Slashdot Mirror
Surfacestations: NOAA Has Overestimated Land Surface Temperature Trends
New submitter BMOC writes "Anthony Watts of Surfacestations project (crowdsourced research) has finally yielded some discussion worthy results (PDF). He uses a siting classification system developed by Michel Leroy for Meteofrance in 1999 that was improved in 2010 to quantify the effect of heat sinks and sources within the thermometer viewshed by calculation of the area- weighted and distance-weighted impact of biasing elements to calculate both raw and gridded 30 year trends for each surveyed station, using temperature data from USHCNv2. His initial claims are that station siting is impacting the surface temperature record significantly, and NOAA adjustments are exacerbating that problem, not helping. Whether you agree with his results or not, recognize that this method of research is modern and worth your participation in the review. Poke holes in publicly sourced and presented research all you can, that's what makes this method useful."
Am I understanding you correctly here? "Because the foundation of the world's scientific knowledge has failed at times before, its worthless and we should trust random things written by people with no credentials that no experts in the field have reviewed as much as everything else"?
I just wrote on a napkin, "The world is flat". Clearly that's as good as peer-reviewed science because of Andrew Wakefield.
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
A few comments:
1 - He has published it, on the web, otherwise you would not be able to read it.
2 - Publishing something in a peer reviewed journal does not make something inherently better, or worse.
Peer review is not some kind of mystical spell that you cast on results to make them "scientific". Peer review simply means that peers, people working in the same fields as you, have gone over the results and agreed with them. Typically, two, to the author anonymous reviewers, go over the paper, after an editor has had a look to see that it is fit for the journal. You might be interested to know that neither Nature, nor Science practices such peer reviews. The editors of those journals accept or reject the papers themselves.
However, in any scientific field, there are only around 150 peers, Dunbar's number. When a field gets larger, it splits into several sub-disciplins. The big problem with the peer review system, both for results, and, very importantly for grant applications, is that all peers are in the same boat. So only results that generally agree with the field will be accepted. If a young brilliant scientist wants to publish results that show that the whole field is a dead loss, that there is no chance it will cure cancer and the like, he is unlikely to be published. He will not receive any grants for a proposal that sets out to prove that all of his peers should change profession, because the field is a dead end.
To fix the problems with peer review, we need competition. Independent funding from many different sources, and preferably none at all from governments. Terence Kealey discusses in a couple of books the empirical fact that for civilian research, for every dollar that the government provides, 1.25 dollars of private money disappears.
Borehole reconstructions are routinely done and consistent with other proxies as well as with the instrumental surface record.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
How can non peer reviewed talking points from 2009 debunk a non peer reviewed paper from 2012, building upon peer reviewed methods from 2010?
I'm not sure you understand the scientific method.
That's an interesting hypothesis but there's no evidence to support it either. Has "Global warming" become so politically charged that it is impossible for any descenting scientist to publish their rejected papers too? Because while I've often seen this claim of bias in publishing, there doesn't seem to any evidence to support it.
Just think about it, if there really were all kinds of papers rejected for political reasons, I'd think that a group like the Heartland Institute would channel some of their money into publishing their own "heretical" journal. I think the reason the Heartland Insitute hasn't done that, is because there's not enough rejected papers to make the endeavor worthwhile, let alone enough high-quality papers. They seem to use up their entire supply of dissenting opinions at their NIPCC conventions.
I suspect this argument is a manifestation of the False consensus effect. The rationale is: it's inconceivable that no scientists agree with my position, so therefore someone must be silencing them. It allows a person to maintain self-confidence in the face of evidence that says 97% of the scientists involved in research in this area agree with the basic premises of global warming (and 2% are unsure).
Fanatically anti-fanatical
"the 'we just don't know' crowd. Well, sorry, but that is not how science works" 1) The empiricist David Hume would beg to differ. 2) Even if that isn't how science works, it's how voting works and voters in the US don't believe AGW exists because of all the shenanigans (i.e. hockey stick graph, East Anglia emails, etc).