshop has an important role in developing the consensus on statistical issues. Although both paleoclimate reconstruction and climate modeling have many fundamentally statistical/stochastic issues, the convergence of the perspectives of statisticians and climate scientists is not great. This talk is not an anti-anthropogenic global warming talk, but will probably irritate climate scientists anyway. (It did at NCAR, but discussion is good.) In this talk I seek to raise some of the statistical issues related to inferences about climate change.