Am I still allowed to question climate change?

[cgksheff]

This was worth a listen:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p6t26

 

 

The Report

Emails taken from the one of the world's major climate research centres have been a boon for climate sceptics who claim manipulation of the data, and a 'major blow' for green activists who are calling for resignations and apologies. Simon Cox looks at why a group of climate scientists decided to play hardball against the sceptics, and, as President Obama heads for the Copenhagen summit, what affect the row could have on his climate change bill.

[Wildcat]

Well we can't all be losers. There's lots of lovely lolly to be made out of the AGW 'business'.

 

So far it seems to be just criminals and investment bankers.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6778003/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Carbon-trading-fraudsters-in-Europe-pocket-5bn.html

 

Yet some people claim there is no 'vested interest' behind it.

 

Pails into insignificance compared with the $9 trillion revenue for the fossil fuel lobby.

[Wildcat]

Here's some for a start

 

http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm

 

They are in the US and whilst the odd sites ones do look strange they amount for less than 1% of them and from the data they have collected on the others it does seem like they are the odd cases and not the norm which should be a reassurance.

[Wildcat]

This was worth a listen:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p6t26

 

 

The Report

Emails taken from the one of the world's major climate research centres have been a boon for climate sceptics who claim manipulation of the data, and a 'major blow' for green activists who are calling for resignations and apologies. Simon Cox looks at why a group of climate scientists decided to play hardball against the sceptics, and, as President Obama heads for the Copenhagen summit, what affect the row could have on his climate change bill.

 

An interesting report, that largely confirms what I have been saying. I would perhaps of focussed more on the sceptics to give more perspective to the tactics and pressure they were putting on the CRU scientists, but that is a fairly minor quibble.

[BritPat]

They are in the US and whilst the odd sites ones do look strange they amount for less than 1% of them and from the data they have collected on the others it does seem like they are the odd cases and not the norm which should be a reassurance.

 

When you take a break from outright lying you resort to dissemblance, if 1% of readings are subject to random errors the statistics will tend to neutralise their effect on the overall result of analysis, however, if they (the 1% of readings) are subject to a bias then they will disproportionately weigh the mean in the direction of the bias.

 

The 'anomaly' being quantified is already small compared to the baseline and therefore difficult to separate from 'noise', the standard error is also of the same magnitude as the proposed anomaly to begin with, is it not?

 

Smacks of attempts to 'hide the decline' if not actually 'drive the delta'

[Wildcat]

When you take a break from outright lying you resort to dissemblance, if 1% of readings are subject to random errors the statistics will tend to neutralise their effect on the overall result of analysis, however, if they (the 1% of readings) are subject to a bias then they will disproportionately weigh the mean in the direction of the bias.

 

The 'anomaly' being quantified is already small compared to the baseline and therefore difficult to separate from 'noise', the standard error is also of the same magnitude as the proposed anomaly to begin with, is it not?

 

Smacks of attempts to 'hide the decline' if not actually 'drive the delta'

 

Err what are you talking about?

 

If there are a handful of examples of poorly sited weather stations collecting data near heating ducts or whatever then their results will be consistently out. They will cancel out over time or be irrelevant because the readings will still be hotter on a hot day and cooler on a cold day. The data would not be so useful but it wouldn't hide the decline, or emphasise warming over cooling, or vice versa.

 

Besides which to think that this amounts to a conspiracy to hide the decline would involve a global conpsiracy involving not just an elite of scientists but numerous contractors from across the globe too.

 

You really couldn't come up with a much more ridiculous argument if you tried. Although you did do several times when you were denying the holocaust so contrary logic, and seeing conspiracies where any reasonable person would see incompetence does appear to be second nature to you.

Edited December 11, 2009 by Wildcat

[BritPat]

Do you have a reference because i don't think I have seen that.

 

 

 

The "trick" was excluding invalid data. It would have been stupid to include it.

 

Tell us about the invalid data, what was it, why was it invalid ?

[Wildcat]

Tell us about the invalid data, what was it, why was it invalid ?

 

During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated.

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0.html

 

Instead of using tree ring data in a 1998 paper based on the evidence of the above research and research that preceded it, for the latter half of the last century they used direct temperature measurements.

 

A perfectly legitimate approach and one that can only be considered necessary for the purposes of accuracy when comparing their models with the best evidence available for temperature. The decline they were "hiding" was the unexplained decline in reliability of dendrochronology as a technique for measuring temperature. Since then other papers have used different proxies to dendrochronology and have come up with the same results justifying their methodology.

[Cyclone]

How can they know that the data from before the unreliable period was at all reliable, or is it just that if they do it that way they get the nice hockey stick graph they were looking for.

 

How do you explain their cherry picking of tree ring data in the first place, with some studies being based on (IIRC) as little as 16 samples because the rest were discarded for not showing what they wanted.

[Cyclone]

Err what are you talking about?

 

If there are a handful of examples of poorly sited weather stations collecting data near heating ducts or whatever then their results will be consistently out. They will cancel out over time or be irrelevant because the readings will still be hotter on a hot day and cooler on a cold day. The data would not be so useful but it wouldn't hide the decline, or emphasise warming over cooling, or vice versa.

 

Besides which to think that this amounts to a conspiracy to hide the decline would involve a global conpsiracy involving not just an elite of scientists but numerous contractors from across the globe too.

 

You really couldn't come up with a much more ridiculous argument if you tried. Although you did do several times when you were denying the holocaust so contrary logic, and seeing conspiracies where any reasonable person would see incompetence does appear to be second nature to you.

They won't cancel out in the long run unless they've been there for a century, or whatever time period we examine.