<p>Something <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/responses-to-mcshane-and-wyner/" rel="nofollow">topical</a>, <a href="http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/14/mcshane-and-wyner-discussion-2/" rel="nofollow">controversial</a> and statistical (and unashamedly from [close to] my field) is the Hockey-stick reconstruction of climate over the past 1500 years. A new paper by McShane and Wyner to be published in Annals of Applied Statistics has generated a lot of discussion and has been made a discussion paper, with 13 responses. All can be found <a href="http://www.imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html" rel="nofollow">here and currently open-access</a> (Scroll to bottom of page):</p>

<p>The main paper and some of the discussions give R code to run the analyses. topic involves time series analysis and multivariate calibration. One potential downside, the main paper is somewhat lengthy and if we add in the discussion papers...!?, plus (at least to my non-statistician non-Bayesian brain) some parts of the main paper and discussion points are quite technical from the stats point of view.</p>

<p>These works represent the first real coming together of statisticians and palaeoecologists to tackle a question of fundamental importance; does the climate of present differ substantially from that experienced in the recent past.</p>

<p>As for dates, I'd favour pushing the next session into early Jan (7th) as I might be hard pushed to get some free time between Christmas and New Year to contribute to whatever topic is chosen, but I am free on Jan 7th to contribute.</p>
