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And to the author's credit, the observations made are not conclusions in themselves.
After reading about the climatology controversies, and not knowing who to believe, I did my own investigation of the climate data using the GHCN data, which was the most comprehensive publicly available set I could find. http://code.google.com/p/tempgraph/ This is written in C++, and you can plot the data in numerous different ways, including individual weather stations if you wish.
This is Hacker News.
Meanwhile, from the adults who use crazy concepts like "sattelite data" and "arithmetic mean": http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE61O02C20100225
Last month was the hottest january on record.
EDIT: Not to take anything away from the guy -- cool code, cool app. But to those who are trumpeting this -- maybe you should take a look at that "hottest january on record" article and take a look at the methods that were used to arrive at that conclusion.
What's the point of this? All it shows is that someone without scientific training is incapable of drawing conclusions from data out of context; they can't "check for yourself". I tought the only people that don't know this are journalists, bloggers and politicians.
I was thinking about this particular type of ad hominem argument the other day and decided I loathe it. Imagine if people told Plato he couldn't write about philosophy because he didn't go to harvard and get a degree in philosophy. Or tell galileo that he was wrong because he didn't have a degree in astronomy. Valid scientific investigations don't require scientific training. This person, who wrote some code and plot…
1) it is an apparently unbiased inquiry, which means a lot. The allegations against leading climate change scientists, whether they are valid or not, highlight an inescapable reality about the world of academic geologists (no matter how "inconvenient" of a truth it is): like many scientists, these people need to raise large amounts of funding for relatively boring projects (i.e. ice samples anyone?). But if they tie in their research to a hot (no pun), visible issue (as rendered by the media and politicians, regardless of its scientific merit), then BAM! It's a lot easier to get funding. Hence, climate scientists have a huge incentive to paint global warming as massive, urgent big problem, whether or not it actually is. Seeing data crunched by an amateur, who has the skills to process it, but not the incentives to skew it, means a lot.
2) Even though it only shows weather data from a single region, "global warming" would presumably be a global phenomenon that one could detect from basically any location (and if this is not the case, then the press needs to revise its doomsday scenarios about global warming necessarily flooding New York City and Shanghai, because if it's only occurring in some places, then we shouldn't use data gathered in Canada to predict catastrophe in East Asia.)
I'm not claiming to know the scientific truth about this issue one way or the other, but I do know that there are a lot of forces at play here besides science (funding incentives, politics, news media sensationalism, green energy business interests, etc.), and I think a return to the data is a great place to start unraveling this issue that is far more complex than Al Gore or his opposite Dick Cheney would have you believe.
Offtopic: that syntax highlighting upon mouseover is a great idea. Does the fact that I haven't seen this before mean I need to get a new editor?
