Zeke is upset that I made this statement in a story at Fox news:
Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported … changes with the moment. In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.
he says:
In the spirit of civility, I would ask Anthony to retract his remarks. He may well disagree with NCDC’s approach and results, but accusing them of fraud is one step too far.
I’d point out that Zeke has his interpretation but nowhere did I say “fraud”. He’s mad, and people don’t often think clearly when they are mad. That’s OK.
Without getting into semantics, I’d like to ask Zeke these simple questions:
- What is the CONUS average temperature for July 1936 today?
- What was it a year ago?
- What was it ten years ago? Twenty years ago?
- What was it in late 1936, when all the data had been first compiled?
We already know the answers to questions 1 and 2 from my posting here, and they are 76.43°F and 77.4°F respectively, so Zeke really only needs to answer questions 3 and 4.
The answers to these questions will be telling, and I welcome them. We don’t need broad analyses or justifications for processes, just the simple numbers in Fahrenheit will do.
richardscourtney,
“But each of the temperature time series (GISS, HadCRUTn, etc.) alters past data several times a year. Why?”
As an IT person, if I had to guess I would say that the most likely reason is that the routines for in-filling/estimating missing data are recursive so that as new real data gets added it automatically affects all of the old estimates / in-fills which of course affects the past monthly and annual averages.
Now if you ask me, doing things like that in a supposedly scientific endeavor is just plain wrong.
MattS, I Agree.. Just Plain Wrong! Unjustifiable… Unconscioable … Illegal… Indefensible.
Have you gone crazy Mattstat?
Matthew R Marler says:
January 24, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Don Monfort: Matt, can you cite the criminal code that prohibits manipulation of 1936 temp data? Is it called fraud? Is jail time a possible penalty? Is their a statute of limitations with regard to the age of the data?
Is there a point there? My comment was directed toward Anthony Watts’ language. It was his language that implied criminal activity.
Matthew R Marler says:
January 24, 2013 at 2:09 pm
In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.
Perhaps Zeke will ask some jurors to decide whether that constitutes libel or slander (when spoken on tv and then written in a blog, I don’t know which word applies.) Or if, as with “torturing the data” the phrase “got to jail for such manipulations of data” is within the bounds of permissible hyperbole when directed at a “public figure” like Zeke.
Look Matt, Anthony was engaging in hyperbole. My moms used to do it, when I transgressed. She would send me to get a switch, while hollering that I deserved to be whupped within an inch of my life. I would have left town, if I had taken that literally. Zeke is not going to court. He has no cause of action, mainly because Anthony did not say it about Zeke. Try to catch up. If you are going to play a lawyer on the internet, you should Google defamation, slander, libel, before you make a fool of yourself, again.
MattS, I suspect you’ve hit the nail on the head there.
A comment from Zeke would be in order. If this is what they’re doing then they’re just playing around with numbers and, as a consequence, totally corrupting the historical data. And they think they’re doing science?
Matthew R Marler:
Your post at January 24, 2013 at 3:52 pm says
You are being silly.
It is simply a legal fact that “In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.”
Don’t disagree with me about it: disagree with those who are in jail because they altered financial data from the past and failed to record the unaltered data.
It is also a legal fact that
people don’t go to jail for altering climatological data from the past and failing to record the unaltered data.
It is NOT libel, slander or hyperbole to state either or both of those legal facts.
Richard
MattS:
Your post at January 24, 2013 at 9:23 pm says
I agree every word of your post, and I have obtained statements which imply your “guess” is correct.
But I want the matter to be openly admitted, and that is why I keep asking my question again and again (including repeatedly on this thread as your post quotes).
I want it to be admitted because I strongly agree with you that “doing things like that in a supposedly scientific endeavor is just plain wrong”. And I think those involved privately agree this, too: please note the silence (including from Zeke Hausfather on this thread) which is the only response I get to my question.
Richard
RockyRoad and pete:
pete’s post at January 24, 2013 at 1:48 pm quotes RockyRoad saying at January 24, 2013 at 6:59 am
and pete’s post replies
Indeed so.
I yet again draw attention to the draft paper which is Appendix B of my Parliamentary Submission which can be read at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
and was blogged from publication by the frequent changes to global temperature data sets (as the Submission explains).
The draft paper considers mean global temperature according to both understandings (i.e. as a modelled real parameter and as a statistic) and the paper considers the implications of each understanding.
Richard
Ouch! I typed “blogged from publication” but intended “blocked from publication”. Sorry.
richardscourtney,
“But I want the matter to be openly admitted, and that is why I keep asking my question again and again (including repeatedly on this thread as your post quotes).”
The problem with this is that the people responsible for it aren’t programming experts and may not understand what they have done and therefore may not be aware that it is happening.
richardscourtney,
I read a number of Zeke’s replies in this light.
He talks about how complicated it is to estimate the average temp for CONUS and that different methods will produce different results. He seems completely blind the the fact that the DATA behind the estimates has changed over time.
MattS:
At January 25, 2013 at 6:49 am you say
If by “completely blind” you mean in the same way that Nelson saw “no ships”, then I agree.
Please note that
(a) I posed the question to him personally at January 23, 2013 at 3:56 pm
(b) I rephrased it for clarity in a post addressed to him at January 23, 2013 at 4:41 pm
and
(c) I reminded him of it in my post addressed to him at January 23, 2013 at 5:46 pm.
Those personal requests for an answer have obtained no response of any kind.
In your post to me at January 25, 2013 at 6:44 am you say
Well, if that were true then Zeke Hausfather could have responded to my posts to him with something similar to, “I don’t know so I will get back to you when I find out”. He did not that. Instead, he was “completely blind” to my posts addressed to him.
Richard
– – – – – – –
MattS,
Thanks for your straight forward discussion style on statistic topics. Zeke’s discussions seemed oblique not only to the most fundamental statistical concern of data integrity, he was also avoiding reasonable probes of negative scenarios about NCDC and GISS.
How to mitigate against any kind of original data corruption by government funded bodies, e.g. , GISS or NCDC or MET?
My thought is the original data should be archived in parallel with three different types of custodians. One set placed with a body like the Smithsonian. A duplicate set placed with a major private university library archivist who must be unconnected with its science departments. Several other duplicate sets should be placed with in the hands of several private volunteer groups.
As each new current monthly data is taken, it would be auto archived simultaneously at each location.
With that approach then screwing with the original data would be virtually impossible.
John
Richard S Courtney: disagree with those who are in jail because they altered financial data from the past and failed to record the unaltered data.
Tell us who went to jail for “such” manipulations of the data as Zeke is responsible for.
Why not just admit that, as far as anyone knows, no one has gone to jail for hierarchical modeling of time series data of different lengths with possibly inaccurate models of the spatio-temporal correlations (and the other methods used to adjust past data for changes in the recording environment and instruments.) Anthony Watts has written many good critiques of the temperature record, but he went a step too far with the allegation of criminality.
You and I are clearly reading the word “such” differently. You are treating it as though it does not even appear in the sentence: In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.
Outside the arena, people go to jail for brawls such as routinely occur in hockey games. But don’t get all nitpickety and start whining that I am accusing hockey players of being criminals. I ain’t. If I wanted to do that, I would say something like this: Hockey players are criminals.
Matthew R Marler:
re your post at January 25, 2013 at 8:46 am.
Give it up. The horse you are flogging is dead.
You were wrong. I repeatedly explained how and why you were wrong.
You have repeatedly ignored everything I have said and tried to flog the horse with a different whip.
Flogging the horse won’t work because it is dead.
Richard
So its crickets…. Thank you Zeke Hausfather and Steve Mosher, there is no good reason for the drifting values of the past, other than it suits your needs?
No ethical problems with rewriting history to suit ?
Maybe CO2 emissions of today do cause past temperatures to fall, I will check my Grandfathers diaries for the ice-age he must have lived through.
Is there a reasonable doubt that there has been corruption of data at NCDC and GISS?
I think it is reasonably established there has been some kind of systemic and frequent manipulation of past data. Always increasing a trend toward ever higher positive rates; only unidirectionally.
The UAH and RSS data since the beginning of the satellite era provide a very critical contrast to NCDC and GISS products; the satellite data adds credibility to those who reasonably view that there is systemic and increasing data corruption at NCDC and GISS.
Any observations of apparent NCDC and GISS data corruptions give rise to the question; is any data corruption intentional? The 10+ years of acts and words from GISS leader Hansen clearly indicate an unbalanced leader who allows no doubt of his view’s truth just as his GISS data manipulations have allowed only increasing revisionist warming rates in the data history.
Hansen’s unbalanced leadership is evidence for expecting data corruption toward a unidirectional extreme. He can remain as GISS’s unbalanced leader only because he represents a very fashionable and pseudo-science cause supported by activists in the media, in NGOs and in politics.
It looks as if Hansen is not a symptom of GISS’s numerous public displays and products that give support to the idea of many critical viewers; the idea that GISS has a unidirectional data corruption problem. Hansen is the root cause of any problem.
NCDC is subject to the same kind of analysis as I have just done on GISS.
Fraud? I do not care what one calls any confirmed malfeasance by NCDC and GISS, the most severe punishment is the individuals involved are placed high on the list of history’s worst scientific pretenders.
John
“Glacials last about 120,000 years, interglacials (like now) about 12,000 or about 1/10 as long.
The natural state of the earth is frozen into an ice age glacial. ”
Wow. Thank you, E.M. Smith. That’s another piece of information that never seems to make it into msm articles or discussions about global warming.
Researcher bias is a well known fact. It has been studied over and over again in the medical fields. Without proper controls a researcher will always bias results in the direction they believe is “true”. The fact CAGW “believers” have been the ones adjusting the data is all the proof that is needed to KNOW with near certainty that the adjustments are too high.
If skeptics controlled the data we’d probably be adjusting it too far in the other direction. Reality exists somewhere in the middle. It may very well be that the raw data is as close to the truth as we’ll ever get.
richardscourtney,
None are so blind as he who will not see.
richardscourtney: You have repeatedly ignored everything I have said
Not so. I have repeatedly addressed the word “such”, which to me, in that sentence, implies an accusation of criminal activity. I am not sure that we speak the same dialect of English, as you persistently deny the importance of that word altogether.
Matthew R Marler:
At January 26, 2013 at 2:11 pm you say to me
It is absolutely “so” that you have repeatedly ignored everything I said. For example, this from me to you at January 25, 2013 at 4:27 am
I can only conclude that it is an act of desperation for you to now want to dispute the meaning of the word “such”. And your implication that the word “such” implies “criminal activity” is plain wrong.
The On-Line Dictionary says this of the word ‘such’.
Clearly, as I quote in this post, I stated that the the “manipulations” are “of a kind” in that they each consist of altering data from the past and failing to record the unaltered data.
Simply, your post is yet another example of your ignoring everything I have written to you in your attempt to flog your ‘dead horse’. You are wrong: live with it.
Richard