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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.
You're not going to convince an idiot by providing evidence that he doesn't understand.
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Bullshit.
It's the kind of obvious, blatant, easily disprovable but nonetheless convenient lie that leads to electing bullshit presidents.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/w...
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
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From where are you getting your figures?
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
That claims they're down 22% from 1990 levels.
Those exclude LULUCF (land use changes) - perhaps you have inclusive figures? (Although I'd be surprised if LULUCF could be bigger than the significant reductions in everything else.)
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
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.
Most people wouldn't understand the data if you clubbed them over the head with it. Doubly so for politicians with no scientific training. The problem in the argument is that one side of this argument isn't arguing with facts and is actually incentivized to demonize any data that contradicts their pre-determined conclusions. They see the argument in one of two ways (sometimes both). A) They see climate change data as a threat to their personal interests - usually financial ones. If you are a politician sponsored by a fossil fuel company, this threatens your self interest. B) They see the climate change argument as something coming from the Other. It's a tribal thing - that Other group supports it ergo it must be bad. Often they frame it as a conspiracy despite the absurdity of that statement.
So in either case you have people who have no incentive whatsoever to acknowledge the data because it threatens what they hold dear. Rationality plays no role in it. The best way to combat this is to frame the argument in such a way as to align their incentives with the data. Point out how much money there is to be made/saved by working on the problem. Put it front and center as an economic issue. Figure out how to align solutions to the problem with economic and political self interest. Until you do that you're going to have this problem of certain politically powerful factions sticking their fingers in their ears and getting in the way.
Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real.
You are wrong. It's not even really a debate among climate scientists at this point. So far all the data seems to clearly show that humans are a key factor in recent climate change. 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. If you want to argue that we are still pinning down the exact extent of the effect of our activities then you might have an argument. But to pretend that our activities have had no effect on global climate is ridiculous.
That said, it doesn't really matter anyway. Even if hypothetically speaking humans weren't responsible at all for climate change we still would need to take action to deal with the reality of it. It's going to affect food supplies, energy resources, ecosystems, pollution, geopolitics, etc. The US Department of Defense (hardly a bastion of liberal thinking) considers it real and a significant threat to national security.
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.
Yeah sorry but the data is just a tad more complicated than your little made up and cherry picked sound bite.
Right. During the late 20th century, ocean temperatures readings were primarily taken mechanically through an “engine-intake valve.” Ships pump water into their hull in order to cool the engine room, and a thermometer measures its temperature on the way. This can introduce bias to the numbers, though: Because engine rooms get hot, engine-intake-valve readings are skewed warmer than the actual ocean.
Whereas 95 percent of NOAA’s readings came from ship engine rooms in the early 1990s, 85 percent now come from buoys, which provide a more accurate reading. It turns out that if you don't account for that known bias you get a result that is less accurate.
No.
Over time the proportion of data contributed by taking measurements on ships has decreased.
NOAA said "hey guys, this has introduced a systematic error into the data and we need to adjust for it"
Other scientists were skeptical.
This group decided to test it. So they took several independent data sets that each used just one measurement so that each dataset is internally consistent.
They then discovered that all the data sets matched the NOAA adjusted combined data better than the previous unadjusted data.
What their work indicates is that the slow migration from ship thermometer to buoy, satellite etc has hidden an extra 0.06C/decade of warming - and that the warming rate over the last several decades is much closer to the rate over the previous decades than was thought.
(It should be pointed out that some statisticians don't accept that there was any statistically significant change in the warming rate over the last several decades even when using the pre NOAA (3b) data. My statistical knowledge isn't sufficient to be able to independently do the changepoint analysis necessary to confirm or refute this)
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
The evaluation was performed by a third party that is not associated with NOAA. In fact, lead author Zeke is associated with the Berkeley BEST skeptics that were once the darlings of the climate contrarian movement - until the results of their audit were released and ended up confirming the consensus position.
Regarding the graph, what you are looking at is the difference between the reference and the reconstruction. A negative trend means the reconstruction is lower than the reference. A positive trend means that the reconstruction is higher than the reference. A zero trend means that the reconstruction is bang on. You'll notice that the ERSSTv4 matches the instrumentally homogeneous reference datasets quite well. That's a good thing!
And the odds of a global conspiracy with thousands (if not 10s of thousands) of actors? LoL
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1732/
>I don't know and neither do you
Yes... we do... because only one of the two options is even POSSIBLE. The other is literally declared impossible by Newton's first law and ALL THREE laws of thermodynamics. Put a ship engine intake thermometer and a buoy thermometer in the same water - it's physically impossible that the ship will NOT measure hotter than the buoy. Because those heaters, engines, people - all those things PRODUCE ENERGY. And energy cannot be destroyed, it cannot dissapear. It's there and it WILL affect the measurement.
Luckily we DO know exactly by how MUCH it affects it - because we DO have buoy's to compare it with.
> I mean I may be thick as a stick in a bucket of pig-shit
There's no may be about it, but congratulations on the closest to true thing you've said all day (it would have been entirely true if you replaced 'may be' with 'am').
>I do at least know these kinds of statistical shenanigans are usually bollocks.
There was nothing statistical about this - and besides which, no they NEVER are - but professional liars like Steve Mcntyre will write screeds declaring the statistics invalid. Not because it is - because he is flat out lying to you about what the numbers mean (or even, on occasion, what those numbers ARE). It's not that he doesn't understand the statistics, he has the training and he does. It's that he knows YOU DO NOT. So he knows if how to tell a convincing lie. And you fall for it.
Probably because of the above stated stick in a bucket of pig-shit problem.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No. Therefore DESPITE NO HEATING FROM THE GLASS, the greenhouse heats up.
And therefore one of the simplest and dumbest denier memes "how can it make"things warmer? That breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" is shown to be bollocks.
You see, if it were NOT proposed as an ANALOGY (look the word up, moron), your "complaint" that greenhouse glass isn't made of CO2 would stand up. But it isn't and it doesn't.
The proof of AGW is
1) CO2 causes heat to be trapped
2) If the sun's output remains the same, the earth will warm
3) We are burning fossil fuels, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere
The greenhouse is an analogy.
The greenhouse effect is the effect, and no greenhouses are required.
On one hand the per capita CO2 emitted HAS increased from 4.3 tons per person in 1990 to 4.9 tons per person in 2014. This suggests that the world doesn't care.
On the other hand the world is far wealthier than it was twenty-five years ago. If you look at CO2 per dollar of purchasing power (PPP GDP), the world reduced it's CO2 emissions per dollar by fifty-six percent. The per dollar of GDP emissions have declined most markedly in ... Europe. The major industrial countries of Europe scored per dollar reductions on the order of 60% - 80%. (UK 600 g/$ --> 200; France 367 g/$ --> 129; Germany 560->208; Denmar 597->148; UK 557->182). Most European countries emit less CO2 per person, in the cases of the largest industrialized countries (UK, France, Germany) dramatically so. Italy is the only industrialized country to score large increases in C02 over that period.
SO here's the TL;DR: the world has tried and succeeded at becoming dramatically more carbon efficient -- about 2x as efficient on a dollar basis. That efficiency gain have not kept up with a Gross World Product that has more than doubled, and a population increase of over 1/3.
There's a world of difference between doing nothing and not doing quite enough to solve the problem. What we have done is push a number of climate change consequences further into the future, and that makes a big difference. For many of us it means not living to see those changes.
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No really, stop tickling my sides. Skeptical Science, a shill front organisation for rent-seeking environmentalists.
Even if that is true it doesn't mean the data they are presenting is wrong. Prove the data wrong or shut up and go away.
It does matter though, imho. It matters for reasons of integrity, especially public trust in science.
The only lack of integrity is coming from the climate change deniers. They refuse to engage in a honest debate about or honest analysis of the evidence. Many of them have clear conflicts of interest (fossil fuel industry ties, etc) and don't even pretend to hide them. All the scientists are doing is presenting the evidence which is mountainous in volume at this point and growing all the time. If the climate deniers had an actual evidence based case they could easily cut through the BS by presenting actual evidence contradicting the current science models. They have no such evidence so they are making a political argument instead of a scientific one.
Exactly, just because you are doing science does mean you abandon common sense. Most would call me a climate skeptic, but even I will admit there has been a warming trend over the period we have been taking actual measurements. Its not credible to assume a massive conspiracy exists to distort measurements. When the was suggestion of such it was investigated and debunked.
I also know based on other day to day encounters with the observable universe that at least on the atomic/chemical scale I occupy thermodynamics is a reality. Finally I know trends are well trends, they continue unless there is a reason for them them to not continue. So when someone argues there as a been a pause in the warming trend the correct response is actually skepticism. A pause would be caused by something, so there are two possibilities we don't know the cause of the pause or the measurements are not correct. Since the measurement methodology was changed that should be the FIRST place we look. Here the interesting thing isn't the absolute values but the deltas. Allowing for some noise in the older measurements we see similar deltas in the data gather in the new measurements, the correct conclusion is the older absolute values are off but the deltas are probably still accurate.
Think of this way, you have two thermometers in a room, one reads 68F the other 70F you turn the heat on and observe the readings again 30min later. The first now reads 70F the second now reads 72F. You can be pretty certain the room is 2F warmer than before, you might guess the actual temperature is 71F but your confidence in that should be low.
There is a reasonable debate to be had about:
1) Are human activities the primary driver of climate change or are other factors playing a more significant role
2) Are these changes really outside the normal range our planet and ecosystem have experienced in the past
2a) if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range
3) Is this a good or bad thing, in terms of our own best interest?
3a) how do you define 'our'
Those are the real questions where climate change is concerned, not that it has changed since the start of the industrial era or that it is changing.
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In other words, it's politicized.
The climate deniers are the one's making it political. But because they have that's the reality we have to deal with. We can pretend it isn't political or we can deal with the fact that it is and get on with fixing the problem.
Also, I would argue that neither side is actually arguing with facts.
Nonsense. The scientists are arguing with almost nothing BUT facts. The fact that a bunch of mostly right wing fossil fuel shills are standing in the way of those facts is plain enough to see. One side has facts and scientific data. The other has economic self interest and little else. The notion that both sides aren't arguing with facts is just nonsense.
Not so funny if you know how scientists think and communicate.
Most of us live in a world where overstatement and oversimplification rule. Politicians certainly do it, but don't forget advertisers. Take that advertisement that says "Four out of five dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." We know it's bullshit, which is not quite the same as saying it is untrue. Four out of five neurosurgeons probably recommend .22 caliber bullets for their patients that shoot themselves in the head.
Scientists don't communicate that way. My wife is a geophysicist who's believed in AGW since the mid 80s. Yet she's never been happy with the state of the data. Her trained response to something clear as night and day is to point out you've neglected to mention civil and nautical twilight. Although she expected the warming trend of the 90s to happen, the unequivocal nature of the data really irked her because data is supposed to be more contradictory than that.
So it boils down to this: a politician won't change his mind unless the evidence is unequivocal, a scientist is reluctant to change his mind unless there is data to support both sides of a question.
This means there is a huge incentive for a scientist to understate their results and make them seem more equivocal. Faced with a very large and dramatic effect, initial scientific reports will almost always understate it. That's because you have to give every possible benefit of the doubt to the null hypothesis.
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All of that data is freely available. Why aren't you doing your own analysis on it?
And if you ask me where to find it and how to analyze it, you can just fuck off. Because you are obviously not smart enough to do it, no matter how much you want to. The data is easy enough to find, but it turns out that science and statistics are hard, and the vast majority of the population isn't smart enough and doesn't have the skill-set to do anything meaningful with the data.
Let's see those e-mails.
Oh yes, right, those emails that have the tens and hundreds of gigabyte data sets attached to them. That's how scientists transfer their data, right? Just like I transfer my spreadsheets.
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