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Global warming? Check for yourself
- diego_moita 17y agoWhat's the point of this? All it shows is that someone without scientific training is incapable of drawing conclusions from data out of context; they can't "check for yourself". I tought the only people that don't know this are journalists, bloggers and politicians.
- fnid2 17y agoI was thinking about this particular type of ad hominem argument the other day and decided I loathe it. Imagine if people told Plato he couldn't write about philosophy because he didn't go to harvard and get a degree in philosophy. Or tell galileo that he was wrong because he didn't have a degree in astronomy. Valid scientific investigations don't require scientific training. This person, who wrote some code and plotted some numbers on a graph may know more about math and programming and data visualization than many of those running weather stations, so it isn't productive to say this person has nothing to contribute because he's someone without scientific training. You don't even know that statement is true. Regardless of its truth, the numbers, the code, and the result should speak for themselves. It doesn't matter whether the investigator is trained in science or not. As a "trained" computer engineer, I am personally capable of taking a raw data set and plotting their numbers on a chart and drawing conclusions from them. Of course there are additional steps one could take with this data to help the human mind comprehend it. I'll tell you one thing for sure, the chart looks nothing like this scary one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_R... Why? If you have scientific training, refute the facts, write another set of code, analyze the data and see what you get. Is it different? Can you replicate the results? Or can you just say this person doesn't have any scientific training and write him off? Personally I think it's awesome that someone is taking the initiative to test a hypothesis. Really, there is nothing more scientific than that. It takes work and I commend this person.
- Tichy 17y agoNothing against amateur scientists. However, it says "At Armagh Observatory", so it is hardly global warming - it's probably Armagh warming? Haven't read all the details, so I can't say. But there seem to be other data sets out there that show rising temperature? So why should this one data point be more significant than others?
- ugh 17y agoI agree with you that excluding someone from a scientific debate because he has no academic credentials or even just not the right kind of academic credentials out of hand is wrong. Certainly wrong in this case, because the linked article doesn’t even make any grandiose claims. Valid scientific investigation doesn’t require scientific training. That’s certainly correct. That doesn’t mean, though, that every investigation has the same weight. I have no expert knowledge. How am I supposed to know whether an amateur is brilliant or crazy? Academic credentials are more often than not a useful filter to figure just that out. Not perfect, but better than giving everything equal weight. (Cue conspiracy theories about the academic establishment and generous East Anglia email quoting – NOW! :)
- jbooth 17y agohttp://www.xkcd.com/675/ http://www.xkcd.com/675/
- gizmo 17y agoI suspect you completely missed the point of the parent. The "Check for yourself" part is only in the editorialized headline, implying that the READER of the article is capable of drawing his own conclusions. This is obviously dishonest, because you can't draw your own conclusions unless you do the research yourself (like the independent researcher who wrote the article did). The No Spin Zone (O'Reilly) uses the "We present the facts, YOU DECIDE" mantra. So do most conspiracy theory movies: "We'll just show you MONEY IS DEBT, and AMERICA is due for RUIN. But is this bad? YOU DECIDE!" And so on. But for any scientific work this is unacceptable, because the way in which you present the results matter. Pick one scale on a graph and people will assume the problem is huge, pick a logarithmic scale and people will conclude there is no problem. It's the responsibility of the researcher to both present the facts and to explain what they mean. The you-decide tactic is manipulative, and it doesn't belong in HN titles. - I should note that I don't have any issue with the article itself. I liked it, and I commend independent research.
- ugh 17y agoData from any one weather station can neither prove nor disprove – well – I would guess pretty much anything climate related. The author doesn’t claim any such thing and the article is actually a quite nice read. The headline here stretches the hyperbole of the original headline quite a bit too much, though.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoAgreed. I liked the article. He used an emotionally-charged topic as a hook, didn't take sides, and instead taught me something about a cool language. Great HN post.
- motters 17y agoAfter reading about the climatology controversies, and not knowing who to believe, I did my own investigation of the climate data using the GHCN data, which was the most comprehensive publicly available set I could find. http://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/ http://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/ This is written in C++, and you can plot the data in numerous different ways, including individual weather stations if you wish.
- KazimirMajorinc 17y agoVery interesting work.
- crocowhile 17y agoData are out there and you can do little stuff with it if you want and if you have a precise question in mind. This is what I did some time ago: http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/ http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-... A recurring argument among denialist is that data are someone tricked to show things that aren't true. Some of those claims can actually be tested, but one needs to know what they are talking about.
- oz 17y agoThis is Hacker News.
- eru 17y agoWhat did you want to say?
- diego_moita 17y agoHN is an open prairie where conspiracy theories roam wild, free and careless. People here don't respect science and think they're smarter than they really are.
- oz 17y agoHonestly, I wasn't thinking about the 'truth' of the claims, I'm FAR from qualified to judge. But rather his approach is something that would be interesting to hackers. Was I wrong?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- abstractbill 17y agoArmagh itself is a smallish town in Northern Ireland, less than 1000 miles south of the Arctic Circle although bathed in the warm currents of the Gulf stream. I wonder how stable the Gulf stream is over time.
- SomeCallMeTim 17y agoVery stable, until it isn't: http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/impact/gulf_stream.shtml
- agentq 17y agoWhile the graph is nice and this was a great visualization example in newLisp, drawing conclusions from the graph alone is not really possible without some amount of statistical analysis (e.g., de-meaning or accounting for seasonality somehow). And to the author's credit, the observations made are not conclusions in themselves.
- jbooth 17y agoHigh "average maximum temperature" -- what kind of statistic is that? Why should he use that instead of the average temperature? Randomly picking a 1-day outlier from each year is useless. Meanwhile, from the adults who use crazy concepts like "sattelite data" and "arithmetic mean": http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE61O02C20100225 http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE61O02C20100225 Last month was the hottest january on record. EDIT: Not to take anything away from the guy -- cool code, cool app. But to those who are trumpeting this -- maybe you should take a look at that "hottest january on record" article and take a look at the methods that were used to arrive at that conclusion.
- jbooth 17y agoFunny.. a bunch of people upvote what is clearly labelled by its own author as amateur and naive number extracting, then downvote a link to rigorous statistical analysis saying that last month was the hottest on record. It's not about the methods, it's about the conclusions? If they agree with me, the methods are ok, if they don't, they're a biased scientist conspiracy? What the hell.. if someone was linking to an amateur analysis saying that log n was more expensive than n^2, would we be getting all of this philosophy about how everyone's perspective is valuable?
- jazzdev 17y agoI think the voting indicates: data, code => cool => upvote statement by some organization with no data, no analysis => boring => downvote
- CWuestefeld 17y agoAnd given the recent breaches of trust amongst the climatologists, this is exactly what is appropriate. Building up open and transparent datasets and models that anyone can work with (or lacking the domain expertise and technical skill, at least be comfortable that somebody can watch over the scientists' shoulders) is exactly what's needed. Another article that trumpets talking points without mentioning all of the caveats is NOT needed. And the fact that it yet again implies a need for action, while entirely ignoring any assessment the costs of those effects, together with a weighing against the costs of remediation, puts the Reuters article squarely into the fearmongering side of the equation, 180 degrees off of rational debate.
- jrockway 17y agoNice chart. Looks like there is global warming once a year or so! Conspiracy!
- dmnd 17y agoOfftopic: that syntax highlighting upon mouseover is a great idea. Does the fact that I haven't seen this before mean I need to get a new editor?
- KazimirMajorinc 17y agoYes, it's fun. PLT Scheme editor supports similar "block style" parentheses highlighting, and it is useful for reading large data sets or machine generated code. http://plt-scheme.org/screenshots/french-profiler.jpg http://plt-scheme.org/screenshots/french-profiler.jpg
- ahi 17y agoI am not sure what the point of this is, but it's an interesting demo of newLisp... but just use R next time.
- waxman 17y agoThis graph actually carries a lot of intellectual weight for 2 reasons: 1) it is an apparently unbiased inquiry, which means a lot. The allegations against leading climate change scientists, whether they are valid or not, highlight an inescapable reality about the world of academic geologists (no matter how "inconvenient" of a truth it is): like many scientists, these people need to raise large amounts of funding for relatively boring projects (i.e. ice samples anyone?). But if they tie in their research to a hot (no pun), visible issue (as rendered by the media and politicians, regardless of its scientific merit), then BAM! It's a lot easier to get funding. Hence, climate scientists have a huge incentive to paint global warming as massive, urgent big problem, whether or not it actually is. Seeing data crunched by an amateur, who has the skills to process it, but not the incentives to skew it, means a lot. 2) Even though it only shows weather data from a single region, "global warming" would presumably be a global phenomenon that one could detect from basically any location (and if this is not the case, then the press needs to revise its doomsday scenarios about global warming necessarily flooding New York City and Shanghai, because if it's only occurring in some places, then we shouldn't use data gathered in Canada to predict catastrophe in East Asia.) I'm not claiming to know the scientific truth about this issue one way or the other, but I do know that there are a lot of forces at play here besides science (funding incentives, politics, news media sensationalism, green energy business interests, etc.), and I think a return to the data is a great place to start unraveling this issue that is far more complex than Al Gore or his opposite Dick Cheney would have you believe.
- jbooth 17y agoThe scientific truth of the matter is that last month was the hottest on record: http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE61O02C20100225 http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE61O02C20100225 There is room for scientific doubt about whether this is caused by CO2 -- it's a greenhouse gas but correlation != causation and all that. But if you conclude that the earth isn't actually warming, you're doing it wrong -- there's no doubt about that.
- ajross 17y agoItem 2 is just wrong. Even something as (comparatively) well understood as an El Niño event causes wilding differing effects from region to region. Every time a scientist goes on TV to explain this stuff, they have to explain this very point: local measurements don't cut it, you have to look at and correlate very complicated global data sets. Apparently you didn't listen becuase of... Item 1, which seems to me to be a completely unsubstantiated ad hominem. You could use that same argument to reject any science you don't want to hear.
- aphyr 17y agoMaybe you didn't finish the article: he's performing an incorrect analysis on purpose! "I've made a number of small mistakes and inappropriate design decisions in this post (some deliberate, or at least, some I'm aware of, others are accidental). But, given the published and freely downloadable weather data, the code listed here, and - of course - the excellent free and open source newLISP language, it should be possible for anyone to retrace my steps, find my mistakes, and present a more credible or compelling view of the same dataset."
- Step 17y agoLittle disappointed so many commenters seemed to miss that. I thought that paragraph was the entire lesson, with the preceding material there so this point would sink in. Since I'm interested in information design (especially right now) I was quite disappointed with the graph he ultimately produced. I'm hoping someone with a bit more time than me takes up his challenge and goes back to correct some of his mistakes (in both analysis and storytelling). I'd rather like to do it myself but I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon. Ultimately, a compelling story about how we as humans require stories for understanding, and how important it is to verify the stories that we choose to believe.
- itistoday 17y agoI cheated and just asked him. :-D If you're interested, his response is here: http://newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3508&p=17814 http://newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=...
- Step 17y agoHa! Well, that explains things rather neatly then. If he was really building only up to that final paragraph, it would have been shaped differently. Instead it seems that was just one conclusion he drew out of a project started for different reasons. Thanks for sharing this.
- Maro 17y agoThis type of analysis and visualization is best done in Mathematica, which incidentally also supports both functional (a la Lisp) and declarative (a la Prolog) programming. It costs money, but it's the right tool for the job.