Abstract: Non-expert who uses scare quotes liberally ("scientific consensus", "data science") finds that he's the only one who's figured out that the world is, in fact, cooling.
These plots, of these specific points of this dataset don't show extreme effect.
These are just arbitrary cities.
Not to mention that, most climate change stuff looks at the start of the industrial revolution, so a starting point of around 1920 is going to necessarily look a lot different.
This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming."
Weather is really really complicated. More greenhouse gases in the air results in more of the sun's energy staying in our atmosphere as heat, but how that affects the ground-level temperature in a specific city can be very, very complicated. Some areas might even become significantly cooler as climate change affects the weather. Plus, many of the worst effects of rising greenhouse gas levels (droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, algal blooms) are not a direct result of rising temperatures.
A climate change indicator with fewer confounding factors than "ASOS temperatures for pseudo-random airports" is ocean acidity level [1] [2] (CO2 gets dissolved in our oceans and changes the pH, affecting marine life). Another one is sea level [3].
> This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming."
Indeed. The way I currently tend to think about the difference in my head is this: human activity has caused a large amount of extra energy to remain inside the atmosphere. Some of it is in the atmosphere itself, some in the oceans and lakes, some in ice, some in land. You can't trivially predict what a lot of extra energy will do when it ends up in such different storage "media". The obvious conclusion is "global warming", but there's no inherent reason for that to be correct. The extra energy could, for example, all go it into generating humungous sized and crazy fast storm systems, which would result in little change in temperature but very noticeable changes in weather and safety.
Of course, it is unlikely that all the extra energy will be directed into a single phenomena, but the example is enough for me to remember that it's really non-trivial to understand what it could do, let alone predict what it will do.
This is just a bunch of plots with no effort to engage with the existing literature and study. Frankly, it is a waste of time trying to draw conclusions about global warming from this.
That would be a testable hypothesis that you have not tested. Anybody can do whataboutism but it isn't a meaningful argument. If it's your belief that the literature is biased by 'green' funding, prove it.
Engaging with the existing literature would be a good start.
If you were interested in studying the relationship between bias and funding you might do a survey of published papers and articles on the subject.
If you can identify some measurable criteria that can be used to rate how "green" a paper's funding is then you can use that as an axis and compare the surveyed papers to reveal trends.
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.
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 it was like and see what it's like now.
I'm in Croatia right now and remember where the sea level was back when I was little and also see where it's at now.
If you lived on this planet for a while and are not ignorant to your surroundings you see the change, you feel it.
Cold places are hot now and warm places are hotter for longer periods of time.
I wrote it before and I'll repeat myself, if you look at what changed in the last 100 years or thereabout, it's mass burning of fossil fuels, the cars, fabrics, planes etc. Yes, I know don't jump to conclusions, scientific method and all.
The not ignorant person just being observant and applying some common sense can see it bright as day.
I'm a little bit younger than OP (~10 years) - I grew up on an island in Croatia and I noticed no difference in beaches that I visited when I was a kid. The shallow rock peers are all in the same place, beaches are the same size.
Only difference I see is a slew of tourists packing every cm2 where there were far fewer while I was growing up, a lot of them getting off on how they are participating in "sustainable tourism" because their hotel has solar panels or whatever bullshit is trendy these days.
Not everywhere has the same beaches. Do a GIS for, say, Mont-Saint-Michel in France at low tide, and you'll see the water receeds miles. It'll be more apparent in these locations; a 10cm difference might mean hundreds of feet less beach at low tide.
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 in terms of snow. I said to myself, it seems like there were bigger snow storms (in termps of inches of snow) when I was a kid. so I got the data to verify it, and yes, not only were the snow as a kid much higher, they were also historical high - a couple record snowfalls when I was a kid. The point of this story isn't meant to tie anything to climate change, but rather be more curious and get data to back up your thoughts.
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 around.
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 they don't fit the width.
Local anecdotes are great if you are old enough to have seen changes, because they are simple and relatable examples.
In Christchurch, New Zealand, a notable example for me is that the snow line has receded since I was a child. Low lying ski fields are struggling to stay open. My parents have noticed less snow on the ground during winter at their rural place (they have been there ~30 years).
> remember where the sea level was back when I was little and also see where it's at now
I am a bit skeptical of that claim! Then again, sea level changes would be difficult to notice in Christchurch because we had fast uplift locally: “these events caused ground motion at the Lyttelton TG [tide gauge], the largest single vertical [earthquake] displacement was >50 mm (cumulative displacement ~110 mm)”[1] and slow uplift probably has occurred too “slow slip events has uplifted sites by up to 0.8 mm/year on average in Wellington and Dunedin”. 150km away the coastline uplifted 2 metres (2 yards)[2], boy was that stinky.
I think this quote is interesting: “At interannual and decadal time scales TG records typically show variations in annual means on the order of 5–10 cm and a possible 60-year oscillation of up to 3 cm. Although to estimate the long-term trend in relative sea level (RSL), five to six decades of reliable and essentially complete TG records are typically required, techniques exist that can use sparse data sets. A TG measures the RSL trend or the change in sea level relative to the adjacent land. Independent estimates of the vertical land motion (VLM) are required to estimate the absolute sea level (ASL). Such motion may occur due to tectonic movements, ice mass loading, glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), or local site instabilities due to, for example, compaction, sedimentation, or water, oil, or gas extraction (Carter et al., ). The stability of a TG site is a critical issue that requires verification (Bevis et al., ) and needs to be considered at both local and regional scales. Historically, many TGs are located in shipping ports where harbor infrastructure is often developed on reclaimed or modified land.”[1].
I told my kids yesterday while cleaning up when we found their sled that they are probably the last generation of Dutch kids to have used one, they don't have skates because there never is a winter long enough to make the ice safe (when I was a kid you could skate on IJsselmeer, and the ice would be 20 cm thick at the end of the winter).
yes, in my hometown there is no more snow in winter while 40 years ago i was happily cross-country skiing there. On the positive side - the peaches, apricots, cherries, etc. - the stuff of my childhood dreams sold back then only at farmers markets at astronomical prices by the traders from South - is now easily growing there in people's backyards/gardens. Though not oranges/mandarins nor watermelons yet - seems needing a bit more warming which looks to be just a matter of [pretty short] time.
In Christchurch we are also getting a lot more mosquitoes than I recall as a child*, which you may get with a warmer climate, so it definitely isn’t all wins.
* Lots of possible reasons for apparently more mosquitoes: perhaps they are evolving to match the environment here?
That reminds me of this article I've read about the River Thames Frost Fairs... The last of which was done in 1814, with people preparing for one in 1870s or so but was cancelled.
The sea level has "dropped" where I grew up because they upgraded the beach. Are you sure you're not seeing the effects of artificial changes, natural erosion, or earthquakes? Those can easily completely dominate any climate change induced sea level rise in one area. Or perhaps when you went to the sea as a kid or adult, it was in some way connected with fishing or other activities that people timed to match the tides, which also completely dominate any lifelong changes in sea level.
This comment reminded me of when Tuvalu's foreign minister stood in the water while giving a speech, to give the impression that the land was lost due to rising sea levels caused by climate change, but then it turned out it was really just due to erosion.
Why not produce an aggregate across all locations?
I appreciate the value of getting up-close with the data to see quality issues, put things in context, etc. But the lack of an overall analysis leaves the most relevant question unasked, leaving us only with the author's biases (as they themselves admit.)
I find this really cool, kudos to the author for trying to build up an understanding from the actual data.
I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much. I wonder if there is some statistical tool to analyze the slight upward angle on the linear regressions of the medians.
I am surprised that these data do not show a more extreme departure. I believe that we are getting hotter temperatures, etc etc. But perhaps my observations are colored by the media on this - if I were a lizard, would I see climate change?
> I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much.
I can think of three possibilities:
1. The cold days have been getting colder, and the hot days have been getting hotter. The median temperature could still be somewhat constant in this scenario if the not-too-cold and not-too-hot days have temperatures that haven't changed much.
2. Even if the cold days have stayed roughly the same temperature, spikes and outliers in the hotter temperatures could still fail to move the medians that much. Consider that the median is often used to actively reduce the contribution of outliers to the data. Then it becomes a question of whether or not those spikes and outliers are meaningful or important.
3. Climate change is just a hoax (not something I believe, but it's certainly a "possibility").
I think it's great for someone to download the data and try to do some analysis. However I would have wished he would have gone into the details a bit more. Separating between daytime/nighttime and summer winter temperatures would have been nice for example to dig doen into the data.
What is the delta-T in the graphs? I took that to mean delta from the average temperature, but then some of the graphs don't make sense. For instance, the fitted line for delta-T in the Stockholm data is entirely < 0, which wouldn't make sense if 0 represented the average temperature.
"The global median temperature (of the entire dataset) is uniformly subtracted from every data point, to keep things relative to an arbitrary x-axis of 0."
The scientific consensus is more than clear, doing your own "research" isn't going to make a difference except to engage with the people that are already happy to ignore science. If anything you'd have to begin to wonder in what ways airports are going to be different from global averages and I can think of a whole pile of reasons why the two would diverge (such as the presence of a large chunk of asphalt or concrete nearby).
For someone who worked at NASA and has a whole pile of claims to his name I would expect a far better researched piece of work. Thermometers placed randomly with a certain goal (to provide temperature data to pilots) and read out by people on irregular times during the day are a rotten source to extract climate change data from anyway.
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 of findings and a lot of structural knowledge of how the field has evolved over time. All of these are not things that an outsider can easily know to even look for.
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 are also of little use.
Don't confuse science with scientific institutions.
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.
"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."
But doesn't this very sentence from you imply that there is no such consensus as you claim? Apparently there are lots of publications that disagree, so where do you get your consensus from?
" 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"
That is why I don't care about a "consensus" - science is not a democracy. I care about verifiable facts, and open discussion.
"So I'm pretty convinced that your argument of a pure, "individually verifiable" science is desirable, but has never existed and never will."
I am not saying that science should output 100% true facts only. Everything only has probabilities. I am saying that scientific output should be verifiable by other people. Scientific facts are not determined in a democratic way, they already exist and are only being discovered.
But that does not mean that when there are two possible outcomes that these carry equal weight: the evidence for human influenced climate is so vast and so well researched that it would take an absolute miracle to displace it at this point.
> I am saying that scientific output should be verifiable by other people.
It is. Reproducibility and peer review are part and parcel of science and it is always done by other people than the ones involved in the original research.
But to you 'other people' may include people that have not studied the subject matter and that are not capable of following the arguments. Those people will end up having to pick a side, just like you have done, you are on the side of the 0.1% versus the 99.9%, likely because that decision works better for you in some way or other. But that does not make you a scientist any more than it makes me one. And I'll throw my lot in with the 99.9%, not because it makes my life any easier but simply because that makes good sense.
" the evidence for human influenced climate is so vast and so well researched that it would take an absolute miracle to displace it at this point."
Even now there are various scenarios, not a single consensus. And I rather doubt that you personally have verified the climate science, so what makes you so sure?
Btw it is not about humans influencing climate (of course they do), but about the doomsday scenarios.
"Reproducibility and peer review are part and parcel of science and it is always done by other people than the ones involved in the original research."
Peer review is not a a guarantee for good science, it was invented for the government grant system. Sorry if people call on the peer review system, to me it just shows they are delusional about the workings of the science systems in most places.
"But to you 'other people' may include people that have not studied the subject matter and that are not capable of following the arguments"
Everybody can study the subject matter, that is the thing. It is you who claims only certain people of your choosing are capable of doing so.
"And I'll throw my lot in with the 99.9%, not because it makes my life any easier but simply because that makes good sense."
Do you even know what the 99.9% say? You can check how that number was derived - it was people evaluating abstracts and judging whether those papers agree that humans affect climate. It doesn't say everybody agrees on the doomsday scenarios.
> And I rather doubt that you personally have verified the climate science, so what makes you so sure?
I also read that report, but I got a different vibe from it than you did. What I read was a bunch of settled stuff, a bunch of stuff where the results are predictable but the exact circumstances are not and a bunch of still open stuff requiring more research hopefully resulting in being able to settle other questions. It's pretty much like any other scientific report that I've read with the difference that it spans the globe.
The tricky bit is that the countries that are doing the least to help stave this off are also the ones best positioned to ride it out unless we end up with one of the worst case scenarios.
But locally some countries are already experiencing the first set of symptoms and it isn't pretty. (Notably: the South of Europe and North Africa)
> Btw it is not about humans influencing climate (of course they do), but about the doomsday scenarios.
The doomsday scenarios will come to pass if we don't make some pretty drastic changes. Personally I won't live to see it, but my kids most likely will, even if they're off by a couple of decades.
Because the thing that there is a lot of discussion about is the exact dates, not necessarily on what the consequences are.
Anyway, you seem to have made up your mind on this and I have more important things to do (in the short term...).
"I also read that report, but I got a different vibe from it than you did."
You read the 1000 pages? Respect! But is it even "science" or just a bunch of predictions?
"The doomsday scenarios will come to pass if we don't make some pretty drastic changes."
They won't, and afaik even the IPCC scenarios are not all doomsday scenarios. But there is no point arguing it with true believers.
"But locally some countries are already experiencing the first set of symptoms and it isn't pretty. (Notably: the South of Europe and North Africa)"
Are they? I have asked the question a lot to point out a real climate change impact, and never received an answer. There were answers, but when I looked into it, the real reason was always something else, like drilling wells and depleting the ground water and so on. Non climate change human actions still do enormously more environmental damage than climate change.
Of course if you can claim "it was climate change", especially as a third world country, you are eligible for receiving a lot of monetary compensation. So most articles and claims attach it as a footnote, "also because of climate change".
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 data.
FWIW, the author Michael Crichton encountered much the same phenomenon in his novel "State of Fear" for which he was castigated for doing the same thing. Just looking at the data.
Michael Crichton isn’t a scientist, though, why should we care about or even acknowledge his opinion on global warming as if there is some scientific merit to it?
you completely missed the point of what the parent comment was saying. parent comment did not say "what Michael Crichton wrote about climate change in 'State of Fear' is the Truth." in fact, in a way your comment demonstrates the very phenomenon parent comment was referring to. it might be helpful to read it again a bit more carefully.
Oh, please. He was capable of conveying complex topics in a way most people can understand. Not just as a novelist, but his past education in medicine and many different fields. He was truly a renaissance man, if that has any meaning today. Not saying he's always right, but he is just as capable as anyone else to weigh in. Science does not thrive when its confined to just a group of experts talking to each other.
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 “journalists.”)
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.”
They are not all "crackpots". Many environmentalists have come forward stressing the importance of walking back some of the verge-of-catastrophe alarms that have been pulled. (Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and one former Obama administration advisor, to name a few). They are not saying its a non-problem, but they are saying it's completely manageable without destroying civilisation by hiking the cost of energy.
These alarms bells have been pulled repeatedly over the past 50 years. Calls for imminent catastrophe in just 10 years if nothing is done. That was 20 years ago. At some point, you have to wonder just who is profiting off of your fears while flying around in their private jets. That should tell you something.
I wasn’t familiar with those names, so I looked them up. Neither is a climate scientist. According to Wikipedia, “ Shellenberger's positions have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics.” Lomborg’s book was found to be “scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts.”
The "environmental scientists and academics" in question have probably also been accused of bad science by their opponents. And who gets to decide who is the scientist in that debate?
Shellenberger and Lomborg have presumable studied the issue for decades, so at what point does one cross into "being a scientist" territory? Years of study apparently doesn't do it, so what does? Obama's seal of approval?
You are confusing science and specific systems of doing science, like say a countries university system. A specific system of doing science does not automatically produce good science.
It requires continued adherence to the scientific method. As soon as you stop doing that you stop being a scientist, whether your name is Shellenberger, Lomborg or Watson for that matter isn't relevant. Science is what you do not who you are.
Of course you are allowed. And whether you are worthy or not is up to you but just gathering a bunch of questionable data, throwing it in the blender, ignoring all evidence to the contrary and using that to spread FUD is definitely not science.
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 have been had for decades now - I implore you to find a new argument - almost every objection to climate change has multiple scientific papers published.
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.
I’d say opposite! He pointed out flaws in the argument and then suggested that his arguments weren’t up to the standard that people with his credentials usually keep!
Doing raw data visualization and being very careful about not making conclusive comments seems like a proper way to step in the subject without pretending to know more than anyone else. Also he didnt cherry pick what would have been the most convenient ones to make a point.
Compare that with typical media science reporting which is often much worse and misleading at best when not grossly wrong.
Quality work starts with data exploration and data mining. I see this article as an invitation to check the actual data thats available, if anything.
You're not criticising any of the author's methods or findings, only the fact that she dared to do her own research. Therefore, your argument would be just as valid or invalid regardless of her research substance. Therefore, it's only valid if you make an assumption that no private person can do any relevant and good research on climate science whatsoever.
If it's not the case, and you allow for a possibility that a private person could do useful data analysis, you would have to prove why her analysis isn't that.
The number of people here saying "I know it's warmer because I feel it!" is funny, and perfectly demonstrates why these discussions are futile, even among so-called "smart people".
Don't you think it is weird that people who try to do their own research end up in the "happy to ignore science" camp, as you put it? I don't think they "ignore science", they just realize it is a lot more complicated and messy than the narrative of the scientific consensus wants us to believe.
We rely on a scientific consensus _because_ it's complicated and messy. The fact that climate change is complicated and messy is a given. Every talk on climate change starts out with it's super complicated and…, but then people get mad that it's not simple, try to make it simple themselves and get mad when other criticize them for trying to explain it in 3 pages. Then all of a sudden they don't believe in science.
Also, the IPCC put out a like 1000 page report, it's not like this information is being hidden.
I did not get the impression that "it's complicated" is the usual way to introduce it. The usual way is to claim billions of scientists allegedly agree and it is supposedly settled science.
"Also, the IPCC put out a like 1000 page report, it's not like this information is being hidden."
Yeah that is actually more fishy than convincing. They should be able to present it in a digestible manner. A 1000 page report is just spam, created with billions of funding. It is also not all hard science afaik, it is a lot of bla bla "this and that will become an issue because of climate change", difficult to find the meat.
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 of the earth?
In the presence of outliers the median is a better predictor of underlying long-teem trends. Subtracting the median gives the delta from zero-median. The delta would be non-zero if there is a long term effect. Here the delta is zero in a number of cases.
What is the concept of an outlier when you’re trying to measure if the earth is hotter than it used to be over a fixed length of time?
If your hottest temperature 500 degrees, then sure, you may have an outlier that needs exclusion. But if all your coldest days are the same and your hottest days are 10 degrees warmer, your median might not move much. But that doesn’t make it look good for life on earth.
Outliers are likely to drag the averages down, not up. The only really substantial global outlier events are volcanic eruptions, which cause a net cooling. Everything else (hurricanes and the like) is just heat moving around
Once we recognize that we're talking about local rather than global there are many local outliers that increase temperatures, countering your argument that volcanic eruptions are the only global outliers.
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.
I think that this has good intentions, at least. Science should be easily reproducible. But using the median for this is very very silly, and I don't think the results from this are very meaningful.
Well, the goal is fair: It would be nice to have science reproducible.
There are simply a lot of pragmatic (and ethical, and legal ...) reasons why it often is not.
I enjoyed this and respect citizens who feel motivated enough to look at underlying data..
This type of discourse ("here is what I did and here is what I saw") leaves room to comment and make progress. People can discuss measurement methods, statistical analysis, and other objective things about a tightly scoped project like this.
This is very clear reading the comments in the substack. A comment exchange that reminded me of my days in grad school:
commenter:
"What I think can be taken conclusively from this survey is that temperature is quite regionally variable, and there are a variety of different trends over time in these locations. Do you feel that there is some more significant conclusion that can be drawn from this?"
author:
"I am hesitant to draw any conclusions. I am more in a state of examining the data itself and asking questions."
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 the globe. So that includes the oceans, the poles and a ton of other places where you won't find airports (or thermometers, for that matter).
"I don't have the data or tools at my disposal to do this properly" Should not prevent you from trying, sharing, and learning. However, it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds.
More complete datasets, a better understanding of how that data was collected and how to interpret it, solid statistical foundations, etc. etc.
People who go out to change minds should be versed in all this and more. But I don't believe they are required to roll up your sleeves and play with some data! :)
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.
I don't know or care who provided him with his information but parts of it clearly didn't pass scientific rigour. Since it seems the claims done by Al Gore was here used to discredit the actual climate science, I felt I needed to comment on that some of those claims by Gore would clearly not been possible to publish in a paper, making it not science.
You maybe missing the trees for the forest. Global or local mean or median temperature is a nebulous (no pun intended) indicator. It's the increases in daily weather variance, incomprehensibly-fast melting of major glacial masses, rising sea levels, and frequency and intensity of storms, fires, famines, and species' extinctions that are the "forest". These are consequences of anthropogenic GHGs that reduced Arctic sea ice (nearing an inevitable blue ocean event) and increased global sea thermal energy absorption which destabilized the jet stream from more predictable cycles. GHGs lead to a -11 F snowpocalypse in Austin, megadrought in US West and SW, "Hurricane Alley" shifting eastward, 100 F in the high Arctic town of Verkhoyansk, water trains of India, and slumping and melting of Siberian and other permafrost areas releasing absurd amounts of methane.
author creon levit 7 hr ago
The variance (locally) is shown in the plots. What do you see re: variance?
"Incomprehensible" glacier movement? As I understand it nine time in the life of the human species the glaciers have advanced to cover much of N. America and then retreated to where there was little or no polar ice at all.
Frequency and intensity of storms? I suggest downloading the data on all hurricanes for the last ~100 years (as long as they've been recorded) from the NOAA national hurricane data center. I did that. I plotted it. Guess what I found?
Fires... I lived in Napa California during the big Napa fires. How much was due to climate change, and how much was doe to terrible forest management by the forest service and the state? (don't thin the forests, don't clear dead trees, etc).
Species diversity is very complicated. A whole different matter. So much to say at another time.
Famines? Have you looked at famines vs. time for the last 1000 years? Other than the global covid mismanagement disasters of 2020-2022 (lockdowns, etc) famines are becoming a thing of the past - though if we continue killing our soils with mono-crop soy, etc they will recur.
Arctic (and Antarctic) sea ice is another deep topic.
Austin was a fluctuation. They happen. Don't kill your local electric utilities - you may want them when things get dicey (or icy :).
Look into the history of draughts (and floods) over the last 200 years in the W and SW US.. Write a post and send me the link.
You raise a lot of points. (or less politely, you are shifting the goalposts 12 times in one paragraph). I am just plotting local temperatures for 75-100 years. Nothing more.
After that exchange I'm fairly convinced this article wasn't written with the goal of 'doing science' however misguided.
Yeah sorry, realised later that I had read your comment wrong and missed the "era".
I do still disagree though with that most of the scientific predictions has been wrong. I think a lot of what was pushed as scientific predictions were not really what was said by the scientific community.
As much as I respect people coming up with analysis like this, there is definitely scrutiny needed everywhere. However, there can be flaws in analysis when not done by experts.
For example, I find the chart #3 misleading a little.
> The global median temperature (of the entire dataset) is uniformly subtracted from every data point, to keep things relative to an arbitrary x-axis of 0.
This only means that relative to the median, the temperatures do no fluctuate crazily on an average. This says nothing about the overall trend in global medians, nor does it say anything about the frequency of extreme temperatures. These need to be accounted for because in data visualization, you can use the same data to tell a different story depending on the design choices you made in you viz.
I honestly think he must have messed up in his data processing or understanding the data because his graphs don't match what official climate stats show:
For instance for his Palm Springs example consider
My hypothesis is that blogs that may possibly be mistaken for climate change denial are often associated with a recent or an impending purchase of an ICE vehicle and a need to rationalize the same.
Has anyone found credible research around mean, min, max, average vis-a-vis climate change? Quick search didn't surface anything beyond lots of average temperatures and median forecasts, but less about the distribution of climate.
Edit: trying to understand the decomposition of average temperatures increasing (more hot days, hotter hot days, etc)
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 "hmmm" does not make an interesting analysis. Sorry, just don't publish shit like this unless you have something to say and viable data to back it up.
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 review and corroborate results. Though this exists now, it's not formally engaged with science reporting. and there's no method to compare amateur results to professional.
What OP is doing here is bolstering amateur observation and he should be praised for that. I'd like to see research like this given more resources and exposure to build trust in scientific findings.
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 dig deeper into the discrepancies”. If I wrote an article with data suggesting that drinking bleach is healthy, I’m obligated to add a disclaimer that says not to take this to heart just yet.
“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“
I looked into the source of the 99% claims before, and in general, they don't say what you claim they say. They may find that most scientists agree that humans have an impact on climate, but that doesn't mean they agree on the doomsday scenarios.
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”.
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.
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.
Interestingly, there are animations of the changes in the hardiness zones over time:
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.
cher·ry-pick
/ˈCHerēˌpik/
verb
choose and take only (the most beneficial or profitable items, opportunities, etc.) from what is available.
"the company should buy the whole airline and not just cherry-pick its best assets"
the author did not cherry pick. in order to cherry pick, the author needs to have had a predetermined thesis such that cherry picking only certain data points would bolster said thesis. instead, the author was looking to see what the deal was with long-term observed weather in specific places relevant to the author, then later expanded to include a few other locations as well. therefore, unless you are accusing the author of being dishonest, the author did not cherry pick.
How do you know he didn't cherry pick these weather stations? One thing to say that it's not clear whether he did, another to claim - as you have in your post - that he did not.
Looks like the hourly temperature plot graphs tend to get darker / "denser" as you look from left to right. Is that more data being available, more fluctuation, less fluctuation? What is that?
I can also see some trends like the variation increasing.
What's different when using another temperature data source? It would be nicer if the R source was just public without having to ask for it.
The author is clearly a knowledgeable person, they still might benefit from asking themselves what they don't know before drawing any strong conclusions.
I think one of the issues here is that the plots just arent setup right for this kind of thing. The main take away plot of the least squares fit goes from -6 to +6, when a -1/+1 change is HUGE. The change only looks small because the plots vertical axis isn't formatted correctly.
There are many additional areas of analysis you could do with this dataset, for example, although the temps may be in the same range, how have those temps changed seasonally? A warmer January and a cooler September can average out to what looks like no change annually, but a couple degrees warmer in January can have huge environmental affects.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadThese are just arbitrary cities.
Not to mention that, most climate change stuff looks at the start of the industrial revolution, so a starting point of around 1920 is going to necessarily look a lot different.
Either way, these graphs look flat from 1920 on. That’s the point of the article.
Weather is really really complicated. More greenhouse gases in the air results in more of the sun's energy staying in our atmosphere as heat, but how that affects the ground-level temperature in a specific city can be very, very complicated. Some areas might even become significantly cooler as climate change affects the weather. Plus, many of the worst effects of rising greenhouse gas levels (droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, algal blooms) are not a direct result of rising temperatures.
A climate change indicator with fewer confounding factors than "ASOS temperatures for pseudo-random airports" is ocean acidity level [1] [2] (CO2 gets dissolved in our oceans and changes the pH, affecting marine life). Another one is sea level [3].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/ocean-acidification
[3] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Indeed. The way I currently tend to think about the difference in my head is this: human activity has caused a large amount of extra energy to remain inside the atmosphere. Some of it is in the atmosphere itself, some in the oceans and lakes, some in ice, some in land. You can't trivially predict what a lot of extra energy will do when it ends up in such different storage "media". The obvious conclusion is "global warming", but there's no inherent reason for that to be correct. The extra energy could, for example, all go it into generating humungous sized and crazy fast storm systems, which would result in little change in temperature but very noticeable changes in weather and safety.
Of course, it is unlikely that all the extra energy will be directed into a single phenomena, but the example is enough for me to remember that it's really non-trivial to understand what it could do, let alone predict what it will do.
Quips like this aren't very productive if you want to convince others of your viewpoint.
If you were interested in studying the relationship between bias and funding you might do a survey of published papers and articles on the subject.
If you can identify some measurable criteria that can be used to rate how "green" a paper's funding is then you can use that as an axis and compare the surveyed papers to reveal trends.
There was no real effort to understand the possible sources of noise or error in the measurements.
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.
It's too bad that humanity hasn't figured out a way to record and share and pool knowledge yet, but them's the breaks.
I wrote it before and I'll repeat myself, if you look at what changed in the last 100 years or thereabout, it's mass burning of fossil fuels, the cars, fabrics, planes etc. Yes, I know don't jump to conclusions, scientific method and all. The not ignorant person just being observant and applying some common sense can see it bright as day.
https://sealevel.nasa.gov/faq/13/how-long-have-sea-levels-be...
Only difference I see is a slew of tourists packing every cm2 where there were far fewer while I was growing up, a lot of them getting off on how they are participating in "sustainable tourism" because their hotel has solar panels or whatever bullshit is trendy these days.
https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
I have actually done this in terms of snow. I said to myself, it seems like there were bigger snow storms (in termps of inches of snow) when I was a kid. so I got the data to verify it, and yes, not only were the snow as a kid much higher, they were also historical high - a couple record snowfalls when I was a kid. The point of this story isn't meant to tie anything to climate change, but rather be more curious and get data to back up your thoughts.
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.
My friend's mate's sister says the same thing and the graph shows otherwise. I guess it must be true.
;)
In Christchurch, New Zealand, a notable example for me is that the snow line has receded since I was a child. Low lying ski fields are struggling to stay open. My parents have noticed less snow on the ground during winter at their rural place (they have been there ~30 years).
> remember where the sea level was back when I was little and also see where it's at now
I am a bit skeptical of that claim! Then again, sea level changes would be difficult to notice in Christchurch because we had fast uplift locally: “these events caused ground motion at the Lyttelton TG [tide gauge], the largest single vertical [earthquake] displacement was >50 mm (cumulative displacement ~110 mm)”[1] and slow uplift probably has occurred too “slow slip events has uplifted sites by up to 0.8 mm/year on average in Wellington and Dunedin”. 150km away the coastline uplifted 2 metres (2 yards)[2], boy was that stinky.
I think this quote is interesting: “At interannual and decadal time scales TG records typically show variations in annual means on the order of 5–10 cm and a possible 60-year oscillation of up to 3 cm. Although to estimate the long-term trend in relative sea level (RSL), five to six decades of reliable and essentially complete TG records are typically required, techniques exist that can use sparse data sets. A TG measures the RSL trend or the change in sea level relative to the adjacent land. Independent estimates of the vertical land motion (VLM) are required to estimate the absolute sea level (ASL). Such motion may occur due to tectonic movements, ice mass loading, glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), or local site instabilities due to, for example, compaction, sedimentation, or water, oil, or gas extraction (Carter et al., ). The stability of a TG site is a critical issue that requires verification (Bevis et al., ) and needs to be considered at both local and regional scales. Historically, many TGs are located in shipping ports where harbor infrastructure is often developed on reclaimed or modified land.”[1].
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
[2] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89206/powerful-eart...
That article was online until about 2015 until it was so widely mocked it was finally deleted. Here’s a screenshot for you.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/snowf...
* Lots of possible reasons for apparently more mosquitoes: perhaps they are evolving to match the environment here?
Little Ice Age ended, you see...
In case anyone was curious, the cherry blossoms were first planted in Berlin in November 1990.
This is about as anti-science a stance as you can take. Why believe data when you've got your lyin' eyes?
Climate change deniers can use the exact same argument, so how do we get anyehere?
https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_...
I appreciate the value of getting up-close with the data to see quality issues, put things in context, etc. But the lack of an overall analysis leaves the most relevant question unasked, leaving us only with the author's biases (as they themselves admit.)
I find it interesting to see that the median temps in these select cities don't seem to be wandering up that much. I wonder if there is some statistical tool to analyze the slight upward angle on the linear regressions of the medians.
I am surprised that these data do not show a more extreme departure. I believe that we are getting hotter temperatures, etc etc. But perhaps my observations are colored by the media on this - if I were a lizard, would I see climate change?
I can think of three possibilities:
1. The cold days have been getting colder, and the hot days have been getting hotter. The median temperature could still be somewhat constant in this scenario if the not-too-cold and not-too-hot days have temperatures that haven't changed much.
2. Even if the cold days have stayed roughly the same temperature, spikes and outliers in the hotter temperatures could still fail to move the medians that much. Consider that the median is often used to actively reduce the contribution of outliers to the data. Then it becomes a question of whether or not those spikes and outliers are meaningful or important.
3. Climate change is just a hoax (not something I believe, but it's certainly a "possibility").
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
For someone who worked at NASA and has a whole pile of claims to his name I would expect a far better researched piece of work. Thermometers placed randomly with a certain goal (to provide temperature data to pilots) and read out by people on irregular times during the day are a rotten source to extract climate change data from anyway.
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 of findings and a lot of structural knowledge of how the field has evolved over time. All of these are not things that an outsider can easily know to even look for.
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 are also of little use.
Don't confuse science with scientific institutions.
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.
But doesn't this very sentence from you imply that there is no such consensus as you claim? Apparently there are lots of publications that disagree, so where do you get your consensus from?
" 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"
That is why I don't care about a "consensus" - science is not a democracy. I care about verifiable facts, and open discussion.
"So I'm pretty convinced that your argument of a pure, "individually verifiable" science is desirable, but has never existed and never will."
I am not saying that science should output 100% true facts only. Everything only has probabilities. I am saying that scientific output should be verifiable by other people. Scientific facts are not determined in a democratic way, they already exist and are only being discovered.
But that does not mean that when there are two possible outcomes that these carry equal weight: the evidence for human influenced climate is so vast and so well researched that it would take an absolute miracle to displace it at this point.
> I am saying that scientific output should be verifiable by other people.
It is. Reproducibility and peer review are part and parcel of science and it is always done by other people than the ones involved in the original research.
But to you 'other people' may include people that have not studied the subject matter and that are not capable of following the arguments. Those people will end up having to pick a side, just like you have done, you are on the side of the 0.1% versus the 99.9%, likely because that decision works better for you in some way or other. But that does not make you a scientist any more than it makes me one. And I'll throw my lot in with the 99.9%, not because it makes my life any easier but simply because that makes good sense.
Even now there are various scenarios, not a single consensus. And I rather doubt that you personally have verified the climate science, so what makes you so sure?
Btw it is not about humans influencing climate (of course they do), but about the doomsday scenarios.
"Reproducibility and peer review are part and parcel of science and it is always done by other people than the ones involved in the original research."
Peer review is not a a guarantee for good science, it was invented for the government grant system. Sorry if people call on the peer review system, to me it just shows they are delusional about the workings of the science systems in most places.
"But to you 'other people' may include people that have not studied the subject matter and that are not capable of following the arguments"
Everybody can study the subject matter, that is the thing. It is you who claims only certain people of your choosing are capable of doing so.
"And I'll throw my lot in with the 99.9%, not because it makes my life any easier but simply because that makes good sense."
Do you even know what the 99.9% say? You can check how that number was derived - it was people evaluating abstracts and judging whether those papers agree that humans affect climate. It doesn't say everybody agrees on the doomsday scenarios.
I also read that report, but I got a different vibe from it than you did. What I read was a bunch of settled stuff, a bunch of stuff where the results are predictable but the exact circumstances are not and a bunch of still open stuff requiring more research hopefully resulting in being able to settle other questions. It's pretty much like any other scientific report that I've read with the difference that it spans the globe.
The tricky bit is that the countries that are doing the least to help stave this off are also the ones best positioned to ride it out unless we end up with one of the worst case scenarios.
But locally some countries are already experiencing the first set of symptoms and it isn't pretty. (Notably: the South of Europe and North Africa)
> Btw it is not about humans influencing climate (of course they do), but about the doomsday scenarios.
The doomsday scenarios will come to pass if we don't make some pretty drastic changes. Personally I won't live to see it, but my kids most likely will, even if they're off by a couple of decades.
Because the thing that there is a lot of discussion about is the exact dates, not necessarily on what the consequences are.
Anyway, you seem to have made up your mind on this and I have more important things to do (in the short term...).
You read the 1000 pages? Respect! But is it even "science" or just a bunch of predictions?
"The doomsday scenarios will come to pass if we don't make some pretty drastic changes."
They won't, and afaik even the IPCC scenarios are not all doomsday scenarios. But there is no point arguing it with true believers.
"But locally some countries are already experiencing the first set of symptoms and it isn't pretty. (Notably: the South of Europe and North Africa)"
Are they? I have asked the question a lot to point out a real climate change impact, and never received an answer. There were answers, but when I looked into it, the real reason was always something else, like drilling wells and depleting the ground water and so on. Non climate change human actions still do enormously more environmental damage than climate change.
Of course if you can claim "it was climate change", especially as a third world country, you are eligible for receiving a lot of monetary compensation. So most articles and claims attach it as a footnote, "also because of climate change".
FWIW, the author Michael Crichton encountered much the same phenomenon in his novel "State of Fear" for which he was castigated for doing the same thing. Just looking at the data.
(People without that monomaniacal background and focus still write about science, but they’re prone to making basic errors. We call them “journalists.”)
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.”
These alarms bells have been pulled repeatedly over the past 50 years. Calls for imminent catastrophe in just 10 years if nothing is done. That was 20 years ago. At some point, you have to wonder just who is profiting off of your fears while flying around in their private jets. That should tell you something.
I'll let you have the last word.
Shellenberger and Lomborg have presumable studied the issue for decades, so at what point does one cross into "being a scientist" territory? Years of study apparently doesn't do it, so what does? Obama's seal of approval?
You are confusing science and specific systems of doing science, like say a countries university system. A specific system of doing science does not automatically produce good science.
All he did so far was provide some data points. The "real" scientists should be able to explain them easily.
Btw, since I was just talking about her elsewhere, would you say Greta Thunberg qualifies as a scientist?
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 have been had for decades now - I implore you to find a new argument - almost every objection to climate change has multiple scientific papers published.
Worship your idol at your own pleasure, but don't call it science.
Given some of their commentary, I'm not sure it can be claimed they were making a good-faith effort. There is a clear agenda to their analysis.
they did much more work than the random person who believes evrything they see on TV. that should be saluted, not derided.
Compare that with typical media science reporting which is often much worse and misleading at best when not grossly wrong.
Quality work starts with data exploration and data mining. I see this article as an invitation to check the actual data thats available, if anything.
It isn't. The only thing it does is stir the pot and give the climate change deniers another straw to try to cling to.
If it's not the case, and you allow for a possibility that a private person could do useful data analysis, you would have to prove why her analysis isn't that.
Also, the IPCC put out a like 1000 page report, it's not like this information is being hidden.
"Also, the IPCC put out a like 1000 page report, it's not like this information is being hidden."
Yeah that is actually more fishy than convincing. They should be able to present it in a digestible manner. A 1000 page report is just spam, created with billions of funding. It is also not all hard science afaik, it is a lot of bla bla "this and that will become an issue because of climate change", difficult to find the meat.
Have you ever even looked at the IPCC report?
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 of the earth?
Not if outliers are REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT, like, say, extreme weather events.
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.
This type of discourse ("here is what I did and here is what I saw") leaves room to comment and make progress. People can discuss measurement methods, statistical analysis, and other objective things about a tightly scoped project like this.
This is very clear reading the comments in the substack. A comment exchange that reminded me of my days in grad school:
commenter: "What I think can be taken conclusively from this survey is that temperature is quite regionally variable, and there are a variety of different trends over time in these locations. Do you feel that there is some more significant conclusion that can be drawn from this?"
author: "I am hesitant to draw any conclusions. I am more in a state of examining the data itself and asking questions."
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 the globe. So that includes the oceans, the poles and a ton of other places where you won't find airports (or thermometers, for that matter).
"I don't have the data or tools at my disposal to do this properly" Should not prevent you from trying, sharing, and learning. However, it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds.
What data or tools do you have so that you are in the position to change other people's minds?
People who go out to change minds should be versed in all this and more. But I don't believe they are required to roll up your sleeves and play with some data! :)
Wait a minute, do you think Al Gore was, or even claimed to be, the person doing the research he was popularizing?
Mike E. 14 hr ago edited 14 hr ago
author creon levit 7 hr ago After that exchange I'm fairly convinced this article wasn't written with the goal of 'doing science' however misguided.I do still disagree though with that most of the scientific predictions has been wrong. I think a lot of what was pushed as scientific predictions were not really what was said by the scientific community.
For example, I find the chart #3 misleading a little.
> The global median temperature (of the entire dataset) is uniformly subtracted from every data point, to keep things relative to an arbitrary x-axis of 0.
This only means that relative to the median, the temperatures do no fluctuate crazily on an average. This says nothing about the overall trend in global medians, nor does it say anything about the frequency of extreme temperatures. These need to be accounted for because in data visualization, you can use the same data to tell a different story depending on the design choices you made in you viz.
For instance for his Palm Springs example consider
https://oehha.ca.gov/epic/changes-climate/annual-air-tempera...
Edit: trying to understand the decomposition of average temperatures increasing (more hot days, hotter hot days, etc)
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 review and corroborate results. Though this exists now, it's not formally engaged with science reporting. and there's no method to compare amateur results to professional.
What OP is doing here is bolstering amateur observation and he should be praised for that. I'd like to see research like this given more resources and exposure to build trust in scientific findings.
Ministry of Truth?
People who 'distrust science community' will simply distrust the new Institution you are proposing.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-ag...
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.
Interestingly, there are animations of the changes in the hardiness zones over time:
https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
Difficult to argue with that, I think.
Needless to say, this is not global climate change, which is what all the discussion is about.
ok google, define "cherry pick"
I can also see some trends like the variation increasing.
What's different when using another temperature data source? It would be nicer if the R source was just public without having to ask for it.
The author is clearly a knowledgeable person, they still might benefit from asking themselves what they don't know before drawing any strong conclusions.
There are many additional areas of analysis you could do with this dataset, for example, although the temps may be in the same range, how have those temps changed seasonally? A warmer January and a cooler September can average out to what looks like no change annually, but a couple degrees warmer in January can have huge environmental affects.