More D&A and FvB.

By chance I happened to notice another paper with an interesting title appearing in Climatic Change on the very same day as the recent Mann et al paper: Is the choice of statistical paradigm critical in extreme event attribution studies? While my noticing it was fortuitous, the publication date was no coincidence, as it was clearly intended as a "comment on" in all but name. I am not particularly impressed by such shenanigans. I know that Nature often publishes a simultaneous commentary along with the article itself, but these are generally along the lines of a sycophantic laudation extolling the virtues of the new work. The climatic change version seems to be designed to invite a critical comment which does not provide the authors under attack any right to reply. Jules and I were previously supposed to be a victim of this behaviour when we published this paper. However the commentary never got written, so in the end we suffered nothing more than a lengthy delay to final publication.

Anyway, back to the commentary. Is the choice of statistical paradigm critical? I can't really be bothered discussing it in any detail. The arguments have been hashed out before (including on this blog, e.g. here). The authors provide a rather waffly defence of frequentist approaches without really providing any credible support IMO, based on little more than some rather silly straw men. Of course a badly-chosen prior can give poor results, but so can an error in your computer program or a typo in your manuscript, and no-one argues that it's better to just take a guess instead of doing a calculation and writing down the answer. Well, almost no-one.