Comments on: The Observer’s still not quite grasped it

By: Monty

Monty — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:27:22 +0000

I am fully in favour of using the technology we have today on the satellites, to initiate and maintain a truly comprehensive database of all the relevant measurements, across the entire planet. And I’m also in favour of an internationally binding treaty for earth based data collection, so that we do not face, in the future, problems caused by loss of weather stations and loss of their integrity (to urbanisation and heat island proximity). If we wish to even map out, with any useful resolution, the temperature distribution across our land masses and oceans, this has to be done. We need good, consistent coverage in both time and space (and ocean depth, and height above sea level.) That would be money well spent.

But we should not be considering synthetic data purporting to represent what the weather stations would have seen back to the 17th century, if we had had those weather stations then. (In Patagonia. And Siberia. And the Sahara. And everywhere else on the planet spaced at regular intervals.)

It seems to me that there has been a great meshing together of historical data from proxies of various kinds, and modern data from weather stations and satellites. And from that, a determination that the modern data shows a departure from the historical norms. What that suggests to me is we are seeing a discontinuity in results simply due to the measurement methods being radically changed.

It’s like if you went upstairs now and got on the bathroom scales, and you were exactly 180 lbs. Then you go next door and get on their scales, and you are 182 lbs. We all know that you haven’t gained 2lbs in the 5 minutes it took to do that. And if a UN committee accused you of catastrophic fattening you’d say they were loopy.

I suspect they never had the data to really support what they have tried to do.

By: Winston

Winston — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:52:22 +0000

I don’t think even groupthink is necessary, simple self interest will suffice. No conspiracy necessary.

By: Pat

Pat — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:16:56 +0000

If I were buying a house I would insist on sight of the deeds and a survey before completion.
Those proposing AGW refuse to release either their data or their calculations. That is all the reason I need not to purchase.
There are we are told four temperature databases on which AGW is founded, and we are further told that these are independent. We are currently told that CRU have lost theirs, Hadley is about to spend three years checking theirs (what have they been doing the last twenty years- certainly not checking their own work) None of these databases have been published, so we only have the word of their keepers that they have made correct deductions, or that they are independent. The e-mails which should have been released under FOI (I assume that a prosecution is in order because CRU have not themselves complied) show the curators of these datasets to be working closely together, which makes me further doubt their independence. Computer code wrung out of Mann in connection with his hockey stick was found to be fraudulent- and the Code from CRU appears ludicrously sloppy.
On this basis I am to commit my grandchildren to poverty , and the poor to worse? It’d be more sensible to buy a house on the estate agents description- no checks necessary.

By: The Great Simpleton

The Great Simpleton — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:23:24 +0000

Prodicus has an excellent graffic that sums it up nicely:
http://prodicus.blogspot.com/2009/12/science-is-settled-consensus-explained.html

Immediately followed by a better one:

http://prodicus.blogspot.com/2009/12/wind-of-change.html