Jelly Beans: Gavin, Steve, ATTP, Lucia,

What do jelly beans have to do with Rabett Run Eli hears you wondering.  Well, there is currently much ado about jars full of jelly beans, touched off by Gavin Schmidt's deconstruction of the Christy graph.  To say that Christy put his finger on the scale, well, those were pretty heavy fingers and Eli has tried to point to some of them in green, of course

In any case this has touched off a climate audit food fight about something else, both there and at ATTP and at Lucia's and lord knows where else.  The issue has to do with how to compare a single observation to the results of a series of model predictions, FWIW, as ATTP says

In other words, in comparing the models and observations, Douglass et al. assumed that the uncertainty in the model trends was the uncertainty in the mean of those trends, not the uncertainty (or standard deviation) in the trends. This seems obviously wrong – as Gavin says – but Steve McIntrye and Nic Lewis appear to disagree.

Eli had a jar of jelly beans and he showed the jar to the bunnies telling them that they could win a bunch of carrots if they guessed right.  They all guessed how many beans were in the jar, as a matter of fact some of the fatter and greedier bunnies guessed more than once.  There were a lot of bunnies and the distribution of guesses grew smoother as more entries were made.  Given how many bunnies there are, there were a very large number of entries.  Then everybunny gathered about as the beans were counted.

 At the end one of the bunnies won (Thumper), but her guess differed from the well known mean guess by a bit, but the distribution of guesses was very well known.  Another of the bunnies demanded a recount.  So we recounted . . several times.  There were a lot of beans, the table was small, and there were a couple of characters with bulging cheeks, the number counted kept on changing.