Live data from Hacker News

Hot or Not?

creon.substack.com

121–130 of 179 posts

Re: Hot or Not?

#121
post #73

My wife is an expert gardener, able to do wonders in Arizona at 5500'. She's been working the same plot of land for 25 years. The advance in the last frost day has been quite noticeable. For our plot (up on a ridge, so lows are warmer by up to 10F than the valleys below), it's usually about two weeks earlier. She's still wary, though, as she's lost entire beds of seedlings to outlier cold snaps in late May. Interesti…

Interesting, thanks! It shows there has been significant change in the central part of the United States. Not much where I live in NH. And, I would have expected to see more change in California.

Needless to say, this is not global climate change, which is what all the discussion is about.

Re: Hot or Not?

#122
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really draw climate change conclusions from the input data though, that's the fallacy that breaks this whole article at the foundation. Let me rephrase that to make it even more clear: if climate change to date would be such that it would show up in datasets like these then we would not have needed any climate research to begin with. We're talking about 1 degree average change over a 60 year period across t…

Counterpoint. Most of the catastrophic predictions from al gore era have not come to pass so this should cause you to doubt the quality of models at hand. If you cant predict anything reliably then its not science.

I don't remember any specific predictions. Could you list some?

Re: Hot or Not?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the presence of outliers the median is a better predictor of underlying long-teem trends. Not if outliers are REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT, like, say, extreme weather events.

Extreme weather events are a symptom of global warming, not a cause.

Yes and?

Re: Hot or Not?

#124
post #63

Given the massive lack of trust in media, and to a lesser degree the popular science community, we need a more formal system of information similar to the justice system. In america the justice system has the judge (representing the state) and the jury (representing citizens). other countries have similar tribunals , each member with a different allegiance. For science, we need a strong and formal amateur tier to rev…

[deleted]

Re: Hot or Not?

#125
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's comments like this that serve as a reminder of how we can't have valuable discussions about a topic of importance without it degenerating into name-calling and allegations of disloyalty to "science". Too many have become so fearful of climate change they are no long in the realm of a scientific discussion. They are worshipping a religion. The author of the article made a good faith effort to simply look at the d…

Comments like these are a _part_ of the discussion, though? They provide rebuttal of the methods used in the article. Why do you want to shut _them_ down? If one wants to redo all the scientific research that has led to the consensus about Climate Change again, they can do so over and over again. But in 2022, most of us are past the 'discussion' phase. We really, really, need to be in _Action_ phase. The discussions…

He belittled the blog post as not worthy by attacking his credibility. Without knowing anything about him. Science is not about consensus, it is founded on skepticism.

Worship your idol at your own pleasure, but don't call it science.

Re: Hot or Not?

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is a scientist, it is all just people.

It may all be people, but some of those people have spent an inordinate amount of time learning the current state of the art in a particular field, and contributed new information to help advance the state of the art in (mostly microscopic) ways. We call those people “scientists.” (People without that monomaniacal background and focus still write about science, but they’re prone to making basic errors. We call them “…

True. But they still need to come out of their labs and talk to normal people by persuading them. Their scientific perch doesn't give them the right to be a dicatator. We are still free to reject their conclusions. That is our right.

Re: Hot or Not?

#127
post #6

All I can say as a 47 year old who lived most of his life in Germany is that the summers when I was a teen, so 30 years ago were considered hot when they were over 25°C. This year in May we had 32°C. Deny or criticize all you want cherries blossoming on Christmas in Berlin is NOT normal. And neither is the absence of snow in winter and mild temperatures. Those graphs don't impress me at all, because I remember what i…

> Deny or criticize all you want cherries blossoming on Christmas in Berlin is NOT normal.

In case anyone was curious, the cherry blossoms were first planted in Berlin in November 1990.

Re: Hot or Not?

#128
post #25

Why would the median temperature be a useful measurement here? Quick, what is the median of these numbers: -2,-1,0,1,2 And what is the median of these numbers: -7,-1,0,1,2 Of course the average and median are identical for a perfectly distributed normal distribution. But part of science is supposed to be reducing the noise from your signal. Why are you adding noise in your quest to investigate the average temperature…

Q: "Why would the median temperature be a useful measurement here?"

A: The median temperature is the calculation that allowed him to deny planetary warming while using statistics.

Look, when you want to show something to be true that is actually false, statistics will help you to do so.

Re: Hot or Not?

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extreme weather events are a symptom of global warming, not a cause.

Yes and?

And that means their measurement contributes to the noise when attempting to identify the long-term causal trend. Taking the median is the correct step. One doesn’t measure the output and assume it’s the input.

Re: Hot or Not?

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely context specific. You can imagine something like in social sciences where people have quite finely tuned but subjective personal awareness of human behavior and some data makes a coarse but objective measurement of it. It's hard for the data to be as "accurate" as the personal experience, so it can easily be wrong. But "it was colder when I was a kid" vs temperature measurements is the other way arou…

I mean, we're looking at an example where the anecdotes and data are fairly in agreement. But the point is that when you encounter a metric that's at odds with recurrent anecdotes, you should strongly consider that you aren't measuring the right thing. You can get incredibly accurate measurements of a doorframe's height but if people keep telling you they're having trouble getting packages in, it might just be that t…

On the flip side, if you change metrics until you get one that says what you want, do your metrics really provide any value?
Post reply on HN