The Holocene Deniers

grmorton said:

I have some things I need to get done for a couple of days and it would probably be good to let tempers cool a bit anyway.

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Agreed. So get you last jabs in.

I want to say something to my critics here. I have two guys who read my blog, which has much of the same info I post here. One is a physicist for IBM and he started out extremely skeptical of my data. He just emailed me last week saying that he finally agrees with me that one can't use the thermometer data to know what the world temperature is doing. His opinion means a lot more to me than that of anyone here.

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Of course it does! He apparently agrees with you!

The second guy who emails me, commenting on my blog reads it whenever I post a new thread. He is a former chairman of a department of statistics at a major US university. He has never had a problem over the years of our correspondence in telling me he thinks I am wrong. He reads what I write on my blog, much the same as the stuff I post here. Not once has he said that my statistics was flawed.

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Fine. All you need do is show me how mine is. Not just say it is, but show me.

I value his opinion being having been a chairman of the statistics department far more than the stuff put out here by a couple of rank amateurs

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I am a rank amateur! I admit it! I've admitted it since day one!

That's why I show all my work and show all the numbers and show all the details of every calculation I run.

All you have to do is show me how it is flawed using mathematics.

I don't care if you have a love-nest with your statistician friend. I don't care if he comes over and cuts your lawn for free just to be near your glowering face. I don't care one whit about who you know or how your friends laugh at the math.

I just care about the math. I really, honestly, do want to learn.

But then I've spent years teaching so I know the value of knowing how to teach.

Now, I have said that I would stay as long as it took to give people here the data.

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your forgot to add "as you understand it".

I have come to wonder if there IS anyone here who cares about what I am posting.

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I care. Obviously enough to invest masses of my time to address the data. Download the data. Run statistics ad nauseam on the data.

Apparently because I don't agree with you on the meaning of said data I clearly "don't care". What you forget is there's a difference between "not agreeing with you" and "not caring what you say". I do the former, not the latter.

I have no illusions and never had any that I would convince the unconvinceable about global warming.

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I thought you valued data as a scientist. Sorry, my bad.

My purpose has never been to convince thau or Gracchus or any of the believers.

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Did you ever for one second think we are "Believers" for a reason?

Haven't I shown ample evidence for my position? Haven't I backed my position up with mathematical support?

My purpose has always been to give those who want some counter information that information.

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And that is only helped by failing to treat the data in a statistically robust manner?

The only reason to avoid the stats is if you don't have a statistically robust stance. QED.

You want to talk only to the ignorant and uninformed in hopes of taking anecdotal data and making a shocking story.

That is precisely the kind of anti-science I am here to fight and I will continue to do so.

If there are those who care about the data I will stick around.

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And I care about the data. That is why I use statistics. To offset the "shock" value imposed by anecdotal data.

I see little reason to stay if I am talking merely to Thau and thugs.

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Except "Thau and Thugs" (a great band name, btw) are the ones who are talking hard math in a data discussion.

Got a problem with that? Then maybe you picked the wrong profession to pick on?

That would be a huge waste of time. So, if there is anyone who likes what I have been posting and would like to see more, please speak up

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Otherwise Glenn will have to take his ball and go home!

Sorry, Glenn, but this is weak.

If you don't care what people think and you have a robust data set that can withstand stats and math, then show 'em. Don't run away.

(Psst: there's a guy who posts on here who calls people like that "cowards"...don't let him hear you talking like this!)

(unlike the snobs who think that YECs are not real people, I don't care what your background is because data is the only thing that matters to me.)

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Indeed. Except data requires statistics to deal with.

Got a problem with the stats? Show me the errors. USING STATISTICS.

THIS REALLY ANNOYS ME. I mean GREATLY annoys me.

grmorton said:

I am very disappointed in Thaumaturgy, who doesn't have the manhood to publically acknowlegde the simple fact that he was the first one in this thread to raise my qualifications.

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EXCEPT THAT IS NOT TRUE, GLENN! I freely admitted early on that I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR POSTING THAT FIRST. You can check it out.

All you need do is look back at POST # 117

thaumaturgy said:

In the present thread I was, indeed, the one who raised the fact that you will ultimately flog your resume as you like to do. And indeed it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it was predicated on your penchant from the earlier discussion we had on the Global Warming Data thread. And, of course, from reading snippets on your blog.

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(Emphasis added)

I find that to be most disturbing about him because it says he has no honor and is no gentleman. It says he is dishonest.

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YOU HAVE BEEN PROVEN WRONG.

MAN UP. ADMIT that over 600 posts ago I said exactly that thing! I TOOK RESPONSIBLITY AND I SAID THIS OVER 600 posts ago.

WHO IS BEING HONEST NOW?

(And the fact that someone brought up my "self-fulfilling prophecy" again later on was also the reason I blew my own cover on my sock puppet! I felt it was very wrong for that to have happened that way, so I outted my own sockpuppet in order to make a point that I was responsible for the "self-fulfilling prophecy"!) I didn't have to do that. I could have let it ride.

Run away now.

grmorton said:

I am very disappointed in Thaumaturgy, who doesn't have the manhood to publically acknowlegde the simple fact that he was the first one in this thread to raise my qualifications. I find that to be most disturbing about him because it says he has no honor and is no gentleman. It says he is dishonest.

Back in a couple of days if anyone here cares.

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I have since been made aware by Glenn that he is not interested in Post #117 where I addressed this point, so I will provide the required confession yet again:

from August 20, 2009:

thaumaturgy said:

In the present thread I was, indeed, the one who raised the fact that you will ultimately flog your resume as you like to do. And indeed it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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The posts since then in which I took personal responsibility for how this thread started off are here:

Posts #117, #122, #259, #273 #359

Done.

grmorton said:

Here is the average daily temperature difference, averaged for each day of the year from 1948 to 2008. It is then put in a histogram

Here is the average daily temperature difference for each day. Then below is the skewed histogram.

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One last bite at this apple then I'll let it rest until we determine if Glenn actually went away. But I like data so I'm still going to crunch some numbers.

Let's take one year out of this series, the year 2000 for both of these stations.

Since each year from January to August should represent a "mini-warming event" of measurable feature I plotted the daily temps of both Okmulgee and Okemah and then fit a line to see, linearly, from January 1 to July 31st, what sort of trends do these two stations "see":



Again, the trends both point upward and are very close, differing only by 0.03degF/day.

Now, of course, much more modest increases in temperature may be harder to parse out, that is obvious. But again, that isn't how this data is used in terms of global warming.

grmorton said:

Thaumaturgy, since no one in 2 days said they liked what I was saying, I will let you have this thread and this forum. You are still wrong because you don't know the difference between a model and mathematics, neither does Thistlethorn.

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That is fine. I have only wanted to be shown specifically, mathematically, how the calculations were in error.

I am not a climatologist by any stretch of the imagination. Nor am I a statistician.

If I give you a sequence of numbers 2,2,2,1,1,1,2,1,2,2,2 and ask if it is the output of a random process. If you answer yes, your mathematics is right but the model is wrong if I tell you that that is the output of a 6-sided die.

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If it is a "fair die" then isn't it merely a means of randomizing the numbers 1-6? If you rolled a fair die 11 times and you ran into that sequence then it would be what it was by random chance, would it not?

Each roll has a 1/6 chance of rolling a 1 and each roll has a 1/6 chance of rolling 2, and each roll is completely independent.

I would agree that sequence would seem unlikely, but I am by no means skilled in probability calculations.

But I never came here to convince you, as I said.

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I thought you came to discuss data. I greatly enjoy discussing data. That is why I jumped on the data as well as I could.

I only want to learn how to deal with the data using the most robust tools available to science. That is why I am working hard to try to learn more stats. I could always be in error on the stats. No doubt about that. I am, as you said a "rank amateur". But the only thing I ask in response is a robust assessment of the mathematics using mathematics and statistics.

I came here thinking that there were a few people here who cared to hear an alternative view. Now I know that there are none, so have a nice life

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There are people who care to hear an alternate view, as you no doubt know from your own blog. You have "followers". There are some skeptics out there.

But just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they are ipso facto uninformed and scientifically naive.

No one on here has ever disagreed that placing a thermometer next to a heat source would cause anything but an error. But the key is, how many bad data sources are there out there and what relative impact do they have on the overall trend estimation.

That's been the real heart of the debate. That is also why anecdotally approaching a few stations and pointing out the flaws does less than approaching the data as a whole as it is treated by the climatologists who are making the claims you disagree with.

Skepticism should always be around. It should always be kept in mind that something could be wrong. You are not wrong to question the data, but that doesn't mean necessarily that you are going to convince everyone.

You presented your data, I presented my take on that data. All I ever wanted to do was provide a robust assessment of what that data said using the statistical tools available. If I was in error on the math (and that is possible!) I want to know specifically what that error was using the same formalisms that underly the statistical and mathematical analyses.

I don't like feeling the nastiness I usually end up feeling on these debates. It gets out of hand quite quickly and I am not innocent of causing it. I attempted to quench the fire I started and took a step back so I could discuss the data. I was apparently unable to effectively stop this particular train, however. And ultimately I got right back on it.

Present your data, make your case. But do appreciate that because I don't agree with you might not mean I don't care about science.

Regarding numbers generatated by a six-sided die, the chance of getting that particular sequence is exactly the same as getting any other specific sequence - very small (1/6) ^ 11. It is like lotto numbers. The chance of getting 1,2,3,4,5,6 in a lotto draw is exactly the same as the chance of getting 3, 11, 19, 25, 32, 43. But at first glance to humans 1,2,3,4,5,6 seems much more improbable.

The chances of getting some ordered set is smaller than the chance of getting a disordered set, of course, simply because there are more disordered sets than ordered sets. But any specific set is as likely as any other other specific set.

grmorton said:

It has been a while since I have been on this forum. I will stay a while.

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This is my first post in a very long time, but it is doubtful that I will remain active, I don't have much spare time.

I would suggest that if humans had not spent the last few hundred years dumping trash and various poisons, seriously damaging ecosystems with population pressures... global warming would not be, ecologically speaking, all that serious.

But we have.

(The Pacific ocean plastic vortex comes to mind as a rather massive example)

Healthy people generally don't have a problem with the flu, but for somebody who is already weakened by other diseases it can be fatal.

May the peace of the Lord be with you,

Robert the Pilegrim