An Open Challenge to Dr. William Dembski

Dear Dr. Dembski, in your recent post on Uncommon Descent “H.L. Mecken on the urge to save humanity”, you quote approvingly from an article at the Investors Business Daily.

A new scientific paper [McLean, de Freitas, and Carter, 2009] says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations……Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century.

As a mathematician Dr. Dembski, you will certainly be able to effortlessly analyse the McLean, de Freitas, and Carter, 2009 paper (the full paper can be found here).

Your challenge, Dr. Dembski, is to show exactly how this paper supports the statements in the Investor Business Daily article. Please pay particular attention to the smoothing and bandpass filtering analysis in your explanation. Oh, and you may also like to explain why the lead author John McLean states:

The paper by McLean et al (JGR, 2009) does not analyse trends in mean global temperature (MGT); rather, it examines the extent to which ENSO accounts for variation in MGT.

and what his statement means for the Investors Business Daily piece. You may also wish to consult these articles at Open Mind, Only in it for the Gold and More Grumbine Science, which do an in-depth analysis of the paper.

Given your interest in the role of science in policy decisions, this challenge is a valuable opportunity for you to use your expertise to show how this paper refutes many decades of climate research.