Researcher discovers Y2K bug in GW data, NASA issues large corr. xpost

[guids]

Najordef posted this in OOT, thought it was relavent.


http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/200...ttest_yea.html

'He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.





Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (199

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
Najordef posted this in OOT, thought it was relavent.


http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/200...ttest_yea.html

'He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.





Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (199

[/ QUOTE ]

What I've learned in these debates regarding this topic is one has to have a "score card" if you will on who's a tool for whom. Without doing much research I'm sure that somehow Steve McIntyre will be accused of being a tool for the oil companies. Wiki about Steve McIntyre FWIW:

Steve McIntyre

My friend wacki should be able to tell us for sure. If wacki is reading this, what about William Gray the hurricane prognisticator?

Edit: I may have posted a link to McIntyre's articles in other threads. Obviously if I did he didn't make much of an impression on me.

[guids]

but, my take is that it was a software error (udisputable mathematical problem) that he fixed and proved, that a lot of global warming people base their premise on. yay or nay?

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
but, my take is that it was a software error (udisputable mathematical problem) that he fixed and proved, that a lot of global warming people base their premise on. yay or nay?

[/ QUOTE ]

It very well may be but the point is that the first question that is raised by those who are on the other side of the debate is who is this guy a tool for. It's rarely, if ever from my observation, a discussion on the merits of what the person is actually stating. The more I educate myself on this (which admittedly I need more of) I become more convinced that we should be skeptical of the accuracy of the climate models FWIW.

Edit: For instance regarding the models check this article out:

Scientists try new ways to predict climate risks

for instance:

We feel certain about some of the aspects of future climate change, like that it is going to get warmer," said Matthew Collins of the British Met Office. "But on many of the details it's very difficult to say."

"The way we can deal with this is a new technique of expressing the predictions in terms of probabilities," Collins told Reuters of climate research published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Scientists in the U.N. climate panel, for instance, rely on several complex computer models to forecast the impacts of warming this century, ranging from changing rainfall patterns over Africa to rising global sea levels.

But these have flaws because of a lack of understanding about how clouds form, for instance, or how Antarctica's ice will react to less cold. And reliable temperature records in most nations stretch back only about 150 years.

and

"Climate science is a very new science and we have only just begun to explore the uncertainties," said David Stainforth of Oxford University in England who contributed research to the Royal Society.

I don't know but to base billions and billions of dollars being spent on what seems like a lot of uncertainty seems to be ridiculous to me.

[MelchyBeau]

[ QUOTE ]


I don't know but to base billions and billions of dollars being spent on what seems like a lot of uncertainty seems to be ridiculous to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree, we shouldn't be in Iraq

[elwoodblues]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't know but to base billions and billions of dollars being spent on what seems like a lot of uncertainty seems to be ridiculous to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is incomplete. You need to factor the costs and the potential benefits (adjusting for uncertainty.) It might be that billions is too expensive, or it might be that billions if, for example, it has a 50% chance of saving all of humanity, is a bargain.

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I don't know but to base billions and billions of dollars being spent on what seems like a lot of uncertainty seems to be ridiculous to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is incomplete. You need to factor the costs and the potential benefits (adjusting for uncertainty.) It might be that billions is too expensive, or it might be that billions if, for example, it has a 50% chance of saving all of humanity, is a bargain.

[/ QUOTE ]

Points well taken and I actually thought about that. You could probably say that about a lot of things. Not convinced at all that humanity is in any kind of immediate danger. Certainly not by some of the doomsday predictions of what some modeles are saying. I see no reason to draw that conclusion. Nonetheless still will buy carbon offsets for the forseeable future. Here's a blurb on something Senator Bingaman proposed and I think it's fair to say that Senator Bingaman is a moderate. Therefore I'd consider this approach a "middle of the road" policy:

EIA: Bingaman Climate Bill Poses Little Economic Pain

Somehow I have the feeling that costs of implementing something like this are underestimated and I see no evidence that it will actually have any effect or is actually needed. We're doing all this based on findings of a new science with not much data (when we're looking at long time periods with climate cycles) and uncertain, unproven models. Seems more likely to be a waste of money than saving mankind to me but maybe not.

BTW I'm serious about buying carbon offsets. For the price of $120 a year I can offset the CO2 my autos emit each year. What about if this was done for every vehicle? Of course some can't afford $120 a year but seems lik the government could pick the slack. I realize that industrial CO2 emissions remain as a problem but how many people would it take offsetting the CO2 their automobiles emit to make a big difference? Maybe wacki can shed some light on this.

[PLOlover]

[ QUOTE ]
BTW I'm serious about buying carbon offsets. For the price of $120 a year I can offset the CO2 my autos emit each year.

[/ QUOTE ]

if you drive 1k a month and get 25 mpg, then you use about 500 gallons of gas a year, which means you pay about 750$ a year in gas tax. so don't feel guilty, even assuming everything about carbon junk is kosher.

[Phil153]

[ QUOTE ]
According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

[/ QUOTE ]
The finding is totally overblown. 1998 was 0.02 degrees hotter than 1934 before the correction. Now it's 0.01 degrees colder. This is versus a temperature anomaly in both years of around 1.25. Look at the changes listed in the blog. This is a very small correction, and doesn't at all invalidate the trend we've been seeing in the last 20 years.

That's not to say there isn't egg on the face NASA, but this doesn't invalidate global warming in any way. Particularly since other data, such as sea temperature, rate of glacial melting, temperature readings from numerous other countries, and so on, all point in the same direction.

[Copernicus]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

[/ QUOTE ]
The finding is totally overblown. 1998 was 0.02 degrees hotter than 1934 before the correction. Now it's 0.01 degrees colder. This is versus a temperature anomaly in both years of around 1.25. Look at the changes listed in the blog. This is a very small correction, and doesn't at all invalidate the trend we've been seeing in the last 20 years.

That's not to say there isn't egg on the face NASA, but this doesn't invalidate global warming in any way. Particularly since other data, such as sea temperature, rate of glacial melting, temperature readings from numerous other countries, and so on, all point in the same direction.

[/ QUOTE ]

so .02 degress hotter was cause for doom and gloom panic scenarios but "only" .01 degrees cooler is irrelevant?

The notion of stochastic models for assigning probabilities to different scenarios is also highly suspect. If you can't accurately assign probabilities and standard deviations to the effects of the underlying causes and their countereffects, and only have guesses as to the correlations between many of those underlying causes, the effect is to blow the entire probabilistic model up because errors are more likely to compound than offset.