Chapter 2
Misuses of Statistical
Analysis in Climate
Research
by Hans von Storch
2.1 Prologue
The history of misuses of statistics is as long as the history of statistics itself.
The following is a personal assessment about such misuses in our field, climate
research. Some people might find my subjective essay of the matter unfair
and not balanced. This might be so, but an effective drug sometimes tastes
bitter.
The application of statistical analysis in climate research is methodologically more complicated than in many other sciences, among others because
of the following reasons;
• In climate research only very rarely it is possible to perform real independent experiments (see Navarra's discussion in Chapter 1). There is
more or less only one observational record which is analysed again and
again so that the processes of building hypotheses and testing hypotheses are hardly separable. Only with dynamical models can independent
Acknowledgements: I thank Bob Livezey for his most helpful critical comments, and
Ashwini Kulkarni for responding so positively to my requests to discuss the problem of
correlation and trend-tests.