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They have some data relatively good for the NYT, e.g., graphs of global average differences (they call anomalies which is common but, still, wildly inappropriat

• mturmon 12y ago
  You have been down voted (not by me), which is reasonable given that you say the report is lying, but offer no counter-evidence. If you look at the press release (http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-determines-2014-warmest-year-in-modern-record/ http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-determines-2014-...), you can notice a pointer to the data and the methods. If you want to be taken seriously, you'd have to engage that, rather than making empty claims and diverting the conversation to a referendum on the limitations of the NYT. I also want to mention that the word "anomaly" in this context is a term of art for any difference between a value and a mean value -- this is not an editorial injection by the NYT. It is necessary to use these differences because seasonal and regional temperature variations make plots of raw temperature (or precipitation, etc.) fields not very useful. If you were aware of the literature in this area, you would know this.
  • graycat 12y ago
    > you say the report is lying I never did any such thing. I just said that (1) their graph data was good but (2) their concern about extreme values was bad. Both (1) and (2) are plainly obvious and need no "counter-evidence". I don't trust the NYT, but I didn't say that they were "lying". > making empty claims I made no claims except the obvious one that the NYT was emphasizing extreme values which, clearly for such data analysis, is wrong. The argument about global warming is totally clear, "settled": No one knows what the climate will be in 10, 50, or 100 years for any scenarios having to do with humans. Proof: Look at the results of the climate computer models; they are in fairly good agreement and predicted that today the temperatures would be much higher. They were wildly wrong. QED Why were the models so wrong? For the technical part, assuming that the work was done honestly (and I don't really believe that), Freeman Dyson has a remark, I don't recall precisely, that maybe the problem was the models didn't do well modeling the effects of the biological responses or some such. So, maybe they did well enough with the Navier-Stokes equations, Planck black body radiation, sun spots, etc. but blew it on green leafy vegetables. But, at least from Freeman Dyson, we don't know. Why would the NYT emphasize extreme values? That's not a scientific or technical question and, instead, is about their motivations. My guess about their motivations, YMMV and no technical references needed, is that they want to pass out drama to get attention for their ads. Believe it or not. But a long time ago people saw that truth and the newspapers were not good bedfellows: Evidence: An Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s where, clearly, the audience accepted that newspapers passed out nonsense. More? Sure, Citizen Kane, which a lot of people can find believable. For the sources of the NYT, I didn't see any mentioned. Sorry to say, at this point, given Obama's political positions, I can no longer take data from NASA or NOAA very seriously, but that is not a biggie in this case. I didn't claim that the extreme values were wrong, just that, when we do have average data, for the data analysis in question here, extreme values add nothing but confusion. Here I am on very solid ground: Clearly the temperature is a stochastic process; commonly we get new extreme values right along even if nothing is really changing. There are some quite precise results in the cases of coin flipping, Brownian motion, and martingales. What would be surprising would be that we didn't get new extreme values -- if we never got more extreme values, then we would have some bounds for the process that we would have a tough time believing. "Anomaly" is still the wrong word. Actually, with a good meaning of anomaly, we should just f'get about them; that is, they are anomalies, and in that case the whole NYT article is moot. Yes, I mentioned that it is common in this global warming mud wrestling to say anomaly -- it's still the wrong word. Critical reading comprehension 101 would have us conclude, correctly in my view, that here anomaly is intended to mean not really from nature but from humans and their evil CO2, and that is value-heavy. Or, the suggestion is that there is a reason for the anomaly, and their claim of the reason is human CO2. Send your money now to your favorite green political pressure group.
• jjoonathan 12y ago
  The IPCC reports are a good place to start your search if you're actually interested in the peer reviewed literature. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/ However, I find your insistence regarding peer-reviewed reports a bit puzzling in light of the vitriol that you fire at the NYT's opinions, given that they aren't out of line with the conclusions drawn by the scientific community. Is there a similarly thorough and rigorous body of peer-reviewed literature out there supporting different conclusions? Because AFAIK the situation looks like this: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/files/2013/05/climate-models-vs-skeptic-models.png http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/files/2013/05/climate-...
  • graycat 12y ago
    > The IPCC 100% pure, total propaganda with nothing objective at all, certainly not peer-review. After reading their Guru Ramaswamy's radiative forcing it was totally clear that they were totally worthless for anything meaningful. They are a political organization trying to raise money by carbon taxes on the developed countries to transfer wealth to the third world. Somehow I just lost 37 points today, 5 points from my post here and another 4 points on a post on how to help a 7 year old girl who went to the wrong comic book store. Apparently with HN arithmetic, 5 + 4 = 39. For the girl, I suggested she go to a music store that focused on classical music. I also suggested the movies, stores of American Girl. The comic book shop was right next to porn. Gee, my suggestion was not liked. > the vitriol that you fire at the NYT's opinions The NYT has long been and still is a NYC wild-eyed liberal, bleeding-heart, emotional hysteria organization, heavily for wealthy English majors and wannabees. I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the NYT, but I fired no "vitriol" but (1) said good things about their graph but (2) criticized them for using extreme values to get people excited. Again, once again, over again, one more time, rock solid, for such a situation extreme values may be better than no data at all but, given good average data, one more time, this time just for you, once again, maybe you will actually read it this time, you can read, right, the extreme value data is useless. Or, some solid advice -- f'get about extreme value data. Stuff it for the hottest, the coldest, the least ice, the fastest winds, etc. Leave the importance of extreme values to, say, Olympic records. For GDP, that's an average. For the corn crop, we want an average. For crude oil production, we want an average, say, monthly. For global temperature to consider global warming, we want an average. An average, not extreme values. One biggie reason for the importance of the average is that it essentially is, has to be, what's important, e.g., the area under the curve, the total energy involved, etc. The average per day times the number of days is the total, e.g., as for your income and paying your taxes. But the NYT will use anything they can get away with to get their readers all hysterical, up on their hind legs, believing in their trilogy of transgression by evil humans against the pure, pristine, precious, 100% all-natural mother earth. So, it's a 1000 year old morality play they learned in English literature class. Then there is the retribution part -- destroy the coral reefs, the oceans, the whales, the forests, NYC via rising sea levels, etc. Then there is the redemption -- suffering, sacrifice, self-denial. So, walk or ride bicycles, use electric cars (NYC liberals hate anything having to do with cars -- in Texas, Wyoming, and Montana they like cars). In this way the NYT creates a story and an audience for their story and then just keeps running such stories to feed their audience. They also make NYC liberals feel good. If you don't see this transparent manipulation, too bad -- it's what they've been doing for decades. You've been manipulated by some people who want your eyeballs, your money, your time, etc. What's going on with the temperature of the planet? No one knows. The record is totally clear -- the computer models have been wildly off. The models are far too much in agreement and far too far away from reality -- what the models predicted for now is much, much higher temperatures than we are seeing. Just why the models are wrong, no one knows. Maybe they got the Navier-Stokes equations right, or the sunspot data right, or the black body radiation right, or the convection right, or some such, but messed up on the biological effects, the oceans, or whatever. Maybe we are still slowly pulling out of The Little Ice Age. As we warm from The Little Ice age, we will also have to warm the oceans, and they are mostly 3 miles down and 7 miles or so over much of the Pacific; it might take a long time to warm the oceans from the cooling they got in The Little Ice Age. There is the NAS report that shows that from year 900 to year 1000, just before The Little Ice Age started, the temperature was increasing very rapidly, about the same as the past 100 years, and that increase had nothing to do with human generation of CO2. But, given their record, and their nonsense with extreme values, there's no way to trust the NYT. So, we need to get their data from other sources. They have to name the sources or we have to regard their writing as just drama. NASA? Sadly they may have been bent by Obama who wants global warming as one of his issues. While I hate the NYT, all I wrote about them was that they wanted people to get excited about extreme values, and there I was rock solidly correct. If you can't see this, then that's your problem.