Richard D says:
December 15, 2013 at 7:58 pm
The issue is whether you can comprehend something without the human sense to detect it. You say the sense is required. I say that comprehension often comes before our building the sensor that allow us to detect it and to transform the manifestation into a format useful to our senses.
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Its only been 4 billion years, if it wasn’t for that comet? 66 million years ago, things would be going according to plan.
There seemed to be comprehension and sensor/senses at that time.
How far back shall we go ?
@Mario Lento at 7:35 pm I get what you are saying – and it’s not what I was trying to get across. If people could not perceive sight none of this would be possible.
I think I get your bigger metaphysical idea. There are things we don’t understand and our present ideas of how to measure them are inadequate.
In addition to the common senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch,
We have a sense of humor. This is a first step into metaphysics.
There is also a sense of drama. What are the equations for that?
There are many other senses grounded in physics, biochemistry, and biomechanics. Some of these listed in the link above are
Pressure
Thermoception
Proprioception (knowing how your body parts are arranged.)
Nociception (Pain)
Muscular Tension
Stretch Receptors (but maybe this is a combination of Tension and Pain)
Equilibrioception (balance, acceleration, equilibrium)
Chemoreceptors: (hormones, drugs)
Thirst: (sense of hydration)
Hunger: (sense of blood chemistry and energy levels)
Magentoception: detection of magnetic fields.
Time: with what organ do we sense the passage of time? The brain.
Nothing says this list is exhaustive.
So I’ll nominate another: a Sense of Mystery
Some of the things that tickle my Sense of Mystery are.
The Lifecycle and Migration of the Monarch Butterfly.
The Reproductive cycle of Salmon.
The values of the 25 fundamental constants of the standard quantum model and why their combined values allow for a “just-right” universe where an Antropic Principle can be stated.
Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. — Han Solo.
That is why you fail. — Yoda.
There are things we do not understand.
There are more we do not grok.
“Wait for Fullness.” — Michael Smith.
Slartibartfast
December 16, 2013 6:41 am
I don’t believe Mosher is doing science at all but simply manipulating existing data.
Collecting and making sense of data is what science is all about, to a large extent. I can’t fault Mosher for doing what he does, personally. It’s what he says that I have a beef with.
That, and the glibness. If he isn’t going to put together a clear statement to argue counter to what’s being said here, he shouldn’t bother at all. IMO, of course.
But I don’t take “doing science” away from him for attempting to make sense of the data. If he’s doing it wrong, time will tell.
Stephen Rasey says:
December 15, 2013 at 11:01 pm
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Nicely stated. I think I cannot come up with things that I cannot sense/perceive because I am limited by the senses and perceptions that I have. That’s why I love science, which has afforded us the ability to sense things which are out of range, and touch –and to see how they work and interoperate. Our minds integrate “things” using combinations of other things which are sensed or perceived. My body is amazing in that it senses levels of sugar and Calcium flowing in my blood, and that triggers all sorts of other things to happen to maintain blood stasis, often times taking minerals from other areas of my body (which are apparently less crucial) to maintain the hierarchy. If blood pH falls below (7.2?) death is near. But I can live with porous bones a bit longer. When I’m angry, my stomach makes other chemicals which make it harder to digest, but which can magically summon me into a fright or flight reaction. We know that these things happen, but we cannot make these things by putting together all of the elements nearly as well as a live cell.
The universe is amazingly more complex than I can imagine it to be. I have never seen single atoms, but we can certainly see evidence of those tiny particles and make nice models to show how they react –in repeatable ways. So many building blocks of the universe act with perfectly precision and we’ve learned to harness their unwavering stubbornness to continue behavior in ways that are defined by Physics. Yet we still do not know why mass attracts mass in a way that we have defined it to be gravity. The universe plays by rules which seem to never break, and we can count on them. Who, what rules these (should I say) behaviors?
Perhaps, it is true that we humans are in fact endowed with all of the senses that are needed to describe our vast universe eventually in its entirety. Had I been born an earthworm, it’d make my understanding of the universe much simpler – perhaps it would be the lush composting garden that gave me a good life which is my wormy universe.
Richard D says: Perhaps fair? I honestly don’t know. Show me why….show your work. I have looked at BEST papers with Mosher as a coauthor and I know from this Blog’s owner A. Watts that his contribution was not insignificant.
What? That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Accountants work with a lot of data, that does not make them scientists.
Richard D
December 16, 2013 10:25 am
Poptech says: December 16, 2013 at 8:50 am
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I’ll take that as a no. You don’t have anything substantive to say about the science produced by BEST and its team of scientists including Mosher.
You’re a terrific thinker, writer, and user of the tools of science. That said, mankind has not the capability to comprehend subject matter beyond that which can be sensed by the limited sensory capabilities of the human physiology. Reading your well written prose, I get the sense that this idea is foreign.
On the contrary, I fully appreciate the fact that there are limitations to our brain’s ability to comprehend and cognitively and conceptually function. I write extensively about it, and struggle with the multicameral, multilayer brain and its oddities of function and dysfunction every day while trying to teach students who come in with a dazzling range of misperceptions, preconceptions, and cognitive styles. Also, note well, the progress of humanity away from Platonic Idealism — the notion that our ideas are some how more real than reality itself, that reality has to conform to our ideas of it when they are sufficiently dazzling instead of the other way around — towards an empirically well-founded ontology took place upon the broad shoulders of two devices — the microscope and the telescope — that extended the range of our limited sensory capabilities to the very small and nearby and to the very large and distant.
The former allowed us to see the actual causes of disease, and thereby realize that all of the manifold hypotheses of “bad air”, “demons”, “God’s will”, “curses”, and more that were advanced for the cause of any given illness were, however much sense they may have made in some myth-based ontology or even whether or not there was some degree of empirical agreement (you are more likely to get malaria in a swampy area than on a dry mountaintop, but not because of “bad air”), incorrect. The latter let is see that the sky is not a collection of transparent “spheres” surrounded by an opaque sphere pierced with holes through which the bright light of a surrounding “heaven” shines and through which God occasionally pours rain. It let us measure it dimensions and learn that our sun is a sphere almost a million miles across, and that those tiny lights are stars like the sun, some larger (MUCH larger) and some smaller, and that in the visible Universe there are hundreds of billions of galaxies each consisting of hundreds of billions of stars. When one looks at the sky with the Hubble, nearly every small light revealed in the deep field view it produces is a galaxy, not a star. These are the stars God supposedly made to “measure the seasons”.
All scientists are well aware of the limitations of the senses, and they work very hard to extend their range. Good scientists are further aware of the limitations of their own cognition and imagination and instrumentation, and are perfectly happy to postulate things like dark energy and dark matter that are literally invisible not only to our senses but to any sort of electromagnetic apparatus, or things like neutrinos or magnetic monopoles or Higgs particles that might (or do) exist but be very difficult to detect.
The difference is that a physicist understands that “belief” in dark matter or a monopole is both weak and strictly provisional unless or until one has solid evidence that they actually exist. It isn’t enough to say that they are a sufficient (or, in the case of monopoles, beautiful) explanation for some of the things we observe, therefore they must exist. Some of us have even read Plato’s parable of the cave. Some of us have even written our own version of Plato’s parable of the cave, or drawn parallels between this and elements of excellent works of speculative fiction such as “The Matrix” movie series.
It is entirely possible that the Cosmos that undeniably exists as something that is at least the actual process of our sensation if not the existential object consistently underlying our experience of sensation is all that there really is, that the Universe we can see (reasonably extended to the limits in length and time) is all that there is that has objective existence. It is entirely possible that the Cosmos we can see is only one of many, even an infinite number of Cosmi that collectively make up the Universe of all things, places, times that have objective existence. It is entirely possible that it is all a simulation (as it was presented to me in The Matrix) being presented to our minds by a fantastically powerful computer, and that everything we think we know is false — also the idea underlying Descartes’ “Evil Demon”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon. It is even possible that the Universe of our senses is being made up by us, that Solipsism is correct, or some pan-deific version such as Vedantic Hinduism, where Atman equals Brahman. It is possible that Chronos originally created Aether and Chaos and made a silvery egg in the Aether that exploded into the Cosmos. There is literally no end to the possible hypotheses capable of explaining our experience of “something” as opposed to the absolute void of no existence of anything anywhere anytime at all.
Given the awful infinity of possible explanations, the still awful infinity of possible explanations that can be made consistent with our observations and experience (often at the expense of considerable complexity, as one can explain absolutely anything with invisible fairies who make things work out the way we experience them because they feel like it), how are we to proceed to put together not only a good epistemlogy/ontology, but a defensibly best ontology, a best possible worldview? One possible answer is to believe whatever the hell you like, for no reason other than it makes you feel good or because you were taught it by your elders, or because believing it gives you status and advantage in our society. One possible answer is that we really don’t have a lot of choice in what we believe because, in the end, the system of belief we adopt isn’t one we actually chose and it contains internal memes that prevent you from discovering or objectively considering alternative schema for deciding what it is best to believe, given our experience.
My own conclusion regarding this question — which you can take for whatever it is worth, as of course you have to make your own choice(s), if you can — is that the rigorously defensible answer is believe the most what you can doubt the least, given your experience (the evidence) and the network of consistent evidence-based mutually supporting beliefs, when you try to doubt very hard. This is a succinct expression of the Cox axioms, as it were, as the basis for an ontology, and is of course the rigorous basis for the scientific worldview. It is also the rigorous basis for what we call “common sense” — it is silly to believe in things without a good reason to do so, and we should increase our degree of belief on the basis of positive evidence and decrease our degree of belief in negative evidence. If we increase our degree of belief in white, we must necessarily decrease our degree of belief in black if black and white are mutually exclusive hypotheses.
This allows me to at last make the final answer to the objection that you seem to raise above. You assert that we do not have the ability to comprehend things outside of our sensory experience. First of all, if that were true there would be no such thing as the discipline of mathematics or almost any capability for science or abstract thought. Indeed, I think it is almost the exact opposite of the case — we comprehend things outside of our immediate experience precisely because we are able to abstract non-sensory constructs that function consistently. Not just in the context of “explanations” — there would be no such thing as prose fiction (which I write), poetry (which I write), or the ability to invent any sort of new concept (which I on occasion do).
However, the real problem with this assertion is that is absolutely no help whatsoever with the terrible infinity of possibly correct notions, all of the notions we can think up and then all the rest that we cannot even think up because we lack the time or processing power or because there is some (hypothetical) barrier to our ability to correctly perceive the True Nature of Things. Lacking consistency and evidence, all of them are equally likely to be true and there are infinitely many of them so in some sense they are all equally unlikely to be true with a probability near zero. After all, even if God exists, all of the world’s religions could be incorrect and God could be nothing like anything we could imagine (literally) or nothing like anything we have imagined so far. And there are an infinite number of ways for this to occur, differing in details great and small, comprehensible or quite possibly incomprehensible. So why in the world should we give any particular invention of our imagination, without any empirical support, any particular weight, elevate it from a vagrant notion or clear work of fiction to the exalted status of something that we really believe is true for good, common sense reasons?
In The Matrix, Neo is perfectly happy living and working in what appears to be a perfectly normal world, right up to the moment that his particular experience gives him new evidence that consistently reveals that his entire world is a simulation built by a Cartesian Demon. At the end of the trilogy that entire world — right down to the Demon in it — is shown to be a simulation at a higher level. Do we believe in this, just because we’ve seen a movie that shows us how this could be possible? Would it be morally correct to believe in it just because it could be true? I think not. We may all live in Plato’s Cave, and our experiences may all be experiences of shadows cast on the wall of that cave, projections from some higher order reality with dimensions we cannot (yet?) comprehend, but we don’t make progress by just making up stories about what goes on in that reality without the very necessary constraint that a) the stories produce results that are consistent with those projected observations of those trapped in the cave; and b) the ability to predict something new, to understand new features in the behavior of the shadows because we look for them only after they are predicted by the inferred higher order reality that created the shadows.
Physicists are constantly working on that. Literally — many worlds interpretations of quantum theory, string theory in absurd numbers of hidden dimensions, and more are stories people invent to try to understand the behavior of the shadows on the wall of our cave (and the wall itself behind the shadows). We don’t believe in them (when we do) just because they are lovely stories — we believe in them when they work.
rgb
Richard D says: I’ll take that as a no. You don’t have anything substantive to say about the science produced by BEST and its team of scientists including Mosher.
Do you understand what a strawman argument is? I suggest you look it up. The “science” produced by the non-university affiliated, not for profit organization “BEST” and Mosher being a “scientist” are two entirely different arguments. Up until recently Mosher was titled an “open-source” volunteer.
It looks like I have to handle this is a more effective way.
Dear Mod,
I appreciate the intervention, and hope that last contribution is more along the lines of the fundamental philosophical basis of skepticism as a constructive tool in human epistemology. In that context, it isn’t entirely irrelevant to discussions of climate science, since a major issue is precisely the necessity of agreement between a complex tentative hypothesis and eventually observed contingent reality — that is, the theory has to make testable predictions and those predictions have to be realized in further observations. Believing in some assertion(s) because of the “beauty” of the hypothesis, or because of how the theory makes one feel (like, for example, someone who is Saving the World, or Doing the Right Thing), or because one derives an income or status or mating rights from social and political actions taken on the basis of the hypothesis, is often called religious belief, and not in a good way, in the context of science because the common factor in all of these is that the right reason to believe in something is because there is direct evidence that it is true, evidence that anybody can replicate or observe for themselves (with the right tools and methods). There are religious assertions (in this specific context) made with great frequency on both sides of the debate. Skeptics are accused of being the paid tools of the oil or coal industry, warmists are accused of making money or becoming famous as world savers — in both cases sometimes implying an underlying sincerity and sometimes not.
Since ethics often frequently comes into the discussion, it isn’t completely insane even to debate the ethics of the science (or the basis of ethics itself) either way. Do we, by inaction, damn the world to a fiery hell in a century (if CAGW is a true hypothesis) or do we, by acting to end it (if CAGW is not a true hypothesis), damn the world to an impoverished, disease-ridden hell right now? The argument is even directly formulated as Pascal’s Wager in new clothing.
That’s the only reason I originally replied. It is unreasonable — literally — to maintain a split standard for what we accept as probable truth. I could wax poetic about the many logical fallacies involved, from special pleading to begging the question, but in the end if one has a confused or dichotomous standard for what constitutes probably true belief, one is going to run a continuous risk of equally confused, internally contradictory, conclusions drawn on the basis of those beliefs.
rgb
My last word here. (If the Mods will allow. If they don’t, no problems on my end. The sometimes fuzzy line has become blurred.)
Many take a lack of a “natural” explanation of what is claimed as “supernatural” is proof that anything that is “supernatural” does not exist. There is no “natural” way to prove there is no such thing as “supernatural”.
My last word here. (If the Mods will allow. If they don’t, no problems on my end. The sometimes fuzzy line has become blurred.)
Many take a lack of a “natural” explanation of what is claimed as “supernatural” is proof that anything that is “supernatural” does not exist. There is no “natural” way to prove there is no such thing as “supernatural”.
Hey, the thread proper is played out AFAICT, so why not?
Or, we could take “nature” to be everything that has objectively real existence, which is a natural way to prove that there is no such thing as the supernatural. To put it another way, even if “magic” exists, it’s ultimately just another branch of physics. I’m happy to believe in fairies, as soon as somebody shows me that fairies are real. But if they’re real, they aren’t really supernatural. If demons exist, but exist in a completely separate Cosmos than this one, that too doesn’t make them supernatural, any more than the versions of physics that postulate multiple “universes” (a term I abhor, given that it oxymoronic) mean that quantum mechanics is supernatural.
Even if the LOTR Cosmos exists, complete with dark lords, magic rings, dragons — that isn’t supernature in that world, it is just a different sort of nature.
As for magic into this world, outside of the timeless quote about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic I’m afraid that I have to invoke the Randi Defense: Show me. Under rigorously controlled conditions. Until then, it is stage magic, not the real thing, until proven otherwise because believing anything else just makes you a mark for every shady con game in the world that exploits people’s desire to believe that the world they live in is something else entirely — a place of perfect justice (in spite of the deaths of countless children for entirely preventable reasons), a place where their misery now will be rewarded later by magical means to balance the scales, a place where if they do things just right they’ll continue to live on in an another world (or be reborn in this one — take your immortality straight up or serially, makes no difference) in spite of the fact that there isn’t a shred of reliable, double blind, placebo controlled, experimentally reproducible under rigorously controlled evidence that we do anything but die when we die and our brains (which support absolutely all of our cognitive functions in ways that incrementally disappear as we age, as we have accidents, as we have strokes in direct proportion to our damage of brain tissue) rot and return indeed to dust.
Everything we understand about cognition and awareness suggests that it is an enormously complex process supported by an enormously complex structure of physically interacting “stuff”, and that when that stuff breaks down and ceases to function, so do “we” (often before our physical bodies even die). If you ask someone how it is that their memory will continue to function or they will continue to be able to remain aware without the actual cells that encode their memory or the processes that represent their cognition running on them, not a single person can even begin to offer a coherent explanation or anything like evidence that any such thing happens. Yet ever so many people are certain that it does. I think there is a very simple explanation for why people are certain that it does. But it has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with psychology and cognitive dissonance.
Personally, I don’t find the idea of a permanent death particularly sad. However much I enjoy life — when I’m not in pain — I’ve lived through some awful deaths of those around me, deaths from a state of misery that nobody would want to endure long, especially when it is hopeless pain, pain and a degradation of the mind itself as it spirals down toward entropic extinction. I’ll no more care about being dead after I die than I cared about being dead before I was born. So far, I’ve had a pretty good life — I’ve been lucky even as I’ve watched countless others be unlucky. I’ve paid some dues in the form of serious pain and misery, but nothing like the pain that many others have experienced. If Janice thinks that I’m existing in a state of personal misery or unfulfilled angst or that I go out of my way too kick cats and dogs because I discovered that Jesus and the other religious worldviews and Science and its reason based worldview are pretty much orthogonal no matter how many people claim (without evidence or even a coherent argument, of course) otherwise, well, neither one is true. I try to lead a good life and harm no one and help as many as I reasonably can.
And gee, I manage to do it without any desire for the carrot of infinite life or communion with God or whatever the current benefit is, or out of fear of the stick of equally infinite punishment in a horrific chamber of tortures or being reborn as an intestinal parasite. I (as did Buddha and many others of passing wisdom) kind of think both are the inventions of the manifold priesthoods of the world seeking to extort compliance with the rules of their religion, however eagerly they are embraced by people seeking an easy way to avoid the truths that their own eyes can see and their own minds comprehend. The incomprehensible is a lot easier, especially if you’re proud of its incomprehensibility and it will provide for you — somehow, incomprehensibly — all sorts of benefits, only don’t ask for any proof that it in fact does or will because there isn’t any. It’s a mystery. Mankind isn’t supposed to understand. Etc. I can really easily understand how my brain’s destruction equals the death of my personal consciousness. That one is bone simple. Explain any alternative, please? Right, a mystery.
rgb
mwgrant
December 16, 2013 6:10 pm
rgbatduke said: Hey, the thread proper is played out AFAICT…
No, it was pretty much suffocated, and that is unfortunate.
Richard D
December 16, 2013 6:21 pm
“in spite of the deaths of countless children for entirely preventable reasons”
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Right and a thought…..A particularly galling argument flaunted by greens is that we don’t want to risk the predicted effects of CO2 induced warming down the line. Yet we’re guaranteed to incur the full cost of green energy policies presently and (as you’ve argued elsewhere in these threads) disproportionately on the weakest, poorest and most vulnerable in the third world. These people desperately need fuel and electricity, clean water, adequate food, vaccination, etc., basics that elites take for granted. Where’s the justice or morality in that?
rgbatduke says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:36 pm
“I’m happy to believe in fairies, as soon as somebody shows me that fairies are real.”
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I feel like I am going into the field of philosophy. Whether or not you are shown that fairies are real has no being on whether they are. Hey – and if they are not real, then how do you explain fairy dust? That last sentence used my sense of humor, which I hope you appreciate.
Mario Lento says:
December 16, 2013 at 6:50 pm
rgbatduke says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:36 pm
“I’m happy to believe in fairies, as soon as somebody shows me that fairies are real.”
++++++++++
I feel like I am going into the field of philosophy. Whether or not you are shown that fairies are real has no being on whether they are. Hey – and if they are not real, then how do you explain fairy dust? That last sentence used my sense of humor, which I hope you appreciate.
========================================================================
Perhaps it would have been BEST if Hansen had blamed fairy dust instead of CO2? They’ve both had about the same effect on CAGW.
Richard D
December 16, 2013 7:52 pm
Poptech says: December 16, 2013 at 8:50 am
What? That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Accountants work with a lot of data, that does not make them scientists.
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So is Dr. Judith Curry an accountant too or is she a scientist, Poptech? Keep in mind she’s a BEST co-author along with Steven Mosher, and others.
BTW, I found this interesting over at climate etc.:
JC comments: “The epistemology of computer simulations is a growing subspecialty in the philosophy of science, and we are even seeing the development of a community of philosophers of science that focus on climate modeling”. …… http://judithcurry.com/2013/12/16/how-far-should-we-trust-models/
Richard D says: So is Dr. Judith Curry an accountant too or is she a scientist, Poptech? Keep in mind she’s a BEST co-author along with Steven Mosher, and others.
Dr. Curry has two science degrees, including a Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences and has been employed her entire life as a scientist. http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/files/currycv.pdf
Mr. Mosher doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree in science and has spent his entire career in marketing.
So your argument is ridiculous.
Mosher is a Scientist. That is just anyone who follows the scientific method of enquiry. Being a scientist does not make you right, just more systematic and with a bit better long term QA filter. (Usually provided by others; and if very famous, often only after death…)
So, roughly, make a guess, gather data, TEST if the data show your guess is right or wrong. Make a new guess or gather more data and repeat…
So, roughly, make a guess, gather data, TEST if the data show your guess is right or wrong. Make a new guess or gather more data and repeat…
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And if the models don’t agree with observations, it’s the crap data.
Richard D
December 16, 2013 10:41 pm
Poptech says: December 16, 2013 at 8:14 pm
So your argument is ridiculous.
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Go study Kant. Be prepared to examine the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics.
There are too many unanswered questions on this thread for it to play out. Bill Illis at 12/12 2:28 pm
What we need is a histogram of the breakpoints identified and pulled out.
For example, how many and what weight were the temperature decline breakpoints versus how many were temperature increase breakpoints.
…
We are talking about a huge number of breakpoints here; on average, about 8 per individual station. TimTheToolMan at 12/12 2:37 pm Mosher writes “We dont adjust data. We identify breakpoints and slice.”
Its a valiant effort. But at the end of the day there is simply no substitute for a proper understanding of a temperature station that statistics simply cant supply. For example a tree growing near to a weather staion increasingly casts its shadow over the area and then one day gets cut down. Voila breakpoint. But without understanding the reality of the weather station environment how do you interpret that? James Allison at 12/12 5:06 pm
@Steven Mosher says: For the benefit of the ignorant among us (especially me) would you kindly post your explanation about how this all works? Stephen Rasey at 12/12 8:32 pm Temperature segments, if they have any reality at all, ought to be most trustworthy at the beginning of the segment when a record segment begins. Its error range should be smallest at the point of maintenance, recalibration, or station move. The potential error should be is largest at the end of each segment. A non-uniform standard deviation that is a function of time, requires unusual mathematics of the statistics and estimations of the trends. What did BEST assume about the standard deviation of the data as a function of time? Stephen Rasey at 12/13 8:12 am
@Steven Mosher at 10:20 pm Let’s take a more realistic example of #1.
You have a Stevenson screen at an airport.
The Stevenson screen gets moved to another place at the airport because airport expansion and growth in activity over the years reduced the siting criteria from a Class 2 to a Class 5. The screen’s new location is now a Class 1. SHOULD it be a split? In my book, it is a much tougher call because the act of moving the station is one of recalibration and restoration of the long term local climate. Preservation of low frequency data content is paramount, so the bias should be to not split the record
How many temperature stations are in the BEST dataset?
What percentage of them have already been adjusted by others?
How many breakpoints (slices) did BEST create on that dataset?
What is the distribution of segment lengths after the breakpoints are applied?
(What is the histogram of segment lengths in bins of 2 year widths. )
What is the average lenght of segment? I’ve read report that it is 12 years.
When the segment slopes are subject to krieging, is there a weighting in the estimated trend that give greater weight to longer segment lengths?
Jason Bates at 12/13 10:20 am ….The adjustment process – whatever it may be – significantly alters the trend of the raw data…..
Therefore, there is something that is biasing the raw data in a systematic way. This leads me to my questions: first, what is biasing the raw data in a systematic way which would justify alteration of the trend? And second, given that the noise in the raw data is systematically biased, what justification is there for assuming that averaging, kriging, slicing, or any combination of those will correcly identify and rectify it? mwgrant at 12/13 12:03 pm ” Thus, there must be an additional source of bias – and one that is stronger than the known bias of the UHI. What is it?”
This is pulling on a thread that has been bugging me–in an interest way, not bad way. Locales with UHI tend to be in well-sampled’ urban areas. Because these areas are preferentially sampled they are over-represented in the overall sample population. (This is entirely separate from the UHI.) It would seem that detailed care is needed to sift thru and ‘sort’ the numbers in these areas where both effects are potentially skewing estimation of a global average. Mario Lento at 12/13 3:27 pm @ur momisuglySteven Mosher at 12/12 10:53 pm There’s so much wrong here.
Regarding “3. Next I wanted to use methods suggested by skeptics”
When did skeptics say the stations with poor siting should be subjectively sliced and added to mix so their warming could fit the narrative?
Neither BEST nor you have ever honestly addressed why “if only urban areas show warming, while rural areas don’t, that you could slice (in?) the poorly sited urban stations to make their “crap” value warm the entire temperature record. E.M.Smith at 12/13 7:27 pm @ur momisugly Steven Mosher at 12/12 10:22 pm I’m sticking with fundamental properties of the universe, thank you. So I don’t really care if you use Kriging or Averaging or how you manufacture your “field”. At the outset the fundamental philosophy of the process is broken. There simply can not be a “global average temperature” so it can not rise nor fall. For that you want to claim I don’t understand your “process”?When from the very foundation it is a fools errand of fundamental impossibility? Just who is not understanding what can and can not be done with intrinsic properties? Hmmm? Stephen Rasey at 12/15 12:19 am @ur momisuglyZeke Hausfather at Dec 13, 6:32 pm Like Sleepalot says, 40,000 stations for what time frame?
I ask again,
How many segments have those 40,000 station been sliced into?
What is the distribution of segment lengths?
What percent of segments are shorter than 10 years? Shorter than 20 years?
Do long segments get greater weight than short segments in the kriging?
While we are at it,…. Suppose we have a month with 30 straight days of 10 C lows and 20 C highs. Mean is 15 C for 30 days straight.
What is the mean standard error of the monthly mean with 30 days of 15 C daily means?
Stephen Rasey at 12/15 12:49 pm @ur momisuglyZeke Hausfather at Dec 13, 6:32 pm
Dumb Question #1: …..
So what is closer to the truth?
(A) where you have 40,747 stations thermometer records you slice into 200,000 segments or
(B) you have fewer than 10,000 thermometer locations you slice into 40,747 “stations.”
Dumb question #2: RE: Iceland 1885 to 1940, there are 3 stations with years where it drops to two.
When yoiu have a partial year, either as a start up, shut down, or drop out for a few weeks, what is the criteria for counting it? At least half a year?
[]
So 1755 to 1870 Iceland trends come from thermometers 500 to 2000 km away from Iceland over open, Gulf Stream warmed, ocean. Why do you do this?
Richard D says: Go study Kant. Be prepared to examine the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics.
More nonsense because you cannot rationally argue your point. Either the label “scientist” has a real meaning or it does not. If anyone can be a scientist by simply declaring themselves one, then the word is meaningless.
Can anyone be called a medical doctor?
Richard D says:
December 15, 2013 at 7:58 pm
The issue is whether you can comprehend something without the human sense to detect it. You say the sense is required. I say that comprehension often comes before our building the sensor that allow us to detect it and to transform the manifestation into a format useful to our senses.
=================
Its only been 4 billion years, if it wasn’t for that comet? 66 million years ago, things would be going according to plan.
There seemed to be comprehension and sensor/senses at that time.
How far back shall we go ?
@Mario Lento at 7:35 pm
I get what you are saying – and it’s not what I was trying to get across. If people could not perceive sight none of this would be possible.
I think I get your bigger metaphysical idea. There are things we don’t understand and our present ideas of how to measure them are inadequate.
In addition to the common senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch,
We have a sense of humor. This is a first step into metaphysics.
There is also a sense of drama. What are the equations for that?
There are many other senses grounded in physics, biochemistry, and biomechanics. Some of these listed in the link above are
Pressure
Thermoception
Proprioception (knowing how your body parts are arranged.)
Nociception (Pain)
Muscular Tension
Stretch Receptors (but maybe this is a combination of Tension and Pain)
Equilibrioception (balance, acceleration, equilibrium)
Chemoreceptors: (hormones, drugs)
Thirst: (sense of hydration)
Hunger: (sense of blood chemistry and energy levels)
Magentoception: detection of magnetic fields.
Time: with what organ do we sense the passage of time? The brain.
Nothing says this list is exhaustive.
So I’ll nominate another: a Sense of Mystery
Some of the things that tickle my Sense of Mystery are.
The Lifecycle and Migration of the Monarch Butterfly.
The Reproductive cycle of Salmon.
The values of the 25 fundamental constants of the standard quantum model and why their combined values allow for a “just-right” universe where an Antropic Principle can be stated.
There are things we do not understand.
There are more we do not grok.
“Wait for Fullness.” — Michael Smith.
Collecting and making sense of data is what science is all about, to a large extent. I can’t fault Mosher for doing what he does, personally. It’s what he says that I have a beef with.
That, and the glibness. If he isn’t going to put together a clear statement to argue counter to what’s being said here, he shouldn’t bother at all. IMO, of course.
But I don’t take “doing science” away from him for attempting to make sense of the data. If he’s doing it wrong, time will tell.
Stephen Rasey says:
December 15, 2013 at 11:01 pm
++++++++
Nicely stated. I think I cannot come up with things that I cannot sense/perceive because I am limited by the senses and perceptions that I have. That’s why I love science, which has afforded us the ability to sense things which are out of range, and touch –and to see how they work and interoperate. Our minds integrate “things” using combinations of other things which are sensed or perceived. My body is amazing in that it senses levels of sugar and Calcium flowing in my blood, and that triggers all sorts of other things to happen to maintain blood stasis, often times taking minerals from other areas of my body (which are apparently less crucial) to maintain the hierarchy. If blood pH falls below (7.2?) death is near. But I can live with porous bones a bit longer. When I’m angry, my stomach makes other chemicals which make it harder to digest, but which can magically summon me into a fright or flight reaction. We know that these things happen, but we cannot make these things by putting together all of the elements nearly as well as a live cell.
The universe is amazingly more complex than I can imagine it to be. I have never seen single atoms, but we can certainly see evidence of those tiny particles and make nice models to show how they react –in repeatable ways. So many building blocks of the universe act with perfectly precision and we’ve learned to harness their unwavering stubbornness to continue behavior in ways that are defined by Physics. Yet we still do not know why mass attracts mass in a way that we have defined it to be gravity. The universe plays by rules which seem to never break, and we can count on them. Who, what rules these (should I say) behaviors?
Perhaps, it is true that we humans are in fact endowed with all of the senses that are needed to describe our vast universe eventually in its entirety. Had I been born an earthworm, it’d make my understanding of the universe much simpler – perhaps it would be the lush composting garden that gave me a good life which is my wormy universe.
What? That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Accountants work with a lot of data, that does not make them scientists.
Poptech says: December 16, 2013 at 8:50 am
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I’ll take that as a no. You don’t have anything substantive to say about the science produced by BEST and its team of scientists including Mosher.
You’re a terrific thinker, writer, and user of the tools of science. That said, mankind has not the capability to comprehend subject matter beyond that which can be sensed by the limited sensory capabilities of the human physiology. Reading your well written prose, I get the sense that this idea is foreign.
On the contrary, I fully appreciate the fact that there are limitations to our brain’s ability to comprehend and cognitively and conceptually function. I write extensively about it, and struggle with the multicameral, multilayer brain and its oddities of function and dysfunction every day while trying to teach students who come in with a dazzling range of misperceptions, preconceptions, and cognitive styles. Also, note well, the progress of humanity away from Platonic Idealism — the notion that our ideas are some how more real than reality itself, that reality has to conform to our ideas of it when they are sufficiently dazzling instead of the other way around — towards an empirically well-founded ontology took place upon the broad shoulders of two devices — the microscope and the telescope — that extended the range of our limited sensory capabilities to the very small and nearby and to the very large and distant.
The former allowed us to see the actual causes of disease, and thereby realize that all of the manifold hypotheses of “bad air”, “demons”, “God’s will”, “curses”, and more that were advanced for the cause of any given illness were, however much sense they may have made in some myth-based ontology or even whether or not there was some degree of empirical agreement (you are more likely to get malaria in a swampy area than on a dry mountaintop, but not because of “bad air”), incorrect. The latter let is see that the sky is not a collection of transparent “spheres” surrounded by an opaque sphere pierced with holes through which the bright light of a surrounding “heaven” shines and through which God occasionally pours rain. It let us measure it dimensions and learn that our sun is a sphere almost a million miles across, and that those tiny lights are stars like the sun, some larger (MUCH larger) and some smaller, and that in the visible Universe there are hundreds of billions of galaxies each consisting of hundreds of billions of stars. When one looks at the sky with the Hubble, nearly every small light revealed in the deep field view it produces is a galaxy, not a star. These are the stars God supposedly made to “measure the seasons”.
All scientists are well aware of the limitations of the senses, and they work very hard to extend their range. Good scientists are further aware of the limitations of their own cognition and imagination and instrumentation, and are perfectly happy to postulate things like dark energy and dark matter that are literally invisible not only to our senses but to any sort of electromagnetic apparatus, or things like neutrinos or magnetic monopoles or Higgs particles that might (or do) exist but be very difficult to detect.
The difference is that a physicist understands that “belief” in dark matter or a monopole is both weak and strictly provisional unless or until one has solid evidence that they actually exist. It isn’t enough to say that they are a sufficient (or, in the case of monopoles, beautiful) explanation for some of the things we observe, therefore they must exist. Some of us have even read Plato’s parable of the cave. Some of us have even written our own version of Plato’s parable of the cave, or drawn parallels between this and elements of excellent works of speculative fiction such as “The Matrix” movie series.
It is entirely possible that the Cosmos that undeniably exists as something that is at least the actual process of our sensation if not the existential object consistently underlying our experience of sensation is all that there really is, that the Universe we can see (reasonably extended to the limits in length and time) is all that there is that has objective existence. It is entirely possible that the Cosmos we can see is only one of many, even an infinite number of Cosmi that collectively make up the Universe of all things, places, times that have objective existence. It is entirely possible that it is all a simulation (as it was presented to me in The Matrix) being presented to our minds by a fantastically powerful computer, and that everything we think we know is false — also the idea underlying Descartes’ “Evil Demon”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon. It is even possible that the Universe of our senses is being made up by us, that Solipsism is correct, or some pan-deific version such as Vedantic Hinduism, where Atman equals Brahman. It is possible that Chronos originally created Aether and Chaos and made a silvery egg in the Aether that exploded into the Cosmos. There is literally no end to the possible hypotheses capable of explaining our experience of “something” as opposed to the absolute void of no existence of anything anywhere anytime at all.
Given the awful infinity of possible explanations, the still awful infinity of possible explanations that can be made consistent with our observations and experience (often at the expense of considerable complexity, as one can explain absolutely anything with invisible fairies who make things work out the way we experience them because they feel like it), how are we to proceed to put together not only a good epistemlogy/ontology, but a defensibly best ontology, a best possible worldview? One possible answer is to believe whatever the hell you like, for no reason other than it makes you feel good or because you were taught it by your elders, or because believing it gives you status and advantage in our society. One possible answer is that we really don’t have a lot of choice in what we believe because, in the end, the system of belief we adopt isn’t one we actually chose and it contains internal memes that prevent you from discovering or objectively considering alternative schema for deciding what it is best to believe, given our experience.
My own conclusion regarding this question — which you can take for whatever it is worth, as of course you have to make your own choice(s), if you can — is that the rigorously defensible answer is believe the most what you can doubt the least, given your experience (the evidence) and the network of consistent evidence-based mutually supporting beliefs, when you try to doubt very hard. This is a succinct expression of the Cox axioms, as it were, as the basis for an ontology, and is of course the rigorous basis for the scientific worldview. It is also the rigorous basis for what we call “common sense” — it is silly to believe in things without a good reason to do so, and we should increase our degree of belief on the basis of positive evidence and decrease our degree of belief in negative evidence. If we increase our degree of belief in white, we must necessarily decrease our degree of belief in black if black and white are mutually exclusive hypotheses.
This allows me to at last make the final answer to the objection that you seem to raise above. You assert that we do not have the ability to comprehend things outside of our sensory experience. First of all, if that were true there would be no such thing as the discipline of mathematics or almost any capability for science or abstract thought. Indeed, I think it is almost the exact opposite of the case — we comprehend things outside of our immediate experience precisely because we are able to abstract non-sensory constructs that function consistently. Not just in the context of “explanations” — there would be no such thing as prose fiction (which I write), poetry (which I write), or the ability to invent any sort of new concept (which I on occasion do).
However, the real problem with this assertion is that is absolutely no help whatsoever with the terrible infinity of possibly correct notions, all of the notions we can think up and then all the rest that we cannot even think up because we lack the time or processing power or because there is some (hypothetical) barrier to our ability to correctly perceive the True Nature of Things. Lacking consistency and evidence, all of them are equally likely to be true and there are infinitely many of them so in some sense they are all equally unlikely to be true with a probability near zero. After all, even if God exists, all of the world’s religions could be incorrect and God could be nothing like anything we could imagine (literally) or nothing like anything we have imagined so far. And there are an infinite number of ways for this to occur, differing in details great and small, comprehensible or quite possibly incomprehensible. So why in the world should we give any particular invention of our imagination, without any empirical support, any particular weight, elevate it from a vagrant notion or clear work of fiction to the exalted status of something that we really believe is true for good, common sense reasons?
In The Matrix, Neo is perfectly happy living and working in what appears to be a perfectly normal world, right up to the moment that his particular experience gives him new evidence that consistently reveals that his entire world is a simulation built by a Cartesian Demon. At the end of the trilogy that entire world — right down to the Demon in it — is shown to be a simulation at a higher level. Do we believe in this, just because we’ve seen a movie that shows us how this could be possible? Would it be morally correct to believe in it just because it could be true? I think not. We may all live in Plato’s Cave, and our experiences may all be experiences of shadows cast on the wall of that cave, projections from some higher order reality with dimensions we cannot (yet?) comprehend, but we don’t make progress by just making up stories about what goes on in that reality without the very necessary constraint that a) the stories produce results that are consistent with those projected observations of those trapped in the cave; and b) the ability to predict something new, to understand new features in the behavior of the shadows because we look for them only after they are predicted by the inferred higher order reality that created the shadows.
Physicists are constantly working on that. Literally — many worlds interpretations of quantum theory, string theory in absurd numbers of hidden dimensions, and more are stories people invent to try to understand the behavior of the shadows on the wall of our cave (and the wall itself behind the shadows). We don’t believe in them (when we do) just because they are lovely stories — we believe in them when they work.
rgb
Do you understand what a strawman argument is? I suggest you look it up. The “science” produced by the non-university affiliated, not for profit organization “BEST” and Mosher being a “scientist” are two entirely different arguments. Up until recently Mosher was titled an “open-source” volunteer.
It looks like I have to handle this is a more effective way.
Dear Mod,
I appreciate the intervention, and hope that last contribution is more along the lines of the fundamental philosophical basis of skepticism as a constructive tool in human epistemology. In that context, it isn’t entirely irrelevant to discussions of climate science, since a major issue is precisely the necessity of agreement between a complex tentative hypothesis and eventually observed contingent reality — that is, the theory has to make testable predictions and those predictions have to be realized in further observations. Believing in some assertion(s) because of the “beauty” of the hypothesis, or because of how the theory makes one feel (like, for example, someone who is Saving the World, or Doing the Right Thing), or because one derives an income or status or mating rights from social and political actions taken on the basis of the hypothesis, is often called religious belief, and not in a good way, in the context of science because the common factor in all of these is that the right reason to believe in something is because there is direct evidence that it is true, evidence that anybody can replicate or observe for themselves (with the right tools and methods). There are religious assertions (in this specific context) made with great frequency on both sides of the debate. Skeptics are accused of being the paid tools of the oil or coal industry, warmists are accused of making money or becoming famous as world savers — in both cases sometimes implying an underlying sincerity and sometimes not.
Since ethics often frequently comes into the discussion, it isn’t completely insane even to debate the ethics of the science (or the basis of ethics itself) either way. Do we, by inaction, damn the world to a fiery hell in a century (if CAGW is a true hypothesis) or do we, by acting to end it (if CAGW is not a true hypothesis), damn the world to an impoverished, disease-ridden hell right now? The argument is even directly formulated as Pascal’s Wager in new clothing.
That’s the only reason I originally replied. It is unreasonable — literally — to maintain a split standard for what we accept as probable truth. I could wax poetic about the many logical fallacies involved, from special pleading to begging the question, but in the end if one has a confused or dichotomous standard for what constitutes probably true belief, one is going to run a continuous risk of equally confused, internally contradictory, conclusions drawn on the basis of those beliefs.
rgb
My last word here. (If the Mods will allow. If they don’t, no problems on my end. The sometimes fuzzy line has become blurred.)
Many take a lack of a “natural” explanation of what is claimed as “supernatural” is proof that anything that is “supernatural” does not exist. There is no “natural” way to prove there is no such thing as “supernatural”.
Gunga Din says:
December 16, 2013 at 3:16 pm
+++++++
Amen – I could not resist.
My last word here. (If the Mods will allow. If they don’t, no problems on my end. The sometimes fuzzy line has become blurred.)
Many take a lack of a “natural” explanation of what is claimed as “supernatural” is proof that anything that is “supernatural” does not exist. There is no “natural” way to prove there is no such thing as “supernatural”.
Hey, the thread proper is played out AFAICT, so why not?
Or, we could take “nature” to be everything that has objectively real existence, which is a natural way to prove that there is no such thing as the supernatural. To put it another way, even if “magic” exists, it’s ultimately just another branch of physics. I’m happy to believe in fairies, as soon as somebody shows me that fairies are real. But if they’re real, they aren’t really supernatural. If demons exist, but exist in a completely separate Cosmos than this one, that too doesn’t make them supernatural, any more than the versions of physics that postulate multiple “universes” (a term I abhor, given that it oxymoronic) mean that quantum mechanics is supernatural.
Even if the LOTR Cosmos exists, complete with dark lords, magic rings, dragons — that isn’t supernature in that world, it is just a different sort of nature.
As for magic into this world, outside of the timeless quote about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic I’m afraid that I have to invoke the Randi Defense: Show me. Under rigorously controlled conditions. Until then, it is stage magic, not the real thing, until proven otherwise because believing anything else just makes you a mark for every shady con game in the world that exploits people’s desire to believe that the world they live in is something else entirely — a place of perfect justice (in spite of the deaths of countless children for entirely preventable reasons), a place where their misery now will be rewarded later by magical means to balance the scales, a place where if they do things just right they’ll continue to live on in an another world (or be reborn in this one — take your immortality straight up or serially, makes no difference) in spite of the fact that there isn’t a shred of reliable, double blind, placebo controlled, experimentally reproducible under rigorously controlled evidence that we do anything but die when we die and our brains (which support absolutely all of our cognitive functions in ways that incrementally disappear as we age, as we have accidents, as we have strokes in direct proportion to our damage of brain tissue) rot and return indeed to dust.
Everything we understand about cognition and awareness suggests that it is an enormously complex process supported by an enormously complex structure of physically interacting “stuff”, and that when that stuff breaks down and ceases to function, so do “we” (often before our physical bodies even die). If you ask someone how it is that their memory will continue to function or they will continue to be able to remain aware without the actual cells that encode their memory or the processes that represent their cognition running on them, not a single person can even begin to offer a coherent explanation or anything like evidence that any such thing happens. Yet ever so many people are certain that it does. I think there is a very simple explanation for why people are certain that it does. But it has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with psychology and cognitive dissonance.
Personally, I don’t find the idea of a permanent death particularly sad. However much I enjoy life — when I’m not in pain — I’ve lived through some awful deaths of those around me, deaths from a state of misery that nobody would want to endure long, especially when it is hopeless pain, pain and a degradation of the mind itself as it spirals down toward entropic extinction. I’ll no more care about being dead after I die than I cared about being dead before I was born. So far, I’ve had a pretty good life — I’ve been lucky even as I’ve watched countless others be unlucky. I’ve paid some dues in the form of serious pain and misery, but nothing like the pain that many others have experienced. If Janice thinks that I’m existing in a state of personal misery or unfulfilled angst or that I go out of my way too kick cats and dogs because I discovered that Jesus and the other religious worldviews and Science and its reason based worldview are pretty much orthogonal no matter how many people claim (without evidence or even a coherent argument, of course) otherwise, well, neither one is true. I try to lead a good life and harm no one and help as many as I reasonably can.
And gee, I manage to do it without any desire for the carrot of infinite life or communion with God or whatever the current benefit is, or out of fear of the stick of equally infinite punishment in a horrific chamber of tortures or being reborn as an intestinal parasite. I (as did Buddha and many others of passing wisdom) kind of think both are the inventions of the manifold priesthoods of the world seeking to extort compliance with the rules of their religion, however eagerly they are embraced by people seeking an easy way to avoid the truths that their own eyes can see and their own minds comprehend. The incomprehensible is a lot easier, especially if you’re proud of its incomprehensibility and it will provide for you — somehow, incomprehensibly — all sorts of benefits, only don’t ask for any proof that it in fact does or will because there isn’t any. It’s a mystery. Mankind isn’t supposed to understand. Etc. I can really easily understand how my brain’s destruction equals the death of my personal consciousness. That one is bone simple. Explain any alternative, please? Right, a mystery.
rgb
rgbatduke said:
Hey, the thread proper is played out AFAICT…
No, it was pretty much suffocated, and that is unfortunate.
“in spite of the deaths of countless children for entirely preventable reasons”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Right and a thought…..A particularly galling argument flaunted by greens is that we don’t want to risk the predicted effects of CO2 induced warming down the line. Yet we’re guaranteed to incur the full cost of green energy policies presently and (as you’ve argued elsewhere in these threads) disproportionately on the weakest, poorest and most vulnerable in the third world. These people desperately need fuel and electricity, clean water, adequate food, vaccination, etc., basics that elites take for granted. Where’s the justice or morality in that?
rgbatduke says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:36 pm
“I’m happy to believe in fairies, as soon as somebody shows me that fairies are real.”
++++++++++
I feel like I am going into the field of philosophy. Whether or not you are shown that fairies are real has no being on whether they are. Hey – and if they are not real, then how do you explain fairy dust? That last sentence used my sense of humor, which I hope you appreciate.
========================================================================
Perhaps it would have been BEST if Hansen had blamed fairy dust instead of CO2? They’ve both had about the same effect on CAGW.
Poptech says: December 16, 2013 at 8:50 am
What? That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Accountants work with a lot of data, that does not make them scientists.
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So is Dr. Judith Curry an accountant too or is she a scientist, Poptech? Keep in mind she’s a BEST co-author along with Steven Mosher, and others.
BTW, I found this interesting over at climate etc.:
JC comments: “The epistemology of computer simulations is a growing subspecialty in the philosophy of science, and we are even seeing the development of a community of philosophers of science that focus on climate modeling”. …… http://judithcurry.com/2013/12/16/how-far-should-we-trust-models/
Dr. Curry has two science degrees, including a Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences and has been employed her entire life as a scientist. http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/files/currycv.pdf
Mr. Mosher doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree in science and has spent his entire career in marketing.
So your argument is ridiculous.
Mosher is a Scientist. That is just anyone who follows the scientific method of enquiry. Being a scientist does not make you right, just more systematic and with a bit better long term QA filter. (Usually provided by others; and if very famous, often only after death…)
So, roughly, make a guess, gather data, TEST if the data show your guess is right or wrong. Make a new guess or gather more data and repeat…
So you are a scientist too? I guess everyone is a scientist now.
So, roughly, make a guess, gather data, TEST if the data show your guess is right or wrong. Make a new guess or gather more data and repeat…
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And if the models don’t agree with observations, it’s the crap data.
Poptech says: December 16, 2013 at 8:14 pm
So your argument is ridiculous.
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Go study Kant. Be prepared to examine the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics.
There are too many unanswered questions on this thread for it to play out.
Bill Illis at 12/12 2:28 pm
What we need is a histogram of the breakpoints identified and pulled out.
For example, how many and what weight were the temperature decline breakpoints versus how many were temperature increase breakpoints.
…
We are talking about a huge number of breakpoints here; on average, about 8 per individual station.
TimTheToolMan at 12/12 2:37 pm
Mosher writes “We dont adjust data. We identify breakpoints and slice.”
Its a valiant effort. But at the end of the day there is simply no substitute for a proper understanding of a temperature station that statistics simply cant supply. For example a tree growing near to a weather staion increasingly casts its shadow over the area and then one day gets cut down. Voila breakpoint. But without understanding the reality of the weather station environment how do you interpret that?
James Allison at 12/12 5:06 pm
@Steven Mosher says:
For the benefit of the ignorant among us (especially me) would you kindly post your explanation about how this all works?
Stephen Rasey at 12/12 8:32 pm
Temperature segments, if they have any reality at all, ought to be most trustworthy at the beginning of the segment when a record segment begins. Its error range should be smallest at the point of maintenance, recalibration, or station move. The potential error should be is largest at the end of each segment. A non-uniform standard deviation that is a function of time, requires unusual mathematics of the statistics and estimations of the trends. What did BEST assume about the standard deviation of the data as a function of time?
Stephen Rasey at 12/13 8:12 am
@Steven Mosher at 10:20 pm
Let’s take a more realistic example of #1.
You have a Stevenson screen at an airport.
The Stevenson screen gets moved to another place at the airport because airport expansion and growth in activity over the years reduced the siting criteria from a Class 2 to a Class 5. The screen’s new location is now a Class 1. SHOULD it be a split? In my book, it is a much tougher call because the act of moving the station is one of recalibration and restoration of the long term local climate. Preservation of low frequency data content is paramount, so the bias should be to not split the record
How many temperature stations are in the BEST dataset?
What percentage of them have already been adjusted by others?
How many breakpoints (slices) did BEST create on that dataset?
What is the distribution of segment lengths after the breakpoints are applied?
(What is the histogram of segment lengths in bins of 2 year widths. )
What is the average lenght of segment? I’ve read report that it is 12 years.
When the segment slopes are subject to krieging, is there a weighting in the estimated trend that give greater weight to longer segment lengths?
Jason Bates at 12/13 10:20 am
….The adjustment process – whatever it may be – significantly alters the trend of the raw data…..
Therefore, there is something that is biasing the raw data in a systematic way. This leads me to my questions: first, what is biasing the raw data in a systematic way which would justify alteration of the trend? And second, given that the noise in the raw data is systematically biased, what justification is there for assuming that averaging, kriging, slicing, or any combination of those will correcly identify and rectify it?
mwgrant at 12/13 12:03 pm
” Thus, there must be an additional source of bias – and one that is stronger than the known bias of the UHI. What is it?”
This is pulling on a thread that has been bugging me–in an interest way, not bad way. Locales with UHI tend to be in well-sampled’ urban areas. Because these areas are preferentially sampled they are over-represented in the overall sample population. (This is entirely separate from the UHI.) It would seem that detailed care is needed to sift thru and ‘sort’ the numbers in these areas where both effects are potentially skewing estimation of a global average.
Mario Lento at 12/13 3:27 pm
@ur momisuglySteven Mosher at 12/12 10:53 pm
There’s so much wrong here.
Regarding “3. Next I wanted to use methods suggested by skeptics”
When did skeptics say the stations with poor siting should be subjectively sliced and added to mix so their warming could fit the narrative?
Neither BEST nor you have ever honestly addressed why “if only urban areas show warming, while rural areas don’t, that you could slice (in?) the poorly sited urban stations to make their “crap” value warm the entire temperature record.
E.M.Smith at 12/13 7:27 pm
@ur momisugly Steven Mosher at 12/12 10:22 pm
I’m sticking with fundamental properties of the universe, thank you. So I don’t really care if you use Kriging or Averaging or how you manufacture your “field”. At the outset the fundamental philosophy of the process is broken. There simply can not be a “global average temperature” so it can not rise nor fall. For that you want to claim I don’t understand your “process”?When from the very foundation it is a fools errand of fundamental impossibility? Just who is not understanding what can and can not be done with intrinsic properties? Hmmm?
Stephen Rasey at 12/15 12:19 am
@ur momisuglyZeke Hausfather at Dec 13, 6:32 pm
Like Sleepalot says, 40,000 stations for what time frame?
I ask again,
How many segments have those 40,000 station been sliced into?
What is the distribution of segment lengths?
What percent of segments are shorter than 10 years? Shorter than 20 years?
Do long segments get greater weight than short segments in the kriging?
While we are at it,…. Suppose we have a month with 30 straight days of 10 C lows and 20 C highs. Mean is 15 C for 30 days straight.
What is the mean standard error of the monthly mean with 30 days of 15 C daily means?
Stephen Rasey at 12/15 12:49 pm
@ur momisuglyZeke Hausfather at Dec 13, 6:32 pm
Dumb Question #1: …..
So what is closer to the truth?
(A) where you have 40,747 stations thermometer records you slice into 200,000 segments or
(B) you have fewer than 10,000 thermometer locations you slice into 40,747 “stations.”
Dumb question #2: RE: Iceland 1885 to 1940, there are 3 stations with years where it drops to two.
When yoiu have a partial year, either as a start up, shut down, or drop out for a few weeks, what is the criteria for counting it? At least half a year?
[]
So 1755 to 1870 Iceland trends come from thermometers 500 to 2000 km away from Iceland over open, Gulf Stream warmed, ocean. Why do you do this?
More nonsense because you cannot rationally argue your point. Either the label “scientist” has a real meaning or it does not. If anyone can be a scientist by simply declaring themselves one, then the word is meaningless.
Can anyone be called a medical doctor?