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Please think about this carefully before making such replies. You cannot "go back" in time and "verify" a weather station reading. It was what it was on a speci

Please think about this carefully before making such replies. You cannot "go back" in time and "verify" a weather station reading. It was what it was on a specific day at a specific place, and if the log books say it was X then it was X. You can't say, gee, I wonder what the temperature was in New York on April 1st 1940 if I use my super-duper new thermometer, because time travel is impossible. "We should only trust people who never ever change their mind or attempt to correct their previous interpretations of data" Look, I realize what I'm showing you is hard to accept. It was for me too. I did a lot of digging before coming to the conclusion that I couldn't refute what was happening. Nonetheless, please recognize that you're in denial here. These people are not changing their interpretations of the data. They are changing the data itself and I believe I made that extremely clear. It's very hard to get the raw, pre-editing historical datasets. Sometimes it's possible, sometimes it's not. It really depends on the temperature series, the organization that produces it, the time frame in question etc. That's why I'm forced to cite newspaper archives above, because they are one of the places where history is recorded that scientists can't easily rewrite. "Thanks, random internet stranger, for showing that millions of scientists and dozens of government organizations are completely incompetent and/or malicious liars!" Unfortunately facts aren't decided by how many people say them or who they work for. Facts are what they are and one person pointing out one fact, can - in fact - show that millions of scientists and dozens of government organizations are doing something highly unusual. At any rate, there aren't millions of climatologists, lol. It's a tiny field. Even fewer of them produce temperature data sets. Probably fewer than 100 people do that work globally (I'm not counting the people who actually read the thermometers here because they aren't publishing combined temperature series). With respect to being incompetent and malicious liars, I'm afraid they are something far worse - highly competent and badly incentivized liars. If there was no global warming them climatology would be dusty academic backwater that none of us would ever think about. They wouldn't be the center of a massive cultural industry that venerates them, instead their status and funding would be somewhere near the sort of people who categorize rare species of butterflies.

feoren 5y ago
It's not even remotely true that the climate change consensus is based only on 100 climatologists. It has been understood that greenhouse gases could lead to global warming for over 100 years. It's a scientific consensus built on the agreement of many disciplines, from chemists studying how photons interact with methane, agricultural scientists studying how much methane a cow produces, wastewater engineers measuring methane and CO2 output from human waste streams, forestry scientists studying how trees decay over time and analyzing historical tree rings, scientists studying ice levels in the arctic, ecologists studying coral reefs, data scientists and statisticians combining all their data, and on and on and on. You absolutely are going against the consensus built up over the last 100 years across all of these disciplines. I don't think it's unreasonable to say the number of people that contributed to that consensus is in the millions. You're claiming all of that work is discredited because someone reviewed old data and said "this measurement was odd and their notes are bad; they probably left the thermometer in the sun. Let's throw out this data point". Questionable or not, that's not a counterexample to the well-understood mechanism of the greenhouse effect and atmospheric measurements of CO2, nor to the hundreds of other lines of evidence that have led nearly all science-literate people to accept reality. It's simple: you are spreading misinformation. Stop it.
- native_samples 5y ago
  This is now the second, third and fourth time you're arguing with arguments I never actually made. I'm not sure it's worth continuing with this because you don't seem to be accurately reading what I write. I said (again, quite clearly) that there are probably 100 or fewer climatologists actively producing aggregated temperature datasets, not 100 climatologists in total. There are many climatologists, but they all use the same set of temperature time series produced by a relatively small group. And that makes sense. Collecting all the data is a lot of work. You have to maintain relationships with many different meteorological agencies, potentially spend lots of time typing in numbers read from old log books, etc. It'd be odd if that work were duplicated by every person who wanted to explore climate data. Then you go off and talk about how there's consensus that CO2 could lead to global warming, which is nothing I've disagreed with at any point. CO2 could cause that, yes, but how much effect it is actually having in practice is definitely not in agreement, as the numerous different estimates for ECS show. "You're claiming all of that work is discredited because someone reviewed old data and said "this measurement was odd and their notes are bad; they probably left the thermometer in the sun. Let's throw out this data point"." Argh, no. I am explicitly not claiming that, I'm claiming the opposite. Faced with measurements they believe are erroneous they do not throw out the data. That would be a scientific thing to do. Instead what they do is keep it, but then apply a large range of "fixes" to it, and present the "fixed" data as if it were the original recordings. This is bad news because actually in the original data no warming is visible, and the trend they are claiming is really happening only appears after their model-driven adjustments. In other words, when observed data doesn't match the theory, the theory triumphs and observed data is modified. "It's simple: you are spreading misinformation. Stop it." Someone who can't even correctly understand the things I'm writing is in no position to claim other people are spreading misinformation. None of the points I've responded to in this thread were actually rebuttals to anything I've said!

feoren 5y ago

It's not even remotely true that the climate change consensus is based only on 100 climatologists. It has been understood that greenhouse gases could lead to global warming for over 100 years. It's a scientific consensus built on the agreement of many disciplines, from chemists studying how photons interact with methane, agricultural scientists studying how much methane a cow produces, wastewater engineers measuring methane and CO2 output from human waste streams, forestry scientists studying how trees decay over time and analyzing historical tree rings, scientists studying ice levels in the arctic, ecologists studying coral reefs, data scientists and statisticians combining all their data, and on and on and on. You absolutely are going against the consensus built up over the last 100 years across all of these disciplines. I don't think it's unreasonable to say the number of people that contributed to that consensus is in the millions. You're claiming all of that work is discredited because someone reviewed old data and said "this measurement was odd and their notes are bad; they probably left the thermometer in the sun. Let's throw out this data point". Questionable or not, that's not a counterexample to the well-understood mechanism of the greenhouse effect and atmospheric measurements of CO2, nor to the hundreds of other lines of evidence that have led nearly all science-literate people to accept reality. It's simple: you are spreading misinformation. Stop it.

native_samples 5y ago
This is now the second, third and fourth time you're arguing with arguments I never actually made. I'm not sure it's worth continuing with this because you don't seem to be accurately reading what I write. I said (again, quite clearly) that there are probably 100 or fewer climatologists actively producing aggregated temperature datasets, not 100 climatologists in total. There are many climatologists, but they all use the same set of temperature time series produced by a relatively small group. And that makes sense. Collecting all the data is a lot of work. You have to maintain relationships with many different meteorological agencies, potentially spend lots of time typing in numbers read from old log books, etc. It'd be odd if that work were duplicated by every person who wanted to explore climate data. Then you go off and talk about how there's consensus that CO2 could lead to global warming, which is nothing I've disagreed with at any point. CO2 could cause that, yes, but how much effect it is actually having in practice is definitely not in agreement, as the numerous different estimates for ECS show. "You're claiming all of that work is discredited because someone reviewed old data and said "this measurement was odd and their notes are bad; they probably left the thermometer in the sun. Let's throw out this data point"." Argh, no. I am explicitly not claiming that, I'm claiming the opposite. Faced with measurements they believe are erroneous they do not throw out the data. That would be a scientific thing to do. Instead what they do is keep it, but then apply a large range of "fixes" to it, and present the "fixed" data as if it were the original recordings. This is bad news because actually in the original data no warming is visible, and the trend they are claiming is really happening only appears after their model-driven adjustments. In other words, when observed data doesn't match the theory, the theory triumphs and observed data is modified. "It's simple: you are spreading misinformation. Stop it." Someone who can't even correctly understand the things I'm writing is in no position to claim other people are spreading misinformation. None of the points I've responded to in this thread were actually rebuttals to anything I've said!