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.
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?
Given that a Sherpa’s lifespan is probably about the same as the climate warm/cold cycle, the person’s perception of warming or cooling would depend on how old they were when asked, i.e., what phase or phases of the cycle they had experienced.
I’ve experienced one whole cycle, and up until recently I might have said warming. Persons born in the 70’s or 80’s will probably say cooling when they hit my age.
Does this distinguish between regional vs “global warming” vs global climate change?
See: Some Himalayan glaciers are advancing rather than melting
Glaciers in the eastern Himalayas are receeding, while those in western Himalayas are advancing. Which are they measuring?
What is the statistical weighting of villages relative to glaciers retreating vs advancing?
Some El Nino’s affect Indian monsoons.Monsoons vary from -3 std dev to +2 std dev from 1871 to 2002.
Global-regional linkages in the earth system By Peter Daughtrey Tyson. p 84
Others report about 4 to 5 million people died in the two year period of the smaller monsoon failure of 1866.
Now what was that about detecting “climate change”?
Sherpas are probably highly attuned to the monsoon (200 inches of rain in 90 days typically starting June 15th in Darjeeling) and to its failure, than detecting fractions of degrees change in temperature!
JJ at 12:o6
So right.
If I was a Himalayan Sherpa quietly going about my business and I was accosted by some mad ‘climate researcher’ with a clipboard, I’m sure I’d tell them anything they wanted to hear just so long as they went away and never bothered me again….
“Memories” are created by the brain as they are “recalled.” The brain records snippets and fills in the details (very convincingly I might add) when it is called upon to “remember.” The brain simply doesn’t have the memory it needs to record everything.
There is a technique that is used to get everyone to remember what the the questioner (propagandist) wants them to remember. The technique is agreement and suggestion. Get the subject to agree with you and they will “remember” the events corresponding to that agreement. This technique is especially effective the worse the actual recall is.
You have to admit it, the Sherpas do live a lot closer to the land than we do.
Thats why you should ask 100 people who live near gas stations what they think about gas prices and what we should do with the economy.
EO
Scientology is more fact based than Climatology. But, at least Al Gore’s houseboat isn’t in international waters and he isn’t into kids.
You guys are so far up your backsides it’s unbelievable
There is a problem asking old men about what conditions were like when they were young which is very well illustrated by the following
http://www.phespirit.info/montypython/four_yorkshiremen.htm
AW as I predicted we are now going into totally max cold temps in the southern hemisphere look at this
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/86218.html
15C daytime in Asuncion, Paraguay, should be 20C or more at this time of year. The Antarctic is certainly influencing the weather. Prediction: we are probably entering the beginnings of a small ice age, it will take 10 to 30 years to experience it, or actually see ice over Ushuaia, southern most part of Argentina. The next winter in the NH will be slightly more intense than the last one and so on. Its probably the Sun’s TSI ask D Archibald…..he also predicted similar. It seems that MSM is beginning to cop on to this…
BTW the tornadoes in the USA are being caused by COLDER than normal air meeting NORMAL warm moist air from the gulf. Ask any meteorologist…..So the intensity of the storms is due to COLDER than normal air. The world is cooling now not heating up.
Another thread addressed the suspected warming of SSTs in the Gulf of Mexico. I now wonder why they just didn’t come and ask me about it. I have been swimming in the Gulf for almost 20 years. That would make me a “data source” as much as the Sherpas. As I remember it, I used to take my first swim earlier in the year than I do now. Clear evidence that the water is cooler at this time of year than it was years ago. Of course I simply may have decided it wasn’t worth my time or effort to suffer chilly water anymore. (Yeah, yeah all you tough skinned Northerners don’t give me any grief. I grew up swimming in the waters off Rhode Island where anything above 59 F (15 C) was considered warm. I am just smarter now). 🙂
When I was a kid in the 1960s , I remember snow over my head. Now as an adult, I’ve never seen the snow over my head. I guess that means we are getting less snow, now.
Himalayan Serpents? Need my glasses.
Wait… when I first saw the picture and title, I though the CAGW subscribers were now using snake charmers to ask the serpents how they felt about Global Warming. Guess they haven’t gone quite that far yet.
I think they should go to Essex and ask some bloke in a pub what he thinks.
Blokes in pubs are very rarely wrong about anything.
jonjermey and BradProp1 are right: I remember having to walk through three foot snow drifts growing up. The Earth is flatter, now, too: back then it was uphill both ways.
wow. This is powerful stupid. One of my neighbours kept records of the seasons, snowfall, etc for over 30 years. He said that those complaints like “there are just no more white winters as they used to be…” bla-bla are nonsense because looking back, there simply weren’t any white winters where I used to live, with few exceptions. It’s people’s wishful thinking after watching too many Disney Xmas movies around that time of the year…
People make things up in their noodle – especially sherpas who believe in the friggin Yeti 😉
Seriously, witness accounts are not worth much – 5 people will give you 5 different accounts.
My own novel opinion is to defund scientists who go bonkers.
Also, should the sherpas say that it got colder, then they don’t serve as a reliable proxy, is that correct?
When I was a young lad adults were huge. As I got older adults got smaller. Based upon this evidence we’ve had it.
“which raises the question of why the other half did not” answer – insufficient indoctrination. We either need:
a) More extensive application of the red no pressure button, or
b) Lots more BBC pieces condescendingly explaining the need to panic
I could not download the .pdf (poor connection) but I would really like to know the questions asked. I managed to get the abstract and they mentioned early bud burst, less water and higher altitude livers experiencing more pronounced effects. This may well be so, no-one is saying that the climate is immovable. and the effect may be local than regional (this area responds sharply to monsoon activity). But how were the questions framed ? Consider the language barrier as well.
These people are intelligent, have outside communication and would be aware of discussion of this topic and could well understand that responding ‘yes’ to a CC question may help their local community.
Larry says:
May 1, 2011 at 1:48 pm
“trap door long johns”
Gotcha! Invest in trap door long johns for females. Females respond to cold way before males do.
Larry says:
May 1, 2011 at 1:48 pm
“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”.”
This is because he lived in Virginia. Monticello is at Charlottesville and the state capital is in Richmond. Virginia has this “Southern Sensibility” problem. Richmond has the same weather as Philadelphia and the same snow removal equipment as Atlanta.
the circle is complete – AGW now consists of nothing but Old Wives Tales.
And Old Wives Tales now constitute “Scientific Proof”.
I wonder if they’ll ask the Sherpa’s how many believe in the Yeti? And if half of them do, will that constitute scientific “proof”???
“It has to be structured, internally consistent and rigorous; that’s the message.”
“Rigorous, eh?” Well, at least we may be moving away from every pronouncement in “climate science” as being “Robust.” Did the knowing ones finally get tired of that word?
My wife always says it’s colder than I do.
She always says it’s hotter than I do.
When we graph the output, the trend always corresponds with her observation.
This one strikes close to home for me. My cousin married (many some years ago) a Tibetan. He is the greatest guy. A strapping tall guy with a forever smile he was trained as a furniture maker and wood carver and he is a master. She is an uber lefty warmist/feminist so on and so forth. He is so above all that he doesn’t even put up with one iota of it in the nicest way that we in our culture can’t even grasp; he’s happy, she’s happy.
When he comes here, he does everything he can to get hold of technology like generators and pumps and the like and ships them back home to make things better. While here, he loves his truck, his power tools and all things machinery. He just loves my machine shop. He so understands how these things make life better in the rough (but unbelievably beautiful) land he comes from. Latest news is back in country he now has a motor bike – big win.
Global warming? Does he care? Bwahahahahahahahahaha!!! You’ve got to be kidding me.
wow that’s almost as dumb as using photos of submarines surfacing at North Pole as proxies for ice extent….or the popularity of wine as a proxy for temperature in England….
It’s a funny old science, innit?
Yeah, Inuit?
Seems to me this is just a way to have opinions on CAGW tabulated, peer-reviewed & published..
Someone has learned from prior mistakes. Now public opinions can be peer-reviewed and referenced in IPCC reports as evidence of CAGW. Can this be considered an advancement is “climate science”?
In Israel there is a saying about “The Elderly of the city of Zefat” as regarding to the ancient history of this city near the Sea of Galilee. Every time there is an extreme weather extreme, they say that even the elderly of Zefat do not remember such event.
The problem is that time and again the “memory” is proved wrong as data shows differently.
It seems to me that the only thing these polls could show is the impact of CAGW propaganda on people.
“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.”
50 50 chance. One half said it started earlier. The other half said it started later. In other words, summer not had changed. The problem lies in the question design. It was structured to deliver a misleading answer.
At first I was mislead by your negativity into thinking this was a dumb idea, but then
“structured, internally consistent and rigorous”
Oh…oh that’s all right then…just one question.
Where are we going to get these rigorous climatologists? Anyone available from the UAE
/sarc
I’m pretty sure that with human nature being what it is, that “it was always better in the olden days”.
It’s science Jim, but not as we know it…
‘Mark says:
May 1, 2011 at 3:18 pm
You guys are so far up your backsides it’s unbelievable’
apologies Mark. It’s not right to mock a persons religion.
I apologise again
EO
Matt says: May 1, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Matt, how many Americans believe they have seen Elvis at a 7/11?
Well, if the warmistas are soliciting opinions, here’s mine: it’s cold (46F) and thunderstorms here right now. So where is the warming?
Lew Skannen says:
at 4.21pm
‘ I think they should go to Essex and ask some bloke in a pub what he thinks.
Blokes in pubs are very rarely wrong about anything.’
How true, how true.
Totally by accident and while looking for something (now disappeared from the UK Met Office website), I found that just over 12 months ago, Cumbria County Council’s very own ‘Climate Change Officer’ put out a similar request on ‘weather related’ forums/groups/message boards. He pointedly admitted that UK Met Office couldn’t or wouldn’t help him and was obviously getting a bit desperate, in order to presumably save his own job.
No Climate Change surely negates the need for a Climate Change Officer.
Mmmmmmm, scrub that last bit.
The reason I was looking was to try and find on the Met Office site where they admitted, about 12 months ago, that there was no discern-able climate change signal in the UK. It was formatted quite insignificantly amongst all their other climate change gumpf but I remember it quite distinctly as it referred almost directly to my own situation.
The Met Office website previously stated “no climate change signal is detectable in the UK” However, it did go on to say that rainfall over the last 10 years, in North West England (that’s exactly me and why I remembered it) had increased by 65% but, that this was not in their view ‘climate change” It was just ‘weather’.
One final thing while I’m on, is that what some people regard as ‘good weather = better climate’ will be regarded as ‘bad weather = worse climate’ by as many others. As a farmer/outdoor worker, I’m very sensitive to ‘weather’ and when I think its good, many people I meet who work indoors think just about the opposite.
As we all know, memories are very selective especially about the ‘Good Old Days when I were a lad’
UNBELIEVABLE! I thought that witness testimony was considered by the scientific community as being the lowest form (if any) of scientific proof, see the easy dismissal By scientists of literally thousands of credible witness testimony concerning Unidentified Flying Objects, by airline pilots, radar operators, policemen, and so on.
But in climate science the normal rules dont apply of course…
Disgusting!
This is Post-Normal Science by the book.
@Mark says: May 1, 2011 at 3:18 pm
“You guys are so far up your backsides it’s unbelievable”
That so?
And the reason you like to come on here and squint up our backsides is….???
They should try asking people in warm places if the temperature has risen 0.00125C. That should result in a chummy dataset. Better yet, now that , they might get a higher anomaly in the hot spots. However, last winter in northern warm-place Kurdish Iraq, there was no denying the continual 30-centimeter snow dumps that had everyone (read expats) stumped (because they assumed Iraq=Baghdad).
Reading back through the last 18 months of WUWT (needing to catch up) I seem to detect 1) a rapid degradation of ‘climate science’ in general; 2) an increase in Llamas & Lamas being used as proxys in place of otherwise absent data (now that the jig is up), and 3) the paucity of smug pro-CAGW ctrl-C/ctrl-V’ers willing to be shredded by an increasingly bloodthirsty and united group of real scientists and thoughtful people.
Kudos, Anthony and all your guest posters. The exponential upturn of reason is inevitable!
When I was trekking in the Himalaya 15 years ago, I recall being polled by a German trekker woman at Tengboche about the state of the environment in the Khumbu region (trash, nuimber of trekkers, etc.). She even had a clipboard.
I pointed out to her that I was surprised at the amount of trash on the 125 mile trail from Jiri to Everest BC, but that most of it seemed to be the refuse of porters and other Nepali locals: butts from Nepali cigarettes, candy wrappers of the type favored by Nepalis, and similar stuff. This was clearly the refuse of locals and not Western trekkers. I also noted that in areas with a lot of trekkers and hence trekker money (such as Tengboche) it was clearly in the business interests of Nepalis to maintain sanitary conditions and facilities, e.g., the outhouses. Perversely, her idea seemed to be that trekkers should be harshly restricted from Khumbu “for the environment.”
As you might guess she was a proto-Green and hence was very annoyed at my suggestion that the Nepalis should clean up their own mess in the Solo Khumbu trekking region, using some portion of the massive annual trekking income to do so.
As with all Green ideas, she really wanted everyone – trekkers and locals – to suffer for Mother Gaia rather to to provide a solution to her aesthetic problem.
Ice core proxy, tree ring proxy, sea coral proxy, man with beaks on head proxy. Sure makes sense to me, just hope the latter is immune from the divergence problem lest they use a trick to make him disappear.
Count me skeptical that these guys know anything about the difficulties in doing this kind of research.
—-
These are the same guys who didn’t think it was necessary to consult someone who knew something about statistics, even though their papers made heavy use of statistics.
Keith Minto says:
May 1, 2011 at 5:50 pm
and higher altitude livers experiencing more pronounced effects.
—–
I didn’t know that altitude had that much affect on the liver.
As a non scientist this seems a pretty good proxy to me – that is, not totally, but not without some measure of sensibility. You see, over a period of more than three quarters of a century, although I have noticed many changes in the weather, I have witnessed nothing in those parts of the world that I am reasonably familiar with that could be called a change in climate. At the end of the day that might be the real test. If any change over that period of time is so minute that man cannot perceive that it has happened, then the level of change cannot be of much consequence.
Thank you Mr Watts, we most wholeheartedly agree with your ridicule of this nonsensical approach to climate science. We have long considered computer models to be far superior and the most efficient use of taxpayer funds. For once we CAGW climate scientists can all agree with you. The last thing we want is “Social Scientists” to get in on our act, running round interviewing people and, you know, generally eating out of our gravy-train trough.
I mean it ain’t at all easy and it has taken years of training to reach the proficiency levels that we now have at CRU.
In the 70’s, Climate Science was in a totally obscure, practically unheard of, backwoods of physics. Through careful manipulation and falsification of data and through tremendous efforts at scare-mongering, we climate scientists have managed to create a multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded industry.
THE LAST THING WE WANT IS THOSE “SOCIAL SCIENTISTS” GETTING A PIECE OF OUR PIE!
To all you Social Scientists out there, “P*SS OFF, GO AND INVENT YOUR OWN CATASTROPHIC SCAM!”
Eyal Porat says: “In Israel there is a saying about “The Elderly of the city of Zefat” [a.ka. Safed in English] as regarding to the ancient history of this city near the Sea of Galilee. Every time there is an extreme weather extreme, they say that even the elderly of Zefat do not remember such event. The problem is that time and again the “memory” is proved wrong as data shows differently. It seems to me that the only thing these polls could show is the impact of CAGW propaganda on people.” (May 1, 2011 at 9:40 pm )
Comes to show, Eyal, that the sages and kabbalists of T’sfat are no better at analysing climate than anyone else, because everywhere I’ve been I heard the same sort of story, even before CAGW propaganda came around. This I think is another key component behind the success of the scheme; the clever exploitation of a universal tendency to accept faulty anecdotal evidence of scientific nature from smart and respected, but unqualified individuals. L’hitarot!
This is called “post normal science”