Bishop Hill writes:
As if there weren’t enough problems with climate data already, the latest bright idea from CAGW subscribers is to use opinion polls to measure climate change. I kid you not…
The journal Biology Letters this week reports a novel yet kind of obvious way to tackle the data dearth; simply asking Himalayan villagers about their experiences.
To be fair, the phrase “simply asking” does the researchers a disservice, because what they emphasise throughout their paper is the need to gather local knowledge “rapidly and efficiently… using systematic tools”.
It has to be structured, internally consistent and rigorous; that’s the message.
We know that some scientists are happy to treat climate model output as data. Now it seems that people’s opinions are to be counted as climatic data too.
It’s a funny old science, innit?
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The story from the BBC by the always discerning Richard Black is here.
Here’s a gem:
For example, in some villages about half of the people questioned reported that summer was now starting earlier than 10 years ago; which raises the question of why the other half did not.
In villages where life is based almost totally on farming, you might expect a more consistent view.
In one sense, that is like putting two thermometers in the same place and finding that one registered a temperature rise while the other did not.
I can’t wait to see the uncertainty values with this one. Apparently Richard Black had no idea that he just described what station siting and UHI effects are all about. Of course when you deny those effects, it is easy to forget them in context.
BTW lest somebody thinks that “Sherpas” only refers to Mt. Everest mountain guides, see this.
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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.
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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.
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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”