Slashdot Mirror
Journal Editor Resigns Over Flawed Global Warming Paper
Layzej writes "Remote Sensing Editor-in-Chief Wolfgang Wagner resigned earlier today (PDF) over a global warming study published in his journal that was said to cast doubt on global warming models but was later found to be flawed. Wagner stated that the paper most likely contained fundamental methodological errors and false claims. He further expressed dismay over how 'the authors and like-minded climate skeptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements.' The author of the paper, Dr. Roy Spencer, has responded to the resignation."
Climate Change is melting jobs!
They got to him!
I don't know why you guys argue about this. The world's gonna end in 2012 anyway, who cares about the climate?
Lemme guess, we're going to hear more about Al Gore, the pseudo-skeptics' favorite whipping boy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I am resigned to hyperbole... both for or against global warming.
...maybe that is a good idea...
... who cares?
But, to quit your job because you made a mistake would leave the banking industry with only janitors.
My take on global warming/non-warming
I was taught to not shit were I sleep.
Here is to hoping Fox jumps on this example of corruption and fraud in academia.
So, he resigned without bothering to find out for sure whether the paper in question contained fundamental methodological errors and/or false claims?
I can see resigning as editor because "I screwed up by allowing fundamentally unsound science into my magazine", but I have a hard time with resigning because it MIGHT have been bad (but he's not sure).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Well, they'll continue to quote it. For those people, science is about repeating something that someone smarter than you figured out. So, they don't care if it is discredited or flawed. That's also why you can troll them so easily with articles from The Onion.
I don't know why you guys argue about this. The world's gonna end in 2021 anyway, who cares about the climate?
The summary is wrong. Wagner did not say that the paper made false claims. According to his statement, he said:
"the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents."
He says the paper didn't address the views of opponents to his views. In response, the authors said
"But the paper WAS precisely addressing the scientific arguments made by our opponents, and showing why they are wrong! That was the paper’s starting point! We dealt with specifics, numbers, calculationswhile our critics only use generalities and talking points. There is no contest, as far as I can see, in this debate."
I don't know who's right. It sounds like politics getting in the way of science. Politics has no place in objective science. Conclusions need to be based on observations, not specific observations made to support a favored conclusion.
Well if I remember correctly Dr. Spencer's conclusions at best would have questioned whether some satellite imagery could detect the effects of global climate change; however his one paper was heralded by many to be the penultimate refutation of climate change supposedly negating the research of many, many scientists.
As an analogy in paleontology, scientists have assembled early hominids in terms of lineage based on techniques like carbon dating and skeleton features. They have made slight errors in the past on dates and relationships between hominids. An exaggeration would happen if a scientist with an Intelligent Design agenda questioned the dating on one of the hominids and then the ID community would proclaim that evolution has been disproven.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Major ice sheets are evaporating, and there's someone in the wild that says, "hay, this is normal, don't worry." And then another person says, "Hay, this is great publishing!" It's like being in a theater and someone yells, "Fire!" and then a chorus of voices blocking the Exits screams, "There is no Fire!"
Is this that list of censored words from the other day?
Just another political brickbat in the climatology-gravy train war at those who would so brazenly question the gravy or the recipe. No doubt some of Spencer's critics are acolytes and professors from the Al Gore School of Energy CONservation.
For most journals this wouldn't be an editor's fault, unless they used bad judgment choosing the reviewers, or ignored negative reviews and published it anyway.
Reviewers wouldn't resign because they're not part of the staff, but the editors should avoid inviting someone to review again if they passed a bad paper. (And that can happen for non-ideological reasons. It's really hard to get qualified people to invest the time required for a thorough review. I've gotten feedback where one reviewer wrote two pages and another wrote two sentences.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So it would appear. I guess the kids in that district are back to school, and testing the new system by commenting on slashdot.
Major ice sheets are evaporating, and there's someone in the wild that says, "hay, this is normal, don't worry." And then another person says, "Hay, this is great publishing!" It's like being in a theater and someone yells, "Fire!" and then a chorus of voices blocking the Exits screams, "There is no Fire!"
So who in this story is saying "Don't Worry" and who is "Blocking the Exits" ? I get the part about "Great Publishing" and "Fire" - end-of-the-world stories make great news. But the rest of your comment is way over my head ....
Anyone publishing anything to the contrary will be fired.
Retraction Watch has more on this.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Mike--
We did it! We redefined peer review! From now on reviewers with "climate sceptic notions" will be kept out of the process, despite their qualifications and proficiencies. Can I say Hallelujah? Hallelujah! This is a glorious day for Science!
his one paper was heralded by many to be the penultimate refutation of climate change
What would have been the final point that refuted climate change? Was there another paper planned?
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The paper in question was written by Roy Spencer. Aside from his views on climate change he's also a vocal proponent of intelligent design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Views_on_intelligent_design and what he calls "the theory of creation". While in a strict formal logic setting ad hominem attacks are not useful, they are a relevant heuristic to decide if someone knows what they are talking about. In this context, it seems pretty clear that Spencer lets his ideological allegiances dictate beliefs instead of careful scientific thinking. There's a certain point where you just stop assigning large amounts of weight to claims made by an individual because they've demonstrated repeated failure before. Spencer is past that point.
He is also an intelligent designer.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
For all the drama of the editor's resignation letter, he seems to be awfully vague about any actual flaws in the paper. Citing argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs as a reason not to publish it is like asserting that no pro-AGW papers should ever be printed because of wattsupwiththat.com.
Any relatively intelligent warmists want to break down for us specific flaws in the paper?
Major ice sheets are evaporating, and there's someone in the wild that says, "hay, this is normal, don't worry." And then another person says, "Hay, this is great publishing!" It's like being in a theater and someone yells, "Fire!" and then a chorus of voices blocking the Exits screams, "There is no Fire!"
Ever wonder why Greenland is named "Greenland"? Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea..
The following is taken from Desmogblog
Spencer and the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance”
Spencer is listed as a “scientific advisor” for an organization called the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” (ISA). According to their website, the ISA is “a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development.”
In July 2006, Spencer co-authored an ISA report refuting the work of another religious organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The ISA report was titled A Call to Truth, Prudence and Protection of the Poor: an Evangelical Response to Global Warming. Along with the report was a letter of endorsement signed by numerous representatives of various organizations, including 6 that have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.
Satellite Research Refuted
According to an August 12, 2005 New York Times article, Spencer, along with another well-known “skeptic,” John Christy, admitted they made a mistake in their satellite data research that they said demonstrated a cooling in the troposphere (the earth’s lowest layer of atmosphere). It turned out that the exact opposite was occurring and the troposphere was getting warmer.
“These papers should lay to rest once and for all the claims by John Christy and other global warming skeptics that a disagreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends means that there are problems with surface temperature records or with climate models,” said Alan Robock, a meteorologist at Rutgers University.
Spencer and the Heartland Institute
Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
The Heartland Institute has also received funding from Big Tobacco over the years and continues to make the claim that “anti-smoking advocates” are exaggerating the health threats of smoking.
Spencer and the George C. Marshall Institute
Spencer is listed as an “Expert” with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
Naomi Oreskes, who wrote Merchants of Doubt has quite a bit to say about the George C. Markshall Institute and their anti-science "scientific research."
CONGRATULATIONS, OBSCURITY, YOU ARE THE FIRST TO BE BANNED FROM THIS SITE. THE CHARGE IS EITHER (1) CHRONIC IGNORANCE, OR (2) MALICIOUS OBFUSCATION. YOUR CHOICE.
Reading the whole discussion is like watching the dick-waving comments go back and forth on Youtube, or like watching a transcript from a Bill O'Reilly episode where the guest speakers just yell at each other until someone gets their mic cut off.
This kind of petty bickering has got to stop if we're ever going to make any progress in this country again. We have to stop putting value in the antics of drama queens. It may have been cute in high school politics but this kind of crap is going to render our country irrelevant if it keeps going on much longer. (And for the pedants and assholes, I am American, so I use the term, "our country," to refer to the United States).
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
That is an incorrect analogy and it is also rather mischievous. You need to read Dr Spencer's refutation before you start throwing around the old and bottom numbingly boring "all AGW sceptics are creationists" meme. There's too much arm waving going on here.
Two words: Cripple Fight.
If only 'twere possible for them both to be wrong. Actually, I'd settle for "wrong for the right reasons" and vice versa, which I think is where we're about at.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's interesting to note that the intersection of the sets of AGW deniers and creationists is not a null set.
It is called Greenland because all the people in Iceland didn't want people immigrating to their island.
... You fail geography forever.
(Regardless of how factual the "false advertising" myth may or may not be, Greenland got its name barely a thousand years ago, which in terms of major climate cycles is last week.)
Just stick your head out the window. How many once in a hundred year storms, hurricanes and floods within a 10 to 15 year period do we need before we accept things are different? Hell how about in a single year! The Phoenix area is still running over a 110 degrees and it's September, It was 115 yesterday where I am and it's supposed to be nearly that until the middle of the month. Most of the anti global warming people are even admitting the change. Their position though is we didn't cause it, we can't change it either way so let's deregulate. We can play dualing papers until doomsday but the truth is on the 6:00 news. If the anti climate change people want to pray for something it shouldn't be deregulation it should be for New Orleans which right now has a monster tropical storm headed for it.
What an obviously falcious argument. Of course the climate goes through cycles.
Ever notice that people who smoke die? And so do people who don't smoke!! Case proven, smoking has nothing to do with health issues!!!!!
Resign vs. retract. Was the resignation due to a 'lazy' selection of reviewers on a politically hot (no pun intended) topic?
Are Spencer's results based on an allegedly "overly simplistic model"?
Lemme guess, we're going to hear more about Al Gore, the pseudo-skeptics' favorite whipping boy.
No, just that the consensus in 2000 to 2003 was that we'd continue warming and have ever-increasing amounts of hurricanes. And neither has happened. Now that reality has deviated from what the models said should happen, we should suspect the models are wrong and go back and look at the conclusions from those models...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
No more interesting than to note that the intersection of the sets of AGW doomsayers and creationists is not a null set.
That would probably be the recent CERN CLOUD paper that was also trumpeted as refuting anthropogenic climate change.
Yes the earth goes in cycles, however there is an increase of temperature OUTSIDE those cycles. That is man made climate change.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements"
You mean in much the same way climate change promoters exaggerate claims from other papers?
Actually, several recent studies have indicated the consensus in academic journals over the last 15 years has understated the actual effects both in terms of overall temperature change and cloud trends. I suppose you could argue there is no difference between a supposed scientist and author of a study on global warming and the press, but for those of us that pay more attention to scholarly journals than mainstream media sound bites, the difference is stark.
... has actually been discovered and revealed in this recent journal article just a couple weeks ago.
use a few Holocaust deniers and white supremacists instead? their reputations are a little bit higher.
Do you understand the concept of statistics? If I have a run of 5 heads when flipping a coin, does that automatically mean that the coin isn't random?
And if you're looking for predictions that came true, there are quite a few of them. One of the more obscure ones is that some of the botanical organizations had to update their maps of where certain species thrive - generally moving everything northward.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Popular fable in Brazil:
Once in a circus a lion escaped from its cage.
Amid the great confusion, with everybody sitting up and trying to leave, one man discovered the planks on which everybody seated had clamped the cloth of his trousers. He need people to sit down, so he could get free.
Then he yelled: "Sit down, it's a tame lion."
---
I simply cannot believe these lame warming deniers, to me they have special interest in Earth's long term damage.
PS: "Cloth". Yeah, right.
That almost all of thousands of papers dealing with global climate warming have dealt with the cause. You sir are full of shit. I understand you want to leverage your knowledge, but you've out leveraged yourself here: Archimedes is frowning at you.
"Ever wonder why Greenland is named 'Greenland'?"
Marketing.
We had folks telling us we'd have heating for the entire decade - and it didn't happen. We have Hansen on record as saying if warming doesn't kick back in by 2013 then all models need to be seriously re-evaluated. This isn't statistics, this is models simply not fitting the real world - no randomness about it.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Ever wonder why Greenland is named "Greenland"? Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea..
Actually, the likeliest and most often cited reason the place's obvious misnomer is because Erik the Red was trying to entice more Scandinavians to migrate there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#Norse_settlement
Not that I disagree with you about Earth's climate going through cycles.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
You don't have to be a creationist to be an AGW skeptic, but it helps.
Then again, you only need to work for a creationist, or oil company, and that's just as good.
I get a kick out of you guys who registered as Slashdot users a few days ago just to refute climate science. You even go to the trouble of making one, maybe two short little posts on a few other stories before you get to the real reason you came here.
Be honest - which of the "New Media Strategies" outfits do you work for? How well do they pay? There are three of you here in this one discussion, all who joined Slashdot within a few days just to post in the climate stories, all posting exactly the same tone in the same language, so I assume you're all the same guy. With the "yourmommycalled" username you didn't even bother to post comments to any story but the climate stories. I guess you're still learning the ropes. Is it hard to keep your usernames straight?
Look, I know it's hard to make a buck right now and recent grads are having a real hard time of it, but don't you feel a little bit like a shit for doing what you're doing? Like someone who's giving blowjobs for ten-spots in a bus station bathroom? Because that's kind of what it seems like to me. You might be a perfectly decent guy who just needed the work, but at some point, you've got start to think that there has to be better ways to make a living.
I wish you luck, friend. It can't be easy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I *so* agree with you. As "adults" we like to believe in all the crazy people out there, not aware that we /all/ suffer under the weight of delusions. The buddhists refer to this as the 2nd noble truth, which is part of the *core* buddhist teaching. (All buddhist teachings fit into the 4 nobles truths.) The origin of suffering *is* about false beliefs, and how they 'cause us to suffer in samsara forever.
Politics suffers under a chronic failure to listen, and the most puerile level of argumentation demands to be taken seriously, least one is accused of being an ideologue. In fact, accusation, guilt trips, misdirection, and claiming the morale high-ground is just how you get things done.
I guess this is why Plato talked about the Noble Lie, although I abhor the very notion.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea.."
yeah, and every single one of those cycles had specific physical causes. If technological civilization had been around, they would ahve figured out why.
We do have such knowledge and data now. We also know the specific cause, and we have ruled out all sorts of other causes.
You can't just say "whah it could be the purple flying monster effect" and "we don't know anything about climate", when the work of decades of scientists and the physical laws we know which predict successfully everything else we can measure about the planet say the same bleeping thing.
You need to show an alternative which has BETTER explanatory power and better empirical justification from measurements. Not just throw out "oh in the past climate changed" which is true, and the implication that if it's also changing now humans have no responsibility for it, which is preposterous.
It's like saying that because trees fell down in forests in the Jurassic, then a team of loggers with power saws can't be responsible for felling a forest grove, despite clear evidence from satellites that they were there, and they were using power tools, and the phsyics of the power tools has been discovered, and we measured the exhaust from the use of their power tools.
I.e. "Oh it could be a natural tree-falling-down-cycle!" is plainly idiotic. And this is EVERY BIT THE SAME as climate change denialism with our current state of knowledge.
Who did the review? Climate skeptics that are friends of the editor. How do you think they find reviewers?
For every study that says global warming is real there is funding behind it and researchers who need more funding to keep doing what they're doing. The same can be said for studies disproving global warming theories. At this point Occam's Razor could be applied. Is it more likely that humans are affecting the climate or is it more likely that Nature with far more power than humans have yet achieved is the cause?
There's more real science on Sanford & Son than there is in global climate change.
pretty soon you're talking Nature scale stuff.
Considering that 2005 and 2010 are tied for the warmest year on record (according to GISS) it's pretty hard to justify saying it hasn't warmed in the past decade.
I suspect these are already missing, because as of now, I'm not seeing anything resembling coherent arguments against the paper (just what seems like teenage angst). That might be due to the parent's supposed deletions, my not-a-climatologist partial ignorance, the confrontational nature of discussion on Spencer's blog, or any combination of the above..., so could someone please summarize?
I registered this account some months ago because the hotmail account linked to my previous slashdot account was hacked and I could not recover it after its password was changed. My previous account had excellent karma. This one doesn't only because whenever I post a comment sceptical of AGW movement's claims, it is modded "troll". This is really quite an extraordinary fact that should give you pause for thought, or at least a little humility.
Now I notice you make no reference to the actual claims in the original article. This is interesting in itself. How often do editors have to resign because they have let papers be published that others think have errors? Did the editor of Science resign when the paper referring to the use of arsenic by certain micro-organisms was published, even though it was quickly refuted? I think you know the answer to that, and you know why the editor of this journal had to resign too: pressure was put on him to do so because AGW isn't about science, it's about politics. And as it's about politics it doesn't deal with facts, it deals with opinions and my opinion is no less valid than yours.
So, Spencer is now the second person after Ron Paul, who always gets to be named with his full "Dr" title by his acolytes. Interesting.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Which professional climatologist is also an intellectual whore for the ID crowd like Spencer? Name one, please.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Redaction is the process of putting black bars over or otherwise removing information which remains classified when declassifying a document for release to the public. There isn't any classified information in the paper, and it was released to the public under a creative commons license, so redacting the document would just be silly.
"As the case presents itself now, the [peer review] editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors"
That would be actually be a good argument, if it wasn't for the case that the opposite (all reviewers sharing pro-AGW notions of the authors) is true on a very regular basis without this fact being considered grounds for criticism.
Did you read Wolfgang Wagner's resignation letter? There is no indication that he resigned other than as a matter of personal honor. It's pure speculation that he resigned because of pressure from anyone
Do you honestly believe that? I expect he was just fed up with the heat he was getting from certain people who want to keep anything contradicting their narrative out of the peer reviewed literature.
Interesting plot of global warming but it uses a 3rd order polynomial fit for the trend, instead of a straight line. What's the trend of the polynomial curve (which actually fits the data better than a straight line)? It's sinusoidal, and we're at the peak. This also fits with the prediction model by Prof. Don Easterbrook - who's been right about the warming in the 90s, flat-line in the 2000s and our start of a cooling trend.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We'll see, won't we. Too bad Dr Spencer can't take his graph back before 1979. I suspect it would break down pretty fast if he could.
I'd pay more attention to those things if they actually posed a physical mechanism for them. Right now it just looks like statistical manipulation to me.
We'll see, won't we. Too bad Dr Spencer can't take his graph back before 1979. I suspect it would break down pretty fast if he could.
Problem is, there aren't any satellite measurements prior to 1979 - most of the "data" used in climate change study are from proxies and are notoriously sketchy and variant.
I'd pay more attention to those things if they actually posed a physical mechanism for them. Right now it just looks like statistical manipulation to me.
That's what a lot of it is. Predicting temperature changes to hundredths of a degree accuracy when your proxies and thermometer measurements are accurate to a degree or more is just statistical wanking...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That was a total non-sequitur. What does this Spencer guy have to do with the fact that BOTH "AGW deniers" and "AGW doomsayers" have a non-null set intersection with creationists? That's right. None. Mangu told a half truth, which is a whole lie. His goal was to convince people that there was a stronger connection between two groups that just doesn't exists. You are trying to support his half truth (whole lie) by stating a fact (that I cannot support or deny, as I don't know this Spenser guy) that has nothing to do with Mangu's statement. That makes your statement also a half truth, and thus whole lie. And no, making a statement in the form of a question does not change the fact that it was a lie.
Spencer himself is a ID proponent, which pretty much rules him out of the science camp. That's the whole point here. The lies are to be found solidly in the other camp.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
What was the name of your previous account, the one where you lost your hotmail account password and could never recover it? And I'm curious: Why would you register this account "months ago" and not post a single comment until five days ago, immediately after the story about Hurricane Irene and it's relation to AGW? And are you claiming that "yourmommycalled" is not one of your accounts and that you don't work for a "new media strategies" company?
Is that what you think happened here? Do you believe that the fired editor only found out about the "errors" in the paper after it was published?
Despite your best efforts, and the best efforts of the energy industry, it's still about science. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such an extraordinary effort to smear the science, and to try to establish a reputable counter-argument to the science. After all this time, there still isn't a statistically significant number of real scientists who deny AGW. Mostly, it's a bunch of C minus students like Rick Perry and other know-nothings.
The interesting thing about the "political" aspects of AGW is that the deniers simply refuse to admit that they don't know. They don't have sufficient humility to simply say that they don't know and that they will honestly consider the huge consensus of people who ARE qualified. They simply discount the work of the entire field of climatology and they do it because THEY ARE STARTING FROM THEIR CONCLUSION. Believe it or not, the majority of climate scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide that they were going to push AGW. It's where the data took them. And from the very beginning, sensing the political implications of where this science would take society, the energy industry simply denied AGW the same way they denied that tobacco was harmful.
Ultimately, if the energy industry is so certain that there is no AGW, why does their long-range planning rely on the very models that they deny? When British Petroleum plans an off-shore platform, they take into consideration the inevitable increase in oceanic levels. When they plan for a land-based facility, they work from the assumption that AGW will change the availability of water in that area. They're saying "There is no AGW" while at the same time using AGW as part of their corporate strategy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The name of the account was "burnhard". This isn't the first comment I've posted. There must be something wrong with your research.
Also, now I bother to read some more of your obnoxious comment, "yourmommycalled" is absolutely fuck all to do with me. I had one account previously (burnhard) and this is the only account I have now. The idea that all sceptics are sock-puppets, or astro-turfers, or creationists, is one of the reasons I rarely visit slashdot to comment these days. You people talk about peer review and the scientific method as if it was completely divorced from the usual Human frailties of pride and greed. It isn't. I'm content to leave it at that because I know that this AGW fraud will eventually fall apart and you people will mince off back to your wattle and daub houses until needed for the next Great Environmental Disaster.
Spencer is irrelevant to the point. The fact that you are claiming he is shows by example that the lies are NOT solidly in the other camp.
I didn't say it was. The first comment you posted appears to have been on August 28.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I can only see comment moderations going back 15 days. Anything before that is not visible in the usual manner.
Problem is, there aren't any satellite measurements prior to 1979 - most of the "data" used in climate change study are from proxies and are notoriously sketchy and variant.
Yes, that's why I said it's too bad he couldn't take the graph back before 1979. Most of the data used in climate science are from the last 150 years. There are actual temperature measurements going back several hundred years and enough of them since around the mid 1800's for reasonable global temperature figures. Before that is considered paleoclimate which is only corroborating evidence. Proxies of course aren't as accurate but are still sufficient to show temperature trends and can be calibrated against the temperature records of the last 150 years.
When an average is constructed from combining many measurements it's reasonable to use a higher precision than the original measurements. That allows you to detect subtle changes in the data. For example if you have a series 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 the average is 52.67 but if the series is 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56 the average is 52.83. Both round to 53 but expressing them to 2 decimal places shows there is a difference between the two series. Statistically speaking that technique is validly used all of the time.
fixt
When an average is constructed from combining many measurements it's reasonable to use a higher precision than the original measurements. That allows you to detect subtle changes in the data. For example if you have a series 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 the average is 52.67 but if the series is 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56 the average is 52.83. Both round to 53 but expressing them to 2 decimal places shows there is a difference between the two series. Statistically speaking that technique is validly used all of the time.
Actually, no. The precision of your final average needs to be based upon the precision of the input values. Your average as listed above would be 52.67 +/- 1.0; if that was to track a change in temperature from 52.55 to 532.67, then difference - 0.12 - is well within the precision of your measurement. It is failure to include the precision that often leads to erroneous claims and results. Is the difference because of actual environmental changes, or from imprecise measurements? You cannot say because the assumed change is less than what you can measure.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The average of rolling a die is 3.5. If what you are saying is true then we would have to say the average is 4 which is not as precise at 3.5. There's a difference between a statistically derived number from a large number of samples and the individual samples that go into it.
Perhaps you need to read carefully. At no point did I imply Dr. Spencer was a creationist. I was using an analogy in that like AGW skeptics, creationists (and generally non-scientists) take corrections to science as proof that the science was completely wrong. For instance homo habilis was originally thought to be the predecessor to homo erectus. More recent studies has suggested that the two may have existed at the same time and shared a common ancestor. This more recent finding does not negate the general finding that both predate modern humans and that one of them may be the ancestor of humans. As in the case of Dr. Spencer, his one study questioning whether the one technique used in climate science was taken by AGW skeptics that the entire climate change science had been disproven and that all the other studies and observations made by other scientists had no meaning.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Redact
verb (used with object) 1. to put into suitable literary form; revise; edit.
If you edit a journal and issue a paper that you later determine should not be published, the editing out of that paper would be a redaction. It would also be a retraction, but redaction is perfectly appropriate.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.