Gays want to have their cake and eat it too. If homosexuality is inborn, cannot be chosen, then one can test for it and abort the gays in a eugenic fit of madness. Gays, quite rightly, don't want that. But that means that homosexuality is, on some level, chosen. But that means that like every other choice in the world, there are good choices and bad choices and it's reasonable to promote the good and discourage the bad. But gays don't like that because of all that icky moral condemnation. But let's face it, you've got no third choice between scylla and charybdis except demagoguery and a vain hope that nobody's going to notice the BS.
A lot of saints never read the Bible. A lot of saints were illiterate. A lot of saints lived prior to the Bible's creation. Catholics' Sunday services, Holy Liturgy features a creed, a statement of common belief. If you can say that statement, you're Catholic. It does not include any statement that we believe in the Bible.
We do believe in the Bible, after all, we wrote it. But it's an instruction manual, not a paper fetish. Just like you can run a computer without reading the manual, Mother Theresa could be a saint without reading the Bible.
The Church is the longest running, largest global charity in the history of the world. Unless you believe in taxing nonprofits (and who knows, maybe you're one of the tiny minority that believes in that) consistency demands your favor for the tax exempt status of religious charities as much as secular ones.
Gays, lesbians, etc. are free to be themselves without being labeled sinner just like the rest of us, by acting in accordance with the rules of the Church. Sometimes I don't like the rules either. They can be rather inconvenient for my pleasure's sake. When I break them, I'm labeled a sinner too. One gets over it, usually by reconciling with the Church and trying again.
The "safe sex" crew says we should reduce the number of bullets in the cylinders of the pistol we're using to play sexual russian roulette. That's fine, as far as it goes. The Catholic Church says don't put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. It is not self-evident to me why the former position is more reasonable than the latter nor why adherents to the first position are so against the promoters of the latter position.
Actually, the Catholic Church did nothing of the sort (ie they did not pretty much admit "itself that the policy induces a disproportionate number of gays into the church"). They had a policy that said that one should be very careful in admitting gays to the priesthood. The US hierarchy took that little crack and allowed a river of homosexuals to enter and a disproportionate number of the post WW II priests turned out to be pedophiles. The new rules imposed by Rome tightened things up a great deal more and new cases seem to be trailing off (thank God).
There were problems with priestly formation. In some seminaries, there may very well still be problems. The hierarchy seems to be improving the situation and are inclined to stay on top of it going forward.
Actually, the studies show that the procedures used in recent decades prior to the latest few rounds of reforms, were seriously deficient in priestly formation which is why Rome just went through the US seminaries like a high colonic, because the local hierarchy screwed up and did it more than most. We're past the worst of the scandal, new cases are trailing off, thankfully, as new procedures come into place and have some time to produce a better formed priesthood.
Regarding birth control, formally, the Catholic Church does not condemn contraception. It condemns artificial contraception. What's left is restraint and calendar watching which, while not as effective as chemically scarring a woman's fallopian tubes, does significantly reduce the rate of conception without requiring more than a modicum of self-restraint (ie, about the same level of self-restraint to avoid committing date rape with a drunk girl). That's actually pretty manageable. And since the actual numbers (not the liberal mythology) say we're heading towards birth dearth and depopulation, I'm not too worried about a few extra kids.
Regarding priestly celibacy, the Catholic Church does not say that priests must be celibate, never has. The Catholic Church has always had orders of priests that are married and orders that are celibate. The celibates are incredibly more effective (about 4:1 over the married clergy) and about a thousand years ago, the roman part of the Church decided to phase out its married orders. Other parts of the Church do retain a married clergy. My parish priest is married, has a daughter, and is a grandfather. He's pastor in the parish his father, also a priest, founded. You want a married priest? Go to a part of the Church that supports those orders, donate to a level that will support married priests, and baptize your kids into one of those rites.
On divorce, the actual position is that women (who tend to be smaller and more physically vulnerable) can separate in order to avoid being beaten or otherwise abused while men can't divorce, period. They have to support their family. And of course if you can patch things up, you should. It's about making marriage something you can actually base a life on, something that a lot of today's worried kids would love to have again. But they find out pretty quick that mommy and daddy can get mad at each other and split for incomprehensible reasons and tear the family apart. Now how is that angst ridden childhood supposed to be better?
Marriage isn't just sanctioned, it's a sacrament. War is sanctioned under a few very tight conditions. The Catholic Church doesn't make a sacrament out of it. Paul being celibate, thought celibacy was the bees knees. He did a lot to develop the theology of celibacy. That doesn't mean that there weren't other theologians with other, just as valid ideas about the position and importance of marriage, ideas that are accepted from pre-biblical times to today. Try taking a run at John Paul II's theology of the body for a different spin on the same position.
Thank you for pointing out, at least indirectly, the problem with most of the commentary here. All the self-righteous protests assume we're at peace. We're not. We're in a type of war that's both new (cyberwar) and very old (pre-westphalian rules). It's going to get very, very ugly and a lot of institutions, including apparently the FRG government are confused as to what the new rules are.
The man's hardly sitting on the institution he runs' money. He's mostly busy running the world's largest and oldest network of charity care bar none, something that uses up an awful lot of that money every year. Are there rainy day funds? You betcha, and if there weren't, you'd be reading periodically about how this or that catholic institution would have to abandon its mission because the money ran out. That doesn't happen too often because the bishops including the bishop of Rome, put something aside so the weak and poor don't get totally screwed by local mismanagement or just bad circumstances leading to a temporary donations down tick.
ok, I'll bite. When was the last sweep of all weather stations in the US to check for data quality? What were the %s of stations that were good, bad, or marginal? How much money was spent upgrading the maintenance and how many stations moved from being noncompliant to the published standards to compliant?
The whole point of surfacestations.org is that such efforts simply aren't happening. All sorts of statistical corrections are being applied to the data but we don't have people verifying the physical compliance with the siting specification requirements and eliminating the data biases.
Uninventing guns worked out real well for the samurai of Japan, NOT. They ended up having the US in their harbors whether they liked it or not. Banning guns is working out very well for the people of the UK, NOT. Gun crime is rising significantly post ban.
Iran, in 1979, committed an act of aggressive war by not observing its obligation to protect the US embassy. Iran has waged several proxy wars using Hezbollah against the US and Israel and Lebanon. Iran is today waging a perfidious aggressive campaign of arming, training and leading mostly Shia secterian militias in attempted genocide in Iraq.
That wonderful persian zoroastrian culture is being actively and significantly repressed by 12er Shia bigots who run the government there. Iran is currently on a slow simmer of internal revolt with active resistance to the central government with arab bombing campaigns in the SW, Balochi rebellion in the east, kurdish violent resistance in the NW and periodic outbursts of protest and even violence by the large Azeri minority.
Right now we've got a problem that people might just be building castles on sand. So long as you do basic data collection, you don't ever just go on to "more advanced areas". You have a continuing duty to go measure your temps, make sure that bird poop, amorous elk, or any of the hundreds of other compromising possibilities aren't eroding the foundations out from under your advanced work. That means that the enclosures have to get painted on time, the slats can't be blocked with debris or wasp nests, and if somebody gets the bright idea to pave within a certain distance of some enclosures, you've got to re-site the enclosures affected. We haven't been doing that job as well as we should.
Now we don't know when a lot of the compromising stuff happened. All we do know is the list of faulty sites is getting longer and we don't seem to have any statement from the powers that be that they're going to do their own site review and fix the ones that they find broken. We don't even seem to have a commitment from them to fix the ones that outsiders find broken.
These people all know each other. They have to in order to coordinate the assembly of the worldwide figures. An email winging around the community noting the issue and asking if anybody else is doing the same sort of data bifurcation that led to the error in the US would have shown a minimal level of care. That doesn't seem to have been done. Would an email have been unreasonable? It's not about ordering stuff done. Everybody's aware that these are national groups who assemble temp data off of surface stations. That doesn't mean that they don't coordinate and talk to each other.
At some point, you either have an indicator that has good quality control which you can bootstrap into validating the other stuff or it's turtles all the way down and we're spending ungodly sums on a chimera. The AGW side is the one advocating huge changes in the world economy and they have the burden of proof. If you want to salvage a data series, you can't just say, there's plenty of other indicators that agree with it. You have to demonstrate why these other indicators (or at least a comforting number of them) are reliable when this series has been violating its own internal rules for how to gather data.
That's the problem with the AGW community response. Their efforts to wave off the challenges are heavy on psychological manipulation, trying to awe everybody into submission, and somewhat light on proactive efforts to improve data quality. And even if the vast majority of people aren't experts in the field, they can smell a BS coverup that would have gotten them flunked by their high school science teacher.
The AGW people, if they are right, are doing their cause and humanity in general a great disservice by trying to go play manipulation games because the markers for those are detectable by most people and *because* most people don't understand the science, they use those BS game markers as proxies for who is right on the science.
Somebody either needs to fix the sites by moving them to better locations (as per the present guidelines) and take the data hit (the anti-AGW camp will make hay on this until new data comes in confirming no change due to siting moves) or come up with an accurate set of siting guidelines to determine what does and does not matter and go through all the sites, validating the current sites by the new standards. Some combination of the two may end up being best.
I'm very uncomfortable at hand waving away internal rules violations at the level that seems to be coming out. No scientist should be comfortable at violating experiment rules.
ok, we seem to be agreeing vehemently at this point, both in favor of openness and aware that there are some issues in theory but not in this case, in putting the theory into practice.
I can live with that.
I think you, not I misinterpreted the original poster but frankly, I don't give a hoot which of us is correct on that point.
Oh, I wasn't claiming that McIntyre (McKitrick is somebody else) was a statistician while Hansen is not. By the whatever reasonable definition is provided they're either both one or they are neither one. What I was peeved at was the double standard, talking McIntyre down and giving him grief while Hansen's protected as an AGW high priest (help, help the Bush administration is repressing me).
The central issue remains, is part of the job of a scientist to enable fact checking efforts to be run quickly and efficiently or are scientists really only bound to grudging sharing and not always that (see the MBH98 controversy)? If you're in favor of openness and as many checks as possible, I can live with most everything else on the thread.
Who is the other statistician? I thought the two people being compared were McIntyre and Hansen. And I'd like to hear your definition of what a professional statistician is. It seems to be non-standard but that might just be me.
Separating out the science from the Gaia worship BS means you adhere to the scientific method and you actually follow your own rules. I want actual scientific data, not some cargo cult science where following the rules is for suckers. That's not FUD but trying to ensure that those responsible for primary data gathering aren't fouling the nest of science.
To do the serious sacrifice that correcting AGW would require is going to kill people, a lot of people. They're going to mostly be in the 3rd world and dirt poor and that doesn't matter other than their lack of powerful protectors. Before we collectively sign that many death warrants we all better be able to run the numbers from start to finish and have them right on the button as best we can. I doubt that you'd accept this sort of sloppiness in a capital case with a single child molester's life on the line. What is wrong with you that you're not interested in fixing basic evidence issues when so many more lives are on the line
I also did not conclude the whole thing is crap. If you inconsistently follow standards, it may make no difference whatsoever. 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.
Fix it. Fix it fast. Get the reliability to where it should be so the data can be used properly.
You're "sure specified siting requirements are far more conservative than is necessary" but you don't actually provide any evidence that they are. Essentially you're making an argument that the standard doesn't much matter, that a certain amount of black asphalt nearby is just as good as 50 yards of fields, that an air condition exhaust nearby may make no difference to a thermometer. How committed are you to salvaging this data set regardless of the effects on your own reputation?
In S. Korea, a geneticist faked some data on cloning and was ruined because of it. Later analysis showed that beyond the data faking, he actually had discovered some useful, interesting stuff that advances the field. The two processes were conducted separately there as they should be here.
The stations are not conforming to the standard. That should create a downward adjustment in how reliable we view the data. 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.
I make a bolt in Michigan. It ends up in a stop sign in a supermarket parking lot in Boise, ID. It uses X units of energy for manufacture and transport and produces Y units of pollution. I make the same bolt in the PRC instead and its manufacture and transport to that stop sign in Boise takes 9X units of energy and produces 4Y units of pollution. How, exactly, does Purchasing Power Parity enter into it at all?
The PRC is now the workshop for the world. We've collectively outsourced a lot of our manufacturing there and it's dirty, inefficient production that often has to be transported long distances. We can reduce PRC pollution much more cheaply than we can reduce 1st world pollution because the PRC production centers often don't even do the cheap stuff that results in a great deal of bang for the buck.
When you reduce pollution in the US, you tend to relocate it to the PRC and other places with lax controls because their production costs become that much lower than ours. They also tend to be more energy inefficient. Global effect is higher energy prices and a dirtier planet. Way to go einstein.
So somebody called around and asked the other nations who do this sort of data collection whether they also partitioned pre and post 2000 data and nobody did except the US? That's reassuring. I wish Hansen had said something more like "we've checked and have verified that the same sort of partition error cannot be happening elsewhere". As far as I can tell, he hasn't said it and nobody's actually done the checking that you assert has been done.
Yes, I made up "data analysis collapse". 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. They're leaving the job to the outsider.
Slashdot Mirror
Gays want to have their cake and eat it too. If homosexuality is inborn, cannot be chosen, then one can test for it and abort the gays in a eugenic fit of madness. Gays, quite rightly, don't want that. But that means that homosexuality is, on some level, chosen. But that means that like every other choice in the world, there are good choices and bad choices and it's reasonable to promote the good and discourage the bad. But gays don't like that because of all that icky moral condemnation. But let's face it, you've got no third choice between scylla and charybdis except demagoguery and a vain hope that nobody's going to notice the BS.
Pick your poison.
A lot of saints never read the Bible. A lot of saints were illiterate. A lot of saints lived prior to the Bible's creation. Catholics' Sunday services, Holy Liturgy features a creed, a statement of common belief. If you can say that statement, you're Catholic. It does not include any statement that we believe in the Bible.
We do believe in the Bible, after all, we wrote it. But it's an instruction manual, not a paper fetish. Just like you can run a computer without reading the manual, Mother Theresa could be a saint without reading the Bible.
The Church is the longest running, largest global charity in the history of the world. Unless you believe in taxing nonprofits (and who knows, maybe you're one of the tiny minority that believes in that) consistency demands your favor for the tax exempt status of religious charities as much as secular ones.
Gays, lesbians, etc. are free to be themselves without being labeled sinner just like the rest of us, by acting in accordance with the rules of the Church. Sometimes I don't like the rules either. They can be rather inconvenient for my pleasure's sake. When I break them, I'm labeled a sinner too. One gets over it, usually by reconciling with the Church and trying again.
The "safe sex" crew says we should reduce the number of bullets in the cylinders of the pistol we're using to play sexual russian roulette. That's fine, as far as it goes. The Catholic Church says don't put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. It is not self-evident to me why the former position is more reasonable than the latter nor why adherents to the first position are so against the promoters of the latter position.
Actually, the Catholic Church did nothing of the sort (ie they did not pretty much admit "itself that the policy induces a disproportionate number of gays into the church"). They had a policy that said that one should be very careful in admitting gays to the priesthood. The US hierarchy took that little crack and allowed a river of homosexuals to enter and a disproportionate number of the post WW II priests turned out to be pedophiles. The new rules imposed by Rome tightened things up a great deal more and new cases seem to be trailing off (thank God).
There were problems with priestly formation. In some seminaries, there may very well still be problems. The hierarchy seems to be improving the situation and are inclined to stay on top of it going forward.
Actually, the studies show that the procedures used in recent decades prior to the latest few rounds of reforms, were seriously deficient in priestly formation which is why Rome just went through the US seminaries like a high colonic, because the local hierarchy screwed up and did it more than most. We're past the worst of the scandal, new cases are trailing off, thankfully, as new procedures come into place and have some time to produce a better formed priesthood.
Regarding birth control, formally, the Catholic Church does not condemn contraception. It condemns artificial contraception. What's left is restraint and calendar watching which, while not as effective as chemically scarring a woman's fallopian tubes, does significantly reduce the rate of conception without requiring more than a modicum of self-restraint (ie, about the same level of self-restraint to avoid committing date rape with a drunk girl). That's actually pretty manageable. And since the actual numbers (not the liberal mythology) say we're heading towards birth dearth and depopulation, I'm not too worried about a few extra kids.
Regarding priestly celibacy, the Catholic Church does not say that priests must be celibate, never has. The Catholic Church has always had orders of priests that are married and orders that are celibate. The celibates are incredibly more effective (about 4:1 over the married clergy) and about a thousand years ago, the roman part of the Church decided to phase out its married orders. Other parts of the Church do retain a married clergy. My parish priest is married, has a daughter, and is a grandfather. He's pastor in the parish his father, also a priest, founded. You want a married priest? Go to a part of the Church that supports those orders, donate to a level that will support married priests, and baptize your kids into one of those rites.
On divorce, the actual position is that women (who tend to be smaller and more physically vulnerable) can separate in order to avoid being beaten or otherwise abused while men can't divorce, period. They have to support their family. And of course if you can patch things up, you should. It's about making marriage something you can actually base a life on, something that a lot of today's worried kids would love to have again. But they find out pretty quick that mommy and daddy can get mad at each other and split for incomprehensible reasons and tear the family apart. Now how is that angst ridden childhood supposed to be better?
Marriage isn't just sanctioned, it's a sacrament. War is sanctioned under a few very tight conditions. The Catholic Church doesn't make a sacrament out of it. Paul being celibate, thought celibacy was the bees knees. He did a lot to develop the theology of celibacy. That doesn't mean that there weren't other theologians with other, just as valid ideas about the position and importance of marriage, ideas that are accepted from pre-biblical times to today. Try taking a run at John Paul II's theology of the body for a different spin on the same position.
Thank you for pointing out, at least indirectly, the problem with most of the commentary here. All the self-righteous protests assume we're at peace. We're not. We're in a type of war that's both new (cyberwar) and very old (pre-westphalian rules). It's going to get very, very ugly and a lot of institutions, including apparently the FRG government are confused as to what the new rules are.
The man's hardly sitting on the institution he runs' money. He's mostly busy running the world's largest and oldest network of charity care bar none, something that uses up an awful lot of that money every year. Are there rainy day funds? You betcha, and if there weren't, you'd be reading periodically about how this or that catholic institution would have to abandon its mission because the money ran out. That doesn't happen too often because the bishops including the bishop of Rome, put something aside so the weak and poor don't get totally screwed by local mismanagement or just bad circumstances leading to a temporary donations down tick.
They would have about the same rights and chances for compensation as someone who lost their garden to an errant artillery shell
ok, I'll bite. When was the last sweep of all weather stations in the US to check for data quality? What were the %s of stations that were good, bad, or marginal? How much money was spent upgrading the maintenance and how many stations moved from being noncompliant to the published standards to compliant?
The whole point of surfacestations.org is that such efforts simply aren't happening. All sorts of statistical corrections are being applied to the data but we don't have people verifying the physical compliance with the siting specification requirements and eliminating the data biases.
Uninventing guns worked out real well for the samurai of Japan, NOT. They ended up having the US in their harbors whether they liked it or not.
Banning guns is working out very well for the people of the UK, NOT. Gun crime is rising significantly post ban.
Iran, in 1979, committed an act of aggressive war by not observing its obligation to protect the US embassy.
Iran has waged several proxy wars using Hezbollah against the US and Israel and Lebanon.
Iran is today waging a perfidious aggressive campaign of arming, training and leading mostly Shia secterian militias in attempted genocide in Iraq.
That wonderful persian zoroastrian culture is being actively and significantly repressed by 12er Shia bigots who run the government there. Iran is currently on a slow simmer of internal revolt with active resistance to the central government with arab bombing campaigns in the SW, Balochi rebellion in the east, kurdish violent resistance in the NW and periodic outbursts of protest and even violence by the large Azeri minority.
All ethical and humane living? I don't think so
Right now we've got a problem that people might just be building castles on sand. So long as you do basic data collection, you don't ever just go on to "more advanced areas". You have a continuing duty to go measure your temps, make sure that bird poop, amorous elk, or any of the hundreds of other compromising possibilities aren't eroding the foundations out from under your advanced work. That means that the enclosures have to get painted on time, the slats can't be blocked with debris or wasp nests, and if somebody gets the bright idea to pave within a certain distance of some enclosures, you've got to re-site the enclosures affected. We haven't been doing that job as well as we should.
Now we don't know when a lot of the compromising stuff happened. All we do know is the list of faulty sites is getting longer and we don't seem to have any statement from the powers that be that they're going to do their own site review and fix the ones that they find broken. We don't even seem to have a commitment from them to fix the ones that outsiders find broken.
These people all know each other. They have to in order to coordinate the assembly of the worldwide figures. An email winging around the community noting the issue and asking if anybody else is doing the same sort of data bifurcation that led to the error in the US would have shown a minimal level of care. That doesn't seem to have been done. Would an email have been unreasonable? It's not about ordering stuff done. Everybody's aware that these are national groups who assemble temp data off of surface stations. That doesn't mean that they don't coordinate and talk to each other.
At some point, you either have an indicator that has good quality control which you can bootstrap into validating the other stuff or it's turtles all the way down and we're spending ungodly sums on a chimera. The AGW side is the one advocating huge changes in the world economy and they have the burden of proof. If you want to salvage a data series, you can't just say, there's plenty of other indicators that agree with it. You have to demonstrate why these other indicators (or at least a comforting number of them) are reliable when this series has been violating its own internal rules for how to gather data.
That's the problem with the AGW community response. Their efforts to wave off the challenges are heavy on psychological manipulation, trying to awe everybody into submission, and somewhat light on proactive efforts to improve data quality. And even if the vast majority of people aren't experts in the field, they can smell a BS coverup that would have gotten them flunked by their high school science teacher.
The AGW people, if they are right, are doing their cause and humanity in general a great disservice by trying to go play manipulation games because the markers for those are detectable by most people and *because* most people don't understand the science, they use those BS game markers as proxies for who is right on the science.
Somebody either needs to fix the sites by moving them to better locations (as per the present guidelines) and take the data hit (the anti-AGW camp will make hay on this until new data comes in confirming no change due to siting moves) or come up with an accurate set of siting guidelines to determine what does and does not matter and go through all the sites, validating the current sites by the new standards. Some combination of the two may end up being best.
I'm very uncomfortable at hand waving away internal rules violations at the level that seems to be coming out. No scientist should be comfortable at violating experiment rules.
ok, we seem to be agreeing vehemently at this point, both in favor of openness and aware that there are some issues in theory but not in this case, in putting the theory into practice.
I can live with that.
I think you, not I misinterpreted the original poster but frankly, I don't give a hoot which of us is correct on that point.
Oh, I wasn't claiming that McIntyre (McKitrick is somebody else) was a statistician while Hansen is not. By the whatever reasonable definition is provided they're either both one or they are neither one. What I was peeved at was the double standard, talking McIntyre down and giving him grief while Hansen's protected as an AGW high priest (help, help the Bush administration is repressing me).
The central issue remains, is part of the job of a scientist to enable fact checking efforts to be run quickly and efficiently or are scientists really only bound to grudging sharing and not always that (see the MBH98 controversy)? If you're in favor of openness and as many checks as possible, I can live with most everything else on the thread.
Who is the other statistician? I thought the two people being compared were McIntyre and Hansen. And I'd like to hear your definition of what a professional statistician is. It seems to be non-standard but that might just be me.
Separating out the science from the Gaia worship BS means you adhere to the scientific method and you actually follow your own rules. I want actual scientific data, not some cargo cult science where following the rules is for suckers. That's not FUD but trying to ensure that those responsible for primary data gathering aren't fouling the nest of science.
To do the serious sacrifice that correcting AGW would require is going to kill people, a lot of people. They're going to mostly be in the 3rd world and dirt poor and that doesn't matter other than their lack of powerful protectors. Before we collectively sign that many death warrants we all better be able to run the numbers from start to finish and have them right on the button as best we can. I doubt that you'd accept this sort of sloppiness in a capital case with a single child molester's life on the line. What is wrong with you that you're not interested in fixing basic evidence issues when so many more lives are on the line
I also did not conclude the whole thing is crap. If you inconsistently follow standards, it may make no difference whatsoever. 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.
Fix it. Fix it fast. Get the reliability to where it should be so the data can be used properly.
You're "sure specified siting requirements are far more conservative than is necessary" but you don't actually provide any evidence that they are. Essentially you're making an argument that the standard doesn't much matter, that a certain amount of black asphalt nearby is just as good as 50 yards of fields, that an air condition exhaust nearby may make no difference to a thermometer. How committed are you to salvaging this data set regardless of the effects on your own reputation?
In S. Korea, a geneticist faked some data on cloning and was ruined because of it. Later analysis showed that beyond the data faking, he actually had discovered some useful, interesting stuff that advances the field. The two processes were conducted separately there as they should be here.
The stations are not conforming to the standard. That should create a downward adjustment in how reliable we view the data. 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.
I make a bolt in Michigan. It ends up in a stop sign in a supermarket parking lot in Boise, ID. It uses X units of energy for manufacture and transport and produces Y units of pollution. I make the same bolt in the PRC instead and its manufacture and transport to that stop sign in Boise takes 9X units of energy and produces 4Y units of pollution. How, exactly, does Purchasing Power Parity enter into it at all?
The PRC is now the workshop for the world. We've collectively outsourced a lot of our manufacturing there and it's dirty, inefficient production that often has to be transported long distances. We can reduce PRC pollution much more cheaply than we can reduce 1st world pollution because the PRC production centers often don't even do the cheap stuff that results in a great deal of bang for the buck.
When you reduce pollution in the US, you tend to relocate it to the PRC and other places with lax controls because their production costs become that much lower than ours. They also tend to be more energy inefficient. Global effect is higher energy prices and a dirtier planet. Way to go einstein.
So somebody called around and asked the other nations who do this sort of data collection whether they also partitioned pre and post 2000 data and nobody did except the US? That's reassuring. I wish Hansen had said something more like "we've checked and have verified that the same sort of partition error cannot be happening elsewhere". As far as I can tell, he hasn't said it and nobody's actually done the checking that you assert has been done.
Yes, I made up "data analysis collapse". 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. They're leaving the job to the outsider.
That's worrisome.