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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 relea

by 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.

by mturmon 12y ago

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.