6 ms·

2016 was not the hottest year on record when including the margin of error

9 points by scedast 10y ago

scarmig 10y ago
By the standard of that blog, it's possible for temperature to continuously really be rising 100 degrees over a century but for the last year to not be the hottest year on record, if the margin of error is a degree. Hottest year on record isn't a great metric, though. It's all about the trendline. And the trend is for continuous, significant, and dangerous increases in global surface temperatures to be observed over timescales of ~5 years.
- scedast 10y ago
  It is all about the trendline. Sick of how people focus on one point in a continuous scale.
- bassman9000 10y ago
  Is it? https://realclimatescience.com/2016/12/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-noaa-data-tampering/ https://realclimatescience.com/2016/12/100-of-us-warming-is-... > The NOAA raw data shows no warming over the past century > When presented with my claims of fraud, NOAA typically tries to arm wave it away with these two complaints. > They use gridded data and I am using un-gridded data. > They “have to” adjust the data because of Time Of Observation Bias and station moves. > Time of Observation Bias (TOBS) is a real problem, but is very small. TOBS is based on the idea that if you reset a min/max thermometer too close to the afternoon maximum, you will double count warm temperatures (and vice-versa if thermometer is reset in the morning.) Their claim is that during the hot 1930’s most stations reset their thermometers in the afternoon. > This is easy to test by using only the stations which did not reset their thermometers in the afternoon during the 1930’s. The pattern is almost identical to that of all stations. No warming over the past century. Note that the graph below tends to show too much warming due to morning TOBS.
  - Oletros 10y ago
    My God, that blog is a joke
kapauldo 10y ago
Grasping at straws.
fisherjeff 10y ago
Okay, it was one of the four hottest years on record. Not sure that significantly changes the argument.
tbrownaw 10y ago
It's also not not the hottest year on record. And if that chart works like I think, it's more likely than not. Maybe around 60-70% or so?
krastanov 10y ago
This soundbite does not carry much useful information. Sure, it is an amusing factoid that the spreads of the data points overlap, but that does not mean anything, especially if you do not explain what that spread represents (is this a confidence interval for the true average, or is it just meant to represent the spread (due to geography) of the data over which it was averaged). It is completely nonsensical to use this margin in order to say things like "Year X was as hot as N other years". Moreover, even if the margin of error is big, we can still easily calculate (with high precision and certainty) the presence of a slope when analyzing the whole data set. P.S. A minor side note is that this is temperature averaged over the entire globe, so to a big extent this spread is not an "error", rather it is representative of the variance of Earth's temperature at different geographical locations and at different times throughout the year.
- scedast 10y ago
  We don't have a fully accurate measure of what the earth's temperature is, so scientists estimate what is it based on available data. Any temperature recording device also has an error margin. Thus the annual temperature is an estimate with a 95% confidence interval.
craigvn 10y ago
You only need to look at all of the other charts on this page to conclude this may not be an unbiased observer.
zardeh 10y ago
(I implore anyone who looks at this to take a look at their other visualizations, all of them push a narrative, and at least three misrepresent information from their sources or explicitly state false information)
- scedast 10y ago
  That's a bold claim. Which ones use false information?
  - zardeh 10y ago
    The Hilary email server one to start. Your (I assume your, since your username matches the site) visualization shows a tree, and reads as there being 31800 wiped emails, of which 12200 were later found, and of those 2800 were work related. I'll quote FactCheck.org, one of the sources you list on your site: >There is no evidence to date that work-related emails were intentionally deleted. ... In his July 5 press conference, Comey said “like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed.” Your visualization states that the FBI found emails that Clinton wiped. This isn't the case (or at least, the FBI doesn't believe this is the case). The racial killing one is misleading, although I'll grant you not explicitly false, just heavily misleading. Specifically, your use of percentages is badly phrased and could be seen to push a misleading narrative. If I hover over raw, I see "6546 blacks killed by blacks". This is a true statement. If I hover over percentages, I see "92.9% of blacks killed by blacks". This is obviously not true, since it would imply that every black person was killed this past year, and 93% of them by other, now dead, black people, a ridiculous assertion. Instead, what you should state is "Of the ~7000 black people killed last year, 92.9% were killed by other black people". That's the true statement. I don't claim this is false though, because it was obviously just a formatting mistake, which I hope you'll amend now that I've informed you of it. It seems to me however, that you are trying to include something percentage based to imply that you're normalizing by population. That is, according to the census bureau, there are about 39 million black Americans, and about 224 million white Americans (I rounded both to the nearest million, which was up in both cases). That means that a black American had a 258/39,000,000 chance of being killed by police, while a white american had a 666/224,000,000 chance. Or in other words, 6.6 in every million black Americans was killed by police, and 2.97 in every million white Americans was killed by the police. To put it another way, you're normalizing within groups instead of across groups, and this leads to a practically useless set of numbers that you can throw at people, but don't have any practical value. So even if you do change your formatting issue, it would be better if you showed the across group normalization, instead of what you currently have, which isn't a valuable piece of data. Edit: For someone who is quick to claim others are making mistakes "its all about the trendline" and "I'm tired of people making the current year being the hottest into something its not", I would expect better work honestly.
yongjik 10y ago
Look at the year 1998. See how it clearly stands above many preceding and following years? In fact, 1998 was so abnormally hot that for a long time AGW skeptics used it as baseline to harp on the meme "global warming has stopped for N years." (It's easy to pretend the world is cooling, when you pick one of the hottest years on record as baseline.) And now see how 1998 is unambiguously cooler than 2016. Rest assured, I expect a decade (two if we're lucky) of listening to "Global warming has stopped since 2016" from now on.
- sirtaj 10y ago
  I've always considered that type of AGW argument as analogous to watching a rubber ball bounce down a hill and saying, "See? It bounces so high! There is no trend."
- scedast 10y ago
  Very interesting - I didn't know that.
toodlebunions 10y ago
2016 was also not a year where the earth was proven to be round.
- scedast 10y ago
  2017 is the year you learned it's actually a spheroid.
  - toodlebunions 10y ago
    There is no proof when you include this vague reassessment of the data.
flukus 10y ago
I love the the trend line is still very evident even though they don't have one. A bet they'd argue the trend isn't there though.
- scedast 10y ago
  The trendline matters. Focusing on a specific year is meaningless, which is what this visualization is trying to show. It's not trying to argue against mercury but against the annual headlines that there is a hottest year.
Oletros 10y ago
Funny thing is that they didn't talk about error bars after the "1998 hiatus"

9 points by scedast 10y ago

By the standard of that blog, it's possible for temperature to continuously really be rising 100 degrees over a century but for the last year to not be the hottest year on record, if the margin of error is a degree. Hottest year on record isn't a great metric, though. It's all about the trendline. And the trend is for continuous, significant, and dangerous increases in global surface temperatures to be observed over timescales of ~5 years.

scedast 10y ago
It is all about the trendline. Sick of how people focus on one point in a continuous scale.
bassman9000 10y ago
Is it? https://realclimatescience.com/2016/12/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-noaa-data-tampering/ https://realclimatescience.com/2016/12/100-of-us-warming-is-... > The NOAA raw data shows no warming over the past century > When presented with my claims of fraud, NOAA typically tries to arm wave it away with these two complaints. > They use gridded data and I am using un-gridded data. > They “have to” adjust the data because of Time Of Observation Bias and station moves. > Time of Observation Bias (TOBS) is a real problem, but is very small. TOBS is based on the idea that if you reset a min/max thermometer too close to the afternoon maximum, you will double count warm temperatures (and vice-versa if thermometer is reset in the morning.) Their claim is that during the hot 1930’s most stations reset their thermometers in the afternoon. > This is easy to test by using only the stations which did not reset their thermometers in the afternoon during the 1930’s. The pattern is almost identical to that of all stations. No warming over the past century. Note that the graph below tends to show too much warming due to morning TOBS.
- Oletros 10y ago
  My God, that blog is a joke

kapauldo 10y ago

Grasping at straws.

fisherjeff 10y ago

Okay, it was one of the four hottest years on record. Not sure that significantly changes the argument.

tbrownaw 10y ago

It's also not not the hottest year on record. And if that chart works like I think, it's more likely than not. Maybe around 60-70% or so?

krastanov 10y ago

This soundbite does not carry much useful information. Sure, it is an amusing factoid that the spreads of the data points overlap, but that does not mean anything, especially if you do not explain what that spread represents (is this a confidence interval for the true average, or is it just meant to represent the spread (due to geography) of the data over which it was averaged). It is completely nonsensical to use this margin in order to say things like "Year X was as hot as N other years". Moreover, even if the margin of error is big, we can still easily calculate (with high precision and certainty) the presence of a slope when analyzing the whole data set. P.S. A minor side note is that this is temperature averaged over the entire globe, so to a big extent this spread is not an "error", rather it is representative of the variance of Earth's temperature at different geographical locations and at different times throughout the year.

scedast 10y ago
We don't have a fully accurate measure of what the earth's temperature is, so scientists estimate what is it based on available data. Any temperature recording device also has an error margin. Thus the annual temperature is an estimate with a 95% confidence interval.

craigvn 10y ago

You only need to look at all of the other charts on this page to conclude this may not be an unbiased observer.

zardeh 10y ago

(I implore anyone who looks at this to take a look at their other visualizations, all of them push a narrative, and at least three misrepresent information from their sources or explicitly state false information)

scedast 10y ago
That's a bold claim. Which ones use false information?
- zardeh 10y ago
  The Hilary email server one to start. Your (I assume your, since your username matches the site) visualization shows a tree, and reads as there being 31800 wiped emails, of which 12200 were later found, and of those 2800 were work related. I'll quote FactCheck.org, one of the sources you list on your site: >There is no evidence to date that work-related emails were intentionally deleted. ... In his July 5 press conference, Comey said “like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed.” Your visualization states that the FBI found emails that Clinton wiped. This isn't the case (or at least, the FBI doesn't believe this is the case). The racial killing one is misleading, although I'll grant you not explicitly false, just heavily misleading. Specifically, your use of percentages is badly phrased and could be seen to push a misleading narrative. If I hover over raw, I see "6546 blacks killed by blacks". This is a true statement. If I hover over percentages, I see "92.9% of blacks killed by blacks". This is obviously not true, since it would imply that every black person was killed this past year, and 93% of them by other, now dead, black people, a ridiculous assertion. Instead, what you should state is "Of the ~7000 black people killed last year, 92.9% were killed by other black people". That's the true statement. I don't claim this is false though, because it was obviously just a formatting mistake, which I hope you'll amend now that I've informed you of it. It seems to me however, that you are trying to include something percentage based to imply that you're normalizing by population. That is, according to the census bureau, there are about 39 million black Americans, and about 224 million white Americans (I rounded both to the nearest million, which was up in both cases). That means that a black American had a 258/39,000,000 chance of being killed by police, while a white american had a 666/224,000,000 chance. Or in other words, 6.6 in every million black Americans was killed by police, and 2.97 in every million white Americans was killed by the police. To put it another way, you're normalizing within groups instead of across groups, and this leads to a practically useless set of numbers that you can throw at people, but don't have any practical value. So even if you do change your formatting issue, it would be better if you showed the across group normalization, instead of what you currently have, which isn't a valuable piece of data. Edit: For someone who is quick to claim others are making mistakes "its all about the trendline" and "I'm tired of people making the current year being the hottest into something its not", I would expect better work honestly.

yongjik 10y ago

Look at the year 1998. See how it clearly stands above many preceding and following years? In fact, 1998 was so abnormally hot that for a long time AGW skeptics used it as baseline to harp on the meme "global warming has stopped for N years." (It's easy to pretend the world is cooling, when you pick one of the hottest years on record as baseline.) And now see how 1998 is unambiguously cooler than 2016. Rest assured, I expect a decade (two if we're lucky) of listening to "Global warming has stopped since 2016" from now on.

sirtaj 10y ago
I've always considered that type of AGW argument as analogous to watching a rubber ball bounce down a hill and saying, "See? It bounces so high! There is no trend."
scedast 10y ago
Very interesting - I didn't know that.

toodlebunions 10y ago

2016 was also not a year where the earth was proven to be round.

scedast 10y ago
2017 is the year you learned it's actually a spheroid.
- toodlebunions 10y ago
  There is no proof when you include this vague reassessment of the data.

flukus 10y ago

I love the the trend line is still very evident even though they don't have one. A bet they'd argue the trend isn't there though.

scedast 10y ago
The trendline matters. Focusing on a specific year is meaningless, which is what this visualization is trying to show. It's not trying to argue against mercury but against the annual headlines that there is a hottest year.

Oletros 10y ago

Funny thing is that they didn't talk about error bars after the "1998 hiatus"