The Holocene Deniers

[grmorton]

No, anything but. All data has errors. Only understanding those errors can allow us to draw any meaningful conclusions about it. And only statistics allows us to understand those errors.

Yes, all data has errors but when there is a bias inserted into the temperature data on stations next to heat sources (and 13% of them are next to heat sources), that is not something that is correctable by statistics. That must be corrected by physics. And if the error is so great that it causes one to to think the differences can't be true because it violates physical law, there is a problem.

All data has errors. Perhaps one morning Joe the Temperature reader went to the station to record the temp, he was distracted and wrote a 5 where a 3 should be. Or the machine had a hiccup (instruments do), the mercury separated and gave an erroneous signal.

fine, then the error is 2 degrees. It makes not sense to claim absolutely that the climate has warmed if the signal is 1.1 degree and the error is 2 degrees. That means that the world might have cooled. 1.1-2 = -.9 deg.

Then on some other day there actually was a cold front moving through and there really was a difference of several degrees between the two stations.

It has to stop, think about this. it has to stop BETWEEN the two towns for the entire day. And it must do it 36% of the days for a week front. That isn't likely.

I have now clearly explained this at least 2 or 3 times. Some may be real, but many may be pure error.

Of course most are pure error. We agree on that. But that means we are not doing a very good job of measuring the temperature. By saying that the majority of cases where the temperature gradient is unrealistic and thus unbelievable, is due to pure error, then you, like me, must beleive that the temperature data is so noisy as to be useless for the purpose of measuring anything.

Well, again, I must ask you to address the question I have asked you now repeatedly: in the data you work with, do you have absolutely no errors in the data? None whatsoever?

I have lots of error in the data. Our success rate as an entire system is only about 1 in 3. But like a baseball batter, if you can achieve that 1 in 3 successes, then you are a star.

Perhaps I am not making myself clear, but I looked back over my posts I noted I am constantly referring to the word error.

Error is just that: error. Wrong measurements.

Progress. That is fantastic. I agree with this. If it is a bad measurement then that says we are not measuring the temperature with a great deal of accuracy, yet, it is claimed that the global temperature has risen by 1.1 deg F over the past century. In the face of such noise--wrong measurements, such a tiny signal would be lost.

You ask about my business. Signal to noise ratio is a huge huge issue for what I do. If the seismic data, which measures travel times to a given horizon in the subsurface has much more than a 10 millisecond error, we can't use the data.

Because it has yet to be proven to be bad. That is why statistics is so vitally important. It can help us differentiate bad from good data.

YOu just said it was bad measurements, didn't you?

In the present case that is likely because of the heavy tails. If this were a normal distribution then it would be likely that about 68% of the observations would be within 1 standard deviation of the mean. In the present case the standard deviation is much more influenced by the outliers and the heavy tails.

Yeah, but the problem I see is that the physics is violated if the data is real. Strong stong temperature differences can't be sustained in the atmosphere along the earth's surface without strong winds developing. That is why the bad measurement is really bad measurement of temperature, not real temperature. But for each bad temperature measurment, we have to admit that we don't know the true value and those days can't be used to calculate the global warming or cooling or whatever.

And that is all very impressive. So I am even more curious as to what kind of data sets you use that you don't have any error or that you cannot allow for any error.

I never ever said I don't have error in the data. But let me try to think of an illustration of what I mean by physics. When the shuttle burned up in the atmosphere in 2003, I remember a dumb reporter saying, after the shuttle was 15 minutes late for landing, "We are hoping that the shuttle will land safely." Such a statement was really stupid where it comes to physics. The Shuttle isn't like an airplane with an engine. It is a glider and can't be late. The 'error' in the landing time can't be 15 minutes long. That would be physically impossible.

That is what I mean when I say that the amount of error in the temperature measurements is physically impossible. Huge temperature gradients are impossible. Winds will destroy them quicker than they can form. The temperture gradients claimed by the data are impossible. And if they are impossible, then they have to be pure noise, and if pure noise, it means that we are not measuring the temperature correctly.

I understand that in the oil field often you have people (geologists) sit beside the well and write down what kind of material is coming up from the well to tell them where they are in the drilling process (which formation?) Do you think they are able to inerrantly determine the exact (down to the inch) point where the formation changes from a shale to a siltstone and they record it perfectly in their "log"?

We can get to within about a foot of the start of the formation. We not only have mud loggers, we have drilling rate changes, and electric logs just behind the drill bit. Our accuracy has tremendously improved since the 1950s when all we had was a guy looking at cuttings.

All data has errors.

And I heartily agree with that. But when error gets too large it means that the entire data set is a meaningless exercise in futility. Believe me, I have shot some seismic data where I got back data free noise--nothing BUT error. Besides having spent huge quantities of money to get nothing but noise, you also have a very unhappy boss.

In that case the example of the two towns in Iowa is very good. It says that there is a high likelihood that both towns are in agreement by about 1 degree F. BUT, your graph has also shown that one town is consistently higher by that 1 degree or so, so the difference can be corrected and it really isn't all that problematic.

But that is if you only correct the error for the entire record of the data. Given that some of the stations I have posted show sharp changes at station changes, sharp changes when there are no station changes, and mysterious reversals of bias for years on end, your method of just using the whole record as if there is only one type of bias in the data, is a wrong approach. When someone parks a reflective airstream travel trailer next to the thermometer, that won't be in the record but the temperature will change.

In a sense the two towns are pretty good replicates. Not perfect, but then, all data has errors.

How do you know that the period from 1991 to 1997 where Toledo is hotter than Belle Plaine shouldn't be corrected by its own bias because someone parked that Airstream by the thermometer? I know of towns where the bias goes back and forth for years at a time, with each set of years having its own bias. How do you correct for that? What meteorological phenomenon would yield such long term reversals of temperature gradient over such a short distance?

You can't. People are human. In fact people are the weak link in the chain and probably responsible for much of real error. But also we are using machines and they have problems at times.

OK so we agree that the only check on the accuracy of the human reader is to compare it with the neighboring town. So, what should we do when the temperature difference means that for that day the temperature gradient is larger than is physically possible? Which town is the erroneous town? That too must be decided. Below is a picture of the temperature gradient between Stillwater and Perry Oklahoma. Note that if one looks at the 0.1 deg F/mile line, which marks a weak cold front, there was a weak cold front between these two towns for 3 years, from 1917 to 1920, 1929 to 1930, 1951 and 1952, and again in 2004. Is it reasonable to believe that a cold front (or warm front) stalled out between these two nearby towns for an entire year? Physically that makes zero sense. Don't you agree?

But you cannot draw physical conclusions based on erroneous data.

I think you miss the logical chain. IF the numbers predict idiotic physical states, then you can clearly say that the numbers are pure bunk. Go look up the argument called reduction to absurdity. It is the most useful logical tool one can have for discerning the truth. If someone says such and such is the case, if you then assume that and it leads to stupid logical conclusions, then you can say that such and such is definitely NOT the case.

Physical interpretations only make sense when you are sure you are looking a the real signal. And in the case of a pile of data this size the real signal can only be understood statistically.

It works the other way. If the numbers require ludicrous physical conditions, then the numbers aren't real--they are total error.

I don't perceive calculating the average to be a "lie". It was certainly not my intention to lie. I was merely posting a comparison.

I was NOT saying you are lying. Oh no. I am utterly embarassed that you take it that way. There is an old saying--go look it up on the internet. That says that "Liars can't figure, but figures can lie" That is an idiom.

I will not call people liars as Thistlethorn always says of me. I beleive that you believe what you are saying. I believe what I am saying. The goal here is to find out which data set and which mathematical or observational approach is stronger. The goal is not consensus, nor is the goal to decide that you or I are liars.

I told you that I respect you. You post data. You seem relatively open to thinking about the issue. That clearly sets you apart from those who come on just to call me a liar. We may never agree on where the data leads, sometimes that is what happens. But it doesn't mean either of us is lying. This happens all the time in the oil business. We will debate long and hard, citing data point after datapoint about whether a given area contains oil. At the end of the day we don't always agree. the exploration director must make the call to drill the well, then he must sell the management above him on giving him the money. Sometimes they don't agree.

this is why I think it is so stifling this claim that we must have consensus on scientific issues. Religions have consensus. Science doesn't!

I want the blind out there to see this.


So, my profuse and abject apologies for making you think I was calling you a liar. I in no way intended it to be taken that way. As we say in China, Dui bu qi! (excuse me)

 

[grmorton]

It is clearly not a good place to measure data and would likely result in bad data.

How on earth do I give you blessings???? My gosh you are one of the very very very few AGW advocates who will actually answer that question and acknowledge that this is a crappy way to collect data. You can't beleive how many people I have asked that of and had them simply call me a liar or simply go silent and evade the issue.

Again thankfully the entire data set is averaged over a larger scale so this station would likely be in the error term.

But what if 13% of the stations are situated next to an active heat source? That is actually what the survey says for the US. And according to the siting recommendations, being next to a heat source will bias the temperature greater than 5 deg C

Look at section 2.2.1 from this NOAA book. http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/documentation/program/X030FullDocumentD0.pdf


Now, in any average if 13% of the stations give a greater than 5 deg C error (biased towards the hotter end), then that will mean 0.65 deg C impact on the final average. (.13 * 5). That is most of the warming over the past century which is claimed to be .84 deg C.

Yet, because no one apparently cares to collect the data correctly, NOAA and GISS leave thermometers next to air conditioners.

(I thought some earlier posts here had discussed NOAA's efforts to show that the "70 best sited stations" --stations that wouldn't be this bad-- also showed the same overall trend in the data as the entire data set. Now if the only thing we had was bad sited stations then we'd have a real problem.)

YEs, I am glad you raised that. They would have also used the homogeneity filter on those best sited stations. Remember what Peterson showed- that a cooling trend can be changed to a warming trend. If you do that, it is not a big surprise that the best sited stations show what they want it to show. Obviously, I have lost all trust in the GISS folks.

I'm not going to defend this station, or the others that you will no doubt post pictures of. Some appear to be quite bad. Some are less than optimal.

Merely siting a station on top of cement or near a building can cause a 4 deg C rise in temperature according to the siting book cited above. 53% of stations are in this situation. That adds additional heat to the 'global warming. Yet all the rabid AGW folks, you are not to be counted among them, ridicule Anthony Watts work on the quality of stations just as some do here with me. They call him a liar as well. Yet he has a huge volunteer sourcing and any skeptics can go actually see the stations which are pictured on his site. Home I have used google street view and satellites to verify what is on his site. (beleive me, I didn't change my mind about global warming without actually verifiying what he was doing).

Also I will note that we are not just stuck with surface stations, I believe there are a number of other ways earth's average temperature is measured that are independently showing warming trends.

For the most part, the satellite data rose in the 1990s, but fell back to near the starting point by 2007. It has gone up again a bit. Basically the satellite data at Huntsville doesn't show what the AGW advocates claim.

Contracelsus, remember this. Scientists deal with data. We don't always agree on the data, nor do we always agree on the importance of any single data point. But Political activists call people names or go silent when faced with difficult data, and they demand consensus and try to stifle questions. Science embraces questions because criticism is the only way to test the idea. When AGW folk claim that it is all beyond question, what they are really saying is that it is not a science.

Now I gotta figure out how to give you blessing points.

If there is something else I need to respond to it will have to wait. I woke up at 1:30 am last night (and eventually came out here and posted to this forum). It is now 10 pm and I am dead. Gotta go to bed

 

[Baggins]

Y
this is why I think it is so stifling this claim that we must have consensus on scientific issues. Religions have consensus. Science doesn't!

I want the blind out there to see this.


)

Purest utter rot.

I can't think of a single religion on Earth that has any sort of consensus on belief which is why there are so many different flavours.

Science does reach consensus in order to drive policy.

That doesn't mean that the science becomes dogma or will not allow new evidence it means that on important questions scientists will reach agreement when the evidence allows to enable politicians to make decisions based on the best possible knowledge.

Mr Morten claiming consensus doesn't exist in science and does in religion appears to be yet another shot at drawing down ridicule on his poor understanding of how science works.

I will not fall into that trap and ridicule this ignorant statement.

 

[grmorton]

Purest utter rot.

I can't think of a single religion on Earth that has any sort of consensus on belief which is why there are so many different flavours.

Science does reach consensus in order to drive policy.

That doesn't mean that the science becomes dogma or will not allow new evidence it means that on important questions scientists will reach agreement when the evidence allows to enable politicians to make decisions based on the best possible knowledge.

Mr Morten claiming consensus doesn't exist in science and does in religion appears to be yet another shot at drawing down ridicule on his poor understanding of how science works.

Clearly you haven't ever belonged to a church and decided to differ with them on some fundamental issue. They will shun you, encourage you to leave, call you names, like heretic. ETC. But I am glad to finally see that you think science is not about free enquiry but about believing what you are told to believe by your superiors.

And no, I am not claiming consensus does not exist in science. I am claiming that it shouldn't be the end all and be all of science. The sociological push for consensus stifles debate, stifles questioning and stifles research.

I will not fall into that trap and ridicule this ignorant statement.

It appears that you already did.

I would point you to a couple of wonderful quotations by Carl Sagan


Carl Sagan:

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.


​

Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Science Quotes | Science Quotations | Science Sayings | Wisdom Quotes

Thought the blind might need help reading that big sentence.
​

And there is this one

Isaac Asimov:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, "hmm.... that's funny...."

​

That is what happened to me when I saw thermometers next to air conditioner exhausts.

Baggins, I apologize for ignoring you over the past week but I figured that was the only way to change the tone here. I didn't put you on ignore, I just didn't read anything you wrote until today.

Would you care to actually answer the question that Contracelsus answered? In the pictures below (as well as that in post 221) there are pictures of a thermometers next to an air conditioners. I love Happy Camp with 21 of them in the courtyard pointing to the thermometer, behind the parked auto.


Do you think that that is a great place to site your thermometer for the purpose of determining if global warming is occurring?

I know what a scientist would say. What say ye?

 

[grmorton]

Baggins, Here is a picture I was looking for. Specially for you. Do you think this is a grand place for a thermometer? Do you think this siting will give you a valid measurement of the temperature for the purpose of determining if the world is warming?

 

[Baggins]

Baggins, Here is a picture I was looking for. Specially for you. Do you think this is a grand place for a thermometer? Do you think this siting will give you a valid measurement of the temperature for the purpose of determining if the world is warming?

Honestly, who cares?

It has been pointed out to you over and over again that statistically poorly sighted thermometer readings mean nothing as they are consistent.

You appear unable to grasps the stats, end of conversation.

As far as I am concerned there is a consensus among the experts in the field that the Earth is warming, climate is changing and humans are to some degree responsible.

End of story, that is good enough for me, if you want to play the loan "skeptic" in the wilderness shouting the "truth" against vested interests that is fine by me I will come along and point out the ridiculous intellectual hubris you are displaying.

Everyone will be happy.

 

[grmorton]

Baggins, When I got my first job in the oil business, working for Seismograph Service Corp, they sent me to a field crew in Riverton Wyoming. It is a rural area--not much to do out there. But just because it is a small town doesn't mean that they are free of the air conditioner effect. The thermometer is at one of the local radio stations. In the picture below it looks like there are 2 air conditioning exhuast coils within a few feet of the thermometer. The address of the station is 603 E Pershing Riverton Wyoming. You can see it in a google satellite view.

Now, Baggins, do you think this is a good place to put your thermometer in order to get a good temperature measurement for the purpose of determining the global warming rate?

I don't think this is a really satisfactory site--I happen to think that air conditioners shouldn't be near scientific instruments designed to measure the natural temperature. Perchance you disagree with me?

Remember what Sagan said about bamboozling--see a couple of posts above.

 

[Contracelsus]

Of course most are pure error. We agree on that. But that means we are not doing a very good job of measuring the temperature.

How much error is too much error? I have shown now several times that the standard deviation can be up to 6 times the difference in two populations and statistical methods, given sufficient data points, can still differentiate it.

I will grant that very noisy data will, indeed, have poor correlation coefficients over time, but that the trend can still be ascertained to some degree of certainty.

But all that aside, the fact is that data is noisy. It always is noisy. Perfect data, even you admit, doesn't exist. So please tell me exactly how narrow must the distribution of differences between two stations be when averaged over 6 decades?

Progress. That is fantastic. I agree with this.

That is not progress for me. Because I've been saying that all along. Perhaps it is progress that you finally agree with what I have been saying all along.

If it is a bad measurement then that says we are not measuring the temperature with a great deal of accuracy

The phrase "with a great deal of accuracy" indicates that this is inherently a statistical debate. One cannot just say "a great deal of accuracy" and have done with it. One must quantify how accurate is accurate. That is precisely what statistics does. that is why the key to many of my posts and examples have been that little p-value figure. It tells me how confident I can be that I am seeing a signal or not seeing a difference.

, yet, it is claimed that the global temperature has risen by 1.1 deg F over the past century. In the face of such noise--wrong measurements, such a tiny signal would be lost.

I would very much like to address this point in more depth, to that end in the next day or two I'm going to spend a bit of time ginning up some data. I will be a bit busy over the weekend and getting ready to start my "second job", so it may take a bit of time.

This will afford me the opportunity to track down the difference between an ANOVA F-test for a correlation and the impact of adjusted R[sup]2[/sup].

YOu just said it was bad measurements, didn't you?

There is a vast difference between saying "there are errors in the data" and saying "the dat is bad".

That is what statistics is all about.

Yeah, but the problem I see is that the physics is violated if the data is real.

That is why it is vitally important to understand how much is error and how much is real data.

But for each bad temperature measurment, we have to admit that we don't know the true value and those days can't be used to calculate the global warming or cooling or whatever.

To my knowledge we never know the "true value" of any measurement. There's always error.

The temperture gradients claimed by the data are impossible. And if they are impossible, then they have to be pure noise, and if pure noise, it means that we are not measuring the temperature correctly.

But human volunteers who measure temperature and thermometers cannot make gross errors from time to time, without being completely without value?

Then surely we must destroy all data that has ever been measured on anything that involves temperature. We've shown how terrible the U.S. HCN is so we can assume that all temperatures ever measured anywhere are equally prone to horrible errors.

We must now dispose of all physics and chemistry and all thermodynamics.

We can get to within about a foot of the start of the formation. We not only have mud loggers, we have drilling rate changes, and electric logs just behind the drill bit. Our accuracy has tremendously improved since the 1950s when all we had was a guy looking at cuttings.

So before the 1950's we should assume that all oil that was found was purely by chance and all the work the geologists and geophysicists did prior to 1950 was useless trash?

No, we improved and got better with the measurements and decreased our error. We never eliminated error, we just got narrower.

If you drilled 500 wells within a 200 square foot plot of land and you measured to the top of Formation X using pre-1950's data techniques you'd probably get a variance of some amount in the depth to the top of the formation.

Some of that would be due to real differences in elevation even across a short area and some would just be pure noise and some would be mudlogger error (I assume some mud loggers are imperfect). One mud logger might have been really tired and completely missed the top of the formation in his analysis of the grit coming up from the well or however he does his job.

The point is with sufficient data you can still get a 95% confidence on how deep the top of that formation is even with a few really bad errors.

Let's assume that the standard deviation of those 500 observations was 2 feet. We can still determine the depth to the top of the formation with 95% confidence to +0.2 feet. That's 95% confidence of the actual depth of plus or minus about 2 and a half inches!

Now I'm not a geologist so this example isn't meant to mimic anything real, but it shows the difference between the confidence on the mean and the standard deviation.

When someone parks a reflective airstream travel trailer next to the thermometer, that won't be in the record but the temperature will change.

So we must make Airstream trailers illegal or abandon the science of climatology.

OK so we agree that the only check on the accuracy of the human reader is to compare it with the neighboring town. So, what should we do when the temperature difference means that for that day the temperature gradient is larger than is physically possible? Which town is the erroneous town? That too must be decided.

Not really. It would only need to be decided if we used daily data without any sort of averaging or gridding of the data. That is not how this data is used.

My example above of the 500 wells would seem to show that with sufficient averaging errors can be balanced out.

That is why looking at individual stations is probably one of the worst critiques to the system unless one can show that all stations are hopelessly flawed and they are the only source of information (which they are not).

I was NOT saying you are lying. Oh no. I am utterly embarassed that you take it that way. There is an old saying--go look it up on the internet. That says that "Liars can't figure, but figures can lie" That is an idiom.

I figured that. (I've heard the phrase before).

this is why I think it is so stifling this claim that we must have consensus on scientific issues. Religions have consensus. Science doesn't!

From what I've read in science this is true. But when a concensus emerges it doesn't mean that science has failed. It is like the old syllogism:

All dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs.

Science does not always have concensus, but concensus does not mean it is "anti-science". Sometimes it just means the scientists agree.

So, my profuse and abject apologies for making you think I was calling you a liar.

No need for apologies! I got the gist of the post.

 

[grmorton]

Of thermometers next to air conditioners, Baggins said.

Honestly, who cares?

As expected. Believers don't really care that hot air conditioners gently blowing on the thermometer will affect the temperature data set. I absolutely find this amazing, indeed almost unbelievable. And it is found among supposedly scientifically literal folk. But you all have seen now what I have observed over and over. They don't care. The only thing that matters is the HOLY CONSENSUS. Data doesn't matter. Sloppy data acquisition techniques don't matter. And they will use this data to convince you that the globe is warming. The data is in such sad shape that no one can say what it is doing--but they claim to know, and they want to tell us in a priestly way what it is that we should believe.They after all, have the CONSENSUS!!!!!

We, on the other hand are not supposed to think for ourselves and notice those air conditioners.


The world 100 years ago didn't have air conditioner coils to blow on the thermometers. Thus, almost by definition, any station with an air conditioner today has to be reading warmer than the station did 100 years ago. This little logical fact escapes the wee minds of true believers who only want to be in the mass of the consensus. They are the believers, data be damned.

Last fall I performed an experiment. The outdoor thermometer was reading 86 deg. F. I put it on my air conditioner exhaust fan. It rose 22.8 deg to 108.8 F. Now, if that temperature is put into the US HCN, one can't believe it. It is utter crap. But then after it is in the USHCN it must be corrected. Someone must say what the temperature should have been. How can they know how much of the temperature is crap and how much is real? They can't. We have seen that nearby towns can vary quite often by over 4 degrees, with a few excursions to 20.


Baggins,
Back to not reading anything you write. My first assessment seems to have been correct. There isn't much of value coming from your posts. And anyone who doesn't have a higher scientific standard for collecting data is not someone worth getting any from. What was that seismic company you work for?

 

[Baggins]

Clearly you haven't ever belonged to a church and decided to differ with them on some fundamental issue. They will shun you, encourage you to leave, call you names, like heretic. ETC. But I am glad to finally see that you think science is not about free enquiry but about believing what you are told to believe by your superiors.

So what, you said religions have consensus not individual churches.

I hear the sound of rapidly moving goalposts.

You show as much intellectual rigor in your analogies as you do in your science I see.

If you meant individual churches have consensus you should have said so and not used the word religion, because even the dimmest bulb can see that religions show zero consensus.

Science is about free enquiry, no one can be an expert in the whole of science, you take it on trust that other scientists are doing their job in an undogmatic way as you do.

I have seen nothing to suggest that that the world's experts on climatology are anything less than rigorous, open minded scientists, therefore I accept their conclusions in that field.

You don't accept their conclusions and you pretend it is for noble scientific reasons, but anybody with any scientific training can see that isn't the real reason, you reject science because of your politics and your personal desires.

To then denigrate others for towing a line from their "superiors" is the height of hypocrisy.

I am not the one who is following a party line here, you are. I have a personal vested interest in the science of AGW being wrong, but I wouldn't sully myself by sacrificing science on the alter of my own base personal desire as you have done.

And no, I am not claiming consensus does not exist in science. I am claiming that it shouldn't be the end all and be all of science.

No one has claimed that it is as far as I can see so you can put down your latest straw man straight away thank you.

A consensus is required for political decisions to be made. Science has formed a consensus that it can unite around to this aim in the field of climatology. You reject that because you don't like the political solutions suggested. You and your ilk unable to come up with solutions politically acceptable to you then attack the science.

Create better solutions to the problem rather than attacking good science.

The sociological push for consensus stifles debate, stifles questioning and stifles research.

No it doesn't. Consensus is always broad and in no way stifles either debate or further work.

You don't like consensus in this case because , politically, you are unable to deal with it.

If science didn't form consensus it couldn't drive political policy.

The consensus in climatology is very broad it is:

- The Earth is warming ( which you accept )
- This is causing changes in climatic pattern, which I assume you accept as it is reality
- That man is to some extent driving this change.

You accept 2/3 of the consensus on AGW you reject the final, and weakest, part of the consensus but not for scientific reasons.

I fail to see what all your refuted blather about temperature measuring stations is about anyway when you appear to accept the Earth is warming, it can only be an attempt to poison the well.

It appears that you already did.

Whoops silly me.

I would point you to a couple of wonderful quotations by Carl Sagan

Excellent some quotations not germane to the case in point by a man who recognised the threat of man made global warming:

He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger

Carl Sagan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Baggins, I apologize for ignoring you over the past week but I figured that was the only way to change the tone here. I didn't put you on ignore, I just didn't read anything you wrote until today.

No problem it was probably for the best. I just don't understand where you are coming from. You are obviously not an expert in this field and yet you denigrate the work of those that are experts. I assume that is for political and personal reasons and I don't like that. I have just as much reason to fear the consensus of climatologists in my professional life but I wouldn't call into to question the integrity and ability of the world's climatologists just because it might negatively impact by employment prospects.

Would you care to actually answer the question that Contracelsus answered? In the pictures below (as well as that in post 221) there are pictures of a thermometers next to an air conditioners. I love Happy Camp with 21 of them in the courtyard pointing to the thermometer, behind the parked auto.

To be honest I couldn't give a hoot about poorly positioned thermometers and neither can you we both accept the world is warming we both accept their are a myriad of data points that lead us to this conclusion and we both know that a few rogue measurement sites doesn't matter statistically given the weight of evidence.

Do you think that that is a great place to site your thermometer for the purpose of determining if global warming is occurring?

I know what a scientist would say. What say ye?

It is an awful place to site a thermometer but we both know it doesn't matter because it will be consistently wrong and can be compensated for and it is statistically meaningless anyway given the weight of data that shows the Earth is warming, which you accept anyway as far as I can tell.

 

[Baggins]

Baggins, When I got my first job in the oil business, working for Seismograph Service Corp, they sent me to a field crew in Riverton Wyoming. It is a rural area--not much to do out there. But just because it is a small town doesn't mean that they are free of the air conditioner effect. The thermometer is at one of the local radio stations. In the picture below it looks like there are 2 air conditioning exhuast coils within a few feet of the thermometer. The address of the station is 603 E Pershing Riverton Wyoming. You can see it in a google satellite view.

Now, Baggins, do you think this is a good place to put your thermometer in order to get a good temperature measurement for the purpose of determining the global warming rate?

I don't think this is a really satisfactory site--I happen to think that air conditioners shouldn't be near scientific instruments designed to measure the natural temperature. Perchance you disagree with me?

Remember what Sagan said about bamboozling--see a couple of posts above.

Mr Morton you know as well as I do that it is statistically meaningless and you accept the Earth is warming anyway don't you? So why the interest in a few rogue temperature measuring stations ?

I am off to rural France for a well earned break for a week now.

Have a good debate everyone

 

[Thistlethorn]

So what, you said religions have consensus not individual churches.

I hear the sound of rapidly moving goalposts.

You show as much intellectual rigor in your analogies as you do in your science I see.

If you meant individual churches have consensus you should have said so and not used the word religion, because even the dimmest bulb can see that religions show zero consensus.

Science is about free enquiry, no one can be an expert in the whole of science, you take it on trust that other scientists are doing their job in an undogmatic way as you do.

I have seen nothing to suggest that that the world's experts on climatology are anything less than rigorous, open minded scientists, therefore I accept their conclusions in that field.

You don't accept their conclusions and you pretend it is for noble scientific reasons, but anybody with any scientific training can see that isn't the real reason, you reject science because of your politics and your personal desires.

To then denigrate others for towing a line from their "superiors" is the height of hypocrisy.

I am not the one who is following a party line here, you are. I have a personal vested interest in the science of AGW being wrong, but I wouldn't sully myself by sacrificing science on the alter of my own base personal desire as you have done.




No one has claimed that it is as far as I can see so you can put down your latest straw man straight away thank you.

A consensus is required for political decisions to be made. Science has formed a consensus that it can unite around to this aim in the field of climatology. You reject that because you don't like the political solutions suggested. You and your ilk unable to come up with solutions politically acceptable to you then attack the science.

Create better solutions to the problem rather than attacking good science.




No it doesn't. Consensus is always broad and in no way stifles either debate or further work.

You don't like consensus in this case because , politically, you are unable to deal with it.

If science didn't form consensus it couldn't drive political policy.

The consensus in climatology is very broad it is:

- The Earth is warming ( which you accept )
- This is causing changes in climatic pattern, which I assume you accept as it is reality
- That man is to some extent driving this change.

You accept 2/3 of the consensus on AGW you reject the final, and weakest, part of the consensus but not for scientific reasons.

I fail to see what all your refuted blather about temperature measuring stations is about anyway when you appear to accept the Earth is warming, it can only be an attempt to poison the well.




Whoops silly me.



Excellent some quotations not germane to the case in point by a man who recognised the threat of man made global warming:



Carl Sagan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




No problem it was probably for the best. I just don't understand where you are coming from. You are obviously not an expert in this field and yet you denigrate the work of those that are experts. I assume that is for political and personal reasons and I don't like that. I have just as much reason to fear the consensus of climatologists in my professional life but I wouldn't call into to question the integrity and ability of the world's climatologists just because it might negatively impact by employment prospects.






To be honest I couldn't give a hoot about poorly positioned thermometers and neither can you we both accept the world is warming we both accept their are a myriad of data points that lead us to this conclusion and we both know that a few rogue measurement sites doesn't matter statistically given the weight of evidence.



It is an awful place to site a thermometer but we both know it doesn't matter because it will be consistently wrong and can be compensated for and it is statistically meaningless anyway given the weight of data that shows the Earth is warming, which you accept anyway as far as I can tell.

I think it's better to give up this line of reasoning, Baggins. Bringing out the facts like this is detriment to his political aim, and it will just be buried in a mountain of straw men and false analogies, and probably a lot more talk about single pieces of data that might or might not be in error.

Glen has made up his mind. He's going to fight against AGW with every muscle in his body, because of oil. Oil is what puts food on his table, and he's not about to allow anyone to take that away from him. Everyone reading this discussion can see that, plain and simple. This makes Glen many things. It makes him a good provider for his family. It makes him human. It also makes him a reality denier, an obfuscator and a political pawn. It's sad to see people like him, but they are out there, and will continue to oppose any AGW legislation until it's too late.

 

[Baggins]

As expected. Believers don't really care that hot air conditioners gently blowing on the thermometer will affect the temperature data set. I absolutely find this amazing, indeed almost unbelievable. And it is found among supposedly scientifically literal folk. But you all have seen now what I have observed over and over. They don't care. The only thing that matters is the HOLY CONSENSUS. Data doesn't matter. Sloppy data acquisition techniques don't matter. And they will use this data to convince you that the globe is warming. The data is in such sad shape that no one can say what it is doing--but they claim to know, and they want to tell us in a priestly way what it is that we should believe.They after all, have the CONSENSUS!!!!!

Neither of us care, you as far as can be ascertained accept that the world is warming so all this is just so much back and forth.

It has been explained to you why these data points are statistically unimportant and I am sure you have grasped that as well. You just chose to ignore it because this is all you have, you are trying to justify your rejection of the conclusions of those far more learned than yourself and it isn't really working is it?

There is a scientific consensus among climatologists who know what they are talking about I accept that. I know very little about climatology and neither do you, I accept that climatologists know what they are talking about but you don't, the reason you don't has nothing to do with science.

We, on the other hand are not supposed to think for ourselves and notice those air conditioners.

We are just supposed to accept that the scientists allow for such rogue sights, which they do.

By your reckoning all climatologists are morons who can't deal with data.

The world 100 years ago didn't have air conditioner coils to blow on the thermometers. Thus, almost by definition, any station with an air conditioner today has to be reading warmer than the station did 100 years ago. This little logical fact escapes the wee minds of true believers who only want to be in the mass of the consensus. They are the believers, data be damned.

Not all data is collected next to air conditioners is it?

 

[grmorton]

How much error is too much error? I have shown now several times that the standard deviation can be up to 6 times the difference in two populations and statistical methods, given sufficient data points, can still differentiate it.

The point at which the error is too much is when the intrinsic uncertaintly in the data is greater than the conclusion. In this case, they say that the world has warmed about 1.1 deg F over the past century. But in the temperature difference between Belle Plaine and Toledo merely 18 miles apart, the standard deviation of their difference is 4 deg F. They should measure almost exactly the same temperature if they are not affected by air conditioners or microclimatic issues. If the error in the data is +/-4 degrees then to say that the world has warmed by 1.1 deg F +/- 4 degrees means that the world might have warmed by 5.1 deg F or cooled by 3.1 deg F. In other words, there is too much error to know that the world has warmed, at least via the thermometer data set. All we can say is that there is a 68% chance that the temperature has changed from -3.1 to +5.1 deg F. Wow, what a conclusion.

So when people claim that the world has warmed by 1.1 deg F and the intrinsic error in all the data collected everywhere is 4 deg, they can't really conclude that the world has warmed.


I mentioned microclimate issues. Microclimatic issues are not constants, yet they are often treated that way in statistical discussions of weather data. The bias of the 70 year data set is about .83 deg F. But, that is an average of biases lasting for years, like when Belle Plaine was hotter than Toledo by 1.68 deg F (average from 1984 to 1990). But then from 1991 to 1997 something changed and Toledo was hotter than Belle Plaine by .9 deg F for those years. Averaging those biases is not really going to solve the error.

Then, as I showed with that US temperature animation showing how much they move the temperature merely by editing that shows how much error is in the data. When they edit the past they are in effect saying the observed value is erroneous and it should be something else. The amount they move it is an indication of the error bar. If the amount they move it isn't an error, then why the heck are they moving it?

I will grant that very noisy data will, indeed, have poor correlation coefficients over time, but that the trend can still be ascertained to some degree of certainty



But all that aside, the fact is that data is noisy. It always is noisy. Perfect data, even you admit, doesn't exist. So please tell me exactly how narrow must the distribution of differences between two stations be when averaged over 6 decades?.

Well that is the question that I have answered above. I also know that no thermometer stations 100 years ago had an air conditioner coil next to it. Whenever that air conditioner was installed there should be an increase in the temperature reading. Yet, there was no station move so station move corrections couldn't be applied. The weather service isn't notified when the air conditioner is installed, so they don't know. They also don't know when the dang thing is on heating the local environment.

That is not progress for me. Because I've been saying that all along. Perhaps it is progress that you finally agree with what I have been saying all along.

Maybe we have been misunderstanding each other cause I feel the same.

The phrase "with a great deal of accuracy" indicates that this is inherently a statistical debate. One cannot just say "a great deal of accuracy" and have done with it. One must quantify how accurate is accurate. That is precisely what statistics does. that is why the key to many of my posts and examples have been that little p-value figure. It tells me how confident I can be that I am seeing a signal or not seeing a difference.

It is not JUST only a statistical debate. It is also a debate about the physics of measuring temperature. It is statistical only to the point of whether the error bar on the data is bigger than the claimed warming. It is physical in so far as the implications of huge temperature differences lead to absurdities that can't be, and in so far as the data is being acquired according to good and sound physical principles. It isn't. So, if I give you lots of crap data which is crap because of the air conditioner next door, or the hot cement beneath you, it doesn't really matter what the statistics are because the data is meaningless before you actually do any statistical analysis. I think that is why I am less impressed with the statistics per se. Physics must come first here.

And as you saw, Baggins doesn't care that air conditioners are next to thermometers. It bothers him not at all. That is my experience with global warming advocates--they lose their sense of 'oh crap, we shouldn't be doing that'. That is why I think so much of you-- at least you haven't lost that. I still think you aren't fully grasping the import of having buildings, hot cement and air conditioners next to thermometer yet though. If you did, I think you would see that the data is crap before you even analyze it.

I would very much like to address this point in more depth, to that end in the next day or two I'm going to spend a bit of time ginning up some data. I will be a bit busy over the weekend and getting ready to start my "second job", so it may take a bit of time.

This will afford me the opportunity to track down the difference between an ANOVA F-test for a correlation and the impact of adjusted R[sup]2[/sup].

Take your time. But if you have garbage before it goes into the test the outcome of any test doesn't really matter. The last time I was here I got side tracked into a discussion of all sorts of math issues. I won't do it again. I want the lurkers reading this to actually understand it. That is why I do pictures. Everyone can understand pictures. And everyone can understand why air conditioners shouldn't be next to thermometers, except most AGW advocates who seem to think it doesn't matter.

There is a vast difference between saying "there are errors in the data" and saying "the dat is bad".

That is what statistics is all about.

NO, that is what PHYSICS is all about. If you have an air conditioner next to a thermometer the natural variation in its reading is lost. Now it goes up when the air conditioner is on and goes down when it is off. The variance is not a natural variance. During the summer it is far more likely to be on than in the winter. But it will affect the minimum and maximum temperature for the day always in a warming direction. Parts of the south have heat pumps and they will affect things a bit differently.

That is why it is vitally important to understand how much is error and how much is real data.

No it is vital to be sure that it is NATURAL variations of temperature that are being measured, not air conditioners and hot cement. If those are not measured, statistics don't matter.


[qutoe]
To my knowledge we never know the "true value" of any measurement. There's always error.
[/quote]

Sure. My favorite saying about oil prospect maps is that they are all wrong. Every single one of them. But some are close to being right. You can't be close if you have an air conditioner next to your thermometer.

But human volunteers who measure temperature and thermometers cannot make gross errors from time to time, without being completely without value?

I posted a case where St. Joseph LA was something like 60 degrees and 25 miles away in Port Gibson MS the temperature was something like 12 degrees. That is a gross error. It is completely without value. It says taht the cold air is coming from the EAST, something that doesn't happen. It says that there is one of the largest temperature gradients ever measured--and is thus unbelievable. For a week some of the temperatures were below zero, like -32 deg. What ridiculousness. They are simply wrong and should be thrown out.

Then surely we must destroy all data that has ever been measured on anything that involves temperature. We've shown how terrible the U.S. HCN is so we can assume that all temperatures ever measured anywhere are equally prone to horrible errors.

No, we won't but we should first ensure that we collect data that tells us what we want to know--is the world warming. Air conditioners are inconsistent with that goal as you already agreed.

So before the 1950's we should assume that all oil that was found was purely by chance and all the work the geologists and geophysicists did prior to 1950 was useless trash?

I think you are going off the deep end here.

No, we improved and got better with the measurements and decreased our error. We never eliminated error, we just got narrower.

If you drilled 500 wells within a 200 square foot plot of land and you measured to the top of Formation X using pre-1950's data techniques you'd probably get a variance of some amount in the depth to the top of the formation.

Some of that would be due to real differences in elevation even across a short area and some would just be pure noise and some would be mudlogger error (I assume some mud loggers are imperfect). One mud logger might have been really tired and completely missed the top of the formation in his analysis of the grit coming up from the well or however he does his job.

The point is with sufficient data you can still get a 95% confidence on how deep the top of that formation is even with a few really bad errors.

Let's assume that the standard deviation of those 500 observations was 2 feet. We can still determine the depth to the top of the formation with 95% confidence to +0.2 feet. That's 95% confidence of the actual depth of plus or minus about 2 and a half inches!

Now I'm not a geologist so this example isn't meant to mimic anything real, but it shows the difference between the confidence on the mean and the standard deviation.

I will tell you what I think of statistics. I have cancer. It is terminal but not near term terminal. At one point the statistics told me I had a 95% confidence of having been cured. I kept saying, it doesn't really matter the chance, it matters what side of the line I fall on. I fell onto the wrong side of that line.

Your example actually misses an important thing about geology. The tops are not flat. They have bumps that are real and it might be a bump as big as 10-20 feet. I have drilled 200 feet away from a well with 35' of pay in it. I owned a piece of that well. We were going up dip, the correct direction. But we didn't even find the sand. It was gone and two others were there. Statistics don't work in that kind of situation.

So we must make Airstream trailers illegal or abandon the science of climatology.

The problem is one of how to ensure that no one parks that air stream next to the thermometer. And if they do, how to document it so it can be corrected for. The AGW crowd constantly crows about how much the world has warmed but they dont' even bother to ensure that their stations are unaffected by obvioius problems like air conditioners. When I see that, why in the heck should I believe them?

If you go to buy a car and you notice that the car doesn't have an engine, are you going to drag out the statistical tests and determine what are the chances of that??? No, physics is going to come in and you are going to say, you can't drive a car lacking an engine.

That is why looking at individual stations is probably one of the worst critiques to the system unless one can show that all stations are hopelessly flawed and they are the only source of information (which they are not).

If 13% of the individual stations are next to heat sources, you don't think we should move them? Is that what you are saying?

From what I've read in science this is true. But when a concensus emerges it doesn't mean that science has failed. It is like the old syllogism:

All dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs.

Science does not always have concensus, but concensus does not mean it is "anti-science". Sometimes it just means the scientists agree.

I would agree with that. But would add. Just because scientists all agree, it doesn't mean it represents the truth. Doctors once all agreed that ulcers were from stress. One guy who was despised by them, proved them wrong. Barbara McClintock was said to be a nutter because she believed in jumping genes. She was correct the consensus was wrong.

My point in this is not that I am therefore necessarily correct, but that it is idiotic to depend upon consensus for truth. Data tells you the truth, not consensus.

 

[Contracelsus]

An interesting example:

I generated a data set today using some statistics software. It is made up of 10 sample sets. Each is a random-normal data set (it was generated randomly to have a normal distribution around a given mean and standard deviation). In this case each data set differs by 0.1 units in the mean but each has a standard deviation of 2 units. I wanted to see if it was possible to find a TREND in this type of data.

Over the entire data set there's only 1 unit difference from beginning to end but each x-value has y-values that have a standard deviation of 2 units.

This is what the data looks like:

Now this data is noisy as all get out. The adjusted R[sup]2[/sup] shows that the total variance of the data is 98% noise. But because there's a lot of data at each point it is possible to create a trend that is statistically significantly different from zero. That's what the F-ratio and p-value are saying.

In this case the noise of the data is very large compared to the overall change but the trend is still significant.

Note the little red "dots" around the trend line, that's the 95% confidence band around the fit itself. The green line is the overall mean of the data. The key factor is that the mean is not encompassed by the 95% confidence band of the trend (as I understand it).

Now this is where my statistical knowledge kind of breaks down. This basically says that this trend, while significantly "non-zero" accounts for only 2% of the total variance of the data overall. So the data is really noisy but we can still see a trend.

I must admit I'm still trying to get my head around this. I found this link online discussing this sort of thing:

The least-squares fitting process produces a value – r-squared (r2) – which is the square of the residuals of the data after the fit. It says what fraction of the variance of the data is explained by the fitted trend line. It does not relate to the significance of the trend line – see graph. A noisy series can have a very low r2 value but a very high significance of fit. Often, filtering a series increases r2 whilst making little difference to the fitted trend or significance.

Trend estimation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'll admit this differentiation seems subtle and I'm still trying to understand it better. But it seems like we can actually pull trends out of really noisy data if we have sufficient data.

(Please, please, please any real statisticians who are reading this, please tell me if this is even close to right!)

 

[Contracelsus]

They should measure almost exactly the same temperature if they are not affected by air conditioners or microclimatic issues. If the error in the data is +/-4 degrees then to say that the world has warmed by 1.1 deg F +/- 4 degrees means that the world might have warmed by 5.1 deg F or cooled by 3.1 deg F. In other words, there is too much error to know that the world has warmed, at least via the thermometer data set. All we can say is that there is a 68% chance that the temperature has changed from -3.1 to +5.1 deg F. Wow, what a conclusion.

Not necessarily. With sufficient data it is possible to narrow the confidence intervals around a mean difference that is significantly more constrained than just the standard deviation.

It is not JUST only a statistical debate. It is also a debate about the physics of measuring temperature.

And until we get perfect measurement then we will always be left with statistics. The physical interpretation of the data can come only after the appreciation of error terms, which is where stats come in.

I think that is why I am less impressed with the statistics per se. Physics must come first here.

But the physics works only if you know how accurate the input is. Not the other way around. If the input is garbage then the physical conclusions are bad (as you've said many times now).

Statistics tells us how good that input data is rather than trying to make assumptions about the ends of the distributions.

Take your time. But if you have garbage before it goes into the test the outcome of any test doesn't really matter. The last time I was here I got side tracked into a discussion of all sorts of math issues.

I am no mathematician, so the only thing I am interested in doing is understanding what is being looked at. To my understanding statistics is the only way to check the value of the data. I don't want to get too sidetracked as I would be out of my depth if it got too mathematical.

However I will not make any judgements about the data without firmly dealing with the errors in the data and the only way I have ever heard of to do that without bias is statistics.

I want the lurkers reading this to actually understand it. That is why I do pictures.

Unfortunately I've seen in myself the ability to be mislead by pictures. I've drawn wrong conclusions by oversimplifying my observations. That's why the nitty-gritty details are often the most important.

As they say, the devil is in the details.

Everyone can understand pictures. And everyone can understand why air conditioners shouldn't be next to thermometers, except most AGW advocates who seem to think it doesn't matter.

Actually this is a really good point and gets to the heart of the debate. If we grant that there's over 1200 temperature stations in the U.S. alone dating back in some cases over a century then we must agree that there's going to be times when people do silly things around them. Park an aluminum trailer, build an ac unit, put up a parking lot. That's why the treatment of the entire data set becomes even more important and why averaging helps. We can see gross trends with enough data, even if it is noisy.

I will tell you what I think of statistics. I have cancer.

I am sorry to hear that!

It is terminal but not near term terminal. At one point the statistics told me I had a 95% confidence of having been cured. I kept saying, it doesn't really matter the chance, it matters what side of the line I fall on. I fell onto the wrong side of that line.

I always like to think that "Statistics is what happens to other people." All the stats in the world wouldn't make me any happier if I found myself in the tail of the distribution like that. But there are tails in distributions.

I am the first to say that while I like statistics I hate to think that I could wind up being that 1 in a 100 that has something bad happen. It won't make me feel better AT ALL should I find myself in similar circumstances. You have my condolences.

Your example actually misses an important thing about geology. The tops are not flat. They have bumps that are real and it might be a bump as big as 10-20 feet.

I figured as much so that's why this was a silly example but if it is "ideal" and the top was reasonably flat and all the data was random (pure noise) then we could still find it very close even with lots of noise assuming we have lots of data. The key was that with standard deviation of the data was 2 feet but we could estimate the top down to about 2".

If you go to buy a car and you notice that the car doesn't have an engine, are you going to drag out the statistical tests and determine what are the chances of that???

I probably would. I would assume that the statistical chance of a car rolling of a production line has about every "error" aspect calculated down to a high degree of certainty. What is the probability the car will have a malfunctioning headlamp right off the production line? I bet someone has done that analysis and it isn't perfectly 0. It's the cost of doing business.

As for missing an entire engine I'm sure that's extraordinarily rare. With the possible exception of one manufacturer of cars that I once bought from. I'd expect from them just about anything.

I would agree with that. But would add. Just because scientists all agree, it doesn't mean it represents the truth. Doctors once all agreed that ulcers were from stress. One guy who was despised by them, proved them wrong.

But I bet no one would have believed him without a statistically robust analysis of data.

 

[Thistlethorn]

SPOILER ALERT:

Here's how the plot plays out:

1. Glenn will start posting examples of local station data showing errors and disagreements between stations. Regardless of how closely the stations correspond over long periods of time he'll blow the differences up into large scale questions about the integrity of the entire meteorological system in place since the 1800's. (prime examples will include comments kind of like: "how can a 20 degree difference exist between these two stations without a giant hurricane forming in the middle of Texas and no one recording it?"-type argumentum ad absurdum coupled with strawman arguments. He'll ignore the fact that data contain errors or that climatologists have been working to track down and deal with errors in a very open and well-publicized manner, and that many of these station "couplets" have a median difference of just about 0 degrees over the course of 40+ years.)

2. People will attempt to refute individual points until it becomes literally a debate about two neighboring stations in backwoods Georgia with some errors.

3. This will cause Glenn to call into question all of climatology regardless of the fact that this isn't how the data itself is used in the assessment of global climate change topics.

4. Then everyone will get snarky and nasty and hurl invective at each other

5. Glenn will remind us that
5a. He's been the director of technology for a major oil company
5b. He's lived in China
5C. He speaks some mandarin
5d. He knows a lot of people with PhD's and he's been their boss
5e. He's published a paper that uses statistics
5f. You likely don't understand the depth of the science he does
6. Everyone loses

Roll credits. (Save the popcorn money).

I am still amazed of how accurate this initial prediction turned out to be. For those who haven't been paying attention, this was on page one.

I am also amazed that Glen is still going on about some poorly placed temperature stations, as that does nothing to strengthen the argument he initially tried to put forth.

Glen has, in this thread, said that he:

- accepts that the earth is warming.

- accepts that said warming will have/has an effect on our environment.

The only thing he doesn't accept, that the vast majority of climatologists do, is that it is us humans that are responsible for a large part of this warming. His point in this discussion should have been to try to demonstrate how this warming is all natural. He has made a few post pertaining to this, but those have been refuted. The rest of his numerous posts have been about squabbling over temperature data from a couple of poorly placed stations, which has nothing to do with what he was trying to say.

It's a strange man we're dealing with.

 

[Contracelsus]

I am also amazed that Glen is still going on about some poorly placed temperature stations, as that does nothing to strengthen the argument he initially tried to put forth.

I'm in no small part responsible for that debate going on and on and on (And considering I read that "prediction post" as well, I've definitely biased the results and made it self-fulfilling by engaging in and continuing the debate...so you can't really blame Mr. Morton for that.)

(But I'm doing it because I'm liking the statistics and I recongize how vitally important statistics is to the whole debate overall, in fact to any scientific debate!)

 

[Contracelsus]

I must confess before any more oprobium is heaped on Glenn that I am responsible for most of the bad stuff in this thread, not Glenn.

Why? Well, becaue I am Thaumaturgy. I know this is the worst thing in the discussion world to use a "sock puppet" and for that I should be beaten severely.

As Thaumaturgy I was responsible for the thread turning nasty but I also wanted to actually discuss the data. So I withdrew after I got really mean and nasty and then I came back on with a more "measured" tone in an effort to discuss the data.

If anyone on here is a liar it is me. I wanted to discuss the data but I had already poisoned the well. I don't feel I lied about any of the numbers or calculations but I did lie about who I was. I was personally responsible for all the bad stuff starting.

Especially when Glenn didn't really get into the nitty-gritty of station-by-station comparisons until I followed up one of his posts.

His blog is full of these side-by-side comparisons and I wanted to address that issue, so when he did bring it up I jumped. But indeed he might not have even brought it up unless I, Thaumaturgy, had typed it up on PAGE 1 in my "prediction post".

My Prediction Post was put up in frustration after the really bad experience I had with him debating on earlier thread. I started off quite pleasant and ultimately we both ended up yelling at each other. He does have an ability to really needle folks. He can be an unpleasant person to the extreme in these debates.

But indeed I am the person responsible for this debate going off the rails. So if all y'all can retract any kind comments about me then please do so.

I do, however, stand by my statistics discussion. I am not a statistician but I honestly do believe in the power of the statistics and what the numbers say. If I am in error in any statistics then please correct me, however I have at no point attempted to misrepresent any statistics or calculation.

To that end, please start whipping me.

(And do cut Glenn some slack on this...I did egg him on to no small extent).

{if this gets me banned from CF so be it. It is only fair. However, I will stress again, that I have not attempted to misrepresent the data or math and that is why I put so many citations with my posts.}

 

[thaumaturgy]

Contracelsus is telling the truth.

The report button is the little "exclamation point" up in the right corner.