Real Climate Science

Some people are impressed by web sites which do a lot of very precise math on data with much lower accuracy. When they see a lot of math and technical jargon, they assume that the writer must be doing really good science.

I’ve been doing science and engineering professionally for the last 35 years, and take a different approach. I do sanity testing and if it doesn’t pass the sniff test, report the results of the sanity testing. It is malpractice to do very precise calculations on data produced by a methodology with very low accuracy.

Should I throw in a few random technical sounding words to impress people?

Every method has its advantages and disadvantages.

The USHCN database has more than 81,000,000 daily temperature readings going to 1895. It is a scientific obscenity to attempt to “adjust” that many records. Adjustments open the door to confirmation bias or outright fraud, and will invariably make the data less meaningful. I call this “tampering.”

There is no need to “adjust” the data. With a database that large, the distribution of error will be uniformly distributed between “too low” and “too high” and average out to zero. Many fields of science and engineering depend on this principle.

Use of anomalies completely hides baseline shifts, as NOAA has done.

Infilling is exactly the wrong thing to do, when station loss is biased towards loss of colder rural stations. It simply corrupts the temperature record further.

Gridding is just barely above the noise level in the US, because the USHCN stations are relatively evenly spaced geographically. It isn’t worth worrying about, and like the other adjustments obfuscates and smears the data.

The best approach is the approach I take (raw data only) and is why I found the problems which other techniques mask and make invisible.

No method is perfect. We know there is systematic UHI producing spurious warming and possibly systematic TOBS producing spurious cooling. To some extent they negate each other. But USHCN heavily weights TOBS and very lightly weights UHI, because their bias is to adjust the data to create warming.

Turning a long term cooling trend into a warming trend, indicates a huge error bar and signal to noise ratio of zero. The only acceptable approach is to leave the data alone.

I have been astonished by skeptics who agree with USHCN on this subject. How could they possibly make public statements that USHCN software is doing legitimate adjustments? They weren’t even aware of the infilling issue which NCDC just discovered. It defies explanation.

NCDC says that they knew the problems with the temperature record were as large as I described, yet failed to report this information to Congress or the courts ahead of the EPA ruling.

#NOAAgate

I’m not talking about soccer.

You can’t make this stuff up. NCDC “expected” problems as large as Paul and I found.

Although all estimated values are identified in the USHCN dataset, NCDC’s intent was to use a flagging system that distinguishes between the two types of estimates mentioned above. NCDC intends to fix this issue in the near future.

Did the point Heller raised, and the examples provided for Texas and Kansas, suggest that the problems are larger than government scientists expected?

NCDC responds to identified issues in the USHCN | Watts Up With That?

In other words, they knew that their graphs were bogus all along.

I wonder how long their public relations department spent working up that statement of misdirection?

Outstanding defense and midfield play, but the strikers looked like rank amateurs.

Exciting match and kudos to Klinsmann for a huge improvement from four years ago. They did need Donovan though.

Politihack did a followup :

Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, also originally downplayed Heller’s claims. But after seeing the data from Texas, Curry acknowledged that he might have had a point.

“I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations,” Curry wrote. “Maybe it is a tempest in a teacup, but it looks like something that requires NOAA’s attention.”

That said, Curry also tweeted that “what Goddard did to the data was bogus.”

Fox’s Doocy: NASA fudged data to make the case for global warming | PunditFact

What  I did to the data was exactly nothing. I left the data completely intact. That is considered bogus in climate science.

The number of hysterical bloggers upset by my use of the complete, raw, untampered HCN thermometer record – is quite remarkable.

Some have called my use of untampered data – “data tampering.”

Their obvious next topic – Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Argentina/Switzerland has completely sucked so far. And now an extra 30 minutes.

Excellent news. New research shows that Guam has not tipped over yet.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7XXVLKWd3Q]

Representative Johnson is not only worried about Guam tipping over, but is also quite concerned that 0.0001 mole fraction of Mann-made CO2 will destroy the planet.

Rep. Johnson urges House to act on climate change

JUL 23, 2013 ISSUES: ENVIRONMENT
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) spoke today on the House floor to again urge GOP leadership to address the need to act on the issue of climate change. Johnson pointed to the dangers climate change poses to the nation’s food production as yet another reason why the House should “stop denying reality and move forward” on a comprehensive plan to address the issue.

Rep. Johnson urges House to act on climate change | Congressman Hank Johnson