Zeke, Mosher, and Rohde and the new BEST dataset

I applaud BEST for transparency, but they ultimately do the same thing NASA, CRU and the rest do…alter measured temperatures.
I have looked extensively at local temperature series. The raw plots are given but are then altered to match some mythical regional trend. If none of the local stations show that trend, then from where does it come?

I love the term homogenized. Just like milk, they remove all the good stuff so whatever is left over will last forever.

Damn Steve! You are getting old! 😉

Zeke is like, “Why do I always have to get the coffee?”

For pity’s sake, is the man’s name “Rhode” or “Rohde”? I see alternating spellings all the time, and I’m pretty sure it must be one or the other!

Rob Dawg says:
December 12, 2013 at 10:30 am
“I have to watch my blood pressure whenever I see “adjustments.” Dedicated people trudging out to a thermometer unceasingly for years back in the 1930s. What would they think if they knew 80 years after their painstaking observations trying to eek out the last 0.1° F from the instruments that people would be adjusting their numbers by several degrees?
Exactly. I was looking into BE to see what they’ve done with one very long record from the Prague Klementinum (uninterrupted since 1775) at BE – which already in the past was absolutely raped and merged with another record from Prague Ruzyne airport by the GISS – even the original record is kept uninterrupted untill very present.
And what do you think?
It was raped even more by the BE and merged with yet another record from Prague-Libus station.
In fact there doesn’t exist any record neither for Prague-Ruzyne, nor Prague-Libus before 1950, yet BerkeleyEarth has it back to 1700s.
Magicians…
What is really funny: the adjustments made to the Prague-Klementinum (made in the past already by the GISS -clearly to get rid of the hot decade 1790-1799) are quite very different than the adjustments done with the Prague-Klementinum+Prague-Ruzyne/Prague-Libus record (just compare this and this(the “PRAHA/RUZYNE U/A TO LIBUS11520” before 1950 it is the Klementinum record – just in the BE they don’t know…).
Which somehow seems to well show what a guessjob is all this.
If they do everything like treating the most valuable historic records their credibility in my opinion tends to simmilar level as that of GISS, moreover they have land only, which is quite unsufficient for global climatology for a planet where more than 2/3rd of the surface is covered by the ocean…

“raw data is crap” S Mosher,
IE: Yes, we don’t want to actually believe that all the observations are real…
…….so we make up our own as we know better that the real data!

MB your post helps nothing here as a few obvious wrong readings have nothing to do with data manipulation at all!

Three of the oldest continuous running thermometer stations in the world are in the USA, all of which falsify the BEST hockey stick by showing no trend change whatsoever:
http://s24.postimg.org/498mmzb6d/2agnous.gif
Few climate papers are referencing overly convenient, massively-parametrized, data-sliced-and-diced, model-matching BEST, just the 2012 up-adjusted HadCRUT4, the magic pause buster compared to boring old HadCRUT3, care of Phil Jones:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1985/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1985/mean:12
Phil was attributed to a Saudi Arabian university on his paper introducing HadCRUT4, seen here in the land of harems:
http://mpc.kau.edu.sa/Pages-Prof-Philip-Jones.aspx

You’re right Steve the raw data is crap, but it is what we have, and what you do with it doesn’t make it better it makes it worse.

Reg Nelson says:
December 12, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Anything other than the satellite data is crap and is not suited for the purpose it is being used. It should be thrown in the bin.
Satellites actually are unable to measure surface temperatures with accuracy the surfacestations do. So I’m not much sure what is the message?

“raw data is crap” S Mosher
Is S. Mosher for real?
Raw data is Data! Do anything to it and it ceases to be data, but becomes results or perhaps information. Data only comes from observation, with measurement being, hopefully, a more precise, accurate and reproducible form of observation. Nothing else is data.
Perhaps Mr. Mosher should return to his wall in Wonderland and leave the world to realists.
(Attn mods. The last line may be over the top, if so please delete).

MB all I said was manipulating data as in altering changing varying etc data… U put the wrong slant on it that I did not intend mate

tumetuestumefaisdubien1 says:
December 12, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Reg Nelson says:
Satellites actually are unable to measure surface temperatures with accuracy the surfacestations do. So I’m not much sure what is the message?
—————
NASA claims the accuracy of the satellite measurements are within 0.03 C. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise? Or are you saying that measurements taken in the 1920’s are more accurate than that?

Holts,
Okay, my bad then. It just seems like whenever Mosher comes along everybody gets a hard on for some reason. It bugs me when people casually lump him in with the real scumbag data manipulators out there, apparently for no better reason than he’s annoying and says stuff people don’t want to hear sometimes.

ref the video from Mario of Mr Mosher
It is suggested by some, (far more than one), thinking, (they have written books and given lectures), older, (the information has been out there for many years), people that the brain subconsciously controls the eyes when thinking, the eyes look, in defined combination up, down , left, right, depending upon wether it is recalling fact or inventing fiction, obviously over written by extraneous forcing influences.
I know what I saw in the video on the first run through, a pretty clear cut well documented example.
regards

Reg Nelson says:
December 12, 2013 at 1:55 pm
tumetuestumefaisdubien1 says:
December 12, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Reg Nelson says:
Satellites actually are unable to measure surface temperatures with accuracy the surfacestations do. So I’m not much sure what is the message?
—————
NASA claims the accuracy of the satellite measurements are within 0.03 C. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise? Or are you saying that measurements taken in the 1920′s are more accurate than that?
The issue with satellite measurements isn’t so much the accuracy of the measurement but figuring out precisely what region of the atmosphere has been measured. The final product is separated from raw data by a lot of data processing.
One overview is presented here: http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature

What we need is a histogram of the breakpoints identified and pulled out.
For example, how many and what weight were the temperature decline breakpoints versus how many were temperature increase breakpoints.
I think I asked for this before and was told it was about the same for both but I haven’t seen the data.
We are talking about a huge number of breakpoints here; on average, about 8 per individual station.

Raw data contains lots of crap. I maintain a well-sited weather station that sends data to the local NOAA automatically every 5 minutes. Despite my diligence in maintaining it there are still problems that interrupt it – power outages that disrupt the computer and console, occasional problems with the sensor suite, etc. I would guess that 1-3% of my data is inaccurate despite my efforts. I would also guess that there are similar problems all over the world, which is why raw data can be smelly. The key is to remove the smelliness in a methodical, objective manner that is free of political or other motivations. Isn’t that part of the reason for the existence of WUWT in the first place?

jono1066 says:
December 12, 2013 at 2:01 pm
“ref the video from Mario of Mr Mosher…”
Your comment would carry more weight if you had noticed that it is not Steven Mosher in the video. Instead it is Robert Rhode or perhaps Rohde depending on where you get your information 🙂

Steve Mosher sez

We dont adjust data. We identify breakpoints and slice.

Then you abandon the data because it is crap, but apparently a nice starting point. And the result as we’ve seen is… wrong.

Mosh,
It was really pleasant to finally meeting you after years of blog dialog.
Thanks for explaining how your poster differentiates your focus from the approaches of other GASTA data sets.
Meeting blog commenting associates in person reminds one that we are all real people not disembodied words. It softens the tone of future comments.
John

That’s more like it. I’m not saying Mosher isn’t full of it, I’ve got no idea on that score and he very well might be, just that I don’t doubt his basic integrity.
Add me to the list of those who’d love to hear how BEST works.

Reg Nelson says: You can put lipstick on pig, but at the end of the day it’s still a pig.
But will it fly?

philjourdan says: “Damn Steve! You are getting old! ;-)”
Heck, Phil, he doesn’t look anywhere near as old as I thought he was. : ]

Get a haircut you Hippy!!

It would be nice it Steve would do a “simple” essay for us on what they have done. I believe WUWT had some information on what they proposed to do some time ago. Or perhaps they have a nice summary on the BEST website somewhere that could be pointed out (again?). Getting old and I don’t remember as well as I used to. But the civil engineer in me wonders how this slicing and dicing would do with test to failure for beams for a new bridge or building design. It may be mathematically or statistically correct, but will it stand the test of time? Will it stand at all? (Just kidding, but a simple essay for the mathematically challenged would be good.)
Oh darn, I was going to stop there but then I went back and did some reading:
“Berkeley Earth is a Berkeley, California based independent non-profit focused on climate science and strategic analysis. Berkeley Earth was founded in early 2010 (originally called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project) with the goal of addressing the major concerns of skeptics regarding global warming and the land surface temperature record. The project’s stated aim was a “transparent approach, based on data analysis.”[1] In February 2013, Berkeley Earth became an independent non-profit. In August 2013, Berkeley Earth was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the US government. Berkeley Earth is now expanding scientific investigations, educating and communicating about climate change, and evaluating mitigation efforts in developing and developed economies.[2]”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“Good Lord y’all”, doesn’t that sound a bit similar to the raison d’être of the IPCC? The mandate appears to be to convince those of us of a skeptical mind that we are the problem. We may be. Certainly most of us here would agree that the earth has warmed up since the Little Ice Age, and most of us would agree that our heating and cooling systems, automobiles, power plants etc. etc. produce heat and must have an effect – we know deforestation has an effect and poor countries short on energy are going to have problems with agricultural practices and deforestation. But CO2 as a MAJOR driver.
I doubt anyone can provide conclusive evidence of CO2 or even the scale of man’s influence on the total. When the next MOC takes things in a different direction, what power will we have to change anything? About as much as ISON had on the sun I reckon.
So let’s have a nice summary from BEST.
Thanks.

Those three wise men really need to acquire some wardrobe assistance. First, and most certainly worst is L-R Zeke Hausfather. May I kindly state, Mr. Hausfather, that shirt of your’s is, like, way too tight. I can handle seeing the distended belly, and the love handles, but I really don’t need to see your nipples. You’re not Vladimir Putin: and I get tired of seeing his too. And, Zeke, if you don’t have any other shirts to wear the least you could do is not assume a cocky stance – hands in the pockets; head cocked with an in-your-face grin – while you’re wearing a nipple shirt. It obliterates any justification for cockiness.
Now, as far as Robert Rhode; do you really wish to be wearing a blue shirt while you’re standing right next to somebody wearing a nipple revealing shirt in the same blue color? If you need to have that explained further, well I just can’t help you. And aside from that wardrobe fail may I suggest that you don’t wear your coat as if it’s the cape of Zorro. You’re not Zorro.
And Steven Mosher, ok, I’ll give you some credit for not looking like a dweeb. But you’re standing next to
people who look like dweebs. I don’t want my life run by dweebs. I don’t want my life run by anybody.

Slicing and dicing of a data set removes the low end and then elevates the high end… now why would we want to remove th low and exagerate the high?
I cant think of a single agenda that would require that … /Sarc…
running low on money send more soon… BEST

Steven Mosher says:
December 12, 2013 at 12:18 pm
There are no adjustments.
There is the raw data if you like crap.
There is qc data
There is breakpoint data.
Then there is the estimated field.

BURMA SHAVE

The three of them have demonstrated an attachment to the AGW même as solid as Hansen and Mann. No respect for them I’m afraid.

Steven Mosher says:
December 12, 2013 at 10:20 pm
Stephan Rasey.
I dont think you understand what the process is. It’s an idea that folks like Willis, RomanM, JeffID and others came up with.
Suppose you have a station.
It starts in location X. on a moutain top. For 10 years it records a summer temperature of 10C.
Then you move it down to the valley. The summer temperature goes up to 15C
What do you do.
A) Raw data lover. Leave the data alone. The record now shows a warming of 5C
B) NOAA. adjust the data because the station moved. either subtract 5 C from
one segment or add 5C to the other
C) The skeptic approved position. These are two different stations. It moved for christs
sake. Split the record dont adjust it
D) The berkeley method: These are two different stations. It moved for christs
sake. Split the record dont adjust it
Suppose you have a station.
At the begining the observer was collecting temperature at 7am. Then after 30 years
they collected temperatures at midnight. This leads to a spurious warming of .25C
What to do?
A) Raw data lover. Leave the data alone. The record now shows a warming of .25c
B) NOAA. adjust the data because TOBS changed. either subtract .25 C from
one segment or add .25C to the other
C) The skeptic approved position. These are two different stations. You changed the TOBS for christs sake. Split the record dont adjust it
D) The berkeley method: These are two different stations. You changed the TOBS for christs sake. Split the record dont adjust it
————————————————————–
Here’s an idea Steven.
Use all the stations we have always used for the last century. Like every single one.
All the databases are unrecognizable since stations have been deleted ad nauseam over time.
Lets use them all over 2 centuries, and if takes another 100 years, so be it.
We have plenty of time, we have been flat for at least 12 years according to GISS and 17 according to RSS.

Humm, sounds very difficult to constantly change stations, change elevations, change locations, compensate for different TOB adjustments, compensate for changes to stations etc, add in all the known and unknowns, homengise relative to nearby stations, and come up with a correct solution. (Lip stick on a pig, or twister with five points of contact may be valid) The potential for FUBAR is real.
In the US alone we have many continuously active stations since the early 1900s. Same station, same location, same elevation, (This accounts for many, but of course not all variables) They show the US as being warmer in the late 30s and early 1940s, at the same time the arctic ice was known to be retreating. The vast majority of the highest recorded Ts were from that time period. Stream flow data from that period also indicates drought far worse then we have experienced since. US average T graphs fro the 1980s and 1990s show the US was as warm, or warmer then the current decade.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/spectacularly-poor-climate-science-at-nasa/
Also, I have yet to hear how the Iceland adjustments are justified, or how many other specific area adjustments are justified, which people have identified and questioned in comments above.
Also the land adjustments appear to be diverging ever further from RSS.

MarkB says:
December 12, 2013 at 2:12 pm
The issue with satellite measurements isn’t so much the accuracy of the measurement but figuring out precisely what region of the atmosphere has been measured.
And that’s it – the satellite measurements of atmosphere are of course useful, but we must always bear in mind it is measurements of the atmosphere layers which is not always clear what are their boundaries (and there is relatively very steep adiabatic lapse rate in the troposphere, changing considerably also with water content, so it is of crucial importance) and it is not same as the surface air and SST in-situ measurements.

One year ago I have read that about thirty percent of the surface stations in the USA show an individual cooling trend (negative regression slope). The first question you should ask is whether there is a difference between distributions of station regression slopes within a certain data set and within drop-out stations. In the last decades of the twentieth century more than 80 percent of all stations were dropped and, because of inclusion, almost no station of the old population survived. If drop-out were random or determined by coverage, the effects would be harmless, but it can be shown that stations were dropped on the basis of their past records. It is the worst kind of drop-out which cannot be repaired by statistical technicalities. From noise from multiple sources you can create any signal you want by source selection. Take a random sample from the drop-out stations and compare mean and variance of slope distributions over a certain period with mean and variance of that distribution in a data set. Has this be done for new BEST?

Anton Eagle says:
December 12, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Why this has to be explained to “scientists” is beyond me. Anyone that publishes any climate article using anything other than raw data is, simply put, not a scientist. Instead, they are simply a propagandist.
===========
One of the very best examples of how to keep records are the old manual ledgers kept by accountants before computerization. In such a ledger you NEVER update or delete any record. All changes to the data must be done via inserts. In this fashion a full audit trail is preserved.
Using an eraser to delete or update any data in a manual ledger was forbidden. It was considered “cooking” the books. Instead, if you wanted to make a correction you inserted two new records. One was a reversal for the previous record, the other a corrected amount.
The problem is that in the age of computers, we started using updates and deletes to “correct” data errors. The problem is that the corrections themselves are also full of errors. These are processing errors as opposed to the data errors in the raw data. And if you do update or delete any data, then you can no longer identify data errors from processing errors.
So, if you are working with any data that contains any updates or deletes you are working with garbage, because you cannot separate data errors from processing errors. Any attempt to place error bounds around the data is a nonsense, because you cannot determine the error rate, because your calculations assume the processing error rate to be zero, which is a false assumption.

Reg Nelson says:
December 12, 2013 at 1:55 pm
“NASA claims the accuracy of the satellite measurements are within 0.03 C. Do you have evidence to suggest otherwise?”
The question is what is measured there. Are you sure it is the surface temperature as measured by in-situ measurements? I very much don’t think so. Also the 2/3rds+ of the Earth surface area is the ocean and the problems with the satellite measurements of the SST are endemic and principial, because the satellite instruments based on IR an microwave sensing are unable to “see” beyond the very surface skin of the ocean where the temperature due to insolation and eveporation is usually not representative for temperature of the layer where in-situ measurements are made. Not speaking any cloudiness immediately makes even this “100 micrometers SST” unmeasurable from a satellite.
And even if this all would be solved one day, which I rather doubt, still there is lack of historic record anyway. So I still think, that the in-situ measurements have its value and especially when it comes to the long historical instrumental time series (as the CET or the Klementinum I mentioned here) -the series should be treated with much more respect than is usual “raw” data treatment with the global temperature composites.
With the ocean I think it is much more telling the data from say the ARGO than satellites. Even for the relatively short period it covers the oceans (last 10 years) it already consistently shows things the satellites in my opinion never would be able to measure, not speaking with sufficient accuracy.
When I touched it – btw. ARGO shows a consistent cooling of the sea surface layer for whole its era since 2004, the downward slopes, especially in the upper photic layer are considerably steeper even than HadSST3 (and the ARGO global SST signal really much more resembles what’s predicted theoretically) and when it comes to yearly temperature maxima caused quite clearly by the Earth perihelion coinciding closely with summer beginning at the southern hemisphere (where bulk of the ocean resides) the cooling is already identifiable even under the photic layer botom at 150m depth. In my opinion the ARGO in-situ data show not only striking dependence of the ocean surface layer temperature on the insolation variation, but more or less “temperature history of the ocean insolation” couple of decades long as the heat waves progress down – which is also quite very well identifiable in the ARGO data despite partially obscured by yearly insolation variation pattern – which nevertheless leaves no space for doubt about intimate dependence of the OHC and resulting temperature in the ocean photic layer on the insolation variation. So if there’s a candidate for adding to the BE to make it truly global temperature dataset in my opinion the ARGO in-situ ocean surface layer data would be much better choice than satellite records.

So, uh… I saw a comment about how “uah doesnt measure temparature. Its raw data is a voltage. This gets turned into a temperature by applying a physics model” which sounds like there is “then a wizard does something” step inserted in there?
I have to say, electricity isn’t magic.
If a receiver shows a certain voltage change and is properly designed then you can eliminate other causes for that voltage change until you can safely assume that there was a specific type of signal received.
Assuming then that people aren’t standing around outside with open microwave ovens trying to spoof your detector you can look at what sort of phenomenon can cause microwave emissions of that type and characterize said emissions accordingly.
If a randomized band of frequencies within certain parameters are typical of thermal emission by bodies at a certain temperature you can then point to a detection of that signal and say “there is a body within the view of this instrument at that temperature, or some jerk is going through a lot of effort to generate noise with certain properties to try and throw off our data collection, or the instrument is broken”, what you can’t do is say “oh that’s a load of crap because microwave sounding isn’t a direct detection, it’s just interpreting signals”… at least not with any sort of credibility.
You aren’t actually seeing these words on the screen, they’re just signals received by your retina and interpreted by the relevant structures in your brain which then pass a note to the homunculus sitting in your skull which says “hey jerk, you saw this” and you register it as an impression of light and dark patterns on a screen representing certain information, which again is interpreted secondhand by the relevant processing routines inside your head, which pass a note back to the homunculus in your head which says “hey jerk that stuff you saw means this”, and then you understand these signals and interpret it accordingly.
The physics involved in microwave sounding is pretty old stuff involving the response of resistors to changes in a linked antenna, light pressure, black body calibration, and so forth. So arguing that “it is just a change in voltage” and then jumping to “and that is interpreted by the same models as the ones that say CO2 is warming the planet” is rather nonsensical.
You can understand the responses of a microwave sounder in terms of some electrical engineering and a bit of quantum mechanics, we’re talking stuff that was around in the 40’s, when the systems were theorized and developed.

bias due to experimenter expectation effect is independent of honesty or sincerity. In fact, honesty and sincerity can make the problem worse, because you are more likely to suspect errors in the work of a dishonest or insincere person. However, even the most honest and sincere among us still have bias. We all do, and it is the in-built bias that blinds us to error that match our bias. Thus the failing of peer review to catch errors when the author and reviewers share the same bias.
Amazingly welle said once again, sir. Bravo!
As Feynman said, the person we have to be the most careful not to fool is ourself. Then we can be just ordinarily honest with other folks.
I teach introductory physics (in fact, that’s what I’m doing right at this moment, sort of, proctoring a final). I am pretty good at it. Give me a kiddy-physics problem and I’m hell on wheels. I lecture cold — no notes, I just walk in and do it. After all, I wrote the book I’m using.
However, teaching like this one quickly learns several things. For example, you can’t find your own errors in anything you write. Not just physics — if you miswrite a sentence, the human brain reads what you meant to say, not what you said, when you try to reread your own work. Never have I worked harder than when I tried to proofread my own novel — it took 20 or so passes, with long times in between for me to forget what I actually wrote (and there are probably still errors in the text). Second, you can’t find your own conceptual errors in anything you write or do. I teach with other, very talented, physics people. Every now and then one of them points out where I’ve been teaching something incorrectly (often for decades). Or where I use nonstandard notation. Every now and then I do the same for them — we all have those “holes” and again, we cannot pull the mote out of our own eye, for that we need help.
Third, my students find errors in what I do. I lecture live. I make algebra mistakes. I bribe the students with chocolate for every error they catch me making at the board, and make an average of 1-2 per lecture. Lots of times they are trivial algebra errors (which I’m as prone to as anybody else) — or I’ll literally SAY one thing (one half of my brain) and WRITE a different thing (a different half of my brain). With luck I catch my own errors — I’m constantly checking units and while I don’t remember the exact results or answers for everything I derive or solve for at the board, I can often recognize a problem and do so with my eyes while I’m talking about the next things. No candy for you! when I catch my own errors.
This is for easy stuff — Newton’s laws, elementary E&M. It isn’t just “bias” — the most honest of us make honest errors, even in the case of stuff we know extraordinarily well. We are also mistaken in places that our knowledge is as good as we think it is. We just don’t know where those places are. To find them, we often need help.
The desire to prove a point is an entirely natural human tendency. It is also one of the great mind-traps, perhaps even the world-class mind trap. Jaynes calls it the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy
… the tendency to believe that the way one sees the world is the way the world really is. Once infected, one “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts” as Sherlock Holmes put it long before Jaynes put a Bayesian cast on the logic of science.
Three words every scientist should make a part of their commonly used repertoire: “I’m not sure.”
rgb

1. I wanted jones data and code so that I could do a better job.
2. My goal was to use all the data and show every step.
3. Next I wanted to use methods suggested by skeptics
A. Slicing rather than adjusting.
B. Kriging rather than averaging
This is better, but I’m still confused. Kriging and averaging “should” give the same result if the kriging is done correctly, because that is a constraint on doing it correctly, is it not? The only kriging does is give you a comparatively high(er) estimate for infilled regions that are strictly consistent because they lead to the same average and hence didn’t invent information where there was none in the data.
Or maybe I just don’t understand this.
Also, how do you “slice” a time dependent increase in general urban population correlated to a general temperature increase distinct from and added to the non-rural temperature variations? The answer, of course, is into lots of tiny slices, a.k.a. a continuous adjustment. I appreciate your not treating a moved station or a station that changed measurement methods or stations that had a road built right in front of them in a six month stretch as different stations, but that doesn’t allow for the fact that some of these “slices” are discrete and monotonically produce more warming, some of the changes are occult and indistinguishable from a sudden but real warming or cooling, and the fact that in many locations, it isn’t just the road, it is the road, the factory down the road, the farm across the road (where there used to be trees), and the small village that springs up along the road to staff the new factory, with small changes happening every year that introduce a local bias into the data that is anthropogenic local warming, to be sure, but not GHG-linked AGW.
rgb

No candy for you!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Bummer. And a bit stingy, professor 🙂 ………..I had a chemistry professor who would give a point added to exams for errors we found in the text. I was seriously interested in reading the text.

Steve says:
December 13, 2013 at 1:19 pm
—————
At EC, there is a station called Ottawa which goes (monthly) from 1872 to 1935 (lots of missing months) and one called Ottawa CDA that goes (monthly) from 1889 to 2006 (with almost no missing months). Ottawa airport from 1938 to today.
Should be able to put a long record together from that.

Folks can find a full high-resolution version of our poster here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lzivyl2dd7bfl2s/AGU%202013%20Poster%20ZH.pdf

Steven Mosher says: I want to thank folks for the kind comments about climategate.

This is how delusional you have become, only ONE person (Rob Ricket) made an inaccurate climategate comment referencing you.

First the drive by troll style comments on many threads this year, make obscure sarcastic mocking, diversionary comments, never return to follow up or explain.
Now an ever increasing defensiveness.
If the data is crap, what is produced from, dicing it up and mixing it around, can only be manure.
Mr Mosher, are you annoyed at yourself for wasting a year?
Or is there more in the “BEST methods”, to make you unhappy with yourself?

It’s a lot more fun to talk about what you actually do and why than to engage in the usual round of ad hominem bashing that often occurs.
__________________________________________-
And much appreciated as it’s an opportunity to learn from scientist actually involved in the process,

Thanks for letting me know that I failed so utterly abysmally at creative writing. Always good to be made aware of one’s weaknesses. Can you believe it? I actually thought I might have communicated something in that story worthwhile even to non-believers. Truth hurts, but truth and nothing else, is what matters.
Oh, and, Merry Christmas! #(:))
Dear Ms. Moore,
Truth is indeed what matters. I am not unfamiliar with the rules of hearsay evidence, and there is absolutely nothing in the Bible that is not hearsay evidence with the possible exception of some of the letters of Paul, and all Paul can give evidence for is Paul, not Jesus. Even so, something like half of the letters in the New Testament attributed to Paul are now known to be forgeries, just as e.g. the Book of Genesis is a work that is cobbled together with contributions from many writers (and cultures!) to the extent that the Rabbinic community has had to generate midrash to explain some of the apparent contradictions between (for example) the six-day creation myth — and I use the term myth very precisely because I can recite direct evidence chapter and verse that any reasonable person would have to accept that the Universe is not six thousand years old, was not created in six days, that evolution happened, that basically 100% of Genesis never happened. One cannot even find a plausible basis for part of it being a legend (assuming that you know the difference between a myth, a legend, and actual history on a continuum).
Nor am I unfamiliar with the actual history of the New Testament. I suggest that you read Ehrman’s work — Ehrman began his life as a born again Christian, attended a Christian undergraduate institution focussing on Bible studies because he wanted to read the word of God in the original, attended Yale for graduate school in pursuit of the same dream, and learned that there is no such thing as the original. We have only fragments of a handful of bible texts from the second century, and there is obvious, visible drift in the texts from century to century.
Over the course of his studies, Mr. Ehrman lost his faith, because he was in pursuit of truth (and was well-educated and well-equipped for it) — if anything the bulk of his education and life experience predisposed him to belief. He simply found that there is no substantive basis for the set of syncretic beliefs and tenth hand texts that eventually became “Christianity”. I think you’d find the well-documented, clearly reference discussion in Misquoting Jesus to be very illuminating even as it overwhelms you with a continuation of your cognitive dissonance on the issue.
I’m also well-aware of the practice of Exegesis and Hermeneutics — which might liberally be reinterpreting ordinary language to hide apparent contradictions in a document that is supposed to be divinely inspired and hence free from all error. I have a very difficult time understanding how any reasonable person could imagine that the Bible is free from all error, especially after reading Ehrman (and that is the NEW Testament, which is far closer to original source material, whatever it might have been). I also find it absolutely incredible that any reasonable person could read, e.g. Numbers 31 and conclude that Moses was a good person, suitable for Jesus to hang out with during the transfiguration. When it comes to slaughtering the Midianite old men, women, and children down to babes in arms and fetuses in bellies except for the young virginal females who he gave to his troops to enslave for sexual pleasure, what exactly would Jesus do? When Jesus speaks of preaching in parables in order to deliberately deceive some of his listeners so that they would not believe and thereby be damned, which is this? Ethical perfection? An error (misquote) in the New Testament? Or is it itself a self-referential piece of hermeneutic obfuscation that would cause a perfectly reasonable person to experience a certain abhorrence towards the speaker (and thereby be damned)? I don’t see any real winners here, and this is the tip of a very large iceberg that is there for anyone to read the minute that they take off the hermeneutical blinders they’ve been raised with.
Again, the fundamental issue is that you clearly use a dichotomous criterion for the evaluation of hypotheses as possible truth. If someone today claimed to be able to cure blindness by rubbing filthy mud and spit into their eyes, you would instantly recognize that to be stage magic at best, conducted with a shill of some sort to take in a gullible audience. You know that because mud (especially middle eastern first century mud, trust me) is literally teeming with bacteria and consists of small pieces of grit that abrade and damage the eye, and the human mouth is the dirtiest and most dangerous part of their entire body and the saliva of another human — especially a human from long before proper dental hygiene was invented — is not a plausible cure for any possible sort of blindness any more than madness is caused by devils or disease is inflicted on humans because they pissed God off. You know that it is incalculably more likely that anyone that makes such a claim is lying, or that the actual events are being misreported, because the claim doesn’t even make sense and because you do have a world of experience with cunning liars who want to profit from uncritical acceptance of “magic”. You have no trouble at all rejecting the claims of miracles in e.g. Hinduism or Paganism, because they are obviously myths (mixed, perhaps, with an unknown base of legend). Why is it that you cannot apply the same criterion to your own belief in a similarly “impossible” mythology?
Indeed, the very way you address me (or “us”, as others seem to share my skepticism) as “non-believers” is highly revealing. What does “belief” have to do with anything? I do not “believe” in science, I accept it as anything from highly implausible, plausible but unproven, plausible and indeed likely to be true, and almost certainly true, on the sole criteria of mutual interwoven consistency and evidence. I have written an entire book explaining why not just my own knowledge but everybody’s knowledge should arise from these criteria — to the extent that all knowledge is the belief, well or poorly founded, that each assertion in an entire ontology, an entire worldview, is probably true, we should use the best possible criterion for sorting all of this out without bias, not the worst one, which is uncritical acceptance of whatever you are told on the basis of some sort of authority.
I urge you to stop “believing” in things. Instead, subject all of the possible plausible truths you encounter to a truly skeptical process, one that begins by confronting your own biases on the matter and then looks at the evidence available on the same basis that you do for everything else, not with one set of rules for religion and a second one for the physical principles that govern the operation of the electrical lights by means of which you are able to read this reply. I can tell you precisely why I believe the latter, and can propose experiments of any rigor you care to suggest that will (I am enormously confident — as confident as I am that my laptop will continue to function, that the sun will appear to rise tomorrow, that a pen, released above the ground, will fall) validate my beliefs and you can conduct those experiments without my presence and be convinced no matter what your preconceptions as long as you rely on evidence to determine the best basis of belief.
What experiment can you possibly suggest to validate one single belief in any of the substantive content of the Bible? The best that you can offer is to “trust” the supposed authors (where my only possible reply is the best philosophical statement Ronald Reagan ever uttered — “Trust, but verify” which is sort of like no, you should never just “trust” a claim, you should be able to verify it or treat it as unproven and usually rather dubious). If I invite Jesus (a supposedly all-powerful God) to appear before me in my den as he supposedly appeared to Saul/Paul and “hundreds of others”, he either declines or, more likely, either never existed or did exist as an ordinary human and is simply dead, and dead is dead. Clearly it would not violate my free will for him to appear there any more than it violated Paul’s (who was, recall, actively persecuting Christians as Saul at the time). Clearly, if Jesus is all loving, he does not want me to be damned, and given that my disbelief is in the very best of faith according to entirely defensible rules of evidence as the basis of good belief, he can hardly fault me for doing my best and thereby disbelieving in him. And of course, it would take a being that could take an (at least) 5 trillion light year diameter Universe and pop it into existence out of nothingness less than zero “energy” (or whatever Gods use for their dynamical process) to save my soul by appearing, changing some water into beer, and explaining my errors as gently and patiently to me as I explain errors to my equally blameless students. It would be easier for Jesus to save me by providing some concrete basis for belief than it is for me to type a single tedious keystroke of this long reply.
Yet he never does. Which would be sad indeed if he does exist — it wouldn’t speak well for his moral compass any more than it would speak well of my own if I failed to gently help my students with their errors and to do the reproducible, double blind, experiments and measurements that would convince anybody reasonable that they are errors and that they aren’t something that I or anybody else “just made up”. This and other mysteries, such as why Jesus never heals amputees, are easy to understand if one hypothesizes that Jesus is a legend or possibly even a syncretic myth, and that the stories of “miracles” in the Bible are without exception non-reproducible myth, hearsay evidence, anecdotes, from long, long ago and a very superstitious age.
Paul did have some good one liners. At some point, the human species does indeed need to put away its childish things and grow up. Actual belief in non-verifiable, physically implausible mythology is one of those childish things.
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