Slashdot Mirror
Blogger Finds Bug in NASA Global Warming Study?
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II." The article's assertion that there's a propaganda machine working on behalf of global warming theorists is outside the bounds of the data, which I think is interesting to note.
Obviously, dumping billions of tons of Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere is not a good idea, period. However, this refined data shows the warming trend in a more accurate light, and that is all to the good.
I see this as (yet another) great victory of the scientific method, and in this case, aided by a sharp-eyed blogger. The beauty and strength of scientific truth lies in its "weakness": its provisionality - things are only true until proven otherwise.
This is very good news.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Now really, that's taking it a bit far. I'm strongly opposed to young earth people, and what they claim is far and away more extreme than global warming deniers, who usually suggest something to the tune of natural climate cycles.
Gamertag: WyleType
....both sides have established a religious level of conviction of their position, and no compromise is possible or desired. Certainly intelligent discussion, moderate debate, and consensus are discouraged if not actually torpedoed by zealots of the Left and Right extremes.
Pretty much like every serious issue in American politics.
-Styopa
I've been told in no uncertain terms that I must BELIEVE in global warming and that man has caused it. Many of the Brethren have warned the unbelievers that they face arrest, scorn and treatment as if they were traitors, holocaust deniers and altogether evil less than human creatures that must be silenced at all costs. By presenting the other side of the argument, (which by the way, according to the Brethren there is no other side of the argument) these people are giving comfort to the enemy. If there are facts which cause doubt about the truth of global warming then those facts must be suppressed. It is for the good of all. Oh, and it's all George Bush's fault I've been told. And America's fault.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Numbers used in the debate about global warming were never questioned. The person who put together the algorithm never made the workings of the algorithm public (why not?). Yet there was no questioning the numbers.
Someone goes to the trouble of reverse engineering the algorithm, and finds a pretty obvious error. Yet you are picking on one sentence? Sheesh. I'd think you'd be jumping on the closed-sourced original scientist instead.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The original investigation and corrected data should have been linked, not that blog entry (which just reports it.)
In any case, the point is that NASAs data was wrong, and they have admitted to that and corrected it. (In some places; if you read the comments of the linked article, you can see that NASA still has some pages with the old data in it. Probably not maliciously, though, just an oversight.)
Comment of the year
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis.
Unless, that is, you've already made up your mind on the subject, in which case anything that supports your view will suffice as "proof".
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
"but this year has been pretty cool."
Global warming is just that - GLOBAL
You are making the common mistake of confusing weather with climate.
Thanks for the link to the blog article. It's a lot more interesting and substantial than the somewhat embarassing DailyTech article.
A lot of people have been criticizing the DailyTech article for the line "Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media." It should be noted that the original blog entry does not contain this or other indications of paranoia, and attributes the people involved in the discovery.
It's not a side jab. Real biology predicts actual observed behavior in biological systems. "Intelligent design" does not. People who study the facts and come up with scientific theories that are verifiable via observation are real scientists. People who speculate about an intelligent designer because the detail of the universe in their opinion is arbitrarily too complex to them or arbitrarily too finely tuned for human life are not being scientific. If "intelligent design" were in any way supported by objective facts , you'd find atheist scientists who would be confounded by it. They'd say, "I don't believe in a God but this stuff is clearly designed!!! Who did it, Xenu, the grays, Martians, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a giant black monolith?" You never ever find such a thing. Where are the "Intelligent design, Whodunit?" books by the nonreligious hard scientists? You'll never find an intelligent design proponent who doesn't have an a priori belief in a particular deity as designer. And since that belief is not founded on scientific principles it completely kicks the legs out from under any claims to scientific validity the "intelligent design" conjecture has. It's called assuming the antecedent.
re: "overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrailize western nations..."
n s
Ludicrous troll.
re: "Why else would the first world have to pay the third world for the 'right to pollute.'" (sic)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commo
To put it simply, because the benefits of processes which cause pollution, accrue to the individual or groups of individuals which create the pollution, but the costs of pollution are paid by all. Duh. Basic ethics.
Lots of global-warming research is closed source. Check out this discussion of a prominent paper in Nature, for example:
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a3200.htm
—when things were finally opened up, it was also discovered to be wrong.
Closed source and hidden data is the norm. It is wrong.
No, the numbers speak for themselves.
It took ten seconds to create a plot in gnuplot with the corrected data.
I was surprised at the results. They show a random scattering of occasional really warm years, and a massive, unmistakable, consistent warming trend since 1980.
This was not at all what I expected to see after reading TFA. Maybe that's why they don't plot the corrected data.
The funny thing is that Steve MacIntyre, the climate skeptic who identified the error, has a history of hyping models with even worse errors like degrees/radians confusion.
So both sides here are capable of making mistakes. The advantage of the mainstream climate community is its robustness. Both its data sources and its models are multiply redundant. This is not the case with the skeptics' criticisms.
The other difference between the sides is that every time the skeptical side finds anything they consider a flaw, no matter how niggling (e.g. a few poorly sited surface stations), they tout it to high heaven as evidence that global warming is WRONG WRONG WRONG. Frankly, that's the behavior of cranks, which is why I am sorely tempted to call them "denialists" rather than "skeptics."
" That's not a pleasant thought."
Yeah, but the CO2 - Temperature correlation is eliminated (at least for the US measurements), since you can't show a consistent upward trend in temperatures associated with the consistent upward trend in CO2 concentrations. So it's more like "gee it's been hot lately, but that's not anything new".
I am much less alarmed to learn that something scary happening now has also happened before and things turned out okay in the end.
Don't assume that just because YOU don't know or understand something, no one does. Read the IPCC reports. The impacts are well known, and its effects are already starting to materialize. Some examples of predicted effects:
- Migration north of insect-born diseases like Malaria
- Shifts in plant blooming patterns
- Shifts in plant growth and viability (check out how gardeners have to change the assessment of what kind of region they're in for plant growing purposes)
- Slow-down of North-Pacific current
- Reduction in ice-coverage in arctic and antarctic.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Hypothesis 1
Proportionally large changes in proportions of climate-involved gases in the atmosphere are having effects on climate. As these changes may threaten the continuation of our advanced civilization, we should closely study all available evidence and model the effects to the best of our abilities.
Hypothesis 2
Massive numbers of scientists who study climate have a secret agenda to bring down industrial civilization, and will fudge any and all data in order to convince the population to end industrial civilization before the sky falls in on us from the shaking of industry's engines.
Note the parallelism
Both hypotheses see a threat to civilization. According to the first, the threat is that the effects on climate from our activities may get away from us. According to the second, the threat is that if we listen to scientists and act prudently, they will concertedly lie to us to achieve the neo-Luddite political result in which we renounce most of our technological and economic means.
Note the absurdity
According to the 2nd hypothesis, scientists - who have been essential in developing our technologies - have now massively subscribed to the sort of anti-technology ideologies that are found in the fringes of some English departments. This is a matter which is easily amenable to sociological research. It would be trivial, really, to go out and, using solid, proven techniques, interview a broad sample of environmental scientists on their personal views of and affections towards technology. It is central to the deniers' case that scientists, as a block, hold anti-technological views. Yet anecdotally, every professional scientist I know (some in climatology) loves technology. Is the only reason that the deniers fail to conduct the basic sociological research to prove their hypothesis that they know from their own anecdotal experience that it would fail to support them?
Are they doing something worse than fudging the data: failing to collect it in an obvious place, because they know it would prove them massively wrong?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Look more closely at that (corrected) graph. In particularly, look at the year-on-year variability. The hot years in the 30's did indeed get very hot, but they were interspersed with cold years. No such thing happens in the late 90's and early 2000s - cold years in this latter period are all a lot warmer than almost any other cold years and in fact warmer than most years prior to 1930! This is another way of looking at what another poster was saying about ranking the 5 year running means, and is in fact the reason those running means are higher.