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Re: Trends. You can compute it if you like. People have done that. I don't recall the results but they were close enough to zero to be equivalent. Re: ClimDiv.

Re: Trends. You can compute it if you like. People have done that. I don't recall the results but they were close enough to zero to be equivalent. Re: ClimDiv. Yes, but from my comment: "they have kept on using the old broken network which they now adjust via models" So indeed you'd expect them to follow each other closely now. There's no attempt to dupe you - a full treatment of the problems with temperature data is a book sized topic, that's all. The reason for the selection of years is simply because that's all the data that has been collected by the new network. By all means, treat this as a good faith attempt to provoke questions and further research. The CRN is just an example - the problem I'm getting at here is what it reveals about the methodologies and culture. Specifically, how do we know that people who claim to be scientists are actually using the scientific method? That's the topic I responded to. For decades the US data collection system was degrading in ways that created false warming, but it wasn't the people who are paid to study climate who raised the alarm. It was volunteers. That should be a serious problem for any rational person who wants to know true things; scientists are meant to care about measurement error and take steps to minimize it. So you'd want at least some sort of post-mortem process to identify the root causes of this collective institutional failure, but, it didn't happen. Instead data accuracy became politicized and now researchers refuse to use the CRN even though it was built specifically to resolve disputes over data quality! The problem here is actually more severe than this one case. Climatologists were well aware of other problems with temperature data! Data quality problems are common in science so that's not inherently an issue. But the scientific approach is to quantify and then communicate the flaws in data through CIs/error bars, then propagate those through any statistical derivation you do, and finally be honest about what the CIs are telling you even if that's "we can't say much". That's the point you were making originally and we agree. Climatologists don't do this. Instead they think up reasons the data must be flawed, "fix" it via post-processing and then issue new dataset versions without error bars. They don't only do this for data collected long ago. Once they opened that pandora's box they couldn't stop and now temperature readings collected even just 5 years ago are subject to large scale revisions post-hoc. These revisions don't just change individual data points. Entire trends appear or disappear due to the revisions. https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-record-please-stand-up/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest... https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 http://www.climate4you.com/images/NCDC%20Jan1915%20and%20Jan2000.gif http://www.climate4you.com/images/NCDC%20Jan1915%20and%20Jan... That behavior is considered fraud in other fields and for good reason: the temptation to change the data to confirm your theory is too great if you allow that. Climatologists though, don't consider it fraud, they think it's normal and fine. Sure enough, there are problems like temperatures as measured by satellites and weather balloons not matching the modified temperature timeseries from ground based weather stations. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to see if the ground station data was corrupted but pointing out this divergence is considered "denialism" and verboten. All this opens up lots of meta-scientific questions like, is the scientific method objective? Do the institutions attempt to enforce the usage of it? What even is the scientific method anyway, can you write it down in a way nobody will object to? Clearly here we have a major disconnect: if you did what climatologists do in a physics experiment, your papers would be retracted and you'd be booted out in disgrace. Yet both fields claim to be scientific. the vast majority of climate change deniers takes are along the lines I described - "it's snowing, ergo suck it libs" Sure, and that's indeed not a useful rebuttal to claims of long term trends. I don't know about "vast majority" because I don't know of any surveys that could be used to check that claim. But unfortunately it's also no longer particularly meaningful to check. Climatologists, governments and media are now all too happy to attribute individual forest fires, cold years, hot years etc to climate change. If they can do it then "it's snowing ergo suck it libs" is in fact a valid argument by the scientific institution's own standards. Hence my point: are they really scientific?

defrost 4y ago
> There's no attempt to dupe you - a full treatment of the problems with temperature data is a book sized topic, that's all. There are a lot of book sized (and larger) data sets and many people that study them. More than a decade ago Richard A. Muller fell in with the climate deniers and studied the Urban Heat centre bias mythology to death hoping from the outset to find it true. > When we began our study ( Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ), we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. > Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. > Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. You seem to be fixated upon a long debunked point that never panned out under close study.
- origin_path 4y ago
  The scope of this conversation is drifting - we started by talking about whether scientists always use scientific methodologies in trustworthy ways. The BEST project you mentioned uses very similar methodologies as climatologists usually do, so it's not a surprise they replicated the results. As the quote you give makes clear, the BEST people took acknowledged-to-be corrupted data, assumed a priori that "correcting" that data is a legitimate thing to do, "corrected" it in largely similar ways and got largely similar results. That isn't really a surprise because replicability wasn't ever an issue under contention. The issue under debate here is rather whether that's a scientifically legitimate approach to begin with, and whether it's the sort of thing people expect when they think of science. I don't see how editing observational data can ever be scientific. If you allow one field to do it you have to let them all do it and then what can be said with any confidence about what's true? The problem is researchers usually start by saying "this question feels important, therefore, we will work with what we've got" and there's no incentive to stop and say "the data quality is insufficient for analysis". BEST claimed to address UHI effects but just like previously, when people dug into the details they found that large numbers of weather stations at airports and post offices had been classed as "very rural", for example, so the data here is just of garbage quality. W.R.T. climatology specifically there probably is a slight rise in temperatures across the globe in the past decades - the satellite data suggests as such. But not much, certainly much less than predicted, and we only have such data stretching back a few decades so not much can be said about long term trends. By climatologist's own admission the surface temperature dataset is heavily corrupted, that's why they modify it so much. The modifications in the current era are relatively small but in the past e.g. first half of the 20th century they are much larger, effectively making the past colder than it was actually observed to be at the time. That's why all the papers and newspaper articles from the 60s and 70s discussing global cooling are now considered obsolete - they edited the data to remove the cooling but, once again, there was never any post-mortem into why their measurement methodologies failed so badly or why they collectively asserted a new ice age with so much confidence. Finally, note that once we zoom out a bit from the question of SST reliability, there is still the problem of aggressive exaggeration and unscientific behavior elsewhere in the field. To quote Muller back at you: "much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed"

defrost 4y ago

> There's no attempt to dupe you - a full treatment of the problems with temperature data is a book sized topic, that's all. There are a lot of book sized (and larger) data sets and many people that study them. More than a decade ago Richard A. Muller fell in with the climate deniers and studied the Urban Heat centre bias mythology to death hoping from the outset to find it true. > When we began our study ( Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ), we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. > Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. > Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. You seem to be fixated upon a long debunked point that never panned out under close study.

origin_path 4y ago
The scope of this conversation is drifting - we started by talking about whether scientists always use scientific methodologies in trustworthy ways. The BEST project you mentioned uses very similar methodologies as climatologists usually do, so it's not a surprise they replicated the results. As the quote you give makes clear, the BEST people took acknowledged-to-be corrupted data, assumed a priori that "correcting" that data is a legitimate thing to do, "corrected" it in largely similar ways and got largely similar results. That isn't really a surprise because replicability wasn't ever an issue under contention. The issue under debate here is rather whether that's a scientifically legitimate approach to begin with, and whether it's the sort of thing people expect when they think of science. I don't see how editing observational data can ever be scientific. If you allow one field to do it you have to let them all do it and then what can be said with any confidence about what's true? The problem is researchers usually start by saying "this question feels important, therefore, we will work with what we've got" and there's no incentive to stop and say "the data quality is insufficient for analysis". BEST claimed to address UHI effects but just like previously, when people dug into the details they found that large numbers of weather stations at airports and post offices had been classed as "very rural", for example, so the data here is just of garbage quality. W.R.T. climatology specifically there probably is a slight rise in temperatures across the globe in the past decades - the satellite data suggests as such. But not much, certainly much less than predicted, and we only have such data stretching back a few decades so not much can be said about long term trends. By climatologist's own admission the surface temperature dataset is heavily corrupted, that's why they modify it so much. The modifications in the current era are relatively small but in the past e.g. first half of the 20th century they are much larger, effectively making the past colder than it was actually observed to be at the time. That's why all the papers and newspaper articles from the 60s and 70s discussing global cooling are now considered obsolete - they edited the data to remove the cooling but, once again, there was never any post-mortem into why their measurement methodologies failed so badly or why they collectively asserted a new ice age with so much confidence. Finally, note that once we zoom out a bit from the question of SST reliability, there is still the problem of aggressive exaggeration and unscientific behavior elsewhere in the field. To quote Muller back at you: "much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed"