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I have no intention of replaying Climategate via HN. There were enough enquiries to consider that settled, with few recommendations. I read _all_ the "smoking g

I have no intention of replaying Climategate via HN. There were enough enquiries to consider that settled, with few recommendations. I read _all_ the "smoking gun" emails at the time, and in context they were typical office work emails, and smoking nothing. Like everyone's office conversations a few silly comments probably should not have become public. But hey, I am not the arbiter, so I will defer to whether those multiple inquiries considered them a smoking gun. They did not. To roll back to your parent: "let me say that I'm not a climate skeptic ... yet" I suspect it's unlikely, or that you would be convinced, but I make just one recommendation. If you haven't read or watched the movie of "Merchants of Doubt", you should as it's both a very revealing and very depressing read. The book has more depth, but the movie is more insightful as you get body language. Via interviews with the notable criminals, and TV clips. Like the fellow with a bloody big grin telling that he couldn't touch Hansen on the science, so took to discrediting him personally and had a good laugh about it. Or Heartland or CATO Institute's, I forget which, entirely scam inverse IPCC report - identical match on look and feel even to number of pages. Except says the opposite. With nary a science degree between the lot of them. Send it to every US representative, claim it's truth. It's tobacco 2.0, and not limited to climate. Every method, every technique, every claim. From the same PR agencies and bullshit institutes, the same people who claimed there's no link between smoking and health now on TV claiming there's no warming. Then again that there is warming and it's a great thing, we should have more of it! etc. You might even understand why, on balance, I am more leery of industry than academia. Check it out. Thankfully Europe is not nearly so scary yet. Even in the US leaning UK. So, specifics: Moving is probably the lesser cases for data adjustment of what springs to mind. There'll be transcription errors, calibration errors affecting a particular station or sensor, methodology and more general systemic errors, such as sea temperature readings as we discover the ship might have an effect on some methods, or that US Navy logs truncated some historic readings, IIRC rounding down to whole degrees only. I tried to find a link to the Navy story, but that seems thoroughly buried by denial results. I come back to the very tedious simple question. What is in it for the Met Office to fraudulently and inaccurately rig their dataset? Their entire reputation, and the majority of income, depends on accurate weather and climate forecasts. What matters for their future is that they match with reality, otherwise they lose contracts to those who can match reality. They've made a few famous mistakes over their decades of forecasting too. So no, not perfect. Then the multiple leaked internal oil company reports, not for public consumption. They have been accurately, surprisingly accurately, predicting effects since the 1950s. Even they have overshot some of the predictions - yet whilst they are claiming rising temperatures, I don't hear claims Exxon and BP are in the pocket of the great global climate conspiracy. > One of the pillars of science is providing your raw data Absolutely. Providing raw data set so others can audit and replicate, or find faults. Not presenting as the definitive raw graph to show a gullible public it's not happening at all. Some things don't need adjusting, others require everything be. Weather recording will be somewhere in between. My only work exposure to sensors via software was liquid pressure sensors many decades ago, and entirely unrelated to climate. Every single reading bar none needed adjusting to fit the unique calibration of that particular sensor. Re-calibration was needed regularly. It was a pain in the ass, as that was a manual "send out an engineer" recalibration. The blog overlays raw results to show there is no climate effect. Are you seriously claiming they have adequately invalidated every adjustment? Why isn't there a paper to read about in Nature? Presuming they haven't invalidated every last one, that's misleading in the extreme. I'm perfectly comfortable that someone may find reason to suspect or exclude some data, and some adjustments. In fact I would expect it in every sizeable dataset. All? That better have some compelling basis. There's none. Just claims of fabrication. So reading from your start point: There looks like reason for suspicion of one localised set of results. Except immediately after he's talking of disproving the hockey stick. Time to stop reading. No point digging for context, or looking to original source. This is astonishingly well worn ground, and Muller, the instigator of that particular conspiracy theory, famously 100% recanted and has since set up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy I'm out.

repolfx 7y ago
I think you're mis-characterising both the graphs I linked. I did not present the raw and adjusted data to show "there is no climate effect". They were presented to show that the observed climate effect in the 20th century is the result of adjustments to the raw data. This isn't the same argument at all: it merely sets up the next questions of what are these adjustments, why do they have such big effect and are we really sure they're correct, and why does NOAA report simulations as if they were actual measurements? Questions which are then investigated in turn. The answer may turn out to be "the code is correct, the algorithms are justified, the adjusted/synthetic data is more reliable", in which case, no problem. But given the low quality of the process these are questions absolutely worth asking. Also these analyses aren't the old ones you're referring to from the 90s about medieval times, or even "Climategate" (which wasn't about any specific scientific claims anyway, but the process by which they were being made). This particular strand only focuses on the 20th century, and are recent analyses triggered by the rapid jump in synthetic data points being reported as temperature readings. So reading from your start point: There looks like reason for suspicion of one localised set of results. Except immediately after he's talking of disproving the hockey stick. Time to stop reading. No point digging for context, or looking to original source. Again I think you subtly misunderstood the argument. The argument made wasn't "maybe there's something wrong with the data in Minnesota". That state was just used as an example because it has a good balance of AM/PM stations in the years when the adjustment is the biggest. The argument was that a key adjustment made to the data doesn't appear to be justified in for that state because the difference has an alternative explanation, yet despite decades of adjustments this was never detected? And by extension, maybe all cases where TOB adjustment is applied have these sorts of problems. To know whether TOB adjustment is fundamentally flawed would require more research, and the other adjustments even more, but there is smoke. Your comparison to liquid pressure sensors doesn't help because in those cases you could measure the ground truth and adjust the sensor to match a pre-calibrated sensor. There's no way to know the ground truth for what temperature really was in Minnesota in the 1930s - all we have are the recorded measurements from those days, by people who thought they already had calibrated sensors. That's why we have to be very careful when playing with the data: we have nothing to calibrate against. The results of any adjustment are uncheckable except via reference to internal consistency and other explanations. Now your position seems to be that there's really no way to investigate these models climatologists use that you will ever accept, because if the outcome is anything other than "yep, everything is basically correct +- minor changes" then you'd write it off automatically. I understand that position: life is short, after all. But you shouldn't trash or write off people who are still investigating. As makomk points out elsewhere in this thread, a peer reviewer paper got published in Nature that promoted the current consensus view, but it turned out to be misusing data and maths to make the conclusions sound way more certain than they were. Found by a blogger who has been critical of climate science for a long time. The system doesn't always self correct and outsiders have different incentives to government-funded scientists. As for the Met Office, of course they aren't directly incentivised to give wrong results. But we know they did before because for years temperature datasets showed a "pause" in warming nobody could explain. That data has now been erased and the latest temperature datasets show no pause ever happened. Where were the mass investigations into that? Look, if the Met Offfice reported wildly different results to the "consensus" then they'd be picking a fight with the rest of the climate establishment, which would be a huge deal for them and put their entire reputation at risk, which is very important to them. In the past I've witnessed the effects of someone claiming there's a consensus of experts supporting their view, in a case when I was deeply involved and knew flat out there wasn't. The effects were terrifying; hundreds of people slowly lost their minds and came to believe things that were clearly nonsense. There actually was no consensus about such ridiculous ideas, just a few people claiming repeatedly there was and a whole lot of social pressure / selective editing on community news channels to make it look like more people agreed with them than really did. It's very easy to see signs of the same things happening here. That's why I want more outsiders and outside scrutiny.

repolfx 7y ago

I think you're mis-characterising both the graphs I linked. I did not present the raw and adjusted data to show "there is no climate effect". They were presented to show that the observed climate effect in the 20th century is the result of adjustments to the raw data. This isn't the same argument at all: it merely sets up the next questions of what are these adjustments, why do they have such big effect and are we really sure they're correct, and why does NOAA report simulations as if they were actual measurements? Questions which are then investigated in turn. The answer may turn out to be "the code is correct, the algorithms are justified, the adjusted/synthetic data is more reliable", in which case, no problem. But given the low quality of the process these are questions absolutely worth asking. Also these analyses aren't the old ones you're referring to from the 90s about medieval times, or even "Climategate" (which wasn't about any specific scientific claims anyway, but the process by which they were being made). This particular strand only focuses on the 20th century, and are recent analyses triggered by the rapid jump in synthetic data points being reported as temperature readings. So reading from your start point: There looks like reason for suspicion of one localised set of results. Except immediately after he's talking of disproving the hockey stick. Time to stop reading. No point digging for context, or looking to original source. Again I think you subtly misunderstood the argument. The argument made wasn't "maybe there's something wrong with the data in Minnesota". That state was just used as an example because it has a good balance of AM/PM stations in the years when the adjustment is the biggest. The argument was that a key adjustment made to the data doesn't appear to be justified in for that state because the difference has an alternative explanation, yet despite decades of adjustments this was never detected? And by extension, maybe all cases where TOB adjustment is applied have these sorts of problems. To know whether TOB adjustment is fundamentally flawed would require more research, and the other adjustments even more, but there is smoke. Your comparison to liquid pressure sensors doesn't help because in those cases you could measure the ground truth and adjust the sensor to match a pre-calibrated sensor. There's no way to know the ground truth for what temperature really was in Minnesota in the 1930s - all we have are the recorded measurements from those days, by people who thought they already had calibrated sensors. That's why we have to be very careful when playing with the data: we have nothing to calibrate against. The results of any adjustment are uncheckable except via reference to internal consistency and other explanations. Now your position seems to be that there's really no way to investigate these models climatologists use that you will ever accept, because if the outcome is anything other than "yep, everything is basically correct +- minor changes" then you'd write it off automatically. I understand that position: life is short, after all. But you shouldn't trash or write off people who are still investigating. As makomk points out elsewhere in this thread, a peer reviewer paper got published in Nature that promoted the current consensus view, but it turned out to be misusing data and maths to make the conclusions sound way more certain than they were. Found by a blogger who has been critical of climate science for a long time. The system doesn't always self correct and outsiders have different incentives to government-funded scientists. As for the Met Office, of course they aren't directly incentivised to give wrong results. But we know they did before because for years temperature datasets showed a "pause" in warming nobody could explain. That data has now been erased and the latest temperature datasets show no pause ever happened. Where were the mass investigations into that? Look, if the Met Offfice reported wildly different results to the "consensus" then they'd be picking a fight with the rest of the climate establishment, which would be a huge deal for them and put their entire reputation at risk, which is very important to them. In the past I've witnessed the effects of someone claiming there's a consensus of experts supporting their view, in a case when I was deeply involved and knew flat out there wasn't. The effects were terrifying; hundreds of people slowly lost their minds and came to believe things that were clearly nonsense. There actually was no consensus about such ridiculous ideas, just a few people claiming repeatedly there was and a whole lot of social pressure / selective editing on community news channels to make it look like more people agreed with them than really did. It's very easy to see signs of the same things happening here. That's why I want more outsiders and outside scrutiny.