Seeing the environmental forest

The recent paper by Johnstone and Mantua ( 2014 ) has certainly made the rounds in conservative circles.  It's popped up several times on my Facebook feed as various friends and acquaintances share articles about it.  Unfortunately, most of those articles get it wrong, usually twisting Johnstone and Mantua's findings to imply that 80% of ALL global warming is natural.  As I explained in my last post , that is a blatant misinterpretation of their paper, which only applies to the northeastern Pacific and coastal regions of the US Pacific Northwest.  Globally, natural cycles do not explain the trend in global temperatures.  How can I say that?  Do the statistics.

I've had a request for a quick tutorial on how to get started using R.  R is a statistical language that analyzes data and saves results in files called "objects."  You can then use the objects to create new analyses and objects.  Note: Wherever you see a "#", what follows is a comment.  You can delete that comment before running the code or leave it in—R ignores anything that follows a # sign.  Here's how I get my students started.