Bishop Hill writes:
As if there weren’t enough problems with climate data already, the latest bright idea from CAGW subscribers is to use opinion polls to measure climate change. I kid you not…
The journal Biology Letters this week reports a novel yet kind of obvious way to tackle the data dearth; simply asking Himalayan villagers about their experiences.
To be fair, the phrase “simply asking” does the researchers a disservice, because what they emphasise throughout their paper is the need to gather local knowledge “rapidly and efficiently… using systematic tools”.
It has to be structured, internally consistent and rigorous; that’s the message.
We know that some scientists are happy to treat climate model output as data. Now it seems that people’s opinions are to be counted as climatic data too.
It’s a funny old science, innit?
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The story from the BBC by the always discerning Richard Black is here.
Here’s a gem:
For example, in some villages about half of the people questioned reported that summer was now starting earlier than 10 years ago; which raises the question of why the other half did not.
In villages where life is based almost totally on farming, you might expect a more consistent view.
In one sense, that is like putting two thermometers in the same place and finding that one registered a temperature rise while the other did not.
I can’t wait to see the uncertainty values with this one. Apparently Richard Black had no idea that he just described what station siting and UHI effects are all about. Of course when you deny those effects, it is easy to forget them in context.
BTW lest somebody thinks that “Sherpas” only refers to Mt. Everest mountain guides, see this.
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Attempting to promote belief in ‘global warming’, by appealing to belief in ‘global warming, is simply the model that they have been working with all along.
Turtles all the way down.
If they asked people about the color of grass twenty years ago and now, Global De-Greening would emerge as an obvious problem.
The BBC’s AGW propagandist Richard Black is pumping this on his blog.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2011/05/personal_tales_a_climate-cha.html
You see, because “Satellites give an incomplete picture – and only since the early 1980s, at that,” we really need polls and the kind of precision that human memory combined with leading questions asked by AGW-promoting sociologists can provide.
Five of every three dentists recommend Dentine!
For more info on ‘The bravest of the brave’ go to-
http://www.gwt.org.uk/
1/2 says they do, 1/2 says they don’t… That “averages” out to NO CHANGE.
HA! Subjective analysis, not worth the time to make it.
Reviewing family PHOTOS of the last 80 years (recently, some digitizing work I did) made me realize that WINTERS in MN are GREATLY EXAGGERATED in my mind! That would be in regard snowfall.
This years 100″ in MN falls into “record” of my family history, reaching back (photo wise) into the 20’s.
The mind makes subtle changes on these things.
OUCH to imagine someone would fall for that!
Max
I’ve read the piece by Black earlier this day and thought, lawdymine, look what has become of the proud ship AGW. And he couldn’t even make it sound halfway alarmist, even though he has been SCHOOLED in climate alarmism. What a sorry outfit it has become.
This was so predictable. Opinion can be manipulated. The alarmists control the government and the media all around the world. This is guaranteed to promote their agenda.
Considering that the case for future climate catastrophe is based upon model output and a consensus mountain of “peer reviewed” papers full of “could”, “might”, “possibly” – why not a Sherpa poll?
Fits right in, I’d say.
I’ll start the skeptics’ data base off, ok?
– Back in the summer of 1947 I talked to a man who had seen a man timing how long it took to fry an egg on the tarmac in one of Oslo’s (the one in Norway) streets. If I remember right it only took seconds. And to complete the data; – when he got home with the rest of the eggs they were all hard boiled in the bag
Nothing new under the Sun
http://www.climategate.com/mountain-ice-disappearance-claims-by-ipcc-based-upon-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
How would an observer tell the difference between natural variation of the climate and man-made variation? One of the more amazing things that I have watched is the belief that *ANY* variation in the climate is CO2-induced. Otherwise, the weather in any given year would be exactly the same as last year’s. This is so obviously stupid that it is breathtaking.
I can’t help but sense a small tint of racism in stories like these. Why will scientists travel all the way to Nepal to ask villagers about their opinions on climate change, and use that as “scientific data” but they won’t travel to a west Texas oil field and ask the workers about their observations on climate change?
My father in law swears ice used to be colder….
…and this coming from a man old enough to remember the dust bowl
“One of the more amazing things that I have watched is the belief that *ANY* variation in the climate is CO2-induced. Otherwise, the weather in any given year would be exactly the same as last year’s. ”
You’ve just described the beauty of Climate Science.
So Biology follows Climatology and others out of the domain of “hard science” and into the domain of “soft science”, on their way to “theology”.
Disciplines like Sociology and Psychology, when properly practiced, go to great lengths to minimize the biases inherent in research whose main source of information is one person talking with another.
Count me skeptical that these guys know anything about the difficulties in doing this kind of research. Bring another team back next year and ask the exact same questions using a different interpreter and if you didn’t prepare your original research correctly you might get entirely different or conflicting results.
Not that it will matter, their goal is not to learn new information, their goal is to get their names in prints and our money in their bank accounts.
All I know is that I can’t get any good tantric skulls or kapalas out of Nepal any more. They stopped allowing them to be exported. Is that a sign of global climate fatigue?
Local perceptions of climate change validated by scientific evidence in the Himalayas
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/04/16/rsbl.2011.0269.short
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” –A. Einstein
This is staggering. It makes my brain hurt.
To think that these so-called ‘scientists’ are paid money to come up with this drivel is enough to drive anybody up the wall.
I wonder what percent of the grant money goes to paying those who are interviewed for saying the ‘correct’ answers. \sarc off
The subtlety of BBC propaganda.
For example, in some villages about half of the people questioned reported that summer was now starting later than 10 years ago ………
Even Thomas Jefferson wrote about climate change in 1801. “Both heats and cold have become much more moderate within the memories of the middle aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep”.He continues with “even the elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow three months in every year. Rivers which seldom failed to freeze over every winter now seldom do freeze”. Sounds alike like the earth was coming out of one of the cooling phase’s. Even I remember snow in Albany Oregon in the sixty’s. Made money shoveling the global warming white stuff from in front of business several times a week. I also remember my grandfather telling me that there is a thirty to thirty five years span were the earth warms and then cools. When the earth is warming people will scare you into thinking that it’s all doom and gloom and man is the problem. When the earth cools it’s the end of the world. My take is this, if the planet is warming great lots of females in skimpy bikinis, men wearing shorts, tank tops and plenty of food to go around. If the planet is cooling wearing trap door long johns, layered clothing to keep warm and less food. Mother nature is in charge and man kind is innocent of all charges from the green religion fruitcake morons.
I would hope that if 20 questions are asked, that the answers to 10 of these are positively known by independent means. That would be a good way to tell how accurate the memories of different people are. So if the same questions were asked of 100 people, it would be easy to verify which of the 100 people had the best memories. Then their answers to the other questions where the answer was not known in advance ought to carry more weight.
Latitude says:
May 1, 2011 at 12:53 pm
“My father in law swears ice used to be colder….”
It was! Ah, yes, when you are young Spring comes so late. The sap is rising within you but you cannot get the lassies to go on a cold stroll. Now, Spring comes so early but you do not want to go on a cold stroll.
And has anyone noticed that gravity is much worse than it used to be? Thirty years ago I hardly ever dropped anything. Now I drop things all the time. All the local slopes have got steeper. And the floor is much further away, too.
How is this helpful when you are addressing a 60 year cycle?