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New Analysis Shows Lamar Smith's Accusations On Climate Data Are Wrong (arstechnica.com)
Layzej writes from a report via Ars Technica: In 2015, NOAA released version 4 of their marine temperature dataset called ERSST. The new dataset accounted for a known cooling bias introduced when ocean temperature measurements transitioned from being taken in ship engine intake valves to buoy-based measurements. The warming of the last couple decades increased ever so slightly in NOAA's new analysis. This was a red flag for U.S. House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX), who rejects the conclusions of climate science -- like the fact that the Earth's climate is warming. Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data. A new study, led by University of California Berkeley's Zeke Hausfather, does just that -- and Rep. Smith won't like these results, either. To test the NOAA dataset, Zeke's team created instrumentally homogeneous temperature records from sensors available only over the last couple decades. As it happens, the Argo float data, the buoy data, and the satellite data each hew closer to the updated dataset that NOAA used. The older version (3b) gives a global average that is too cool in recent years, growing to an offset of about 0.06 degrees Celsius. The researchers repeat this same analysis for two more major sea surface datasets that are used by the UK Met Office and the Japanese Meteorological Agency for their global temperature records. Both of those datasets also drift cooler than the comparison data, but less so than NOAA's old dataset.
(1) Who gives a fuck? Seriously. Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere - especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
(2) Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect? As I was taught: If you don't know your error, you haven't made a measurement. In this case the error could be even greater than the effect itself!
A comment: This paper is getting so much publicity I'm going to call BS on it for now. I expect someone like Steve McIntyre will rock up in a few months time after having analysed the data to show where they fucked up their analysis. By then nobody will care of course.
OK I'm done. Start down-voting my comment.
Why should he? Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real. So far we just have a gently upward trend starting about 400 years ago, very similar to the previous upward trends that were entirely natural.
If you disagree with the method used for correction of the valitidy of the bias claims, then attack those on their merits.
People have. They're labeled "deniers" and then told by the ivory tower elitists that they're "backwards rednecks." That does wonders to ensure that people will actually listen now doesn't it? It's just like the 15 odd years of the progressive left screaming that anyone who's for immigration law enforcement are racists. Or that anyone deviating from orthodoxy and Obama's policies are automatically a racist. Or demand that people who rape children in child grooming gangs are charged as rapists, and the law enforced. Instead the politicians pussyfoot around it for fear of being labeled racists, so do the police, so do crown offices and so on.
The left and academia dug their own fucking pit on this, people warned them. They doubled down, now they get to reap the rewards of it.
Om, nomnomnom...
No really, stop tickling my sides. Skeptical Science, a shill front organisation for rent-seeking environmentalists.
It does matter though, imho. It matters for reasons of integrity, especially public trust in science. Who's going to believe the next big scare and impress on their politicians to do something about it when the previous 120 scares proved to be shite.
Maybe AGW is happening, maybe it isn't.
Nobody cares because if we were to attempt to improve the Earth's climate, warming it up and adding CO2 is exactly what we'd do.
And even just on the face of it the notion that we could be dumping so many billions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere without any effect or consequence is just absurd.
Right. The consequence is more foliage, consuming and returning the equilibrium of CO2.
Has happened many times in the past going back millions of years, is happening now.
The real problem is, how will we possibly deal with the increase of chickens, as they continue to be hatched, and will by projecting the trend cover the entire face of the planet in a few decades? How, just how-handwringingly-how-even-if-we-buy-Gore-another-mansion, will we deal with this? Foxes or something? Get real. It's not like the environment is some kind of complex system like that.
The Republicans didn't really win all three in the sense that Americans voted for Republican candidates because these voters liked the Republican candidates. The Republicans won because the voters disliked the Democrat candidates far more, and their only practical option was to vote Republican.
Your attitude is a great example of why so many average Americans have come to despise the Democratic Party and the people associated with it.
Facts do matter to average Americans. But what they've gotten from Democrat environmentalist sorts is anything but facts. These average Americans are presented with questionable climate data, full of "adjustments" and other shenanigans like that, going back only a very short amount of time when it comes to geophysical time scales. Worse, time and time again we've heard doom and gloom scenarios from environmentalists that never come to pass, even as the situation allegedly gets worse and worse.
Environmentalists were loudly warning us about "global cooling" and an upcoming ice age during the 1960s and 1970s. Major cities were supposedly soon going to be under many feet of ice. When that failed to happen, then they switched to "global warming" in the 1980s and 1990s. Major cities were supposedly soon going to be under many feet of water from melted ice caps. When that didn't happen, they switched to the more general "climate change" in the 2000s and 2010s. For many Americans, especially older ones who have seen this whole thing play out, Democrat environmentalist sorts are crying wolf, and can't be trusted.
The first thing to do would to present actual facts. Avoid using data that has been massaged. Avoid making disastrous claims that don't come to pass. Avoid calling average Americans "idiots" and "retards" just because they don't implicitly believe everything you're claiming. Don't just ignore past climate change that was far more drastic than what we're seeing now, that happened tens of thousands if not millions of years before humans were capable of making any significant impact. Instead of showing total arrogance, try admitting that you don't have all of the facts, and stop claiming with certainty that humans are somehow responsible when they likely aren't.
Democrats should be smart enough to realize this on their own, but here's how it works, in case you guys can't figure it out on your own: if you treat average Americans like shit, especially when they're actually being quite reasonable, then you shouldn't expect them to like you, and you shouldn't expect them to support you, and you surely shouldn't expect them to trust you.
Average Americans don't like the Republicans. But when the only other viable choice is the Democrats, the Republicans look so much more appealing.
Given that environmentalists aren't productive in the sense that they're earning anything except what's given to them by frightened politicians from tax payers, I would have thought that was completely fucking obvious.