CEI, which brought us the ludicrous "CO2: We call it life" ads is trying again. This time they are resorting to ad hominem attacks on Al Gore, and claiming that a carbon tax would result in "death on a massive scale". Makes sense. If CO2 is life, then taxing it must be death.
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Are we absolutely sure that leftists haven't infiltrated CEI?
I'm in favor of the creation of a tax for folks who are overweight. They consume more resources, food, fuel, etc, than folks who are not overweight, and thus have a greater carbon footprint. They already pay more for these things because they use more, but this makes the penalty even greater, sort of like a luxury tax... taxes the luxury of being fat.
badly done commercials, full of errors.
just take a look at the "5 year trend" in the one in the middle. totally absurd.
just compare it with the "black balloon" CO2 commercial.
apart from getting everything wrong,they even do it in an idiotic way.
How about a tax on stupidity? I think we need to cut down on needless overabundance of stupidity. People like CEI are using up all the dumb and that's not fair. I've heard people talking about how there's plenty of dumb to go around but what about our children and our children's children? Will there be enough dumb left for them if these selfish idiots use so much of it that everyone else turns away from stupid?
Hey, it occurred to me that if Al Gore is fat, then he's sequestering a bit of carbon (at least while he's still alive, and still fat).
Don't you know that the Lavoisier institute proved that there is no law of conservation of dumb? We can make more dumb out of thin statospheric air! We have the technology!
Well, that's the difference between those luddite liberals and the industrious conservatives. While the chicken littles are worried about the world running out of stupidity, the conservatives just settle down to manufacture it in bulk.
Noted pinko Jeff Immelt (CEO of GE) has his attitude tuned up by the True Believers. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/13/0145/56590
"Interestingly, criticism from the right came only from pundits and think tankers. Every CEO that addressed Immelt was supportive."
Patrick, James, z:
Does stupidity even obey the Laws of Economics? It seems to be one of those weird kinds of things with the property that the more you consume, the more you produce.
Can we, should we, put a copyright on stupid?
Bi:
It may be more like a virus, in that it spreads through infection and can lie dormant until particular triggers kick in. This may explain the chronic tendency for otherwise reasonable people to lapse into Stupid over very particular things. Observations indicate that Stupid appears to be renewable and non-conserved, but also doesn't appear to be evenly distributed throughout the population. There doesn't seem to be a sure-fire cure for Stupid, although Ideologues seem to be at greater risk of infection. The possibility of vaccination deserves further study.
Patrick:
Of course, if they're using up all the stupid (or, if it's truly bottomless, if they're hogging all the stupid), that forces the rest of us to deal with reality without the cotton-candy buffer of stupid between us and the hard places. Didn't the Catholic church recently make social injustice like that a mortal sin (along with environmental damage and being filthy rich, if I recall correctly)? Maybe we should try to get them to call down the wrath of God or something. I wonder where it'd strike.
Remember, the messiah-like Julian Simon said that we live on Cornucopia, whereby even though Earth is finite, human stupidity is infinite, and scarcity is infinitely substitutable with human stupidity.
Best,
D
The problem with this is that it takes more and more carbon to keep the sequestered carbon in place. It's a losing situation. He'd be better off letting the sequestered carbon out of the bag, since he'd experience a net carbon reduction.
Not necessarily. They might just be getting less exercise. How unsurprising that ben didn't think of this.
Brian D:
Stupid is a virus? No, that's totally wrong, because that'll mean that Stupid is like Terrorism, and we know that's not true (because I say so). Obviously Stupid obeys some as yet undiscovered and unspecified Laws of Economics -- yeah, that must be it.
Stupid: they call it Terror, we call it Life.
z:
Hahahahahaha. Yeah, true entrepreneurs actually know how to make money, unlike idiotic think-tanks like the CEI who are now practically begging for money.
RE: Al "Fat Al" Gore
All mobsters have nicknames, and mobster "Fat Al" is running a really slick "enviromental protection racket". Fat Al scares everbody with his Drumbeats of Doom and Gloom and then proceeds to shake down the guillible public who pay "protection money" for his book, video, carbon-credit trading fees, and speaking fees. Since Fat Al needed "muscle" to provide some scientific credibility for his racket, he hired climite hitman James "Jimmy the Enforcer" Hansen, who was payed handsomly for services with money laundered thru the Heinz Lady.
Harold Pierce Jr:
Yeah, this is the same reason Michael Moore was called "fat".
By the way, is James Hansen fat too? What about Naomi Oreskes, is she also fat? And, is Gavin Schmidt fat? Do tell us, Harold!
I have never met these people so I really don't know. They might very well be secret "made members" of Don Al "Fat Al" Gore's organization, but that allegation is just speculation.
Science historian Naomi Oreskes must surely know of the late John Daly, but she makes no mention of him and his climate studies. He showed by analyses of temperature records from many remote weather stations that there was little or no global warming upto ca 2000.
GO: http://www.John-Daly.com, scroll down, and
click on "Station Temperature Data" for more info. In particular check the temperature-time plots for Death Valley and Alice Springs, AU.
Note the plot for the annual mean winter temperature in Death Valley which is below sea level. If CO2 has any effect on warming the lower atmosphere, then there should be slight but detectable increase in mean temperature that follows the increase of the concentration of this greenhouse gas in the air. Since none was observed, I have concluded that CO2 has no effect on warming the air at this site. This conclusion could be verified by analyses of the mean monthly minimum temperatures for this site.
This analysis is my next project after I finish my Quatsino, BC weather station climate study.
Harold Pierce:
(emphasis mine)
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Harold, is William Connolley fat?
Harold Pierce writes:
[[Science historian Naomi Oreskes must surely know of the late John Daly, but she makes no mention of him and his climate studies. He showed by analyses of temperature records from many remote weather stations that there was little or no global warming upto ca 2000.]]
Yes, he showed that by picking out the stations that showed cooling or stasis and ignoring the very many more than showed warming. If you think that proves anything at all, then you are as statistically illiterate as the late John Daly.
Harold Pierce Jr.
I'm curious - are you using t-tests for your analyses?
Cheers.
Barton Paul Levenson:
Dang, he should've simply attacked Al Gore, like the CEI did. Al Gore uses lots of energy -- according to energy usage figures pulled out from my butt -- therefore global warming doesn't exist!
Harold, Oreskes only used published work. Having a cute blog with nutjob contributors may be impressive for some, but doesn't constitute 'publishing'. Published in a journal, you see.
But Harold knew that already. No one is that dumb. But passing on this FUD to an audience that would believe it is indicative: that gullible crew doesn't get access to decision-makers, so the fact that their FUD spreads on The Internets is of no consequence. Well, there is a consequence - I get entertainment value from Harold's comedic gold.
Best,
D
I did think of that. They do consume more fuel, because it takes more fuel to drag their heavy bodies around, unless they are home bound. And they eat more food than they need too. If they aren't getting enough exercise, then they don't need as much food. Plus they are a burden on the medical system. Plus...
ben:
Is Naomi Oreskes fat?
Is Ben fat?
Or better (given that Ben is young) will Ben be fat in 20 years?
Odds are good, actually ...
"Fat Al scares everbody with his Drumbeats of Doom and Gloom and then proceeds to shake down the guillible public who pay "protection money" for his book, video, carbon-credit trading fees, and speaking fees."
Except of course Gore contributes the royalties from his books and movies to charity and Generation Asset Management actually spends money buying carbon credits to offset the emissions generated by its staff and neither sells emission credits nor acts a broker or consultant for such trades.
dhogaza:
If Ben's day job is as a marching keyboardist -- which I'm guessing it is -- then he's probably already quite fat.
Ian Gould:
Oh noes, them's facts!
And right after the denialists accuse Gore et al. of preaching "Doom and Gloom", they decide to turn around and actually preach their gospel of economic doom and gloom. Carbon caps are going to destroy the economy! Taxing CO2 is death!
Alas for these screaming idiots, there's this little report from the EPA:
"assuming advanced energy technologies hit the market fast, America's economy will grow 80 percent by 2030. If we don't cap carbon emissions, America's economy will grow 81 percent by 2030."
ben:
How does increasing exercise reduce your carbon footprint from the production of food you consume?
Who's that?
I'm 215 pounds, and I've been more or less that weight since I was 18. I think my body fat is around 16% or so, while it was more like 10% when I was younger. I'm in my mid 30's now.
It doesn't. Moderate exercise is good for you. Being fat is bad for a person and makes them more of a burden on the medical system. You need to strike a balance. Being heavier than you should be results in more fuel used to cart your heavy butt around. I can't help being heavy, it's my body type, so that's different. I exercise regularly but moderately.
group hug! Ben and I have something in common!
I too am a fat fascist. I am waiting for the airlines to start charging by total weight instead of baggage weight, so I can get cheap flights, or carry my whole house with me. And maybe then I won't have to squeeze up against the window while some oversized underaged traveller snatches my armrest and oozes into my pockets.
We could make a good start on global warming and third world malnutrition tomorrow if we introduced a methane tax on meat and a proper carbon tax too. The entire western world would drop its overconsumption of meat, and land devoted to cattle farming could be returned to jungle. The huge quantities of water and feed crop currently being wasted on making us fat could be diverted to actually feeding people who're too thin, and to restoring rivers. 10 years and half the world's environmental problems would be over. Even the Great Barrier Reef would recover.
But why won't this happen, I wonder? Because Al Gore is fat! (that sentence was the only sarcastic one in this comment, btw).
And why is it that the only thing I can find in common with Ben includes the word "fascist"?
Why is it fascist to tax stuff that many people can't seem to moderate on their own? Maybe it is, but I'm not convinced.
RE: #20
Yes, I am using t-tests. For one study, I compared mean mimimum temperatures for the March, June, Sep, and Dec sampling intervals, which is 11 days centered on the equinox or soltice, for the years 1900-05 vs the years 2000-05. Although in many comparisons there were significant differences between the means (i.e., p < 0.05) for the minimum temperature for these sampling intervals on a year by year comparison (e.g., 1900 vs 2000), there was no clear winner. For the Sep sample interval, however, the 2000-05 interval just trounced the 1900-05 interval with 4 wins and 1 tie.
Now for some interesting results. For 1906 vs 2006, there was no significant difference between the means for the four sampling intervals. For 1907 vs 2007, there was a tie: 2007 wins Mar and Sep while 1907 wins Jun and Dec.
I used a t-test for unpaired data, and found that if imeans differ by 1 or more K, the difference is usually significant(i.e., p < 0.05). For some tests the computed p values were 0.0001. This occured if the difference between the means was ca 2 K.
Now for the really interesting results. I did a multi-decadal analysis of the minimum temperature for the Sep interval from 1900 to 2005. A summary of the data for the min temp +/- AD (i.e., the classical average deviation) is as follows: 1900-29, 280.5 +/- 1.5 K, 1930-89, 281.8 +/-1.5 K, and 1990-2005, 283.1 +/- 1.5 K.
Note (1)the large temperature change over the entire sample period is 2.6 K (0.26 K/decade), (2)the constant AD of 1.3 K, (3)the long intervals of constant temperature and (4)the temperature jump of 1.3 K between the intervals.
The temperature jump between the intervals was significant by the t-test. For this test, I compared the yearly means of the decadal interval on either side of the jump point. If anybody has some explantions for these results, please post your ideas here. Sixty years is longer than the PDO period.
I chose the Sep interval because in BC Aug and Sep are the warmest and driest months with the fewest cloudy days and the effects of the ENSO are minimal. I used John Daly's criteria for selecting this weather station. These are remoteness, long and continuous station weather records (at Quatsino the records start in 1895), meticulous record keeping, and good site maintenance. Closeby is the Cape Scott weather station whose data I used as substiture for missing Quatsino data. Unfortunately, the Cape Scott weather station does not have continous records. GO: http://www.fogwhistle.ca/bclights for the location of these weather stations which also have lightstations and for some really spectacular pics of the lightstations.
To confirm the temperature jumps found in the above multi-decadal analysis, I doing the same analysis for the max temp, and I have three decades to go.
When I get this project done, I shall send the results to Roger Sr and request that he post them on his Climate Science Blog. I will also put all of my results in an ASCII text file and send to anyone whose makes a request.
I will post a notice here when the project is done.
Harold Pierce Jr.:
OK, so starting from daily records for 1900--1905 and 2000--2005 -- which together comprise about 4,000 data points -- you decide to
- pick 6 * 4 * 11 = 254 out of the 4,000 data points, and then
- aggregate them into 6 * 4 = 24 "data" points,
and only after that do you do a t-test. Yeah, right.
Maybe you should've just said that Naomi Oreskes is fat. It's so much simpler.
RE #19
Hello Paul!
There is no basis for your criticism of John Daly's analyses of the remote weather station temperature records. Did you read his article, "What the Station Say:..." Probably not! The gist of it is quite simple: Do not use weather stations located in urban areas or any other site that might bias the measurements, e.g., large int. airports.
His study of the remote weather stations is quite straight forward, does not use statistics, and he used the GISTEMP and HadCRU data bases, which are freely available.
I don't trust the GISTEMP data base because Steve Mc. and Anthony W. have shown that most of the station records have been sliced, diced, and homogenized! As a matter of fact, rural weather stations data are used to provide corrections via alogrithms to the urban weather stations located nearby.
I see Harold responds to my criticisms by ignoring them.
ben:
Then why did you imply it did as in "They (the overweight) consume more resources, food, fuel, etc, than folks who are not overweight, and thus have a greater carbon footprint"?
Hello Frank!
I have a preliminary study where I show that you do not have to crunch megabits of temp data to obtain useful results. If you want a look-see at this study, then post your email address to my gmail address.
I sent these results to Roger Sr, and he had no criticism of my methodology and really liked the idea of using lightstations. As a matter of fact, I have also done some calculations using the Quatsino Lightstation data and have compared it to the weather station calculations.
This type of study is quite useful since the lightstation is at the same latitude and longitude as the weather station but at higher elevation, 21 m vs 7.4 m.
What both data sets show is that there is a really big temperature drop from 1990-99 vs 2000-06 for the max temp and smaller drop for min temperatures for both the equinox and monthly sampling intervals (i.e, Sep 16-26 and Sep 1-30, resp). This is because the max temp is a measure sea breeze temp while the min temp is measure of land breeze temp.
For mean max temp, the lightstation showed a drop of 1 K and weather station showed a drop of 2.3 K. These results are in agreement that climate is moving into a cool cycles.
Unfortunately, no data for 2007 is available for the lightstation.
Frank "?????" , no more cheap shots. I doing calculations and your are just blowing a lot of hot air that is contributing to global warming.
RE: "?????", This is your nickname that I'm working on. Don't worry. It won't be "Fat Frank" or "Fat Mouth Frank"
Harold Pierce responds to my criticisms by ignoring them... and then changing the subject.
Yes, I am using t-tests. For one study, I compared mean mimimum temperatures for the March, June, Sep, and Dec sampling intervals, which is 11 days centered on the equinox or soltice, for the years 1900-05 vs the years 2000-05. Although in many comparisons there were significant differences between the means (i.e., p < 0.05) for the minimum temperature for these sampling intervals on a year by year comparison (e.g., 1900 vs 2000), there was no clear winner. For the Sep sample interval, however, the 2000-05 interval just trounced the 1900-05 interval with 4 wins and 1 tie.
dear Harold, just a word of advice:
anybody who doesn t understand how cherrypicking stations or years and tiny time intervals will effect the results of a study, should NOT torture a statistics program until he gets the desired results.
what you are doing is NOT science. that puts you in the right company with John Daly and your results will fit in perfectly when posted on non-science blogs as climate science or CO2 science.
RE: #39
The Quatsino weather station and lightstation are
"strategically-located stations" using John Daly's term for some stations. The latitude is 50 degrees N, i.e., half way between the equator and the north pole, and the stations face the vast Pacific Ocean. The closest humans are in Hawaii which is 3000 miles to the southwest. If you go due west, the closest large group of humans is in Japan.
I am quite well aware that this is just one station, but you have to start somwhere at a specific site. And how many of these remote sites are required to obtain a fairly good assessment of global temperature? In AU, the BOM has selected only 100 reference sites. So clearly you don't that many.
Climate Science is a non-science blog? Shame on you! I should track you down and wash your mouth out Grandma's lye soap!
Do you remember Grandma's lye soap,
Good for anything in the home.
The secret was in the scrubbing,
it didn't suds and didn't foam!
Harold Pierce continues to ignore my criticisms.
Harold, is Naomi Oreskes fat?
ATTN: Tim!
Please warn Frank bi to mind his manners are you will exile him to a sheep station in the outback. Or better, send him to Alice Springs where he can analyze temperature records which start in ca 1880!
PS: I will email you the file with the results of my prelim. study of the Quatsino WS.
As Big Monkey said: It Takes a Gulag.
Harold, is Naomi Oreskes fat?
(by the way, 254 should be 264; my bad)
Ben, as Darth Vader would say (if his lines were written for him by Jonah Goldberg), you must embrace your inner fascist. You're a fat fascist. So am I. Let's be proud of this together. Release your hatred and anger.
Btw, what sport do you do, and how much? I find it hard to believe you were ever 10% body fat - that's the realm of elite athletes. And 16% in your mid-30s is pretty good too. What's your trick? Getting your pulse up by visiting here?
Harold Pierce Jnr.
I am very intrigued as to your reasoning with respect to selecting t-tests for your analyses. Could you explain this a little please?
Muchos gratias.
Muchos gratias? What was I thinking?
Muchas gracias!
Harold Pierce writes:
[[There is no basis for your criticism of John Daly's analyses of the remote weather station temperature records. Did you read his article, "What the Station Say:..." Probably not! The gist of it is quite simple: Do not use weather stations located in urban areas or any other site that might bias the measurements, e.g., large int. airports.]]
There is no significant difference if you compute the land surface temperature trends from rural stations alone or from all stations. My criticism of Daly stands -- he would cherry-pick stations that showed cooling or no trend and use them to give the impression that there was no global warming.
Harold Pierce writes:
[[I don't trust the GISTEMP data base because Steve Mc. and Anthony W. have shown that most of the station records have been sliced, diced, and homogenized! ]]
So how do you explain the close correlation with the HADCRU data base? Or do you reject that one as well?
?!?
Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear! Someone's been wasting their time then.
SG:
I don't know about ben, but I must confess that I accidentally unleashed my inner fat fascist when I suggested to counter Fred Singer's "climate realism" with "climate factism". Bwahahahahahaha!
Some fat people do consume more food than they eat. Others are to sedentary.
The point is that they have a "greater carbon footprint" when you figure in all the reasons. Most especially use of fuel on account of it takes more fuel to cart their butts around. If they are also over-eaters, and many/most are, then it requires more fuel to cart all that food around. If you looked at all the secondary and tertiary effects, it's probably much worse still.
Football. I was a running back and linebacker in high school and college. College didn't work out, I mostly rode the pines and didn't get along with the coaches. My academics sucked too, and I dropped out after two years. Now I hunt, snowboard and golf. Hunting is what keeps me in shape, since I'm motivated to keep the weight off and to keep the cardio up etc. throughout the year. When I was 18, it was easy to stay in shape, my dad running a fitness center not withstanding.
Actually, the funny thing is that the best shape I ever got in was on account of my girlfriend at the time, my junior year of high school, dragging me off to aerobics twice a week. That's when I got down to the 10%.
"Some fat people do consume more food than they eat"
is this one of those star trek episodes where you try to make the artificial intelligences blow up by feeding them a paradox?
Is that what they call it now, Ben? "Aerobics", eh? The secret of your success...
I'm surprised football kept you at anything resembling a low body fat percentage, even a lot of the professionals look pretty porky. But the "aerobics" explains it...
Heh! What I meant was "need," not "eat." Little brain problem there.
Er, very few running backs have any fat on them, and more or less the same for linebackers.
To be honest, 16% now is wishful thinking, probably more like 18-20%, depending on the season. My plan is to get to and stay at 16% The three Big Macs, Quarter Pounder, and McChicken sandwich I had for lunch and dinner on the road didn't help. But at $7 for the whole shebang, I couldn't pass it up, what with the expensive gas.
Now SG, what's your weight story? Play any sports? Any motivation to stay in shape now, besides the obvious reasons to have a longer healthier life and so on?
See... the group hug has begun. I don't even know what a linebacker is Ben, just going on the sight of all those fat boys "running" around.
I'm 15 years a kickboxer, but not competitive. For a while there I had an ... inappropriate ... diet and dropped to 11%, but when my weight got really low and everyone became too big for me to spar, I hit the weights and ate more. When I left Australia I was probably at a healthy 15-18% body fat, but now 2 years in rural Japan with a shoddy kickboxing school (once a week at best, when I can be bothered) and too many commitments, and I'm starting to get the mid-30s spread I had been putting off. I tried a bit of soccer here, but because it's "safe" I didn't wear my mouthguard at practice, and now I have 3 less teeth. Good thing Japanese dentistry is dirt cheap...
maybe as summer comes around I'll up my exercise rate. But the school isn't fun, so mostly I'm just doing weights and a bit of running. Nowhere near enough. (And my motivation, btw, is almost entirely vanity, which fades as one ages and becomes less and less of a motivator).
Well, as Ben mentions, running backs and linebackers in general aren't among the "porkies". The only exception I can really think of, who was successful, was Jerome Bettis, and he was a freak, a huge fat guy who could sprint and had amazing quickness.
But that doesn't come along often - only once, in the US professional football leagues.
Most of the players who play running back are scary-fit, and while not Olympic-class sprinters could probably run 100 meters competitively in much of Europe, since many of them compete on university track teams here in the US.
While the linebackers are people you don't probably want to call fat, to their face, because whatever you may think of their fitness level, they'll run you down because you're not as quick as you think you are.
But, on the other hand, Ben's political, scientific, and historical knowledge doesn't only lack fat, it lacks meat, and skeleton. He's typically full of it, but despite that, I'm more than happy to bolster his accurate description of football athletes at those two positions.
fortunately for me, dhogaza, I don't think I'm very quick, and I'm certainly not very brave, so I tend not to tell anyone they're fat to their face.
...
but I think you just called an ex-linebacker a big fat windbag!
RE: #46
Hello Bernard!
The type of analysis I used is not new idea. I got the idea from a blog article on the Central England Temperature
record. There was a table in the article that had for each month the mean annual temperature for 30 year intervals from 1750 to about 2000. The t-tests was used to compare the means for each of these intervals. I recall for several months there was no sig differnce between the means
for 250 years while for some months there were significant differences over this time period, and short intervals for comparisons.
Unfortunately, I have lost the link to this to site, but I'm fairly sure I book marked it. I don't routinely backup the favorites list. Out of the blue, Win 98SE coughs up
"general protection fault" furballs, and when that happens
"It's reformat Drive C! Ask questions later!" However, turning off or restarting the computer once every few days seems to eliminate this problem.
I'm still searching for the link to this site. If anybody knows it, please post it here.
I finding from my analyses fo the Quatsino temperature records that it not a good idea to use a broad metric suchas the mean annual temperature. You got more interesting information if keep the max and min temps seperate.
RE: #49
Hello P. Lewis.
I might use these data bases for rural sites. There is a file at GISS that gives the type of adjustments that are made for weather stations. These are based upon night time satellite images. Most rural and remote sites are dark and have no adjustments. Cities and urban areas have varying degrees of brightnesss, and this parameter is used to determine the type of adjustment that is applied to the temperature records. In some cases these adjustments change due to encroaching urbanization.
Go over to ClimateAudit for info on how this is done and all the problems it causes.
Harold now decides to completely ignore Barton Paul Levenson's criticisms.
Is Naomi Oreskes fat, Harold?
Compared to whom? I'm at least in the upper 50% of ex-linebackers who were too small (6' 225 at the time) to make it at linebacker and ex-running backs who were too slow (i.e. white, 4.7 s 40 yd) to make it at running back, who almost flunked, and then dropped, out of college the first time around.
Now, is Al Gore fat? I dunno, but his heft doesn't seem any more ponderous than that of the average American, probably less. So his carbon footprint shouldn't be too deep, except maybe in the soft, loamy earth you find in the Tennessean back country. Maybe Al isn't fat, but he might be loamy.
RE: #47
Hello Barton Paul!
I stand by what I stated. John Daly picked a great many cherries, enough to bake a lot of pies! Did you count them? He also mentioned that he tried to use weather stations that were compliant with the WMO standards.
Now you can complain til the NZ sheep come home, but he is right and you are flatout wrong.
Have you ever downloaded weather station records and examined them? If you do this, you will quickly concluded, "WOW! These numbers are all over the place.
How do the GISS and HadCRU guys come up with a mean global anomaly of 0.4 deg C?" This number is just statistical phony balony and it means squat!
GO: http://www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html. Click on "Customized Search" and type in "Yelloknife". Then select the record for Dec 2007.
Yikes! It really is darn cold up there.
The individual stations records can be downloaded and printed out for FREE. The on-screen record is a work of art. Very pleasant and relaxing to view. The USHCN is a clunky and ugly.
Maybe because the USHCN site contains the metadata?
Harold Pierce writes:
[[I stand by what I stated. John Daly picked a great many cherries, enough to bake a lot of pies! Did you count them? He also mentioned that he tried to use weather stations that were compliant with the WMO standards.
Now you can complain til the NZ sheep come home, but he is right and you are flatout wrong.]]
Which part of "he only showed stations that showed cooling or a flat trend" did you not understand?
You have to use all the relevant data, not just the part that supports your point of view. That's the first principle in a statistical investigation. You can't cherry pick the part that gives the results you like. Doing what John Daly did in a statistical analysis class would get him a big red F on his paper. He was flat-out wrong, and you are flat-out wrong if you buy his stupid so-called demonstration.
Harold Pierce Jnr
In #58 you noted:
It seems to me that the data you use contain at least two independent factors. The first is 'time', which may be further divided into categories such as season, month, and/or time intervals over a greater considered period. The second is 'location', which can be further divided at least into altitude, latitude and geography (including but not restricted to distance from 'heat islands'). I'm sure that the good folk here could suggest many other appropriate factors that could be validly included.
When analysing factored data such as these one is immediately forced into performing more than one comparison between two groups, as you yourself have noted in your descriptions above. In such as instance the use of a t-test would be deemed inappropriate by just about any statistician I know of, because the action of such multiple comparison compounds the probability of obtaining a Type I error, as is ubiquitously explained in statistics texts and online sources such as here at our favourite wiki.
Ironically, the lack of a positive result even with the increased chance of one that the repeated use of t-tests engenders, would seem to work in your favour when trying to refute any warming trend. However it is not this simple, for several reasons. Firstly, as Barton has pointed out, you have been very selective in your choice of small datasets from a very much greater dataset. If you have only investigated non-randomly selected subsets of those response variables impacted upon by the relevant factors, you lose the ability to comment on the effect(s) of these factors. And remember, we are speaking of GLOBAL warming. Secondly, by selecting subsets from a large database, and doing multiple comparisons, you have not demonstrated that any negative statistical results are not just a function of the nature of your data selection.
Here though it is possible to determine whether there is a selection bias in your selected datasets. One would expect a certain familywise error rate in a group of independently performed multiple comparisons. A rate either higher or lower than that predicted with an underlying null hypothesis effect (eg no warming) could indicate either a real effect drowning in a gaggle of 'some positives amongst "many" negatives', or a data selection bias that masks expected Type I error results, respectively.
In either case, when performing multiple comparisons one should use a suitable method (see the bottom of the above link for basic examples) that is designed to perform multiple comparisons simultaneously. These would follow on from the use of a procedure (such as an ANOVA or MANOVA at the very least) to detect a general factor effect, and should be chosen a priori to the analyses.
To reiterate by quoting the above link:
I know of no statistician or mathematician who would use a t-test in such a circumstance, and I would be very curious to see the site to which you referred, and the of bona fides of the analyst(s) involved.
RE: #64
Hello Barton Paul!
As a matter of fact, you do not have to use all the data if you suspect that the integrity of the measurement site has been compromised. You can do this by travelling to the site and inspecting it. Go to John Daly's site and read the article about the poor siting of a measurement station in Death Valley.
Go: http://www.surfacestation.org. Anthony Watts is doing just that for the weather stations in the USHCN, and he has many photos of sites which have been compromised. He has examined about 50% of the sites in this network so far.
Upon examination of the temperature records from the Quatsino WS, I have that on several occasion errors in the records. For example, in one record I found -0.6, -0.6, and -0.6. Yikes! The Sign of the Beast! How this got by the data quality checker is a mystery to me. I have found errors such as -0.5 which should have been -5.0.
End of argument! Harold gets cherry pie al a mode, and Barton gets crow pie!
RE: #66
Hello Benard!
Good Grief! You just wasted a lot of time and bytes telling me stuff I already know! You can't scold me about the stat analysis because you have not seen any data.
Here is some raw data right off the Quatsino WS records.
March 16-26, 1906, min temp:
-4.4 -2.2 -2.2 -1.1 0.0 2.2 3.0 3.3 3.9 3.9 4.4.
March 16-26, 2006, min temp:
-1.0 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.0 2.5 2.5 3.0.
I used the t-test for unpaired data, and the computer says that p=0.94. For these data sets an "eyeball" t-test would yield "NS"! There was no sig difference between the means for summer and winter soltice sample intervals (Jun 16-26 and Dec 16-26, resp.) and for the Sep equinox sample interval (Sep 16-26) for 1906 vs 2006.
The criteria for my analysis methodolgy is this: Keep it simple, Stupid!
End of argument! Harold gets cherry pie with whipped cream, and Benard gets crow pie!
Enough of this nonsense! I have to go finish my report for Roger Sr on my Quatsino climate study project.
BTW: If I find the link to the CET study I'll post it here.
BTW: If you want a look-see at the results of my preliminary study, send your e-mail address to this numbered account 76543.30ATcompuserve.com.
Yum! John Daly makes great cheery pie!
Harold, trying to talk to John Daly is not recommended.
Harold Pierce Jnr.
Even though the numbers are meaningless unless truly random selection of the datasets is demonstrated, I am still curious...
How many t-tests have you done in total for all of your analyses? How many of these have given you a p value less than α = 0.05?
Eli Rabett:
Yesterday I managed to channel the spirit of John Daly through an ouija board. He said he was totally wrong about global warming, and he no longer has any issues with the IPCC consensus.
* * *
Harold Pierce:
Yeah, the measurement site was installed by pinkos. QED.
Still trying to get me exiled to a sheep station, Mr. Galileo? Well, I'm still here.
Harold, is Naomi Oreskes fat?
he criteria for my analysis methodolgy is this: Keep it simple, Stupid!
your methodology is stupid stupid stupid. cherrypicking 20 datapoints from a dataset of BILLIONS to draw a conclusion, is simply moronic!
For example, in one record I found -0.6, -0.6, and -0.6. Yikes! The Sign of the Beast! How this got by the data quality checker is a mystery to me. I have found errors such as -0.5 which should have been -5.0.
links please!
RE: #68
Hello Eli!
John Daly passed away in 2004 as the result of heart attack. This is most unfortunate because most of his temperature-time plots of the data from the remote weather stations stop about 200O.
I really like the Death Valley graph, and I going to bring it upto date. I'm also going to construct plots of the max and min temp for selected months.
Harold, is Naomi Oreskes fat?
Harold Pierce Jnr.
I am a great fan of keeping things as simple as they can be (and of Occam's razor in accounting for effects) but you have stretched the concept far beyond its breaking point.
If you had a mysterious disease would you want your doctor to conduct the most detailed and appropriate medical tests that he is able to, or rather to simply have you poke out your tongue twenty times so that he can see what colour it is (without even checking for texture, moisture and breath odour whilst he is at it)?
This is analogous to what you are doing - aside from the matter of test choice you have no factors in your approach, no stratification, and you appear to have no a priori rules for data selection/inclusion that avoid selector bias. And don't try to say that you are not biased - even the most rigorous and objective real scientists struggle to ensure that they leave their unconscious preconceptions out of their experimental protocols. At the very least they endeavour to cover every contingency in their experimental design, and they usually run their designs past their colleagues before they start work. In addition, they are mercilessly scrutinised by peer-review, where any reviewer will immediately highlight any shortcomings in procedure. And after all of this, there is the response of the body of informed scientists to publication...
Your work would not make it out of a colleague's office, let alone to a funding body, to an editor's desk, thence to a peer-review, and certainly would be howled at by the general body of informed scientists. And this would not be because you are an undiscovered, unappreciated genius. Believe me, there are enough broad-minded folk around who would give you your day in court, exactly as has happened here at Deltoid, but the fact that you use the scientific equivalent of calling your teddy bear as a witness immediately invalidates your case.
Even if you were conducting preliminary exploration you would rapidly have to pass beyond the structure that you have described. It is not nonsense to point this out, and as much as I can appreciate that it is your baby, all babies have to grow up and stand on their own legs.
You have not addressed my point of selecting the appropriate test for your data. And your point about errors, whilst valid, is probably not as significant in the overall context of climate analysis as you might think.
During my PhD field work I captured and measured thousands of animals. For each individual I collected dozens of data points, in addition to about a dozen environmental parameters, and I am well aware of how errors of transcription and of instrument reading creep into datasets. I also know how such errors, especially if uncommon, become very minor when datasets become large - as an extreme pedant I have spent weeks cleaning databases as well as they can be cleaned, and to my chagrin after these exercises the difference to final analyses is nearly always insignificant. Not always though, and it certainly is satisfying to discover a blooper, but when a properly factored, stratified and inclusive analysis is conducted on large datasets, which are in general derived from high-standard collection protocols, the chance of finding result-altering errors is not high. And if such significant errors exist in the first place, they are generally detectable by various methods which even a half-clever professional will be familiar with, and would have been caught well before a major body of science evolves from the material.
You may think that you are keeping things simple, but what you are really doing is keeping things scientifically incomprehensible. The questions that your tests 'answer' are not those that you think you are answering. At least, without having been presented with your a priori-formulated hypotheses, that is the most reasonable conclusion an informed statistician, mathematician or scientist would come to.
Need I remind you of the story of Gregor Mendel's pea experiments, which conveniently for him did not contain proportions of colour variants that were outlier to his theories? He somehow 'did not have' these, even though a basic understanding of statistics would have accounted for, and indeed predicted, such outliers. Modern statistical methods would have allowed him to present his ground-breaking theories without this fiddle, and modern statistical methods vehemently prohibit your approach as being entirely a fiddle.
I myself am scientifically sceptical, and I am always prepared to listen to proposals counter to accepted wisdom. And as an ecologist whose species studied and worked with are on a one-way slide to oblivion with even minor climate alterations, I vehemently hope that even the conservative predictions of change do not come to pass. However my personal best assessment of the current wisdom is that the >97% of climate experts have it nailed, and as much as I hope to see it otherwise I am disappointed to say that nothing of substance has yet caught my attention.
If you are going to be the one to do so you will need to work in an entirely different fashion to what you have to date.
RE #69
Hello Benard!
I found the link to the site that has the info about the CET with the large table showing the t-tests. GO:
http://www.usefulinfo.co.uk/climate_change_global_warming.php.
NOTE: PUT AN UNDERSCORE ON EITHER SIDE OF "change".
The link is not being properly displayed.
I haven't tallied the number of t-tests yet, but it is not that many because I haven't processed that much data.
One objective of my project is to test Roger Sr's idea that the best metric to use for examination of land surface temperature data is the max temperature. The other two choices are the min and mean temps.
As a matter of fact, I just finished the calculatons for the max temp for the Sep sample interval (Sep 16-26). Here are the results expressed in the same way for the min temp data (vide supra): 1900-1939, 289.2 +/- 1.5 K,1940-1989, 290.4 +/- 1.7 K, and 1900-2005, 290.3 +/- 1.4 K
Note the temperature jump between 1900-39 interval and the 1940-89 interval is 1.2 K. This is about the same as the jump found in the min temp data set, but there is only one jump for the max temp data set.
More importantly, note the long interval of constant mean max temp i.e., from 1940-2005.
The most mysterious feature of these data sets is the temperature jump of 1.2 and 1.3 K around 1940. Perhaps this is due to a shift in the PDO.
These results tend to support Roger Sr's idea about temp metrics. However, if I had done a convential analyses, e.g., using the monthly mean temps, I might not have discovered the temperature jumps. Will these jumps be found for different sampling intervals? I don't yet, but I will check it out.
Finally, I have concluded that it is best to keep the max and min data separated, because every weather station has its own story to tell.
Harold Pierce Jnr.
What magnitude of values for Ï do your analyses produce? What amount of temperature change are you prepared to detect that would imply change?
I should, perhaps, phrase it as "What amount of temperature change are you prepared to detect/accept that would imply climate change?
"I should, perhaps, phrase it as "What amount of temperature change are you prepared to detect/accept that would imply climate change?"
oh, that's easy: more than exists.
this is why they teach you in high school that you define the test of your your hypothesis a priori rather than look at it a posteriori and decide whether it's convincing.
I'll leave ben to his gibberish.
Harold Pearce, giving a classic demonstration of militant ignorance, writes:
[[As a matter of fact, you do not have to use all the data if you suspect that the integrity of the measurement site has been compromised.]]
Who made this rule up? You?
[various blather deleted]
[[End of argument! Harold gets cherry pie al a mode, and Barton gets crow pie!]]
And you get the strong recommendation that you take an introductory course in statistics. The simple fact is that you don't know what you're talking about, and your idiotic declarations of victory are convincing only to you.
In short, grow up.