There’s a new paper out today, highlighted at RealClimate by Hausfather et al titled Quantifying the Effect of Urbanization on U.S. Historical Climatology Network Temperature Records and published (in press) in JGR Atmospheres.
I recommend everyone go have a look at it and share your thoughts here.
I myself have only skimmed it, as I’m just waking up here in California, and I plan to have a detailed look at it later when I get into the office. But, since the Twittersphere is already demanding my head on a plate, and would soon move on to “I’m ignoring it” if they didn’t have instant gratification, I thought I’d make a few quick observations about how some people are reading something into this paper that isn’t there.
1. The paper is about UHI and homogenization techniques to remove what they perceive as UHI influences using the Menne pairwise method with some enhancements using satellite metadata.
2. They don’t mention station siting in the paper at all, they don’t reference Fall et al, Pielke’s, or Christy’s papers on siting issues. So claims that this paper somehow “destroys” that work are rooted in failure to understand how the UHI and the siting issues are separate.
3. My claims are about station siting biases, which is a different mechanism at a different scale than UHI. They don’t address siting biases at all in Hausfather et al 2013, in fact as we showed in the draft paper Watts et al 2012, homogenization takes the well sited stations and adjusts them to be closer to the poorly sited stations, essentially eliminating good data by mixing it with bad. To visualize homogenization, imagine these bowls of water represent different levels of clarity due to silt, you mix the clear water with the muddy water, and end up with a mix that isn’t pure anymore. That leaves data of questionable purity.
4. In the siting issue, you can have a well sited station (Class1 best sited) in the middle of a UHI bubble and a poorly sited (Class5 worst sited) station in the middle of rural America. We’ve seen both in our surfacestations survey. Simply claiming that homogenization fixes this is an oversimplification not rooted in the physics of heat sink effects.
5. As we pointed out in the Watts et al 2012 draft paper, there are significant differences between good data at well sited stations and the homogenized/adjusted final result.
We are finishing up the work to deal with TOBs criticisms related to our draft and I’m confident that we have an even stronger paper now on siting issues. Note that through time the rural and urban trends have become almost identical – always warming
up the rural stations to match the urban stations. Here’s a figure from Hausfather et al 2013 illustrating this. Note also they have urban stations cooler in the past, something counterintuitive. (Note: John Nielsen-Gammon observes in an email: “Note also they have urban stations cooler in the past, something counterintuitive.”, which is purely a result of choice of reference period.” He’s right. Like I said, these are my preliminary comments from a quick read. My thanks to him for pointing out this artifact -Anthony)
I never quite understand why Menne and Hausfather think that they can get a good estimate of temperature by statistically smearing together all stations, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and creating a statistical mechanism to combine the data. Our approach in Watts et al is to locate the best stations, with the least bias and the fewest interruptions and use those as a metric (not unlike what NCDC did with the Climate Reference Network, designed specifically to sidestep the siting bias with clean state of the art stations). As Ernest Rutherford once said: “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”
6. They do admit in Hausfather et al 2013 that there is no specific correction for creeping warming due to surface development. That’s a tough nut to crack, because it requires accurate long term metadata, something they don’t have. They make claims at century scales in the paper without supporting metadata at the same scale.
7. My first impression is that this paper doesn’t advance science all that much, but seems more like a “justification” paper in response to criticisms about techniques.
I’ll have more later once I have a chance to study it in detail. Your comments below are welcome too.
I will give my kudos now on transparency though, as they have made the paper publicly available (PDF here), something not everyone does.
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If you adjust the ruler temperature to the UHI and you find that oke. And it is somewhat in line whit AGW. And thats what you after anyway.
BUT is that not somehow a bit like committing fraud?
By all means any adjustment to data must be avoid it in the first place only than you get the right answer.
The raw data is the only correct data to use. But that means no warming so there is a adjustment done and just like you do it goes upward so to match the needed global warming.
In the real world however the temperature is what the raw data shows so there is a difference. Man made off cores.
The only way to go and the honest way is using the raw data if however you want to make a correction the only hones way to go is down. If yo want to correct data you must do UHI minus ruler.
So if ruler is 15 and UHI is 18 you make 15+18+3 /2 =18
If you do nothing you get 15+18/2=16,5 thats the correct number.
If you do the adjustment right 15+18-3/2=15.
You see the differences and it dose not look like a lot but recherches showed that UHI cane be up to well over 5 degrees. And your result won’t be correct if you work whit faulty data.
And then I read the paper over and see something I can’t place.
I can see some fraud in this paper to.
Somehow the raw data is higher then the adjusted data. That looks oke for you but if correct you must get the same result. So the correction must be the same as the raw data. Or a bit over because you adjust the UHI.
U use the wrong raw data and then I like to now witch one (Barkleyes I would say)
Now to me it looks like you have taken the agw temperature altered it and say look the temperature is all right we smoothen UHI and still there is global warming!
troyca,
“Given that using the PHA with rural-only neighbors *still* identifies the inhomogeneities, and increases the trend, this led us to the conclusion that the corrections were warranted and not simply UHI spreading.”
False conclusion, of course. Tell me, from where comes this systematic increase of trend. If you do not have a convincing answer to this question, I do not think there is much conclusion to draw from your paper. Sorry.
A quote from Press et al (1989) ‘Numerical Recipes’ in the introduction to the chapter on Statistical Description of Data, which somehow seems pertinent to ‘climate science’ in general:
“Data consists of numbers, of course. But these numbers are fed into the computer, not produced by it. These numbers are to be treated with considerable respect, never to be tampered with, nor subjected to a numerical process whose character you do not completely understand. You are well advised to acquire a reverence for data that is rather different from the ‘sporty’ attitude which is sometimes allowable, or even commendable, in other numerical tasks.”
The figures from the Supplementary data shows what’s really happening here.
I want to just focus on the ISA Urban Rural classification and use the TOBs adjusted data (I still like my data raw but that is not presented in the supplemental other than in the chart).
ISA Rural Trend – TOBs -> Min temp 0.064C/decade -> Max temp 0.026C/decade
ISA Rural Full NCDC Adjusted 5.2i -> Min 0.070C/decade -> Max temp 0.060C/decade.
So the Rural stations are adjusted up 0.006C/decade in the Minimum temperatures and up 0.034C/decade in the Maximum temperatures.
So, the Rural temps are adjusted UP on average +0.23C from 1895 to 2010.
Why adjust the Rurals UP +0.23C ?
Applying the same math, we get Urbans adjusted DOWN -0.09C (hardly a UHI adjustment)
And ALL stations (and not including the TOBs adjustment remember) are adjusted UP +0.138C from 1895 to 2010.
I don’t think this is how it is usually described. (and the TOBs adjustment adds – well noone really knows what it is anymore – but I’ve got it at about +0.28C – and then the adjustments from the truly raw data to the NCDC adjusted Raw data is another +0.15C – add it all up if you want).
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/papers/hausfather-etal2013-suppinfo/hausfather-etal2013-supplementary-figures.pdf
Remember this,
Assuming nothing, I downloaded raw daily data for 282 out of 289 sites. (The other 7 sites either had id number discrepancies or were not online at GHCND.) From this, I calculated average monthly TMAX and TMIN temperatures for all the sites and then calculated 1961-1990 anomalies. I then calculated simple averages of the “raw” anomalies for the two networks BEFORE any jiggery-pokery. Even if all the subsequent adjustments are terrific, from a statistical point of view, it’s always a good idea to see what your data looks like at the start.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/04/1859/
Gary Pearse says:
February 13, 2013 at 6:18 pm
I think something is being missed here. This is a great idea. If you chose the 100 most pristine sites in the world only, and kept track of their raw data over time, even though you are unlikely to have a good average of global temp(if that is what is being attempted with all the adjustments), you would have a handle on a clean useful trend.
———————————————
I could never figure out why there is a need to compare station pairs, an honest trend with raw data from pristine rural sites is all that`s needed. If you have a rural neighboure just use that and junk the urban station.
Mosher: “did that. the answer is the same.”
I doubt it. Show me your list of stations.
By the way, this is from their paper, “for simplicity, non Urban stations are classified as rural”. As Roy Spencer found, a very significant amount of UHI effect can still be seen in smaller growing communities and suburbs, even when they are not classified as Urban. And some Urban stations can show little or no UHI change because the area was Urban before the thermometers were ever put there. As such, they only reflect the change in urbanization, not the total urbanization. And this means that the total UHI contamination is not reflected in the data anywhere.
This paper is designed to prove a forgone and desired result while avoiding any research that might actually yield some other result.
@JC
That was well considered. The claims as early as 1980 that we are headed for thermageddon because of CO2 were, as we now know, wild-assed-guesses (WAGs) based on a hunch. What ensued after 1988 was a relentless drive to prove the hunches were right (at any cost to ‘scientegrity’) and that drive is still floundering around seeking to legitimize the initial WAGs. Time and time again the reading of the bones precedes the location of a skeleton. Your comment was spot on.
The inveterate devotion to the line ‘the End is Nigh’ permeates the culture of alarmism as a confused humanity submits to yet another crop of quasi-scientists and meta-priests of the counter-culture. It is so easy to see through it is a surprise to me that it has gained so much momentum. I work in a field where I have been told in all seriousness ‘play along, a lot of money will come into your sector if you do’. Just like that – blue lies spoken baldly. And I am speaking of a Top Dog.
There is a moral crisis in the scientific community rooted in the unravellings, at some level, of the social order. The lunatics are in control of the asylum’s administration block and have a grip on the microphone of PA system. It is going to make a very, very interesting documentary.
Pearse: “even though you are unlikely to have a good average of global temp(if that is what is being attempted with all the adjustments), you would have a handle on a clean useful trend.”
While any one station may have it’s own climate for a year, or even for several years, the mixing of the atmosphere will assure that no station will have climate that is independent of global trends. I’m just shooting from the hip here, but I seriously doubt that the 100 most pristine stations in the world would have a 100 year trend that varied by more than .1C from reality.
The whole Berkely idea of taking fragments from anywhere and everywhere and statistically homoginizing them together so that they can claim that they have results based on 10,000, or whatever, number of stations seems totally idiotic to me. Beyond a hundred stations the answer is going to be far more effected by the quality of the stations and the amount of data manipulation than any gains that may be made from including those stations.
…..It is so easy to see through it is a surprise to me that it has gained so much momentum. ……
No it is not difficult to see at all. The idea of man made climate change because CO2 got off the ground in the UK because there was a near state of war between the PM and the government on one side and the miners union and its leader on the other.
Hadley climate centre was created with the remit to find a reason to ban coal. It was near inevitable that it would succeed from there given its use as a reason to tax industrial nations to fund socialist programs in addition to the original use.
@ur momisugly Crispin in Waterloo
Your “reading of the bones” observation just about sums up the levels of function shown and the primitive compulsions behind them. Succinct and accurate! Perhaps even those rummaging in the carcass of civilization will get it. Actually, too much to ask.
I can’t see that this is a surprise though. All of what we see is simply a playing out of themes and characteristics which came into sharp focus in the 1960’s, gained structural definition in the ’70’s and were applied, increasingly widely, through the 1980’s.
The good news is that it is now approaching terminal exhaustion having been largely static and immutable for a quarter of a century. The bad news is it is hard to see a societal wide basis for a renewal. How is anything worthwhile built from complete degradation?
Dishonesty – that is, a basic unwillingness to face reality and the always present limiting factors of that whether in science, politics, human relations, or anything else – is endemic. Convenience, expediency, gratification and self- validation dictate the tenor of just about everything.
The concept of values has been extinguished and has been replaced by the erection of self-interest masquerading as belief, which being completely self-contained is absolutely impervious to those things that don’t confirm it. A self-reinforcing ignorance and sense of moral purity in a vacuum.
“Climate Change” is the ultimate expression of one important strand of this. If this fails the edifice tumbles.
I am encouraged by the occurrence and fate of what seems to me a very comparable hysteria running from the mid-late 19th Century through to the 1920’s: Spiritualism. This had as its most devoted adherents precisely the same type of person: the newly released from toil who no longer had reason for a grounding in the realities of the material world but did not have a commensurate sophistication to translate their experiences back to that. They were pig ignorant.
This might have been more limited in scope and with less capacity for damage but the nature of it seems to me to the same. A big difference of course is that now it is not just a matter of parlour entertainments, there is also a great deal of power and money involved. And powerful influences that either see advantage in others being subsumed in a zombie culture or who themselves are oblivious to what that is.
You referred to the unravellings of the social order, which as the above must make clear, I agree with, although I might refer to it as the underpinnings that make a social order possible – or even make possible a coherent, meaningful, and effective interaction with the world in every part.
Like in anything, the scientific community cannot stand apart, but it is possible with such a history of observable achievement, and the obligation of rigour that has to go with that, that the first signs, and strength, might come from within it. Its certainly hard to see the consumer classes being able to pull anything out of this.
@JC
Thanks for the observations and thoughts. The consequence of extreme materialism is unabated self-interest, or rather, selfishness, and the phrase ‘the end justifies the means’ is usually not made to further the interests of others. It is one’s own narrow version of reality that allows such seeds to gain a root-hold in the fertile soil of personal amibition.
Climate science takes full advantage of the propensity to treat the well-schooled (as distinct from the educated) as para-priests who will interpret the Book of Life on behalf of the ignorant masses. The self-image of being ignorant is reinforced by laying on the BS about how if you get a string of degrees you are therefore educated and therefore knowledgable and therefore wise. I was surprised when a senior manager friend of mine said that an MBA was really meaningless. He said it just means the person jumped through the hoops; that it told me nothing about their ability to think or perform.
Climate alarmists rush to any corner of the room where paper-rooted status attaches to pronouncements. It is has been interesting for me to see the sterling work performed by non-specialists applying common sense to obfuscative and largely meaningless ‘work’ done primarily in support of a CO2-is-dangerous narrative. To date I have yet to see anything that shows CO2 is dangerous. Zilch. Its thernal effects in the atmosphere are not even detectable for heaven’s sake. But the effect of a well-placed and shrill call to defend The Earth is definitely detectable, on our wallets.
The work in the paper above is, as far as I see, not technically defective in the sense that they are reporting what they observed when analysing the outputs of data massaging protocols. So a high horse awaits the work – technically correct. Moving the deck chairs on the Titanic away from the exits was also technically correct and wise. We could host a conference on how and where chairs should be moved away from exits on sinking ships. It seems to me, at least, that the time would have been better spent learning how to steer ships through fields of icebergs – not ever having to think how to displace and place deck chairs.
If we have a heavily contaminated US temperature set, there may be a passing usefulness in learning if one or another method of ‘correcting’ it (guestimating with best guesses in sets and contra-sets) but doesn’t it occur to people whose limited working lives are all to evident in the phrase ‘three score and ten’ that it is pretty much a waste of talent?
That of course applies equally to those who are bending over backwards to defend the indefensible position that human emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing not only a rise on global temperatures, but that the rate of rise is increasing. What a load of horse feathers. Any child who can read a thermometer soon knows it is untrue. My goodness, don’t people have better things to do with their limited time and self-acclaimed talents?
Professional climate science and particularly CAGW has become a moral exclusion zone. “Death to climate deniers”? They have the moral gravitas of witch-sniffers (ukubhula). Thank goodness for the few stalwarts who insist on finding and publishing comprehensive analytical works that meet the standards which obviously should apply universally. That they are bitterly opposed simply adds lustre to their diadems.
Bill Illis,
The majority of the positive adjustments to max temperatures by the PHA are due to the negative bias of around 0.4 C introduced when stations change from CRS to MMTS instruments.
You can see the effects rather clearly here: http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/MMTSCRSraw_zps436b0190.png
Or read this post: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/a-cooling-bias-due-to-mmts/
There are is also some bias introduced in the 1940s when many stations moved from urban rooftops to newly constructed airports or wastewater treatment plants.
Zeke Hausfather says:
February 14, 2013 at 11:26 am
Bill Illis,
The majority of the positive adjustments to max temperatures by the PHA are due to the negative bias of around 0.4 C introduced when stations change from CRS to MMTS instruments.
You can see the effects rather clearly here: http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/MMTSCRSraw_zps436b0190.png
—————–
Your chart shows a bias in both Max and Min temperatures. There is almost no net change in the Avg from the MMTS.
And how did this inaccurate sensor get installed all over the US (and then with a wire that is too short to use properly). Who at the NCDC/NOAA tested it?
Zeke: “The majority of the positive adjustments to max temperatures by the PHA are due to the negative bias of around 0.4 C introduced when stations change from CRS to MMTS instruments.”
Why are you compensating for a negative MMTS bias? Why don’t you compensate for a positive CRS bias. As the CRS instruments age, their peeling white paint has less albedo, introducing a positive bias. So compensate for the right bias. Don’t compensate for new instruments that were calibrated in the lab.
Oops, I forgot, the cardinal rule of climatology is that all corrections must be positive. And any negative corrections, like UHI obviously would be, must be made to magically disappear with without actually being corrected for.
And another question, if you are going to “disappear” UHI using homoginization only, they why not disappear TOB using homoginization only. Why not “disappear” MMTS using homoginization only? With the things that give you positive corrections you add them in seperately. With the things that would give you negative corrections you don’t compensate for them at all. You simply spread them out across all stations so that the difference between stations is not visible, but the bias is still there.
Multiple studies have already shown that there is a huge UHI factor. Differences between large urban areas and their surrounding landscape can be clearly seen on satellite images. As much as 7 to 10 degrees F of difference exists between some cities and their surrounding rural farm and wild areas. I can see between 2 and 12 F difference nearly every day driving my wife to work from the suburbs to the city and then coming back. Producing a result that shows that there is no UHI effect simply shows that you have no ability to do science.
Those who homogenize are great logicians. When it comes to explain a sudden drop in temperatures, roofs heat a lot, UHI is large, evaporation cools very efficiently.
Miraculously, when you implant a road next to a thermometer when you drain near a station, when you build around the instrument, pffuit, nothing, no effect at all.
Hi Zeke – In your analysis, there are a number of issues that were not examined in your paper. We overviewed most of these in our paper
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-321.pdf
Unfortunately, you ignored these issues in your paper (as has NCDC, in general). Anthony, in his preliminary comments, has already effectively summarized some of them.
In this comment on your paper, however, I just want to highlight one issue. That is, you and your co-authors have not assessed if the trends in absolute humidity between rural and urban locations are identical. If they are, than this eliminates an important uncertainly regarding your conclusions. However, if they are different, than in terms of using these trends as part of the construction of a global land average (or USA land average) in terms of global climate heat changes (“global warming”, will be misinterpreted. This issue is discussed in the papers
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, and J. Morgan, 2004: Assessing “global warming” with surface heat content. Eos, 85, No. 21, 210-211. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-290.pdf
Davey, C.A., R.A. Pielke Sr., and K.P. Gallo, 2006: Differences between near-surface equivalent temperature and temperature trends for the eastern United States – Equivalent temperature as an alternative measure of heat content. Global and Planetary Change, 54, 19–32. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-268.pdf
Fall, S., N. Diffenbaugh, D. Niyogi, R.A. Pielke Sr., and G. Rochon, 2010: Temperature and equivalent temperature over the United States (1979 – 2005). Int. J. Climatol., DOI: 10.1002/joc.2094. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2010/02/r-346.pdf
Peterson, T. C., K. M. Willett, and P. W. Thorne (2011), Observed changes in surface atmospheric energy over land, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L16707, doi:10.1029/2011GL048442
As we show in Figure 11 of
Pielke, R.A. Sr., K. Wolter, O. Bliss, N. Doesken, and B. McNoldy, 2007: The July 2005 Denver heat wave: How unusual was it? Nat. Wea. Dig., 31, 24-35. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2012/01/r-313.pdf
the dry bulb temperature can be quite high, but the actual heat content of the air could be lower than earlier in the day when there is more water vapor in the air.
Thus, your paper has ignored the issue of the effect of concurrent trends in absolute humidity. It would be remarkable if the rural and urban locations had the same trends.
Tilo Reber says:
February 14, 2013 at 1:39 pm
I have a free local TV Weather App on my smart phone where you can select different weather stations to get the conditions there, you can see the temp change between stations at your finger tips. I’ve compared the two closest (less than ~5 miles away), to the Airport, and the Airport is 2-5 degrees warmer. I’m sure there are hundreds of versions of this free app, and mine (WKYC) will call up the weather I think all over the world.
Zeke, I’ve noticed you’ve looked at T-min, T-max, etc. I worked from the NCDC’s Global Summary of Days 120M+ record set to determine today’s T-rise and subtract tonight’s T-fall at each station, then average T-diff from different stations across various areas. This rejects many of the sources of error with looking at T-min, or T-max alone because it’s an anomaly of measurements taken within 24hrs of each other.
What I’ve found is that the annual daily average Rise and Fall is ~18F each, it varies some from year to year over the last 60+ years, but the difference between the various years is slight, with no trend as Co2 has increased.
Basically with only slight variation, the night time temp drops as much as the temp went up during the previous day.
Also when you select very low humidity, minimal wind speeds and no rain over the 48hr period, the swing can be 40F up and down. Clearly Co2 isn’t reducing the ability to cool at night.
You can review this by following the link in my name, where I have a handful of blogs on the topic.
Tilo Reber,
Actually, NCDC’s method assumes that current temperature readings are the most accurate ones, and applies adjustments relative to those. So the MMTS adjustments do effectively cool the past (since MMTS max temps read ~0.4 C lower than CRS).
MMTS adjustments are made automatically using homogenization. TOBs adjustments can be as well (you get around the same result, e.g. in the Berkeley approach or in Williams et al 2012). As far as I know, the separate manual TOBs adjustment is somewhat of a legacy approach, and will likely be removed in the future provided they are satisfied that automated pair-wise methods can be as effective.
.
Dr. Pielke,
Thanks for your comment. Do you by chance know of a spatially-dense network of stations that have wet bulb and humidity readings over long period of time for the CONUS region? We were somewhat limited in our analysis to drybulb temperatures by lack of readily available data over the last 50-100 years, more than anything else. There could certainly be some interesting follow-up work looking at the humidity question in more detail.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
February 14, 2013 at 11:00 am
Very well said. Especially liked the tone.
jc says:
February 14, 2013 at 8:52 am
“Like in anything, the scientific community cannot stand apart, but it is possible with such a history of observable achievement, and the obligation of rigour that has to go with that, that the first signs, and strength, might come from within it. Its certainly hard to see the consumer classes being able to pull anything out of this.”
Enjoyed your posts greatly. I see science as the last bastion of reason in a civilization undermined by postmodern thought – which is little more than Derrida’s literary theories.
Zeke,
“So the MMTS adjustments do effectively cool the past (since MMTS max temps read ~0.4 C lower than CRS).”
Less than 0.1 ° C for Tavg much of which has nothing to do with the instrument itself. Very little is allocated. Especially in the case of PHA on rural only. None perturbation (considering your assumptions) can be invoked to explain negative jumps.
You have still a lot of work.
Hi Zeke – Regarding your question
“Thanks for your comment. Do you by chance know of a spatially-dense network of stations that have wet bulb and humidity readings over long period of time for the CONUS region? We were somewhat limited in our analysis to drybulb temperatures by lack of readily available data over the last 50-100 years, more than anything else. There could certainly be some interesting follow-up work looking at the humidity question in more detail.”
please see the data sources we used in the papers I listed.
Roger
@ur momisugly Crispin in Waterloo
“The ends justify the means” can probably be taken to be the definitive summation of the past 40 years. To those who register it, it is generally automatically taken to refer to “politics”. You are however dead right to draw the connection to individual values, mindset – which effects how things are seen, and even the capacity to see them – and behavior.
Such a mindset can only legitimize itself to someone who holds it by viewing those effected by any actions taken as being an enemy. Even there it has no validity since the means appropriate for dealing with an enemy differ in nature to those required in dealing with a member of the same cohort or society. Such an instinct is possessed only by those who cannot get what they want by means that are legitimate within the society they live in.
Within a society that is not openly at war internally, this is invariably expressed in deceit. Presenting things as other than they are, or ommiting that which should not be, with the intention of gaining advantage, has been completely normalised.
Thus to hide things rather than reveal them is standard. This is antithetical to any interaction in society happening in a manner that is of benefit to any but the deceiver. It is plainly evident in “Climate Science”. Reality can be hidden by distortion, withholding core information, or manipulation.
The most vivid illustration I have come across in this area of “climate science” is with the sea level data at Colorado. The claim that an adjustment is justified because “the land rose” is an extremity of deceit and degradation.
Sea level is just that: the level of the sea against the land. It is not sea depth, it is not sea volume, it is not sea area. It is not “what it would have been if something we claim has happened had not occurred”.
This claim is an assault on the capacity of anyone, including children, to have a grasp on reality. Every child has had an understanding of what sea level means. Now they don’t.
All of this is a direct and inevitable result of “the ends justifies the means” being in fact not a “political” strategy or abstraction but an expression of primaeval self-interest. Just because it expresses itself collectively does not change that. What vehicle it took to carry it here is a distraction and cammoflage in itself.
In a world of “the ends justifies the means” the publicly claimed end can never arrive; it is not actually the intention, and in any case can only create conditions that make any worthwhile end impossible.
There are only means and if these are not honest this is to the advantage of the intrinsically dishonest, and in a culture based on this self-interest, to the mediocre.
Behold “Climate Change”.
I think your comment on “accreditation mania” goes to a significant part of the problem as to how things play out not just in science but in all areas. It is not just the “devotees” relationship to those who hold paper, but the paper holders themselves, as you point out.
I suspect there is now a very large proportion of not just MBA’s but those in science and elsewhere, that actually do not have a grasp of the fundamental nature of what they are involved in. Instead, that they have been trained (point well taken about distinction from education) to apply a process and that the process is itself the point.
That is, the process is not a tool or protocol in service of seeking a truth, but that the process is the truth. This is a technicians role. And a good technician will offer more than that in any case.
This is the mentality of a lawyer. The Law may legitimize itself as being based on justice, but no lawyer I’ve ever met thinks that what they do is about justice. It is a system of administration that refers only to its own internal processes which may or may not deliver what might be seen as justice.
For a lawyer any proposition can be promoted if there is advantage to it. And this is seen to be legitimate. It has no values, is ratified as properly executed entirely by its own processes not by reference to any reality external to them, and has only an incidental relationship with its foundational basis.
Your analogy to the Titanic is very apt. There is no point to arguing the toss about seating arrangements. It is a symptom of the problem that people do.
Although many of these points we have exchanged will be seen as extraneous to science by many posters on the site, to me, and it seems to you and others, that these are basic.
Contrary to the aphorism, you can build on sand if properly dealt with by human intelligence. But you can’t build on the primaeval swamp.