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Hot or Not?

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Re: Hot or Not?

#131

Post by BoumTAC »

bobthepanda wrote: post #89
xyzzy123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the author adequately considers changes to the local environment of the thermometer, changes in the equipment itself (eg replacement, movement) possible changes in recording methodology and so on. There was no real effort to understand the possible sources of noise or error in the measurements.

Also, 1920 is a very arbitrary starting year. Why then? In 1920 the Industrial Revolution has been going on for over 100 years, the US petroleum industry was already big enough to have been affected by antitrust action, and Henry Ford's assembly line has been enabling mass motorization for the better part of a decade.

1920 is 100 years ago, so I don't think it's an arbitrary starting year. Also the older you start, the worst the data quality will be.

Re: Hot or Not?

#132

Post by olodus »

ekianjo wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #33

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.

Counter counter point: Al Gore is not a climate scientist so why would we really listen to his predictions. His most well known movie did have a lie/fault in it (he moved the data to try and show that increased co2 always predates warming if I remember correctly). That does not make climate change fake though and if you listen to the real science most of the predictions has come through. It is just that news media does not always present the predictions accurately.

Re: Hot or Not?

#133

Post by tehsauce »

mwint wrote: post #113
tehsauce wrote: post #68

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to…

> public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival Might be good to find some new words there. Last time I heard those it was after government leaders were lying to me about masks.

Are you saying you suspect that government leaders are lying when they say climate change requires urgent action??

Re: Hot or Not?

#134

Post by jdlshore »

starkd wrote: post #126
jdlshore wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s kind of a non-sequitor, isn’t it? Scientists aren’t being dictators. But climate scientists specifically are raising alarms, with an unprecedented level of consensus. We ignore those alarms at our peril.

Climate science is full of well-meaning laypeople rehashing basic facts, and doing so poorly. I’m not a climate scientist, and I don’t know the details, but I know enough to know that figuring out historical temperatures is a whole branch of science with massive amounts of work and research behind it. This amateur comes along with a naïve data collection methodology and gets some results that casts doubt on one of the fundamental facts of climate science—that the world is getting warmer.

At this point, he could have stopped and said, “this data is completely out of line with the established science. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand.” Perhaps do a literature search to find out how data is collected and confounding factors are addressed.

Or he could throw his crap data up “without comment,” implying that he’s found some secret. Pfeh. Lazy and irresponsible. At the bare minimum, he could have shown a little intellectual courage and asked what he was missing, and why his data was at odds with the scientific consensus.

The scientific community encounters these sorts of well-meaning amateurs all the time, particularly in physics. They combine ignorance and enthusiasm into an unending firehose of time-wasting ideas. They’re called “crackpots.”

Re: Hot or Not?

#135

Post by uniqueuid »

misslibby wrote: post #76
uniqueuid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point, and to add a bit: Scientific consensus does not mean the average of all opinions (i.e. "scientists on average believe in 2 degrees warming"), nor does it mean the average of all possible values of opinions ("there are people that believe in 2 degrees, and there are people that believe in 0 degrees"). These heuristics are wrong. It's a summary that needs to include reputation, credibility, trajectory…

You are merely constructing an idealized authoritarian elite of scientists whom nobody can question because allegedly their craft is too complicated for mere mortals. Sorry, but no. A lot of people have an academic education, for example, and are capable of reading scientific papers. You have to be able to make a solid point that other people can verify. The last couple of years have already shown that institutions a…

Sorry, but I disagree, and my point is even simpler.

Take the evolution of temperature measurements through proxies (although that is not my field). If at some point it becomes known that some method of measurement is biased, then that implies a re-evaluation of past research.

Every time such adjustments happen, there is a meta-learning regarding the pace of adjustments and the severity, and also regarding which people andinstitutions prefer to stick to "old" or perhaps more conservative interpretations in some sense.

When you try to summarize the scientific consensus, you need to do so by literature because (1) the composition of the field is always changing to some degree and (2) you will never get all scientists to tell you their opinion at the same point in time.

But when you do this - summarize the literature - it is crucially important to adjust for historic biases, drift in methods adoption and interpretation and so on.

And this is just the measurements part: There is also the problem of predatory journals etc etc. - all of these can skew the "consensus" if you don't account for them.

So I'm pretty convinced that your argument of a pure, "individually verifiable" science is desirable, but has never existed and never will.

Re: Hot or Not?

#136

Post by tehsauce »

josephcsible wrote: post #117
tehsauce wrote: post #68

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to…

This reminds me a lot of the historical attempts to suppress heliocentrism.

Yeah it’s exactly the same except instead of the church its decades of data from thousands of satellites processed by scientists all over the world that are trying to suppress my unsustainable lifestyle because they just want everyone to suffer.

Re: Hot or Not?

#137

Post by tehsauce »

milosmns wrote: post #105
tehsauce wrote: post #68

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to…

It is in multiple places in the article, isn’t it?

Not really, the overall tone of the article is more like “my weekend project failed to produce results that agree with established ideas, everyone in that field are idiots because they have ‘science’ in their name”.

Re: Hot or Not?

#138

Post by tehsauce »

misslibby wrote: post #70
tehsauce wrote: post #68

Seems a bit irresponsible to publish this analysis which seems to contradict an enormous body of scientific work (the public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival) without making any consideration of apparent discrepancies. It’s fine to observe something that seems off and write about it, but I think it would be appropriate to add “This most likely doesn’t disprove climate change, but I’m curious to…

How big is the enormous body of scientific work?

“More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies“

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-ag...

Re: Hot or Not?

#139

Post by tehsauce »

perrygeo wrote: post #61

This is a poor analysis. There's no justification for binning hourly temperature data into 3-year intervals and comparing the _median_ over time (an aggregate metric which ignores outliers, in a system where outliers drive the behavior of interest). Nor does this article perform any systematic test to confirm or deny a global trend - just pointing to some cherry-picked graphs with questionable assumptions and saying…

^This! For some reason people poking holes in his analysis are getting downvoted here. Strange.

Re: Hot or Not?

#140

Post by jahnu »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #39
autokad wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think the global temperature is rising, but you can't say things like 'what I considered hot as a kid is different than what I now consider hot' and be taking seriously scientifically. Its an interesting anecdotal point but that's about it. I'm sure the data for where you grew up as a kid is available for the last 50 years, so get the data and give a real numbers to numbers comparison. I have actually done this…

> Its an interesting anecdotal point but that's about it I hate quoting Bezos about this, but it's catchy and thought provoking: when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.

> when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.

My friend's mate's sister says the same thing and the graph shows otherwise. I guess it must be true.

;)

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