William M. Briggs, a climate change skeptic who has been in a recent running battle with the other side ever since getting a podium at the Wall Street Journal is having a go at clarifying his position on Time Series.
In Let’s Try This Time Series Thing Again: Part I, Briggs starts with the idea of such a series as representing something that is “measured without error” and adds the claim that “Something causes every observation to take the values it does”. Both of these reduce my expectation that he has anything useful to contribute so maybe I should look up a serious reference on the topic and see if he’s really as far off base as I think he is.
Right, because your feelings about global warming mean your opinions about time series analysis are more qualified than someone with a PhD in statistics?
Neither the Briggs post itself nor my response makes any essential reference to global warming except by way of giving context for why he was posting. And as to qualifications, the only one that matters is being right – which, when it comes to the mathematical sciences, is usually objectively decidable.