Global warming? Check for yourself
unbalanced-parentheses.nfshost.com
Global warming? Check for yourself
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#2What'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.
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#3What'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 plotted some numbers on a graph may know more about math and programming and data visualization than many of those running weather stations, so it isn't productive to say this person has nothing to contribute because he's someone without scientific training.
You don't even know that statement is true. Regardless of its truth, the numbers, the code, and the result should speak for themselves. It doesn't matter whether the investigator is trained in science or not.
As a "trained" computer engineer, I am personally capable of taking a raw data set and plotting their numbers on a chart and drawing conclusions from them.
Of course there are additional steps one could take with this data to help the human mind comprehend it. I'll tell you one thing for sure, the chart looks nothing like this scary one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_R...
Why? If you have scientific training, refute the facts, write another set of code, analyze the data and see what you get. Is it different? Can you replicate the results?
Or can you just say this person doesn't have any scientific training and write him off? Personally I think it's awesome that someone is taking the initiative to test a hypothesis. Really, there is nothing more scientific than that. It takes work and I commend this person.
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#4Data from any one weather station can neither prove nor disprove – well – I would guess pretty much anything climate related.
The author doesn’t claim any such thing and the article is actually a quite nice read. The headline here stretches the hyperbole of the original headline quite a bit too much, though.
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#5After 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.
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#6What'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…
Nothing against amateur scientists. However, it says "At Armagh Observatory", so it is hardly global warming - it's probably Armagh warming? Haven't read all the details, so I can't say. But there seem to be other data sets out there that show rising temperature? So why should this one data point be more significant than others?
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#7Data are out there and you can do little stuff with it if you want and if you have a precise question in mind.
This is what I did some time ago: http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-...
A recurring argument among denialist is that data are someone tricked to show things that aren't true. Some of those claims can actually be tested, but one needs to know what they are talking about.
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#8What'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…
I agree with you that excluding someone from a scientific debate because he has no academic credentials or even just not the right kind of academic credentials out of hand is wrong. Certainly wrong in this case, because the linked article doesn’t even make any grandiose claims.
Valid scientific investigation doesn’t require scientific training. That’s certainly correct. That doesn’t mean, though, that every investigation has the same weight. I have no expert knowledge. How am I supposed to know whether an amateur is brilliant or crazy? Academic credentials are more often than not a useful filter to figure just that out. Not perfect, but better than giving everything equal weight.
(Cue conspiracy theories about the academic establishment and generous East Anglia email quoting – NOW! :)
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#9This is Hacker News.
Re: Global warming? Check for yourself
#10Armagh itself is a smallish town in Northern Ireland, less than 1000 miles south of the Arctic Circle although bathed in the warm currents of the Gulf stream.
I wonder how stable the Gulf stream is over time.