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NASA Releases Massive Climate Change Data Set
An anonymous reader writes: NASA is releasing global climate change projections to help scientists and planners better understand local and global effects of hazards. The data includes both historical measurements from around the world and simulated projections based on those measurements. "The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe." You can download them and look through the projections yourself at NASA's Climate Model Data Services page.
In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, ...
Raw data is available on line. Most people are too lazy to look for it and even if they got it they wouldn't have a clue how to use it. The techniques used to make the adjustments are all out in the open too. Again, most people are too lazy or lack the technical knowledge to fully understand the adjustment methodology.
Complaining about lack of raw data or hidden adjustment methodology just shows you haven't taken the time to even investigate if those claims are founded on anything and are relying on someone else telling you that is true.
Here are the links for Berkeley Earth which is one of the more straightforward web sites to track down the data:
Berkeley Earth - About the data set
Berkeley Earth - Source files
>Considering we don't know what the temperature will be tomorrow, or whether it will rain at my house, I'm pretty sure we don't know what the climate will be in 100 years. So, not settled in my book.
That's a ridiculously stupid claim to make. Climate is a LOT simpler than weather. Many, many orders of magnitude simpler. Why ? Because climate is an average.
If I ask you to predict the final results of a high school student randomly chosen, odds are you'd get it wrong almost every time.
If I give you a bunch of background information on him and his grades up until now, you'll get it right more often but almost never 100% for all subjects and there will still be outliers that surprize you.
Predicting a kid's final results is HARD -even with lots of data.
On the other hand - if I ask you to predict the average grade distribution for the state of New York for an entire high-school senior class and you say "It will be a normal-distribution" you will be right almost every time ! In fact, we're so confident in that outcome that if it's anything else that is - in and off itself - legally considered proof that there was large-scale cheating in the exam !
Same principle - even when it's VERY hard to predict a single data point, predicting an AVERAGE of those data points is far easier.
Climate is an average of weather over long periods (30 years typically). That's a LOT simpler to predict than the individual weather points that make it up.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
if they gave you the unadjusted data you would think global warming was 20% worse (warmer) than it is, because the overall effect of the adjustments has been to reduce the apparent warming shown in the data.
and again the whole "just give us the data" argument seems silly. I mean, sure, they could give it to you (indeed if you dig the data is out there).
but based on what precise qualifications will you be basing your second guessing ?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.