But without actual quality control that works (ie following consistent standards) your actual data quality approximates a random number and as far as public policy decisions go, the data becomes crap, unreliable to the point of uselessness whether it is correct or not. This is false. There are plenty of independent reasons to believe that the data is not crap, and the implications about siting quality are themselves tenuous at best.
You're "sure specified siting requirements are far more conservative than is necessary" but you don't actually provide any evidence that they are. Any specification is conservative, by its nature: you over-engineer.
Essentially you're making an argument that the standard doesn't much matter No, I'm making an argument a violation of siting standards doesn't imply that the temperature data is automatically invalid.
How committed are you to salvaging this data set regardless of the effects on your own reputation? Are you addressing me, or Hansen?
Forensically, a team should be assembled to see how bad the damage is and how much of the data is salvageable but that's a separate issue. As I noted, that is (part of) the purpose of the Climate Reference Network.
And that's funny liar, if that's true, then why did YOU say I didn't call YOU a hypocrite? Because, you didn't literally say that. You merely said something equivalent to it. You're just not smart enough to understand the difference. Or rather, you do know that you called me a hypocrite, and want to resort to semantic gymnastics to distract from your failed arguments about science funding.
But hey, let's see how long we can keep this going. I want to see how many puerile jeers I can elicit from you in lieu of cogent arguments about biases in AGW research. Maybe you can spend all day avoiding the point.
Which one is the lie liar? You are, as you're poorly attempting to use "retarded 5-year-old logic" to argue that "Your views are hypocritical" isn't equivalent to explicitly saying "You are a hypocrite". But hey, if you want to keep looking like a bozo, keep at it, man. Maybe with enough legalistic hairsplitting you can convince yourself you're not an idiot.
In other words, you can't refute it, so it's irrelevant. In other words, it's got nothing to do with anything being discussed on the thread. You have utterly failed to prove any monetary influence on AGW conclusions.
The partitioning of the pre and post 2000 data has to do with the USHCN network in the U.S., not with any other country. You're frankly being absurd. It's a totally independent data set using totally independent analysis code. It's like a physicist making a sign error in a calculation, and arguing that all physicists everywhere need to recheck all their calculations for sign errors.
The point is that when the outsider fact checker gets one right and the insiders acknowledge it, the healthy response for the insiders is to take a bit of time and check everything else that might be affected by the same problem. But the insiders aren't doing that. As I noted in my response to you, this error is just the U.S. because GISS doesn't control any of the data sets in other countries. It's not a case of other countries all using the same flawed algorithm, it was just a matter of GISS feeding the wrong data to their algorithm.
This is the kind of accuracy that is present in your though process. It shows in your posts. Arguing with you is like arguing with a retarded 5-year-old. You called me a hypocrite. Deal with it.
I made a very clear point Which is provably irrelevant to anything being argued here, but you refuse to admit it. Next.
You didn't refute a single thing I said I didn't "refute" it, I just showed that it didn't support the point that the conclusions of AGW scientist are being biased by funding sources. It other words, it's irrelevant.
as you already admitted, you aren't reading what I say I admitted no such thing. You called me a hypocrite, I read it, you won't admit it.
On the study, you're referring, I think, to Colaprete et al, published in Nature (12 May 2005) No, I was referring to Fenton et al. in Nature (5 April 2007). They do have a comparable grid size (5x6 degrees).
One thing it will certainly change is that people won't be whining about how data isn't checked. That won't "certainly" change; I think it's the main point of contention. Sure, grassroots efforts can provide some extra checks, but there's only so much work that can go into checking previous studies. To robustly check data would require independently redoing from scratch every important study, and arguably there isn't enough expertise and manpower around to essentially duplicate the efforts of the scientific community.
You become a professional statistician by being paid to do statistics. What you're talking about are his academic credentials. Someone who does some statistics as part of one's job is not a professional statistician either (for the same reason that Hansen is not a professional statistician). A professional statistician is someone who ONLY does statistics. Hell, McIntyre for the most part has been a mining director, not a practicing statistician.
McIntyre's sheepskins say pure mathematics, philosophy, politics, and economics much as Hansen's say physics, mathematics, and astronomy. For the Nth time, my remarks weren't about Hansen or whether McIntyre is right. Drop the knee jerk defensiveness and read what the hell I'm saying. They were merely about the fact that McIntyre is not a professional statistician. You want to argue about public disclosure or whatever, go argue somewhere else.
Once again, I agree that McIntyre's analysis was right. I was merely responding to your illegitimate appeal to authority: "A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise." McIntyre isn't a professional statistician and does not necessarily have any more expertise in "cutting edge statistical analysis" than a climate scientist like Hansen.
So you're trying to claim scientists don't get corrupted by money? Right, STFU with that, no one's buying. Look, you jackass, I'm saying that the NSF and other standard funding sources don't actually offer scientists money to prove AGW (and in fact would withhold funding from anyone who says he's going to), so your point is irrelevant.
And then, please quote where I called YOU a hypocrite. "It never ceases to amaze me how hard you people try to rationalize your viewpoints, no matter how ridiculous and hypocritical you look in the process. Like you did right there."
Ok, you never called me a hypocrite, you merely called my viewpoints hypocritical.
As to your points, I don't give a fuck about them. They don't matter to my point, and I really don't care to hear your ideas on the subject. In other words, your point is trivially disproven but you don't want to admit it and refuse to even consider the possibility that your point is stupid.
As suggested above, you obviously don't know how to read. The original post nowhere claimed that scientific data should be hidden, merely that widespread peer review won't change anything.
Hansen isn't a statistician. I never claimed he was.
Hansen's acknowledged the error in this controversy so McIntyre's work quality is not at issue in this case. I didn't say McIntyre was wrong; he obviously is right, and Hansen admitted it. I merely said that McIntyre wasn't a professional statistician, and that the other poster was being an idiot for respecting the statistical analyses of non-statisticians over statisticians as a general principle.
And no one anywhere claimed as much. The fact that you have to resort to this kind of hyperbole speaks to the strength of your point. The original poster claimed that "You're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source". I pointed out that scientists do not actually get together and agree on what conclusions they're going to tell their funding sources, so this criticism is off the mark. It is merely a conspiracy theory with no basis in the realities of scientific funding.
The time honored refrain of the hypocrite. "Nuh-uhhhh...Nu-uhhh..." Your continued inability to actually point out any hypocrisy on my part speaks for itself; your argument is nothing but "Yuh-huh... yuh-huh..."
Pretending that studies that diagree with your viewpoint are poisoned because of it is moronic. On the contrary, the moronic oil-funded studies which have been produced are the best evidence that oil-funded studies tend to produce wrong conclusions.
People bend their ethics in the presence of money. And for the second time you ignore the basic fact that funding sources do not actually give funding for which CONCLUSION is going to be reached, and in fact would REJECT any funding request for a study which claims it intends to either support or contradict AGW.
In fact, the US is aggressively cleaning up it's environmental footprint. Not in every key area, however. For instance, it has not required that new coal power plants utilize the cleanest technologies now available. Coal plants are among the largest emitters of CO2 in this country, the plants being built today are likely going to be in operation for many decades, and retrofitting is much more expensive than building the technology in from the start. Even more than trying to convert to nuclear power right away, we need to make sure new conventional plants are as clean as possible.
What's not needed is heavy-handed government intervention and wealth redistribution. Ah yes, the libertarian resonse: everything can be solved by the free market and any kind of government coordinated effort is "heavy-handed wealth redistribution".
Technological advance is only part of the solution. In order for even the free market to work, it needs to be aware of the true cost of carbon. Right now carbon is an externality in the market: how much or how little you emit is economically irrelevant. That has to change. Once the market is aware of the cost of carbon — and that basically boils down to either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax — only then can we expect efficient solutions. And that's not going to happen without government policy.
You said they get paid LOW SALARIES" and I showed you were wrong. No, he said RELATIVELY low salaries, and said that this was respect to corporate research scientists, not your silly strawman of policemen. The point, you will recall, is that climate scientists aren't in it for the money: they could easily be making more money outside of academia, or for that matter outside of climate science.
The points in that article are useful, but fail to address the concerns raised by the likes of Freeman Dyson as to the reliability of our current models. Dyson never raised any specific concerns about the reliability of current models, just vague handwaving.
It's certainly true that, say, cloud parametrizations are a limitation of the models, but there's a big difference between "doesn't get everything right" and "is completely untrustworthy". Even GCMs from 20 years ago have done a decent job at predicting the future. Feedbacks contribute the greatest uncertainty to GCM predictions, which is why those predictions have error bars, but you can't get extremely far from the mainstream predictions without making some very questionable assumptions. I'm not saying that it's impossible that the basic prediction of future warming will change, but generic FUD about "models are untrustworthy" are not useful: you have to quantify the range of probable error.
The problem is that we don't understand much about how [CO2] impacts the Earth's climate. This is disingenuous. We don't understand everything, but we understand a great deal. (Your example below, by the way, does not concern CO2's impact, but rather land use change.)
For example (and this is only an example for sake of the more abstract discussion of the models), I'm not aware of any model that takes ground-cover water vapor into account. GCMs take into account water vapor from terrestrial vegetation, but do not include water vapor from irrigation. The issue has been studied, however; see, for instance, here. The authors found that there is not much impact on the global climate, but there can be significant impacts on regional climates where there is large land use change. They found that the greenhouse effect of agricultural water vapor is negligible; the main climate effect comes from changes to surface heat fluxes, which reduce warming rather than adding to it. They summarize that while the effect is not significant to the global climate, it may be significant as far as crop production is concerned.
Is this related to warming? Perhaps, but the more important question is: why are we so quick to assume that we understand the relationship between humans and climate when we're still at such an early stage of our understanding of the climate? This misses the point. We do not assume we understand everything about the climate. We don't, and never will. All models are wrong, but some are useful. There is great uncertainty about many climate predictions, yet those predictions when compared to observations are still accurate enough to be useful from a policy perspective, as surmised from several decades of intensive study.
It never ceases to amaze me how delusional and out of contact with the actual practice of science people are. The reality of scientific funding has nothing to do with the fantasy wherein scientists get together in smoke-filled back rooms and privately decide what conclusions they're going to reach before they apply for grants. As I noted, funding agencies don't ask what conclusion you intend to support AT ALL, and in fact will not fund a proposal that claims to know what conclusions it will arrive at before performing the study! Grant proposals do not state what the study will conclude.
There is nothing hypocritical about what I said. Unlike, say, the NSF, oil companies do fund studies which reach pre-determined conclusions. And I stated that there are also perfectly legitimate contrarian papers, which are funded by perfectly legitimate sources (like the NSF) — further disproving the ridiculous idea that you can only get funding for "politically acceptable" conclusions.
The agreement of the surface stations with two independent satellite temperature records, as well as other temperature proxies, suggests that any errors present in the surface record are minimal at best.
My statement applies only to the global record, however. It's still possible that the U.S. record could have some significant problems (though I doubt it, for various reasons I've gone into elsewhere in this thread). But it won't change any basic conclusions about global warming in general.
the last D-O event is loosely spoken of as an ice-age and the events are characterized by rapid temperature changes. As I said, D-O events are rapid, and if you want to be speaking of "rapid climate change", you should be talking about them, not ice ages, which are not that rapid.
That being said, D-O events have nothing to do with the current climate change.
Mann's hockey stick graph of current temperature changes has been debunked (some believe) or at least seriously questioned by a number of researchers - in other words temperature changes are probably not occuring at the rate originally suggested. On the contrary, the current rate of change is the best upheld part of the hockey stick, as reaffirmed by both the NRC and NAS reviews. It's the very earliest temperatures that are in question. Those reviews noted that there is no evidence for temperature changes as large/rapid as the current change, although they said that the amount of time over which you can compare is not as long as Mann claimed.
The National Academy follow up was ambiguous regarding Mann's claims about the recent decade being the hottest on record. That's true of that decade, but they were quite unambiguous about the 20th century warming trend in general.
There are differences of opinion regarding the recent little ice age. There appears to be 3 to 4 minima with the most extreme occuring in the 1700s. All of them agree that the overall extent was several centuries, not "50 years", and none of them find support for a rate of change as rapid as the second half of the 20th century.
We have models that predict past activity, but they have so far failed to accurately predict future activity accurately. What's your basis for that statement? See here, here. Sure, they're not perfect, but they're accurate enough to be informing policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Eight.
"Which one of those statements was a lie?"
As noted above, neither.
Seven.
As noted above, neither. You called me a hypocrite, just without using those words in that order.
That's five, by my count. Care to go for six?
But hey, let's see how long we can keep this going. I want to see how many puerile jeers I can elicit from you in lieu of cogent arguments about biases in AGW research. Maybe you can spend all day avoiding the point.
The partitioning of the pre and post 2000 data has to do with the USHCN network in the U.S., not with any other country. You're frankly being absurd. It's a totally independent data set using totally independent analysis code. It's like a physicist making a sign error in a calculation, and arguing that all physicists everywhere need to recheck all their calculations for sign errors.
Sorry, I didn't think it was you. I got the threading mixed up and thought Evilest Doer's response was to the AC, not to you.
Once again, I agree that McIntyre's analysis was right. I was merely responding to your illegitimate appeal to authority: "A professional statistician (which is what McIntyre is) might not be able to check the underlying science but he might be better than the original climate scientist in applying cutting edge statistical analysis because that's *his* expertise." McIntyre isn't a professional statistician and does not necessarily have any more expertise in "cutting edge statistical analysis" than a climate scientist like Hansen.
Ok, you never called me a hypocrite, you merely called my viewpoints hypocritical. As to your points, I don't give a fuck about them. They don't matter to my point, and I really don't care to hear your ideas on the subject. In other words, your point is trivially disproven but you don't want to admit it and refuse to even consider the possibility that your point is stupid.
As suggested above, you obviously don't know how to read. The original post nowhere claimed that scientific data should be hidden, merely that widespread peer review won't change anything.
Technological advance is only part of the solution. In order for even the free market to work, it needs to be aware of the true cost of carbon. Right now carbon is an externality in the market: how much or how little you emit is economically irrelevant. That has to change. Once the market is aware of the cost of carbon — and that basically boils down to either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax — only then can we expect efficient solutions. And that's not going to happen without government policy.
It's certainly true that, say, cloud parametrizations are a limitation of the models, but there's a big difference between "doesn't get everything right" and "is completely untrustworthy". Even GCMs from 20 years ago have done a decent job at predicting the future. Feedbacks contribute the greatest uncertainty to GCM predictions, which is why those predictions have error bars, but you can't get extremely far from the mainstream predictions without making some very questionable assumptions. I'm not saying that it's impossible that the basic prediction of future warming will change, but generic FUD about "models are untrustworthy" are not useful: you have to quantify the range of probable error. The problem is that we don't understand much about how [CO2] impacts the Earth's climate. This is disingenuous. We don't understand everything, but we understand a great deal. (Your example below, by the way, does not concern CO2's impact, but rather land use change.) For example (and this is only an example for sake of the more abstract discussion of the models), I'm not aware of any model that takes ground-cover water vapor into account. GCMs take into account water vapor from terrestrial vegetation, but do not include water vapor from irrigation. The issue has been studied, however; see, for instance, here. The authors found that there is not much impact on the global climate, but there can be significant impacts on regional climates where there is large land use change. They found that the greenhouse effect of agricultural water vapor is negligible; the main climate effect comes from changes to surface heat fluxes, which reduce warming rather than adding to it. They summarize that while the effect is not significant to the global climate, it may be significant as far as crop production is concerned. Is this related to warming? Perhaps, but the more important question is: why are we so quick to assume that we understand the relationship between humans and climate when we're still at such an early stage of our understanding of the climate? This misses the point. We do not assume we understand everything about the climate. We don't, and never will. All models are wrong, but some are useful. There is great uncertainty about many climate predictions, yet those predictions when compared to observations are still accurate enough to be useful from a policy perspective, as surmised from several decades of intensive study.
It never ceases to amaze me how delusional and out of contact with the actual practice of science people are. The reality of scientific funding has nothing to do with the fantasy wherein scientists get together in smoke-filled back rooms and privately decide what conclusions they're going to reach before they apply for grants. As I noted, funding agencies don't ask what conclusion you intend to support AT ALL, and in fact will not fund a proposal that claims to know what conclusions it will arrive at before performing the study! Grant proposals do not state what the study will conclude.
There is nothing hypocritical about what I said. Unlike, say, the NSF, oil companies do fund studies which reach pre-determined conclusions. And I stated that there are also perfectly legitimate contrarian papers, which are funded by perfectly legitimate sources (like the NSF) — further disproving the ridiculous idea that you can only get funding for "politically acceptable" conclusions.
The agreement of the surface stations with two independent satellite temperature records, as well as other temperature proxies, suggests that any errors present in the surface record are minimal at best.
My statement applies only to the global record, however. It's still possible that the U.S. record could have some significant problems (though I doubt it, for various reasons I've gone into elsewhere in this thread). But it won't change any basic conclusions about global warming in general.
That being said, D-O events have nothing to do with the current climate change. Mann's hockey stick graph of current temperature changes has been debunked (some believe) or at least seriously questioned by a number of researchers - in other words temperature changes are probably not occuring at the rate originally suggested. On the contrary, the current rate of change is the best upheld part of the hockey stick, as reaffirmed by both the NRC and NAS reviews. It's the very earliest temperatures that are in question. Those reviews noted that there is no evidence for temperature changes as large/rapid as the current change, although they said that the amount of time over which you can compare is not as long as Mann claimed. The National Academy follow up was ambiguous regarding Mann's claims about the recent decade being the hottest on record. That's true of that decade, but they were quite unambiguous about the 20th century warming trend in general. There are differences of opinion regarding the recent little ice age. There appears to be 3 to 4 minima with the most extreme occuring in the 1700s. All of them agree that the overall extent was several centuries, not "50 years", and none of them find support for a rate of change as rapid as the second half of the 20th century.