Finally, The Blog Gets Visited By A “Legitimate Skeptic”

It is about time a legitimate skeptic showed up here.

Twilight Zone music playing in the background.

ScreenHunter_5252 Dec. 16 22.12

December 16, 2014 at 1:33 pm

GISSUS19992014

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
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49 Responses to Finally, The Blog Gets Visited By A “Legitimate Skeptic”

  1. Maybe you didn’t see my subsequent note, in which I allowed that I could be wrong, in which case I would retract my snarky comment and apologize, and that I would look into the question further.

    • You accused me of being dumb, illegitimate, cheating, and doctoring the image – based on absolutely nothing.

      • Olaf Koenders says:

        Agreed. Although he made a concession to retract the accusations (thanks Dave), it would have taken mere minutes – which have come and gone – to research his error and apologise profusely. However, the apology is still conspicuously absent.

      • That’s what I like about sceptics. None of this pretended consensus or “let’s not rock the boat and all live in a nice delusional harmony”.

        Sceptics speak their mind, and if they are wrong we expect to be told so.

      • philjourdan says:

        But he smiled when doing it.

    • B says:

      For my own satisfaction that Winston Smith has been at work in the temperature record I took two plots of NASA temperature anomalies. These came from archive.org (of a nasa webpage) and the nasa website. A few years spread between the two plots (1998 and 2014). NASA had of course changed the scale so I used GIMP to scale the images so the grids were identical. I changed the color on one and then over layed them on top of each other. I did not align any particular year, I simply used the grid numbers. That is I aligned zero to zero. Sure enough the past was cooled and years closer to the present were warmed.

      Anyone can do what I did or what Tony does for themselves. Tony has his own ways of doing it that detect more tampering, but I gave our dear government’s intellectuals the greatest benefit of the doubt by how I aligned the plots. They’ve been changing the past. They are changing data to match theory.

    • Streetcred says:

      If you “could be wrong” why make the accusation in the first place? It is “legitimate skeptics” like you who don’t have much of a clue that make us all look bad … are you sure that you’re a skeptic and not some troll warmista trying to make a name for himself?

    • Not very good for your credibility, Mr. Laing. It’s dumb stuff like this that gives us legitimate skeptics a bad name. Clean up your act.

    • Sharpshooter says:

      Was this “subsequent” before or after you opened your ‘mouth’ and shoved your foot in clear up to the knee?

  2. talldave2 says:

    I LOLed.

  3. Real science is about honest unadulterated facts. It can’t be anything less.

  4. Alan Poirier says:

    This isn’t the only site to question the cooling of the past. Dr. Ole Humlum at http://www.climate4you.com discusses this extensively as well, As he notes, it’s hard to have any faith in a dataset where past temperatures are constantly being adjusted.

    • Gail Combs says:

      Not to mention the adjustments made to the present data.

      The weather station within walking distance of me is a brand new state of the air weather station that updates ever few minutes. It went on line in March of 2001. Yet this weather station that is ‘state of the art’ has its raw data adjusted up by 1 °F to 3°F within 24 hours and continually adjusted up there after. The definitive evidence came on February 12 last year. My stock tanks developed 2 inches of ice overnight and that morning we had a snow storm with enough snow to cover my pastures in ~ 4 inches of snow. This was reported as above freezing and the snow as RAIN a few days later!

      Seems the freezing point of water must have changed…. Oh and when I called Jeff Masters on it they changed the .37 inches of rain to .37 inches of snow. My ankle bones are not 0.37 inches off the ground.

      Seems the length of an inch has changed too…. (And no I am not going there but…)

      Makes you wonder just how accurate the NH snow cover data actually is….

      • nielszoo says:

        My ankle bones are not 0.37 inches off the ground.

        The NWS (in accordance with the latest Executive Order modifying the PPACA) has taken the liberty of giving you flat feet and no, that isn’t covered by Obamacare… it comes out of your deductible. If you decline to get treated for this condition the IRS will still assess a “tax” equal to that deductible plus 10%. Welcome to the USSA where a “mid range” on the drought scale means standing water and mud for 7 straight months.

    • Anto says:

      Apart from his great work, I will always be grateful to the good doctor’s parents for giving him one of the best names I’ve ever heard.

  5. John Silver says:

    Where can I get my license?
    I want to be legitimate.

  6. JP in Baltimore says:

    I hope Galvin is called to testify before Congress. It is clear as day (warmer weather with no clouds) that GISS is mathematically manipulating the current and historic temperature record by his Mann made algorithm, dropping rural stations to maximize Heat Island Effect, making up numbers for missing day readings or in areas where no thermometers exist, “adjustments,” deviation from RSS satellite measurements where older temperatures are “adjusted” lower, and current higher, political press releases days before international climate warming meetings or protest by the naive with manufactured record highs, keep funding going to GISS, Hanson prodigy (opps, poles are not melted completely like foretasted) – when will we have fake data to show polar ice is melting abet at above average since 1979? Would like to see science returned to science instead of politics and gov funded propaganda. Two decades of no global warming and massive increase in minuscule trace gas CO2 so small measured in parts per millions would say theory is BS. Natural variation in temperature and a decade trend back in time reversed now tells nothing statistically significant. Some people at GISS should lose jobs or be replaced for faking temperature data causing wasting $billions in scare mongering, it is a scandal. It seems GISS just keeps on BSing it more and more as hedge. If you can create global warming by manipulating temperature record, keep charade going, but limited BS looking at details of “adjustments,” making up data, or comparing with RSS since 1979, or historical record. Clock ticking out on fake data versus reality, can not go on forever. Hope for Congressional hearings to fry the liars in their own sea of Mann made up global warming.

  7. Otter (ClimateOtter on Twitter) says:

    What’s a david bennett laing? First I’ve heard the name, and I’ve been paying attention for 15 years!

    • Gail Combs says:

      OH, it gets better and better. A quick search turned up this gem. It is david bennett laing’s comment on the topic Wake Up and Smell the Soil! Groundbreaking UN Report on the Paradigm Shift Needed to Feed the Future

      Dear Ms. Lappé,

      I’m copying here a post I made a few days ago to the Dartmouth College Great Issues Listserv. I would welcome a dialogue with you on this rather alarming topic. My email address is [email protected].

      Back in 1971, I wrote a paper for Ray Siever’s environmental geology course at Harvard Grad School on the use rate and depletion time of phosphate rock. I used an integrated curvilinear regression model to estimate the time to depletion of world phosphate reserves given the exponentially increasing production rate as of 1970 and a. proven reserves at the time and b. five times proven reserves. When I turned the crank, I came up with depletion times of 2011 for case a. and 2026 for case b. I also made note of the fact that 50% of world reserves were located in Morocco, which could create an interesting geopolitical scenario. My paper was subsequently published in Not Man Apart, the news magazine of Friends of the Earth, and it earned David Brower’s very nice compliment that it was the single most alarming piece of environmental forecasting that he’d ever seen. We’ve obviously made it past 2011, due either to a slowed down production rate or to the discovery of more reserves, or both, but 2026 looms a mere 13 years down the road. It’s true that Earth isn’t making any more of this stuff, at least not at the rate at which all known reserves of it were made under very unusual geological circumstances in the past, and it’s also true that as we use it up, we disperse it in ways that make it non-recoverable, and there’s no easy fix for that. I also noted that before the Green Revolution of the 1950s, Earth’s human population of 2 billion had reached the critical point beyond which it could only be sustained by technoagriculture, which is absolutely dependent upon non-renewable phosphate fertilizer. I said it then, and I’ll say it now: if there’s anything that could sink our ship faster than climate change, it’s phosphate depletion.

      David Bennett Laing ’62
      http://civileats.com/2013/09/18/wake-up-and-smell-the-soil-a-groundbreaking-unctad-report-on-the-paradigm-shift-needed-to-feed-the-future/#comment-35136

      Who is David Brower? Brower is the founder of Friends of the Earth.

      David Brower has widely been considered one of the most dedicated, enthusiastic and influential leaders the environmental movement has known….

      …in 1963, Brower spent large amounts of time and money on the prevention of dam construction in the Grand Canyon. This included running a controversial full-page advertisement on the back of the New York Times calling for wide-scale opposition to the dam’s construction. Unfortunately, Brower’s aggressive lobbying backfired and the Sierra Club lost its tax-deductible status in 1967. Two years later Brower was fired from his position as executive director.

      Widespread controversy did not deter him from his passion as an influential, albeit fiery, environmentalist and soon after losing his Sierra Club position he founded the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth….
      (wwwDOT)wilderness.net/NWPS/Brower

      Aaron Labe Linas, 19, was sentenced to over three years for vandalizing and damaging new homes, SUVs, construction equipment, and fast-food restaurants in Richmond. Linas was active in his school’s Friends of the Earth club and later moved to the Earth Liberation Front, a group the FBI classifies as Eco-terroists.
      From: 1970s: ’Ecoterrorist’ Groups Begin Operations in US

    • Gail Combs says:

      Bennett also made a comment on Nation of Change: Five Big Considerations for the US as Climate Change Sweeps the Globe

      David Bennett Laing · Top Commenter · Stockton Springs, Maine
      All this could be moot. As is clearly evident from publicly available NOAA charts, global temperature has not increased since the turn of the century while CO2 concentrations have continued to soar unchecked. If this divergence in trends continues much longer, it will be necessary to rethink the prevailing assumption that CO2 is actually what has driven the dramatic global warming of the last 3 decades of the 20th century and to consider the possibility that the warming might very well reverse itself of its own accord.
      http://www.nationofchange.org/five-big-considerations-us-climate-change-sweeps-globe-1411227813

      So he is at least open to evidence when it hits him on the head but he seems to consider government scientists as being above corruption.

  8. Keitho says:

    Oh how we laughed and laughed.

  9. catweazle666 says:

    “It’s dumb stuff like this that gives us legitimate climate skeptics a bad name. Clean up your act.”

    Heh, you said it, Mr. Laing, you said it.

    At least you had the good grace to retract.

  10. Frank K. says:

    What I find very interesting about the blinking comparison of the two graphs is how much ALL the data points have changed. What did they do to the GISS algorithm in 14 years to affect the past values so dramatically? If you look at the GISTemp algorithm, it basically throws out a lot of data that doesn’t fit certain criteria (e.g. number of data points in a series) then infills using its magic 1200 km interpolation scheme (even though the correlation at those and shorter distances is dubious). I believe what you end up with is garbage and certainly not of sufficient quality to based policy decisions on. It’s much better to look at individual sites like Steve has done in many posts, although many of those sites suffer from obvious UHI impacts.

  11. Dear me, little did I suspect that my snarky remark would unleash such a firestorm. I freely admit this was not one of my finer moments, and I sincerely regret having made the remark on the basis of so fleeting a non-analysis. I have learned from this, and I resolve to refrain henceforth from pejorative, insulting commentary period, and to preface my critical remarks in future with due diligence rather than running with an impression and shooting from the hip. I see that some of you have done a good job at sleuthing out my identity. As soon as I get the time, I will do as promised and carefully research Mr. Goddard’s original posting to see whether or not there is any basis for my gratuitous accusation. In any case, I do apologize for my hasty judgment and lack of due diligence.

  12. Laing is another ‘skeptic’ who like Anthony Watts, would like to be leader of the banjo band playing background music in the movie 1984. It has been clear since the 1980s that the US gov’t, its agencies and the Useless Nations have been using ‘science’ meaning fraud; to push agendas, namely control over carbon energy, higher taxes, regulations and of course, the institution of a cult designed to control behavior, assumptions and thinking patterns.

    Maybe Laing et al should re-read Climate Gate and the real reason that an insider released thousands of documents outlining the sorry, sordid machinations of corruptocrats and criminals.

    • Laing did, and he agrees with you one hundred percent! Laing, incidentally, spent three years as a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research back in the 1970s while pursuing a PhD in geosciences and was appalled by the misuse of statistics in paleoclimatic reconstructions. One of the key issues I found was that Dr. Harold Fritts was using the eigenvector transform on precipitation data in principal component analysis. The transform is only valid on normally distributed data, but precip is Poisson distributed. Garbage in, garbage out. When I (undiplomatically) pointed out the problem, I was,of course, kicked out of the PhD program. One other tidbit was that a study I did at the lab revealed that two thirds of the variance in annual tree ring growth in one of the main western US douglasfir chronologies was accounted for by depth of winter snowpack. Neither precip nor temp showed any statistically significant response. It was after these two epiphanies that I became a climate skeptic.

  13. Dave1billion says:

    So I’m illegitimate? Who knew?

    Methinks this will add a bit of spice to the family Christmas party when I ask Mom and Dad about this …

  14. Beale says:

    I believe if you look back, you’ll find that not long ago a commenter made the same “discovery” that Mr. Laing made; but he didn’t explain what he was talking about, and apparently nobody guessed.

    http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/the-new-and-improved-giss-us-cheating-animation/#comment-470152

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