A peek at how AGW data is “adjusted”
And it’s a lot like the way sausage is made—only a bit uglier.
I can’t say I understand all the technicalities here; I welcome comments from those who do. But it seems to me that “garbage in, garbage out” hardly begins to describe it.
I read it, too, and and was surprised at the magnitude of the adjustments involved. The entire warming trend of the data from Darwin comes solely through the adjustments and not the raw data. The raw data shows a temperature decline.
Now I understand the purpose of doing an adjustment. If a weather station moves to a different nearby location that averages a warmer temperature, the only way to reasonably compare data gathered in years before the move to data gathered in years after the move is to account for that shift. Either the former temperatures need to be adjusted up or the current temperatures need to be adjusted down to make a continuous series, where like is being compared to like. However, as I said, the magnitudes are quite stunning. They’re boosting actual temperature readings by 2.5 degrees and then remarking on the fact that temperatures have gone up 2 degrees. Reading through the methodology of how and when to make corrections doesn’t seem to justify those kinds of numbers.
Just a guess from a social scientist, but wouldn’t most local environmental changes near stations require downward adjustments? I’m thinking about things like urban sprawl, the growth in air conditioning units, highway and parking lot construction and the decline of crop lands.
Sounds like it was not garbage in so they had to adjust it to get garbage out.
The adjustment as it was configured seemed reasonable: i.e. average the nearby stations and if the suspect station is out of line, then adjust. However, in this case the “nearby” stations were 700km away!
This is just sloppy data processing that was not questioned because it gave the result they wanted.
There is something seriously whacked about the data and their treatment of it.
It’s not surprising that AGW scientists are so resistant to sharing their data and methodology, and how evasive and misleading they are in even discussing it.
In my go-rounds with Gavin Schmidt over releasing the data and the methodology, he kept demanding that I “audit” the NASA/GISS data but of course that dataset had already been “homogenized.”
Mr. Frank Says:
December 8th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
From what I’ve read, that’s definitely a part of it. The “urban heat island” effect.
But apparently the fiddling with the data is far worse than the unreliability of the raw temperature readings.
The steps in the “homogenized” graphs might result from volcanic activity that has heretofore gone unnoticed.
Genuine recorded data of actual temperatures? Nope.
Yeah–I understand it. I’ve worked with huge data sets of both natural and financial systems. You can call it some scientific or mathematical name, but the result is still the same:
When working with data, it is very, very easy to rationalize an idea why the data doesn’t look like you think it should and devise an elegant ‘correction’ to make it look ‘right’.
However, the idea you rationalized away to make the data ‘look right’ should be tested as an hypothesis. It is the scientific equivalent of photoshop.
That is the ‘special sauce’ they put on the data that I was bitching about in my beefs with that dope Mitsu.
I get it now! When they said, “The science is settled”, they were using “settled” in a special technical sense. The average, ordinary layman would have said, “The science is rigged”.
I’m sure that Global Warmism has the same sound principles as phrenology and Lamarckism….
It is stunning…..
We look at the Salem Witch trials or the Turd Reich and wonder:
“How could they be so deluded, so blind, so superstitious?” “How can those people think they are so righteous and yet be so evil?”
Now we see how. We are seeing it again in our own lifetime; a mass movement predicated on murder and built on willful lies.
I talk to scientists from “a local famous national laboratory”; one of them is a Global Warmzi. I can talk to him about physics…. I can talk to him about chemistry…. As soon as I bring up Global Warmianity; it’s as though I’m talking to a different person. He gets all vague, his eyes unfocus and he starts making sweeping pronoucements: “This isn’t sustainable!” “We need sustainability!” “There are too many people!”
I can almost hear a mental *click* when he switches over to Warmist dogma. It is chilling. I think of my toddler whom by his philosophy he must despise as non-carbon neutral.
When I get him wound-up about “The Environment”, I wonder to myself:
“I’ll bet this is what it was like talking to Nazi scientists; they are perfectly focused and reasonable on science until you bring up Jews then the fangs descend, the eyes glaze and they start talking about ‘lebensraum’ and ‘purity’.”
It’s clearly not an intellectual or scientific issue. It’s visceral.
Except in the current Global Warmzi case, it’s not “The Reich” it’s “The Environment” and it’s not “Jews” it’s “Humans”.
Hmmmm…. I wonder if the Warmzis enjoy imagining a world without humans as much as the Nazis enjoyed imagining a world without Jews?
I can’t believe I am living through this.
There were a great, great many PhD scientists from the famous old universities who were brilliant and well read and became “racial theorists” for the Turd Reich.
Priests bugger kids, Tiger cheats on a supermodel, and scientists lie about data….
It is the way of this fallen world.
(Really, I should start calling the current anti-human, anti-toilet paper Warmzi Regime the “Turd Reich”. It is more fitting.)
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/12/07/science/07climateg.html
See that great variability that suddenly becomes ‘homogeneous’ and concerted at about, oh, 1900? Notice how instead of some (any) variability past 1900, the different sources actually become more homogenenous as we move to the recent temperature measurements?
Bulllllllllllllshit!
That. Does. Not. Happen. In any natural system. Hell, even if the warming was true, measurement variability would show more noise than that.
That data is obviously, and amaturishly cooked. If someone where I worked showed that to me as a graph of temperatures of anything I would say: “You did something wrong. Nothing behaves like that. Nothing.”
Then I would ridicule them saying:
“Oh, I see how the Vietnam War led to a great agreement in your disparate data sources. I mean, I can see how all those napalmed kids heated The Earf, but I cannot see how that event would cause your indirect measurements to agree more than any time in history!”
(I’m kinda an a-hole to work with.)
The “true believers” will keep on believing, regardless of the facts…by definition. It’s simple faith in their “religion”… 😯
Gray, your 12:46 comment is chilling. This may not end well.
JoNova fills in more details on Darwin here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/smoking-guns-across-australia-wheres-the-warming/
It includes maps, graphs and concludes with a question:
“I generated these graphs using the Bureau of Meteorology website, and there are more sites there to look at. Perhaps you can find the missing warming locations across the vast north that would bring the average up? Is there any way the official calculated averages for northern Australia could reflect the data we have on the ground?”
What is so horrendously chilling about the AGW Left is its anti-human drive. There has never been in history something like this. The Nazi’s were anti-Jew, anti-Gypsy, anti-Catholic etc, the Communists were anti-capitalist, anti-religious etc, but this is something new altogether! Here you have a bunch of humans talking with contempt about humanity and human beings as such!
They are calling themselves by their own words the enemies of mankind. Why do we, the despised rest, even take this garbage! Why don’t we rise up against these people who start by calling themselves our enemies. Look at how they despise our children!
To set up humanity against itself is evidently the worst thing you can do. It is spiritual poison of the darkest kind. In order to survive spiritually and bodily we have to fight this poison with everything we have.
Look at the many speeches of lord Monckton at You Tube. He makes it as clear as day that AGW is a communist fraud to push for leftist dictatorial global government.
To me it is the exact opposite of true Christianity. True Christians are ready to, if necessary, give their own lives in order that their loved ones might live. AGW fanatics want us to die in order that they have power.
Don’t think it can happen. For 40 years DDT was banned at the instigation of the world Left. Approximately 40 million people (mostly children) died as a result of this a terrible death of malaria needlesly. Only when the criminals who instituted this madness either retired or died the ban could be lifted.
How many will have to die as a result of the AGW madness before todays fraudsters have either died or retired?
Well I must say that in my wilder moments (some would say that’s just about all the time lately) I’ve wondered whether these guys might hope at some point to use the recent EPA move designating CO2 an environmental pollutant to enforce mandatory population control measures. You know, since we humans exhale the stuff as part of our respiration.
“I’m sure that Global Warmism has the same sound principles as phrenology and Lamarckism….”
Don’t forget Lysenkoism, which is essentially a form of Lamarckism, but backed by the power of a totalitarian state. In fact, it’s pretty obvious to me that this is what many of the AGW charlatans hope for–that the secret police will come and take away the dissenters, leaving no one to dispute their dubious claims.
WSJ calls the warmists deniers
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574576683216723794.html
Gray, I think you absolutely nailed it with your 12:46 am comment.
Yes, it is chilling.