Click for a larger image
The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for March 2009 was published yesterday and has dropped after peaking in January. The change from April with a value of 0.202°C to May’s 0.09°C is a (∆T) of -0.112°C.
Recent RSS anomalies
2008 10 0.181
2008 11 0.216
2008 12 0.174
2009 01 0.322
2009 02 0.230
2009 03 0.172
2009 04 0.202
2009 05 0.090
RSS (Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa)
The RSS data is here (RSS Data Version 3.2)
Oddly, a divergence developed in the Feb 09 data between RSS and UAH, and opposite in direction to boot. UAH was 0.347 and RSS was 0.230
I spoke with Dr. Roy Spencer at the ICCC09 conference (3/10) and asked him about the data divergence.
Here is what he had to say:
“I believe it has to do with the differences in how diurnal variation is tracked and adjusted for.” he said. I noted that Feburary was a month with large diurnal variations.
For that reason, UAH has been using data from the AQUA satellite MSU, and RSS to my knowledge does not, and makes an adjustment to account for it. I believe our data [UAH] is probably closer to the true anomaly temperature, and if I’m right, we’ll see the two datasets converge again when the diurnal variations are minimized.”
It certainly looks like the data sets are converging now, with a scant difference in May of .047°C and that Dr. Spencer was right.
“…the truth that lie”
“when the truth turns out to be lies
And all the joy within you dies.”
By the way, I do a tolerably good karaoke version of ‘White Rabbit’, preferably after two or three beers.
Arthur Glass (20:37:07) :
” data just is”
Depends upon what ‘is’ is, as that great philosopher Bill Clinton once said.
I think I have already expressed my opinion about philosophers [great and not so great] when it comes to science.
Boswell recounts: “After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — “I refute it thus.”
Ah, Leif Svalgaard, I promised no more and will not be baited.
“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant
And an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.”
Arthur Glass (21:28:16) :
Ah, Leif Svalgaard, I promised no more and will not be baited.
“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant
And an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.”
“If it Was So, it Might Be, and if it Were So, it Would Be, but as it Isn’t, it Ain’t. That’s Logic.”
Arthur Glass (07:02:28) :
UKIP (08:03:18) :
You fellows might like this
Just Want Results
I appreciate the thought, but since my computer dates back to the year of the Great El Nino, and since I am still using snail-paced dial up access, playing streaming videos is almost impossible. I have enough problems downloading satellite loops from the NHC.
Just Want Results
Although I am somewhat confused by that diagram, which seems to show that at the solstices, the sun is direct overhead at the equator. I thought that on Jun 21, the sun was directly overhead along the Tropic of Cancer and on Sep. 21 along the Tropic of Capricorn. The sun would be directly overhead along the equator twice a year, at the equinoxes.
A friend of mine from Quito, Ecuador once told me that for him the hardest adjustment to make when he moved up here to 41N was the variation in the length of daylight from June to December. I told him he should try living in Fairbanks for a year.
Just Want Results:
I need to see my eye doctor. Of course that diagram shows the sun directly overhead at the Tropic of Cancer on Jun 21.
First a word of warning: putting cats in boxes is difficult enough but opening the box is extremely dangerous because I have observed that not only does the cat turn out to be alive but is absolutely furious at being put in the box in the first place.
LS I think M&M did for the ether in the sense that Fresnel and Stokes thought of it, although their views differed: but admit that debate and experiment rumbled on for another forty years.
And if we cannot test either by experiment or by observation some hypothesis then it is no better or worse than any other untestable hpothesis. And mathematical argument, however elegant, does not necessarily mean that the effect described eventuates in the real world.
Likewise I differ over philosophy, many here are fond of quoting Popper, few Betrand Russell who did very important work on numbers. Science after all is Natural Philosophy, the title Aberdeen University used for its physics department until recently. It is simply that NP has been so successful in providing practical answers that it has encroached on other areas of philosophy. And its reach is enormous, who even thirty years ago would have thought that evolution and economics would turn out to be the opposite faces of the same coin?
If the common modern view of Western philosophy has a weakness it is the idea that there is nothing useful between Aristotle and Descartes: not least because it was mainly the province of clerics. Wrong, the notion you cite of an electron being both one and many has its roots in debates about the physical nature of the world in the 10th and 11th centuries: even earlier in Oitnetla philosophies of course.
Arthur Glass (06:31:05) :
Just Want Results
Although I am somewhat confused by that diagram, which seems to show that at the solstices, the sun is direct overhead at the equator. I thought that on Jun 21, the sun was directly overhead along the Tropic of Cancer and on Sep. 21 along the Tropic of Capricorn. The sun would be directly overhead along the equator twice a year, at the equinoxes.
It also says that the day length is 24 hours at the Nth pole on June 21st, being pedantic it’s ~6months.
Sorry the end of my last post got scrambled by a keboard glitch and I asked the Moderator to chop the resulting gobbledegook.
So errata: I should have said untestable COMPETING hypothesis. And it should be Oriental in the last line.
What I was also going to say was that Bishop Berkley’s ideas altho’ often ridiculed remained a subject for debate for a very long time in the Oxford school of Metaphysics. And the ideas still resonate today in terms of the observation of quantum mechanical processes.
Still robust as Dr. Johnson’s refutation might be it lacks both the elegance and subtlety of Monsignor Ronald Knox’s twin limericks: there are many versions this is the one I know:
A young Oxford fellow said God
Must find it exceedingly odd
That this tree that I see
Simply ceases to be
When there is no-one about in the Quad.
Sir your predicament’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
So you see that the tree
Continues to be
As observed by yours faithfully God.
And for all who use Matlab and such like to busily work out statistics, trends and so on I first heard this one in the late 1960’s and suspect it is by that famous and prolific poet Anonymous.
A computer to print out a fact
Will multiply divide and subtract
But the output can be
No more than debris
If the data is not quite exact.
Kindest Regards
Phil: The confusion was my own bad, and I have recanted. Unlike Galileo, I shall not recant my recantation.
If the common modern view of Western philosophy has a weakness it is the idea that there is nothing useful between Aristotle and Descartes: not least because it was mainly the province of clerics.’
Bertrand Russell’s potted history of philosophy is the villain here.
I read recently, in immediate sucession, The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle’s classic demolition of the Cartesian ‘ghost in the machine’, and Sir Anthony Kenney’s Aquinas on Mind, which argues that Aquinas, and indeed scholastic philosophy in general, had more in common with 20th c. English phiosophy’s emphasis on logic and language than did the tradition descending from Descartes.
It seems to me that Aquinas, and the Aristotelean tradition in general, is more in touch with the experiential realities of human thinking than post-Cartesian theories of mind and epistemologies.
Russell demotes Aquinas from the ranks of philosophers because instead of following a free inquiry, he constructed rational accounts of what he already believed on other grounds. Kenney makes the point that in the
Principia, Russell takes a hundred pages to prove that 2+2=4, something that Russell had belived all his life.
Umm er.
As in all things philosophy has its fashions.
Western philosophy was was very much influenced by Christian beliefs from about 500 A.D. on and this did not begin to fade until the Age of Reason. Russell’s opposition to this is very much of it’s time with its strong anti clerical bias: the black crows.
Just as Newton could boast ‘Physics, I invented it’, which does some injustice to Hooke and others, I think Aristotle has a good claim to be the father of NP as we understand it today.
But the rise of Christianity meant that God got involved in NP, which caused thinkers from about 500 A.D. onwards to view the world in a different way in that God was the prime mover.
In actual fact they were quite free thinking but as the Roman Catholic church became a great secular power so dissent became dangerous. It could not of course ban ancient texts so these increasingly became almost holy writ incorporated into its dogma.
This after all was the charge used against Galileo: to his bemusement.
But the idea that these Christian thinkers before about 1100 A.D. had nothing to say is quite wrong, they produced many novel concepts, albeit ones distorted by the prism through which they saw the world: which is why Russell and many others have unfairly condemned their work as worthless.
Thus in the Age of Reason, especially in France with its strong anti clericalism, the last prince strangled with the entrails of the last priest etc, they were taboo.
And whilst the French tradition based on Descartes is very narrow it has its strengths, I don’t imagine that the Duality of Nature could have been conceived by anyone not brought up in it.
In England the tradition of language and logic to which you refer came from religious and political constraint, the mediaeval disputation which cared nothing for the premise only the arguement: and once freed from that it has proved a powerful tool.
So I think you could say that modern NP is essentially derived from the English tradition and is much closer to Aristotle than its French and indeed European counterparts: and that it owes even less to Oriental philosophies.
Kindest Regards
a jones (19:47:54) :
As in all things philosophy has its fashions.
Are there any philosophers today at all?
Yes. Bad ones.
Arthur Glass: ‘Putting ‘theory’ before the collection of empirical observations is voodoo-do, not science.’
Perhaps you could test that proposition: collect some empirical observations and report your findings.
Leif Svalgaard:
Science has long ago left philosophers in the dust. Their philosophizing and problems are not relevant to science.
Data is neither accurate nor inaccurate. With a stated uncertainty, the data just is and is a accurate as the uncertainty species, not in absolute terms. The data, to the stated accuracy, represent the real ‘truth’ about a phenomenon.
Or more correctly, from a philosophical standpoint, the data, to the stated accuracy represents the truth about the aspect of the phenomenon the data measures. It does not encapsulate the phenomenon itself. The measure is not the man.
I would say that the dust the scientists have kicked up is the cloud of their unknowing which prevents them from understanding the context of their quest for truth within the wider corpus of human knowledge.
That’s why we need a discipline called ‘The philosophy of Science’ to help them out of their confusion on ontological and epistemological issues. 😉
Bishop Berkely of Cloyne was a subtle thinker, and there is much of interest in his writings beyond the usual anecdotes of the hapless Johnson toe stubbing incident.
Arthur Glass (11:53:49) :
If the common modern view of Western philosophy has a weakness it is the idea that there is nothing useful between Aristotle and Descartes: not least because it was mainly the province of clerics.
Arthur, if you haven’t read ‘Against Method’ by Paul Feyerabend, you must.
It contains a delightful chapter entitled:
Aristotle not a dead dog.
tallbloke (03:00:15) :
Or more correctly, from a philosophical standpoint, the data, to the stated accuracy represents the truth about the aspect of the phenomenon the data measures. It does not encapsulate the phenomenon itself. The measure is not the man.
Modern quantum theory posits that a phenomenon does not ‘exist’ until observed [not necessarily by humans only], so the measure is the man, in a quantum mechanical sense. The spin of an electron is a superposition of all possible spins until observed, at which time the spin becomes what is observed. The act of observation gives the spin a definite value.
“”” Leif Svalgaard (12:24:13) :
Arthur Glass (11:49:40) :
Of course a theory can be either true or false.
It seems that people around here can’t read. The truth is not about the theory, but about the data. The data is the truth the theory has to explain. “””
Amen to that.
“””This explanation itself is neither true nor false. It is a useful theory if it allows predictions of not yet observed values and those predictions come out correctly within the bounds of observational error. The phlogiston theory was useful when it was proposed, because it explained observed facts. When further facts [the truth] became available, the theory failed, as will [probably] all theories eventually. “””
The “theory” describes the behavior of a “model”. All of it is fiction including the mathematics which we made up out of whole cloth to manipulate the models.
It is comparison of the data “the facts”; from real observations, with the fictional behavior of the model; that leads to conclusions as to whether the model is a sufficient facsimile of the real universe. In a sense, the model doesn’t have to “be like” the real universe; it doesn’t even have to be unique; you could have a dozen models all described by a dozen theories; but what we require of any of them is that their behavior replicates the “facts” ; the real data gathered by real observations of the real universe.
As for the models; they have no reality; just usefulness as tools to perhaps predict what other observations we might be able to make in the real universe to glean new “facts”.
George
Leif Svalgaard (10:01:00) :
Modern quantum theory posits that a phenomenon does not ‘exist’ until observed [not necessarily by humans only]
Good ol’ Bishop Berkeley. 😉
tallbloke (11:51:01) :
“Modern quantum theory posits that a phenomenon does not ‘exist’ until observed [not necessarily by humans only]”
Good ol’ Bishop Berkeley.
He should have kicked the stone too to let his sore toe tell him about reality…
Or punched Johnson maybe. 😉
Some crazy reality sites! watch now:[URL=http://olya.allmediabuy.com/smoking-girls]smoking girls[/URL]
[URL=http://love.allmediabuy.com/unique-custom-jewelry]unique custom jewelry[/URL]
[URL=http://marina.allmediabuy.com/bukkake-rachel]bukkake rachel[/URL]
[URL=http://olya.allmediabuy.com/dirty-adult-stories]dirty adult stories[/URL]
[URL=http://bride.allmediabuy.com/black-gay-porn]black gay porn[/URL]
[URL=http://bride.allmediabuy.com/straightcollegemen]straightcollegemen[/URL]
[URL=http://olya.allmediabuy.com/lesben]lesben[/URL]
[URL=http://anya.allmediabuy.com/free-anal-videos]free anal videos[/URL]
[URL=http://olya.allmediabuy.com/celeb-sex-tapes]celeb sex tapes[/URL]
[URL=http://marina.allmediabuy.com/free-rape-videos]free rape videos[/URL]