Average Global Temperatures since 1850 • Hacker News Board

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#121

Post by southern_cross » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

zapnuk wrote: post #82

southern_cross wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that. This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that al…

You provided no evidence to support your claim. Why should one believe your claim that most/all climate research like this http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ has it wrong?

Check my comment history from another thread a little while back to see details about problems I've found with Berkeley Earth. But the short version is that the charts and graphics provided by those folks for my local area, and created by others using their data, seem to bear little resemblance to the reality of the situation. Feel free to follow up on the links provided there to see what you can see about your own local area.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#122

Post by southern_cross » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #96

southern_cross wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what they've been doing! Or, perhaps more correctly, they've let their "algorithms" run amok without doing any quality control on the final results, thereby turning modest warming into "scary" warming. Whether this was intentional or not is debatable (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor ), but it certainly looked that way to me at the time. About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorr…

> Much of that data has since been hidden again You mean the datasets here? https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/ with the data used to generate it available here? https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/crutem3/station-data/ What do you think has been hidden?

At the time I went back later to look at the data again, almost none of the various links on the relevant web pages still worked. Some working links claimed to link to both raw and adjusted data but then didn't actually have the raw data. Some still had things like precipitation data but the temperature data itself was now missing. Some claimed to have "raw" data but it wasn't the data I was actually looking for and had accessed in the past. And so on. I know that I saw at least one statement which seemed to indicate that the data I was looking for was no longer available for legal reasons.

"Legal reasons" was the cover they used to not make this data available to begin with, but some authority or another finally forced their hand here. It wouldn't surprise me to find that they still don't want it out there, and so it may only be available on an on-again, off-again basis, maybe only after somebody complains about not being able to get it. Nor would I be surprised to find that the data itself mysteriously changes over time, as many have claimed. I believe that they have even admitted to such - that they routinely "correct" various data sets, meaning that what you see today may be different from what you see tomorrow.

In any case, I didn't expend a lot of effort the second time around, and the first time around I was mostly interested in what the "official", final data sets were claiming about temperatures (at least at first), because that was what was being put out to the public. And after finding issues with local temps, I ultimately went out and got local data from local sources, completely bypassing the official sources. And one of the first things I discovered was that there was an awful lot of data - both old and new - that was ultimately marked as "missing" in the official records but was sitting there plain as day in the local records. I never did quite figure out what was going on there either, but I have my suspicions.

The whole process just left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and so I don't generally trust anything other than the original station data from the original sources. The HadCRUT4 stuff may be a bit better; I haven't really looked into it but others have and they say it can't really be trusted either.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#123

Post by southern_cross » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #83

southern_cross wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was it possible back in 1880, to measure temperature up to the third digit in accuracy? No, not even close. You were probably lucky to get one-degree accuracy, if that. This is one of the first red flags that I noted when I started paying closer attention to climate-related stuff about 15 or 20 years ago. I did a little digging, and it turns out that there is a mathematical theorem (I forget the name of it) that al…

> But you can't have it both ways You're reducing multiple known sources of error to a single one for some reason, which doesn't help here. Here's an example: my car shows 4% higher speed than the real one due to difference in expected tire diameter. Additionally it has some small dynamic error of speed measurement. In this case I can "have it both ways". I can correct for the known difference and use multiple measur…

If you've read a few of the relevant papers and reports like I have, then you would know that they routinely state that they assume that most of the errors and uncertainties and such cancel out. But mathematically you can't get away with that; instead you have to know that they mostly cancel out, using whatever methods legitimately allow you to know this. But since we only have really good instrumentation and data going back at most a few decades, there's no way they can actually do that (at least for most of the historical data), so instead they just pretend.

And to my point, no, you can't claim that the errors in various temperature readings mostly cancel each other out, without having any solid proof of that. Nor can you then turn around and claim that since there are enough errors out there that obviously don't cancel out, that this then gives you the right to set loose a computer program to blindly "correct" those errors, said program having been constructed using whatever models and biases you were operating under at the time. (Those "corrections" may not be anywhere close to accurate, in other words.) But that's exactly the kind of thing they've been doing.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#124

Post by woodandsteel » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

southern_cross wrote: post #121

zapnuk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You provided no evidence to support your claim. Why should one believe your claim that most/all climate research like this http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ has it wrong?

Check my comment history from another thread a little while back to see details about problems I've found with Berkeley Earth. But the short version is that the charts and graphics provided by those folks for my local area, and created by others using their data, seem to bear little resemblance to the reality of the situation. Feel free to follow up on the links provided there to see what you can see about your own l…

It's interesting reading the views of those who disagree with the mainstream position. What is interesting is how many different positions they have

Some claim the world is not getting warmer.

Some agree it might be but we don't know for sure.

Some agree it is getting warmer, and say it might be due to human activity, but we don't know for sure.

Some agree it is getting warmer, but claim it is due to some other cause than human activity.

Some claim it is getting warmer, but increased co2 will bring huge benefits.

Some agree it is getting warmer and agree that increased co2 brings harm, but that efforts to reduce emissions would bring great economic harm.

Plus probably several other positions I have not mentions. Also, some people try to combine several positions.

You know, you all would be more persuasive if you could first reach agreement among yourselves. Or at least if the advocates of each position would be as critical of the other positions as they are of the mainstream position.

Re: Average Global Temperatures since 1850

#125

Post by southern_cross » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

Flip-per wrote: post #85

agent008t wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also some conflict of interest. Academics studying climate change have a big incentive to show that ACC is real - it increases their importance, potential for funding, relevancy, political power, etc. At this point, the issue is also way too political. I would love to see a group of researchers, ideally originally from a different discipline (studying complex systems, so finance perhaps?), with pro-economic-…

I work as software developer in the climate research field. According to the researchers here, during the past decades the problem has been being played down by science. Predictions of effects and outcomes and especially the chosen language in publications was rather conservative. This changed during the last couple of years.

Why the change?