Antarctic temperature plots through the history of the debate:
NASA 2004:
NASA 2007:
Steig et al 2009:
O’Donnell et al 2010:
Some historical perspective:
“If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment”
Ernest Rutherford quotes Baron Rutherford of Nelson. New Zealander born British Chemist who laid the groundwork for the development of nuclear physics by investigating radioactivity. Nobel Prize in 1908. 1871-1937
Personally, besides all the original obtuse PCA statistical sophistry, the buried weather stations, and other issues, now I simply think the issue boils down to: it’s weather, not climate.
See here as to why.
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@Gneiss:
February 13, 2011 at 3:25 pm
“he understands nothing about peer review. Steig’s reviews were those of someone who thought O’Donnell’s paper had flaws but also merit; he helped make it good enough to publish.”
Do you really believe that, or more to the point, expect anyone here to? Is it not far more likely that Steig’s reviews were a damage limitation exercise that backfired, leading to further damage limitation from the pages of RC?
It seems that to many AGW proponents, peer review is simply a reinforcement process, whereby any scrutiny of the scientific method (or lack thereof) in climate divination can be smothered with obfuscation, misrepresented, censored or squashed by any means necessary.
This way, any progress of understanding is completely abandoned and we are left with an echo chamber full of zealots slapping each other on the back for their extreme cleverness in statistically eking out minute patterns from meaningless noise and mangled data. Obviously better this than to allow the impressionable public to get wind of uncertainty in the settled science though, don’t you think?
jorgekafkazar writes,
It was already good enough to publish, according to Reviewers B and C. Reviewer A was the only one who required a major rewrite.
Reviewers B and C, unlike Reviewer A, were not doing their jobs. As Nielsen-Gammon writes,
“Meanwhile, reviewer B states that he/she doesn’t really understand the statistics, saying ‘I am not conversant with the statistical nuances of the analyses by Steig et al. and the approach adopted here, so trust that Eric Steig or Michael Mann will provide that needed expertise.’ Reviewer B has not seen any other reviews at this point, but is fully expecting that Steig or Mann ought to be one of the other reviewers.
Reviewer C states that he/she carried out his/her review of O’Donnell et al. without re-reading Steig et al. ”
After all was said and done, Steig 2009 was still toast.
On reconsidering I have to agree with you that attacking Steig, not learning anything about climate or Antarctica, was the motive behind O’Donnell’s paper. But now it’s published, so is Steig’s paper toast? Only in certain corners of the blogosphere, like this one.
Among scientists, that’s not how it works. O’Donnell is not the last word either. And then there’s that real Antarctica of rock and ice, where the patterns of warming (or not) will become more obvious in the years ahead. Reality might better fit Steig’s work, or O’Donnell’s, or neither.
jorgekafkazar writes,
Another untruth. You evidently didn’t follow the link, Gneiss:
Evidently I didn’t, but I did. And when I said it shows no understanding, that’s the truth.
Delingpole obviously understands all the critical points of peer review well enough, just as I don’t have to study horse anatomy to know a dead horse when I see one.
If you say so.
Gneiss says:
February 13, 2011 at 6:10 pm
“Among scientists, that’s not how it works. O’Donnell is not the last word either. And then there’s that real Antarctica of rock and ice, where the patterns of warming (or not) will become more obvious in the years ahead. Reality might better fit Steig’s work, or O’Donnell’s, or neither.”
=====
I vote for neither, considering the time constraints.
Gneiss says:
February 13, 2011
Reviewers have no veto power, and they don’t have to agree. Disagreement is in fact very common, and editors are the ones who make the call.
Depends upon the journal. The ones I reviewed for : three reviewers, two rejections, paper’s toast.
The ones I reviewed for : three reviewers, two rejections, paper’s toast.
That’s not a veto, that’s a vote. And it’s not what happened in this case.
Among scientists, that’s not how it works. O’Donnell is not the last word either. And then there’s that real Antarctica of rock and ice, where the patterns of warming (or not) will become more obvious in the years ahead. Reality might better fit Steig’s work, or O’Donnell’s, or neither.
Generally among scientists poor reasoning is not revisited. O’Donnell’s will not be the last word, for sure. However if the real world does fit Steig, then it will be purely by accident, because his paper is not sound.
One of the most jawdropping bits of hard data that finally made me into a skeptic was John Daly’s plot of a cooling south pole. I made a wallet card of it to see how various people I ran into responded to this astonishing debunking of the claim that the entire globe was suddenly on a major upswing in temperature. The response was mostly the same, namely disbelief that whole populations of scientific bodies would simply ignore such damning dents in their alarming theory.
How has this chart of what I called ‘The South Pole’ held up? The original is here: http://www.john-daly.com/stations/amundsen.gif It’s the Amundsen-Scott base and is indeed at The South Pole. Ten more years of data later, and…it’s feeling some heat finally, but not much: http://appinsys.com/globalwarming/climgraph.aspx?pltparms=GHCNT100AJanDecI195720090900110AR70089009000x
It still does not seem to be getting the message that it should form the blade of a hockey stick. The closest stations that have data going back to the 1800s are Capetown, Africa (http://appinsys.com/globalwarming/climgraph.aspx?pltparms=GHCNT100AJanDecI185720090900110AR14168816000x) and Adelaide Airport, Australia (http://appinsys.com/globalwarming/climgraph.aspx?pltparms=GHCNT100AJanDecI185720090900101AR50194672000x) and neither corresponds to a Mannian hockey stick.
I abandoned my wallet card though since the trend is no longer so linearly downsloped, in favor of super long thermometer records in the North (http://oi49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg), along with a global average that shows a similar lack of any uptick in smooth warming (http://oi49.tinypic.com/2mpg0tz.jpg). Call me a simpleton, but these charts alone in their failure to show a change in trend is even more convincing than the oddity of limited span Antarctica data. Until I run into a serious discussion by about how actual thermometer records are not fit for the cover of IPCC reports, all this back and forth debate about statistical software settings makes me feel that both sides of this debate are failing to educate voters on the simple fact that thermometer data quite simply do not say what almost every left leaning citizen assumes it does. Being dragged into debate about statistics is a PR trap!
I have a hard time trying to follow what you are saying as a fair representation on what happened when this sentance shows that the whole point of the argument, which was stated clearly both in text followed by in graphics, is being missed by you.
Although it is true that Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand, to
describe him as “New Zealand born” implies that as a babe in arms
he was whisked away elsewhere. In fact, E.R. graduated from Canterbury
University. And that’s not Canterbury, England.
#
#
climatebeagle says:
February 13, 2011 at 12:55 pm
In the referenced WUWT thread “Mike” said:
“Both papers show that most of Antarctica is warming.”
Can one even say that? I would each paper has a statistical model that purports to show warming across the entire Antarctica continent based upon sparse data from around the edge of the continent. The real issue is do the models reflect reality in any way? From our experience of the US we would say that that a handful of stations around the edge of the continental US and a statistical model could not in any way model the entire temperature map of the US.
I think its just numbers with no mechanism for validation.
#######
then you havent read the paper and you dont understand how calibration and verification works or how one constructs a model with hold outs.
The thing about Rutherford was that he was a great experimenter, and encouraged many in his field to think outside the square, I think 10 or 11 of his trainees and colleagues went on to get nobel prizes.
His quip about statisticians was right for the time.
Not for nothing he was buried near Newton in Westminster abbey.
Perhaps ‘Juice’ is a statistician. (See first comment)
steven mosher says:
February 13, 2011 at 10:24 pm
“then you havent read the paper and you dont understand how calibration and verification works or how one constructs a model with hold outs.”
Are you actually trying to say that the “Models” can give an accurate view of USA temperatures just using a few Temperature sites on the Coast?
Have you looked at the USA/Canada temperature map lately?
If you used the West Coast you get Warming. Look at the East Coast you get massive cooling.
John Marshal says “Perhaps ‘Juice’ is a statistician.”.
No, mate. Were Juice a statistician, he or she would have known what Rutherford meant by his statement “If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment”. Note – he did not say “If your experiment needs a statistician”. Just the result, John.
Lord Rutherford was a scientist. He knew that the only thing that statistics can “prove” is correlation. Indeed, they are all about correlation, not causation. A scientist may use statistical analyses when assessing whether phenomena merit close investigation. He may use statistics to help him formulate theories about the underlying causes but never as proof, per se.
Graphs of New Zealand statistics in the nineteen-sixties present three almost identical correlations for NZ birthrate. The birthrate declined in almost exact inverse relationship with the rise in the sales of three commodities – apples, televisions and oral contraceptives.
It is also seems illogical to mix the temperature data of areas that have clearly different climates. When I audited climatology in college (1980), we studied a map that showed different climate regions. Accompanying the map were temperature and precipitation data by month for a particular area. I went back to look at it, but it did not have Antarctica included. Too little data perhaps? Anyway, as many others have noted, the peninsula is clearly a completely different climate regime from the continent, and the continent from the oceanic fringe of the continent. It seems to me that it would be interesting to have climatologist suggest station sites that would more clearly delineate the climate regions of the Antarctic. If Antarctica was inhabited as thickly as Australia, I daresay that several different climate regimes would be identified over the continent.
This has always perplexed me about the global temperature also. How are the differing regional climate characteristics accounted for in creating and comparing world wide temperature averages? Are stations placed on the globe to account for climate regions, and weighted for that region?
Also,