What Do We Think About Climate Change

[alanrockwood]

Originally Posted by alanrockwood

I think I see at least part of what is going on with the HadCRUT3 data. I have been analyzing the HadCRUT3 data and Guillermo has been analyzing the HadCRUT3v data. The two data sets are giving opposite trends in the 1998-2009 time fram.

HadCRUT3v is some kind of adjusted data, though I haven't figured out yet what the adjustment is.

OK, I tracked down some information on the data adjustments applied to produce HadCRUT3v. It comes from the paper "Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: A new data set from 1850" by Brohan et al. (JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 111, D12106, doi:10.1029/2005JD006548, 2006).

Here is what is says about the usage of adjusted vs. non-adjusted data sets:

"If it is necessary that grid box anomalies have a spatially and temporally consistent variance, then variance adjusted data should be used. Otherwise, better results may be obtained using unadjusted data. In particular, global and regional time series should be calculated using unadjusted data."

Thus, the preferred data set to use for looking at global temperature trends is the data set I used (HadCRUT3) rather than the adjusted data set that Guillermo used in post #8496. Please note that the text of post 8496 referred to "HadCRUT3" but the labels on the figures he posted show that the data set he actually used was the variance adjusted data, which is HadCRUT3v. Thus, Guillermo analyzed the less preferred data set rather than the recommended (i.e. not variance adjusted) data set.

It was an easy mistake to make, but now that it is cleared up let us hope that Guillermo uses the preferred data set for future discussion rather than the variance adjusted data set.

[Boston]

well that was interesting, so G used data that was "adjusted" something he has accused others of doing often.

and it certainly could have been an honest mistake
I suppose the best way to discover the "honesty" of the error will be by Guillermo's reaction to being informed of his mistake

what I've noticed is that some folks want to react to this kind of error like
"aha you were wrong" but my take has always been to allow the person to own up to it and move forward from there

[hoytedow]

Originally Posted by Boston

and yet his name was used to by a political front organization which spreads disinformation for the oil and gas industry

have you written a letter of protest that your hero's name is being used in such a deceitful manor, one would think you would be on some campaign with the intent to clear his good name

BS.

Since you don't believe anything I say, please don't follow any of the following advice either.

At least the warmnotologists won't burn us at the stake as heretics until they have amassed the requisite carbon credits.

Advice for the rational amongst us.:

Read this and make a copy for your files in case you need to refer to it someday. Maybe we should all take some of his advice! A corporate attorney sent the following out to the employees in his company:

1.... Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put 'PHOTO ID REQUIRED.'

2. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, DONOT put the complete account number on the 'For' line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who might be handling your check as it passes through all the check processing channels won't have access to it.

3. Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address. Never have your SS# printed on your checks. (DUH!) You can add it if it is necessary. But if you have It printed, anyone can get it.

4. Place the contents of your wallet on a photocopy machine. Do both sides of each license, credit card, etc. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel.... Keep the photocopy in a safe place.
I also carry a photocopy of my passport when I travel either here or abroad. We've all heard horror stories about fraud that's committed on us in stealing a Name, address, Social Security number, credit cards.

Unfortunately, I, an attorney, have first hand knowledge because my wallet was stolen last month... Within a week, the thieves ordered an expensive monthly cell phone package, applied for a VISA credit card, had a credit line approved to buy a Gateway computer, received a PIN number from DMV to change my driving record information online, and more.
But here's some critical information to limit the damage in case this happens to you or someone you know:

5. We have been told we should cancel our credit cards immediately. But the key is having the toll free numbers and your card numbers handy so you know whom to call. Keep those where you can find them.

6. File a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc., were stolen. This proves to credit providers you were diligent, and this is a first step toward an investigation (if there ever is one).

But here's what is perhaps most important of all: (I never even thought to do this.)
7. Call the 3 national credit reporting organizations immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and also call the Social Security fraud line number. I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for credit was made over the Internet in my name.

The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit.

By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves' purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert. Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away this weekend (someone turned it in). It seems to have stopped them dead in their tracks..

Now, here are the numbers you always need to contact about your wallet, if it has been stolen:

1..) Equifax: 1-800-525-6285

2.) Experian (formerly TRW): 1-888-397-3742

3.) Trans Union : 1-800-680 7289

4.) Social Security Administration (fraud line):
1-800-269-0271

[troy2000]

I'm not sure what any of that has to do with a shady organization naming itself after a famous dead guy, Hoyt. Boston never said he doesn't believe Marshall is a hero to a lot of people, including you. He said you should object to the misuse of Marshall's name by what is essentially a propaganda machine.

If you're going to judge an organization favorably just for naming itself after dead people, you'd have to love the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Communists. They were known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--and Lincoln is a hero to a lot of people....

[Guillermo]

Alan,
I'm afraid you are the one here who not only do mistakes, but also do not carefully read (many times refusing to read at all) and now, on top of that, intentionally misinform people here by telling partial or incomplete information, masaging data, and refusing to comment uncomfortable questions which can put you in evidence.

Of course my analysis are done using specificaly the hadcrut3v data set. That is clearly and explicitly indicated in my posts, the same way I made clear a while ago I use http://www.woodfortrees.org site tools to run this kind of analysis. Woodfortrees clearly and explicitly indicates the data sources, program used and the way the calculations are done, as well as its limitations.

Doing things this way allows all members here to check what I present by theirselves, contrarily to what you do, not expliciting the data sets you use and performing your own and not checkable analysis.

The 2006 Brohan et al. work as the source of the hadcrut3v is clearly cited and credited in http://www.woodfortrees.org/credits. Here the paper: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/te...3_accepted.pdf

Have you read it? I'm afraid not, as it is usual in you.

Introduction:

"The historical surface temperature dataset HadCRUT [Jones, 1994, Jones & Moberg, 2003] has been extensively used as a source of information on surface temperature trends and variability [Houghton et al., 2001]. Since the last update, which produced HadCRUT2 [Jones & Moberg, 2003], important improvements have been made in the marine component of the dataset [Rayner et al., 2006]. These include the use of additional observations, the development of comprehensive uncertainty estimates, and technical improvements that enable, for instance, the production of gridded fields at arbitrary resolution. This paper describes work to produce a new dataset version, HadCRUT3, which will extend the advances made to the marine data to the global dataset. These new developments include improvements to: the land station data, the process for blending land data with marine data to give global coverage, and the statistical process of adjusting the variance of the gridded values to allow for varying numbers of contributing observations. Results and uncertainties for the new blended, global dataset, called HadCRUT3, are presented."

A.1.2 Comparing adjusted and true data

"The synthetic data were then run through the variance adjustment algorithms and the variance of the output was compared to that of the original model data (see figure 16). Before variance adjustment the variance of an average land data grid box was overestimated by around 11% and the variance of an average marine grid box by 180%. After variance adjustment the variance of an average land data grid box was found to be underestimated by less than 2% and the variance of an average marine data grid box was underestimated by 5%. In the marine case, discrepancies from the true variance can be larger than this in individual grid boxes, although in all cases the adjusted variance is closer to the true value than the unadjusted variance. In individual grid boxes variance adjustment typically brings the synthetic data closer to the true value (see for example Figure 17), especially at times when such adjustments are large. This is notable, for example, during the second world war or early in the record. The frequencies of individual grid-box monthly averages are also typically improved (see for example Figure 18) with extreme outliers due to noise being effectively adjusted. This means that it is possible to make more meaningful analyses of the occurrences of true extremes using the variance adjusted data. However, when these individual variance-adjusted gridbox values are averaged over large regions (Figure 19), the opposite is true. Whereas the random errors of individual grid boxes tend to cancel out when averaged, the cumulative effect of the hundreds of slight, but correlated, variance adjustments is to reduce the variance of the regional average. Some degradation of the true temperature signal is inevitable, as no filter can perfectly separate out the measurement and sampling error component of the temperature signal, and the reduction applied to the noise component
will then be applied to some of the signal as well. Despite this, the variance adjustment process is very successful at the grid-box scale."


From the CRU site FAQs page (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#faq):

Why do global and hemispheric temperature anomalies differ from those quoted in the IPCC assessment and the media?

We have areally averaged grid-box temperature anomalies (using the HadCRUT3v dataset), with weighting according to the area of each 5° x 5° grid box, into hemispheric values; we then averaged these two values to create the global-average anomaly. However, the global and hemispheric anomalies used by IPCC and in the World Meteorological Organization and Met Office news releases were calculated using optimal averaging. This technique uses information on how temperatures at each location co-vary, to weight the data to take best account of areas where there are no observations at a given time. The method uses the same basic information (i.e. in future HadCRUT3v and subsequent improvements), along with the data-coverage and the measurement and sampling errors, to estimate uncertainties on the global and hemispheric average anomalies. The more elementary technique (used here) produces no estimates of uncertainties, but our results generally lie within the ranges estimated by optimum averaging. The constraint that the average be zero over 1961-90 in the optimal averages also adds a small offset compared to the other data described here.

The present optimal averages with annual uncertainties are accessible from the Hadley Centre. The data include values filtered to show decadal and longer-term variations and uncertainties. This replaces the IPCC 2001 version at the above site (see Parker et al. 2004). All other versions of global and hemispheric temperature anomalies are only steps to the IPCC series.


Why are values slightly different when I download an updated file a year later?

All the files on this page (except Absolute) will be updated on a monthly basis to include the latest month within about four weeks of its completion. Updating includes not just data for the last month but the addition of any late reports for up to approximately the last two years. In addition to this the method of variance adjustment (used for CRUTEM3v and HadCRUT3v) works on the anomalous temperatures relative to the underlying trend on an approximate 30-year timescale. Estimating this trend requires estimation of grid-box temperatures for years before the start of each record and after the end. With the addition of subsequent years, the underlying trend will alter slightly, changing the variance-adjusted values. Effects will be greatest on the last year of the record, but an influence can be evident for the last three to four years. Full details of the variance adjustment procedure are given in Jones et al. (2001). Approximately yearly, the optimally averaged values will also be updated to take account of such additional past information"


This last explains the HadCRU altering of data I complained about a while ago, as it is producing an slide to higher temperatures in the recent times.

May I say now that HadCRUT3v is a quite acurate and perfectly acceptable data set to be used as a source to perform the global temperature trends analysis?

[Guillermo]

May I say also now you are a perfect and shameless idiot, Boston?

[Guillermo]

And finally, my dear Alan, would you like to answer my post 8502? Please do that soon as I have many other questions like that to present to your "Highness of the Statistics"

[hoytedow]

Originally Posted by troy2000

I'm not sure what any of that that has to do with a shady organization naming itself after a famous dead guy, Hoyt. Boston never said he doesn't believe Marshall is a hero to a lot of people, including you. He said you should object to the misuse of Marshall's name by what is essentially a propaganda machine.

If you're going to judge an organization favorably just for naming itself after dead people, you'd have to love the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Communists. They were known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--and Lincoln is a hero to a lot of people....

You always call the truth propaganda and vice versa.

Is the Blueberry finished yet?

I don't have to love the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Communists and I won't. You can't make me.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by hoytedow

You always call the truth propaganda and vice versa.

Is the Blueberry finished yet?

I don't have to love the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Communists and I won't. You can't make me.

Propaganda seems to be 'anything Hoyt doesn't want to believe,' regardless of the source.

Of course you don't have to love the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, simply because of the name--nor should you should blindly believe the George C Marshall Institute, just because of the name. Marshall had nothing to do with it; he died 25 years before it was established.

Nope, haven't had a chance to work on the Blueberry for a while. Last time I was home was only for two days. I spent one day mostly on the honey-do list, and the second one I got dragged off to Sea World by the wife.

John Birch, George C. Marshall...Do you suppose that they will make a "Me" society one day? If they do, It will have a theme song not like Troy's "Volt" (41 large, AGW believers issued extra driving priveledge!) song but perhaps a little more along these lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbON8udTPo

No doubt that your side will have stealthier vehicles for the next civil war, (revolution, if you will, http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...volution-.aspx ) but ours will make you tremble.
Blueberries? They are plump and just a bit tart now and beat the salmon berries this year! AGW? I don't think so - it's been the coldest summer on record (since I have been keeping records, 1980)
Oh, by the way, yesterday, there was IMMENSE solar flare activity, including a large magnetic filament. Basically the entire side of the Sun facing the Earth blew. Men in space will get inside of lead-lined chambers, Auroral activity will skyrocket and Earth will get a little warmer - followed, of course, by a rise in CO2 and idiots professing that the CO2 caused the GW. Maybe the academic can take the time to relate it all to you - then go with the opposite of what he says.

Screw Chevy - Ford has better music.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by mark775

John Birch, George C. Marshall...Do you suppose that they will make a "Me" society one day? If they do, It will have a theme song not like Troy's "Volt" (41 large, AGW believers issued extra driving priveledge!) song but perhaps a little more along these lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbON8udTPo

No doubt that your side will have stealthier vehicles for the next civil war, (revolution, if you will, http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...volution-.aspx ) but ours will make you tremble.
Blueberries? They are plump and just a bit tart now and beat the salmon berries this year! AGW? I don't think so - it's been the coldest summer on record (since I have been keeping records, 1980)
Oh, by the way, yesterday, there was IMMENSE solar flare activity, including a large magnetic filament. Basically the entire side of the Sun facing the Earth blew. Men in space will get inside of lead-lined chambers, Auroral activity will skyrocket and Earth will get a little warmer - followed, of course, by a rise in CO2 and idiots professing that the CO2 caused the GW. Maybe the academic can take the time to relate it all to you - then go with the opposite of what he says.

Screw Chevy - Ford has better music.

Go tell the Russians it's been the coldest summer on record since you've been keeping records, and see if they're impressed:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared a state of emergency on Monday in seven of Russia's 83 regions due to wildfires fueled by the worst heatwave in over a century, news agencies reported.

The death toll from the fires rose to 40 on Monday, as millions of Muscovites coughed through a haze of smoke from burning peat bogs and firefighters scrambled to put out hundreds of new blazes.

The fires come after weeks of searing heat and practically no rain. Although temperatures in the Moscow area dipped modestly over the weekend, experts predict they'll climb back to around 38 C (100 F) this week.

I have no idea what all your babbling abut 'Volt' is supposed to mean. I take it you're referring to some sort of electric or hybrid vehicle?

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by mark775

John Birch, George C. Marshall...Do you suppose that they will make a "Me" society one day? If they do, It will have a theme song not like Troy's "Volt" (41 large, AGW believers issued extra driving priveledge!) song but perhaps a little more along these lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbON8udTPo

No doubt that your side will have stealthier vehicles for the next civil war, (revolution, if you will, http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...volution-.aspx ) but ours will make you tremble.
Blueberries? They are plump and just a bit tart now and beat the salmon berries this year! AGW? I don't think so - it's been the coldest summer on record (since I have been keeping records, 1980)
Oh, by the way, yesterday, there was IMMENSE solar flare activity, including a large magnetic filament. Basically the entire side of the Sun facing the Earth blew. Men in space will get inside of lead-lined chambers, Auroral activity will skyrocket and Earth will get a little warmer - followed, of course, by a rise in CO2 and idiots professing that the CO2 caused the GW. Maybe the academic can take the time to relate it all to you - then go with the opposite of what he says.

Screw Chevy - Ford has better music.

Is America headed for a second revolution? I don't think so. The sort of lunatics who write posts like the following (found on the investors.com page you linked, which asks that question) probably couldn't find their own butts with both hands and a flashlight--much less start a revolution. If they ever come stumbling around my neighborhood, we'll take their guns away from them and spank them.

Be advised the Problems America Faces with the Islamic Chairman, Obama, his Obamanation Administration an the Progressive/Marxist controlled Congress IS NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVE FUMBLED, STUMBLED OR ARE INEPT - NO, NO, NO. Its going exactly as they have Planned to Bankrupt America, Break the Will of the American People and ENSLAVE OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN UNDER AN ISLAMIC/MARXIST GOVERNMENT.

Confess, Mark: was it you who posted that?

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by mark775

...Oh, by the way, yesterday, there was IMMENSE solar flare activity, including a large magnetic filament. Basically the entire side of the Sun facing the Earth blew. Men in space will get inside of lead-lined chambers, Auroral activity will skyrocket and Earth will get a little warmer - followed, of course, by a rise in CO2 and idiots professing that the CO2 caused the GW. Maybe the academic can take the time to relate it all to you - then go with the opposite of what he says.

Screw Chevy - Ford has better music.

You're wrong about the men in space: CME's (the ejections from solar flares) lower the level of cosmic rays, by electromagnetic deflection. So during periods of high solar activity, the astronauts are actually safer than they are the rest of the time.

Of course, the CME's do cause solar proton storms, which could be dangerous to people in space. But solar protons don't penetrate the hulls of spacecraft. On the other hand, cosmic rays do--and lead shielding against them would probably be counterproductive: it would simply create more secondary radiation.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news.../07oct_afraid/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_...slandone.org-7

By the way, I doubt anyone's going to measure or claim any climate change from a single solar incident. You're dramatizing.

I didn't read that part... I don't believe it is quite that bad but somewhere between that and incompetence.

[troy2000]

Originally Posted by mark775

I didn't read that part... I don't believe it is quite that bad but somewhere between that and incompetence.

That was in the comments section. As with most reactionary websites, reading the comments was the fun part.