6 ms·

> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accurac

> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that. This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that allows you to do things like this (derive a higher level of accuracy than the data would otherwise allow) if you know for a fact that the associated errors pretty much all cancel out. But you have to know this, from prior sampling or whatever; you can't just assume it. But that's what these folks are doing - waving their hands and just assuming that the errors mostly cancel out. To add insult to injury, for other portions of the data they state that they have the right to make routine, automated adjustments because of systematic errors in the data. But you can't have it both ways - assuming that the errors mostly cancel out on the one hand, while on the other hand claiming you have the right to make adjustments because, you know, those errors don't actually cancel each other out after all. > I'm not questioning the data per se You should be! Most of the "data" here is either of remarkably low quality, or just pretty much made up.

zapnuk 7y ago
You provided no evidence to support your claim. Why should one believe your claim that most/all climate research like this http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ has it wrong?
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  interestingly the person who headed up the berkely earth project made similar arguments to the person you are replying to, and went and did it "better" but got the same result.
- southern_cross 7y ago
  Check my comment history from another thread a little while back to see details about problems I've found with Berkeley Earth. But the short version is that the charts and graphics provided by those folks for my local area, and created by others using their data, seem to bear little resemblance to the reality of the situation. Feel free to follow up on the links provided there to see what you can see about your own local area.
  - woodandsteel 7y ago
    It's interesting reading the views of those who disagree with the mainstream position. What is interesting is how many different positions they have Some claim the world is not getting warmer. Some agree it might be but we don't know for sure. Some agree it is getting warmer, and say it might be due to human activity, but we don't know for sure. Some agree it is getting warmer, but claim it is due to some other cause than human activity. Some claim it is getting warmer, but increased co2 will bring huge benefits. Some agree it is getting warmer and agree that increased co2 brings harm, but that efforts to reduce emissions would bring great economic harm. Plus probably several other positions I have not mentions. Also, some people try to combine several positions. You know, you all would be more persuasive if you could first reach agreement among yourselves. Or at least if the advocates of each position would be as critical of the other positions as they are of the mainstream position.
viraptor 7y ago
> But you can't have it both ways You're reducing multiple known sources of error to a single one for some reason, which doesn't help here. Here's an example: my car shows 4% higher speed than the real one due to difference in expected tire diameter. Additionally it has some small dynamic error of speed measurement. In this case I can "have it both ways". I can correct for the known difference and use multiple measurements to get a higher precision speed reading. The same thing applies to old temperature measurements if you provide good explanation of the systematic error.
- southern_cross 7y ago
  If you've read a few of the relevant papers and reports like I have, then you would know that they routinely state that they assume that most of the errors and uncertainties and such cancel out. But mathematically you can't get away with that; instead you have to know that they mostly cancel out, using whatever methods legitimately allow you to know this. But since we only have really good instrumentation and data going back at most a few decades, there's no way they can actually do that (at least for most of the historical data), so instead they just pretend. And to my point, no, you can't claim that the errors in various temperature readings mostly cancel each other out, without having any solid proof of that. Nor can you then turn around and claim that since there are enough errors out there that obviously don't cancel out, that this then gives you the right to set loose a computer program to blindly "correct" those errors, said program having been constructed using whatever models and biases you were operating under at the time. (Those "corrections" may not be anywhere close to accurate, in other words.) But that's exactly the kind of thing they've been doing.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
> or just pretty much made up. Yeah man, it's all like this big global conspiracy to um, err, what? Get people to make the air cleaner for everyone? Fund big solar's evil ways?
gameswithgo 7y ago
I'm familiar with the blog posts you have been reading on this topic, but its really not so easy to dismiss the data. The hypothesis you would need to accept, to believe the surface temperature record is not accurate, would be the systematic error is consistently measuring things a little bit warmer over time. If you wanted to prove that point you could try to find some mechanism that would explain it. But the problem is many other measurements confirm the surface temperature results. Air temps agree with ocean temps, various proxies agree with those (ice extent and mass for example, are declining as would be expected with a warming trend) Now, does 1800s temperature data have large errors? Yes, and those are reflected in surface temperature reconstructions by large error bars. You are not the first person to be convinced that climate data is bad, some very smart people have felt that, and got funded by the koch brothers to do it right, and they did an excellent job, but got the same answers NASA, NOAA, and other groups did: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...
- skrowl 7y ago
  It's not so much that the surface temperature record isn't accurate, it's that it's been systematically tampered with / adjusted. https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2018_03_20_05_20_11.png https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20... Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to be warmer. You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter is indisputable. Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016 https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NASA_Fig._A_2001vs2016.gif https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/... 1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with everything in between.
  - southern_cross 7y ago
    Funny you should mention this. This was one of the other things that really drew my attention towards the whole climate situation many years back. I was in a techie forum somewhere when the subject of climate came up, and one of the folks there mentioned that he was something of a data hoarder (which is a real thing, I guess). And he said that he had copies of historical temperature data downloaded from various years, and that he had noticed the numbers sometimes magically changing from year to year. He said that it appeared to him that the data sets were being tampered with. And most everybody else there (not me) jumped all over him, calling him a liar and saying that reputable scientists would never do such a thing! Except, of course, that's exactly what they've been doing.

zapnuk 7y ago

You provided no evidence to support your claim. Why should one believe your claim that most/all climate research like this http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ has it wrong?

gameswithgo 7y ago
interestingly the person who headed up the berkely earth project made similar arguments to the person you are replying to, and went and did it "better" but got the same result.
southern_cross 7y ago
Check my comment history from another thread a little while back to see details about problems I've found with Berkeley Earth. But the short version is that the charts and graphics provided by those folks for my local area, and created by others using their data, seem to bear little resemblance to the reality of the situation. Feel free to follow up on the links provided there to see what you can see about your own local area.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  It's interesting reading the views of those who disagree with the mainstream position. What is interesting is how many different positions they have Some claim the world is not getting warmer. Some agree it might be but we don't know for sure. Some agree it is getting warmer, and say it might be due to human activity, but we don't know for sure. Some agree it is getting warmer, but claim it is due to some other cause than human activity. Some claim it is getting warmer, but increased co2 will bring huge benefits. Some agree it is getting warmer and agree that increased co2 brings harm, but that efforts to reduce emissions would bring great economic harm. Plus probably several other positions I have not mentions. Also, some people try to combine several positions. You know, you all would be more persuasive if you could first reach agreement among yourselves. Or at least if the advocates of each position would be as critical of the other positions as they are of the mainstream position.

viraptor 7y ago

> But you can't have it both ways You're reducing multiple known sources of error to a single one for some reason, which doesn't help here. Here's an example: my car shows 4% higher speed than the real one due to difference in expected tire diameter. Additionally it has some small dynamic error of speed measurement. In this case I can "have it both ways". I can correct for the known difference and use multiple measurements to get a higher precision speed reading. The same thing applies to old temperature measurements if you provide good explanation of the systematic error.

southern_cross 7y ago
If you've read a few of the relevant papers and reports like I have, then you would know that they routinely state that they assume that most of the errors and uncertainties and such cancel out. But mathematically you can't get away with that; instead you have to know that they mostly cancel out, using whatever methods legitimately allow you to know this. But since we only have really good instrumentation and data going back at most a few decades, there's no way they can actually do that (at least for most of the historical data), so instead they just pretend. And to my point, no, you can't claim that the errors in various temperature readings mostly cancel each other out, without having any solid proof of that. Nor can you then turn around and claim that since there are enough errors out there that obviously don't cancel out, that this then gives you the right to set loose a computer program to blindly "correct" those errors, said program having been constructed using whatever models and biases you were operating under at the time. (Those "corrections" may not be anywhere close to accurate, in other words.) But that's exactly the kind of thing they've been doing.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

> or just pretty much made up. Yeah man, it's all like this big global conspiracy to um, err, what? Get people to make the air cleaner for everyone? Fund big solar's evil ways?

gameswithgo 7y ago

I'm familiar with the blog posts you have been reading on this topic, but its really not so easy to dismiss the data. The hypothesis you would need to accept, to believe the surface temperature record is not accurate, would be the systematic error is consistently measuring things a little bit warmer over time. If you wanted to prove that point you could try to find some mechanism that would explain it. But the problem is many other measurements confirm the surface temperature results. Air temps agree with ocean temps, various proxies agree with those (ice extent and mass for example, are declining as would be expected with a warming trend) Now, does 1800s temperature data have large errors? Yes, and those are reflected in surface temperature reconstructions by large error bars. You are not the first person to be convinced that climate data is bad, some very smart people have felt that, and got funded by the koch brothers to do it right, and they did an excellent job, but got the same answers NASA, NOAA, and other groups did: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...

skrowl 7y ago
It's not so much that the surface temperature record isn't accurate, it's that it's been systematically tampered with / adjusted. https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/2018_03_20_05_20_11.png https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20... Older data has been adjusted to be cooler and newer data has been adjusted to be warmer. You can debate why it's been adjusted all you want, but the fact that the adjustments are there and they are adjusted to make newer data appear hotter is indisputable. Here's an animated gif comparing the exact same data from NASA 2001 vs 2016 https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NASA_Fig._A_2001vs2016.gif https://i1.wp.com/realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/... 1880 is adjusted to .2 lower and 2000 is adjusted to .2 higher, along with everything in between.
- southern_cross 7y ago
  Funny you should mention this. This was one of the other things that really drew my attention towards the whole climate situation many years back. I was in a techie forum somewhere when the subject of climate came up, and one of the folks there mentioned that he was something of a data hoarder (which is a real thing, I guess). And he said that he had copies of historical temperature data downloaded from various years, and that he had noticed the numbers sometimes magically changing from year to year. He said that it appeared to him that the data sets were being tampered with. And most everybody else there (not me) jumped all over him, calling him a liar and saying that reputable scientists would never do such a thing! Except, of course, that's exactly what they've been doing.