Temperature is such a simple finite thing. It is amazing how complex people can make it.
– commenter and friend of WUWT, ossqss at Judith Curry’s blog
Sometimes, you can believe you are entirely right while simultaneously believing that you’ve done due diligence. That’s what confirmation bias is all about. In this case, a whole bunch of people, including me, got a severe case of it.
I’m talking about the claim made by Steve Goddard that 40% of the USHCN data is “fabricated”. which I and few other people thought was clearly wrong.
Dr. Judith Curry and I have been conversing a lot via email over the past two days, and she has written an illuminating essay that explores the issue raised by Goddard and the sociology going on. See her essay:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/06/28/skeptical-of-skeptics-is-steve-goddard-right/
Steve Goddard aka Tony Heller deserves the credit for the initial finding, Paul Homewood deserves the credit for taking the finding and establishing it in a more comprehensible
way that opened closed eyes, including mine, in this post entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas. Along with that is his latest followup, showing the problem isn’t limited to Texas, but also in Kansas. And there’s more about this below.
Goddard early on (June 2) gave me his source code that made his graph, but I
couldn’t get it to compile and run. That’s probably more my fault than his, as I’m not an expert in C++ computer language. Had I been able to, things might have gone differently. Then there was the fact that the problem Goddard noted doesn’t show up in GHCN data and I didn’t see the problem in any of the data we had for our USHCN surface stations analysis.
But, the thing that really put up a wall for me was this moment on June 1st, shortly after getting Goddard’s first email with his finding, which I pointed out in On ‘denying’ Hockey Sticks, USHCN data, and all that – part 1.
Goddard initially claimed 40% of the STATIONS were missing, which I said right away was not possible. It raised my hackles, and prompted my “you need to do better” statement. Then he switched the text in his post from stations to data while I was away for a couple of hours at my daughter’s music recital. When I returned, I noted the change, with no note of the change on his post, and that is what really put up the wall for me. He probably looked at it like he was just fixing a typo, I looked at it like it was sweeping an important distinction under the rug.
Then there was my personal bias over previous episodes where Goddard had made what I considered grievous errors, and refused to admit to them. There was the claim of CO2 freezing out of the air in Antarctica episode, later shown to be impossible by an experiment and the GISStimating 1998 episode, and the comment where when the old data is checked and it is clear Goddard/Heller’s claim doesn’t hold up.
And then just over a month ago there was Goddard’s first hockey stick shape in the USHCN data set, which turned out to be nothing but an artifact.
All of that added up to a big heap of confirmation bias, I was so used to Goddard being wrong, I expected it again, but this time Steve Goddard was right and my confirmation bias prevented me from seeing that there was in fact a real issue in the data and that NCDC has dead stations that are reporting data that isn’t real: mea culpa.
But, that’s the same problem many climate scientists have, they are used to some skeptics being wrong on some issues, so they put up a wall. That is why the careful and exacting analyses we see from Steve McIntyre should be a model for us all. We have to “do better” to make sure that claims we make are credible, documented, phrased in non-inflammatory language, understandable, and most importantly, right.
Otherwise, walls go up, confirmation bias sets in.
Now that the wall is down, NCDC won’t be able to ignore this, even John Nielsen-Gammon, who was critical of Goddard along with me in the Polifact story now says there is a real problem. So does Zeke, and we have all sent or forwarded email to NCDC advising them of it.
I’ve also been on the phone Friday with the assistant director of NCDC and chief scientist (Tom Peterson), and also with the person in charge of USHCN (Matt Menne). Both were quality, professional conversations, and both thanked me for bringing it to their attention. There is lots of email flying back and forth too.
They are taking this seriously, they have to, as final data as currently presented for USHCN is clearly wrong. John Neilsen-Gammon sent me a cursory analysis for Texas USHCN stations, noting he found a number of stations that had “estimated” data in place of actual good data that NCDC has in hand, and appears in the RAW USHCN data file on their FTP site
From:John Nielsen-Gammon Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 9:27 AM To: Anthony Subject: Re: USHCN station at Luling Texas
Anthony –
I just did a check of all Texas USHCN stations. Thirteen had estimates in place of apparently good data.
410174 Estimated May 2008 thru June 2009
410498 Estimated since Oct 2011
410639 Estimated since July 2012 (exc Feb-Mar 2012, Nov 2012, Mar 2013, and May 2013)
410902 Estimated since Aug 2013
411048 Estimated July 2012 thru Feb 2014
412906 Estimated since Jan 2013
413240 Estimated since March 2013
413280 Estimated since Oct 2012
415018 Estimated since April 2010, defunct since Dec 2012
415429 Estimated since May 2013
416276 Estimated since Nov 2012
417945 Estimated since May 2013
418201Estimated since April 2013 (exc Dec 2013).
What is going on is that the USHCN code is that while the RAW data file has the actual measurements, for some reason the final data they publish doesn’t get the memo that good data is actually present for these stations, so it “infills” it with estimated data using data from surrounding stations. It’s a bug, a big one. And as Zeke did a cursory analysis Thursday night, he discovered it was systemic to the entire record, and up to 10% of stations have “estimated” data spanning over a century:
And here is the real kicker, “Zombie weather stations” exist in the USHCN final data set that are still generating data, even though they have been closed.
Remember Marysville, CA, the poster child for bad station siting? It was the station that gave me my “light bulb moment” on the issue of station siting. Here is a photo I took in May 2007:
![marysville_badsiting[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/marysville_badsiting1.jpg?quality=83)
It was closed just a couple of months after I introduced it to the world as the prime example of “How not to measure temperature”. The MMTS sensor was in a parking lot, with hot air from a/c units from the nearby electronics sheds for the cell phone tower:
Guess what? Like Luling, TX, which is still open, but getting estimated data in place of the actual data in the final USHCN data file, even though it was marked closed in 2007 by NOAA’s own metadata, Marysville is still producing estimated monthly data, marked with an “E” flag:
USH00045385 2006 1034E 1156h 1036g 1501h 2166i 2601E 2905E 2494E 2314E 1741E 1298E 848i 0 USH00045385 2007 797c 1151E 1575i 1701E 2159E 2418E 2628E 2620E 2197E 1711E 1408E 846E 0 USH00045385 2008 836E 1064E 1386E 1610E 2146E 2508E 2686E 2658E 2383E 1906E 1427E 750E 0 USH00045385 2009 969E 1092E 1316E 1641E 2238E 2354E 2685E 2583E 2519E 1739E 1272E 809E 0 USH00045385 2010 951E 1190E 1302E 1379E 1746E 2401E 2617E 2427E 2340E 1904E 1255E 1073E 0 USH00045385 2011 831E 991E 1228E 1565E 1792E 2223E 2558E 2536E 2511E 1853E 1161E 867E 0 USH00045385 2012 978E 1161E 1229E 1646E 2147E 2387E 2597E 2660E 2454E 1931E 1383E 928E 0 USH00045385 2013 820E 1062E 1494E 1864E 2199E 2480E 2759E 2568E 2286E 1807E 1396E 844E 0 USH00045385 2014 1188E 1247E 1553E 1777E 2245E 2526E -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999 -9999
Source: USHCN Final : ushcn.tavg.latest.FLs.52i.tar.gz
Compare to USHCN Raw : ushcn.tavg.latest.raw.tar.gz
In the USHCN V2.5 folder, the readme file describes the “E” flag as:
E = a monthly value could not be computed from daily data. The value is estimated using values from surrounding stations
There are quite a few “zombie weather stations” in the USHCN final dataset, possibly up to 25% out of the 1218 that is the total number of stations. In my conversations with NCDC on Friday, I’m told these were kept in and “reporting” as a policy decision to provide a “continuity” of data for scientific purposes. While there “might” be some justification for that sort of thinking, few people know about it there’s no disclaimer or caveat in the USHCN FTP folder at NCDC or in the readme file that describes this, they “hint” at it saying:
The composition of the network remains unchanged at 1218 stations
But that really isn’t true, as some USHCN stations out of the 1218 have been closed and are no longer reporting real data, but instead are reporting estimated data.
NCDC really should make this clear, and while it “might” be OK to produce a datafile that has estimated data in it, not everyone is going to understand what that means, and that the stations that have been long dead are producing estimated data. NCDC has failed in notifying the public, and even their colleagues of this. Even the Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon didn’t know about these “zombie” stations until I showed him. If he had known, his opinion might have been different on the Goddard issue. When even professional people in your sphere of influence don’t know you are doing dead weather station data infills like this, you can be sure that your primary mission to provide useful data is FUBAR.
NCDC needs to step up and fix this along with other problems that have been identified.
And they are, I expect some sort of a statement, and possibly a correction next week. In the meantime, let’s let them do their work and go through their methodology. It will not be helpful to ANYONE if we start beating up the people at NCDC ahead of such a statement and/or correction.
I will be among the first, if not the first to know what they are doing to fix the issues, and as soon as I know, so will all of you. Patience and restraint is what we need at the moment. I believe they are making a good faith effort, but as you all know the government moves slowly, they have to get policy wonks to review documents and all that. So, we’ll likely hear something early next week.
These lapses in quality control and thinking that infilling estimated data for long dead weather stations is the sort of thing happens when the only people that you interact with are inside your sphere of influence. The “yeah that seems like a good idea” approval mumble probably resonated in that NCDC meeting, but it was a case of groupthink. Imagine The Wall Street Journal providing “estimated” stock values for long dead companies to provide “continuity” of their stock quotes page. Such a thing would boggle the mind and the SEC would have a cow, not to mention readers. Scams would erupt trying to sell stocks for these long dead companies; “It’s real, see its reporting value in the WSJ!”.
It often takes people outside of climate science to point out the problems they don’t see, and skeptics have been doing it for years. Today, we are doing it again.
For absolute clarity, I should point out that the RAW USHCN monthly datafile is NOT being infilled with estimated data, only the FINAL USHCN monthly datafile. But that is the one that many other metrics use, including NASA GISS, and it goes into the mix for things like the NCDC monthly State of the Climate Report.
While we won’t know until all of the data is corrected and new numbers run, this may affect some of the absolute temperature claims made on SOTC reports such as “warmest month ever” and 3rd warmest, etc. The magnitude of such shifts, if any, is unknown at this point. Long term trend will probably not be affected.
It may also affect our comparisons between raw and final adjusted USHCN data we have been doing for our paper, such as this one from our draft paper:
The exception is BEST, which starts with the raw daily data, but they might be getting tripped up into creating some “zombie stations” of their own by the NCDC metadata and resolution improvements to lat/lon. The USHCN station at Luling Texas is listed as having 7 station moves by BEST (note the red diamonds):
But there really has only been two, and the station has been just like this since 1995, when it was converted to MMTS from a Stevenson Screen. Here is our survey image from 2009:
Photo by surfacestations volunteer John Warren Slayton.
NCDC’s metadata only lists two station moves:
As you can see below, some improvements in lat/lon accuracy can look like a station move:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/#ncdcstnid=20024457&tab=LOCATIONS
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/#ncdcstnid=20024457&tab=MISC
Thanks to Paul Homewood for the two images and links above. I’m sure Mr. Mosher will let us know if this issue affects BEST or not.
And there is yet another issue: The recent change of something called “climate divisions” to calculate the national and state temperatures.
Certified Consulting Meteorologist and Fellow of the AMS Joe D’Aleo writes in with this:
I had downloaded the Maine annual temperature plot from NCDC Climate at a Glance in 2013 for a talk. There was no statistically significant trend since 1895. Note the spike in 1913 following super blocking from Novarupta in Alaska (similar to the high latitude volcanoes in late 2000s which helped with the blocking and maritime influence that spiked 2010 as snow was gone by March with a steady northeast maritime Atlantic flow). 1913 was close to 46F. and the long term mean just over 41F.
Seemingly in a panic change late this frigid winter to NCDC, big changes occurred. I wanted to update the Maine plot for another talk and got this from NCDC CAAG.
Note that 1913 was cooled nearly 5 degrees F and does not stand out. There is a warming of at least 3 degrees F since 1895 (they list 0.23/decade) and the new mean is close to 40F.
Does anybody know what the REAL temperature of Maine is/was/is supposed to be? I sure as hell don’t. I don’t think NCDC really does either.
In closing…
Besides moving toward a more accurate temperature record, the best thing about all this hoopla over the USHCN data set is the Polifact story where we have all these experts lined up (including me as the token skeptic) that stated without a doubt that Goddard was wrong and rated the claim “pants of fire”.
They’ll all be eating some crow, as will I, but now that I have Gavin for dinner company, I don’t really mind at all.
When the scientific method is at work, eventually, everybody eats crow. The trick is to be able to eat it and tell people that you are honestly enjoying it, because crow is so popular, it is on the science menu daily.
A few weeks ago a poster here on WUWT [ details; WUWT post and blogger ?? ] pointed to a Hawaiian Islands station that for the last year or so was listed in the USHCN [ ? ] using “estimated” temperatures.
As the poster pointed out, the particular station had in fact been reporting as usual for all of that year long period and it’s data was all there in the data base despite being listed as missing and therefore estimated in-filled temperatures were being used for that supposedly missing station.
It would be good reality check albeit a very small one to go back and see what differences there are in just this one instance between the actual data and the “estimated” in-filled temperature data for that particular station.
In any case in an Island situation surrounded by ocean which acts as a very good stabilising influence on temperature changes, finding a long term, well run and maintained remote island station and verifying it’s real hard data against the official HCN data might be quite illuminating.
Alternatively, decades long duration temperature data sets from the very remote and vast desert like land masses such as much of Australia’s remote arid interior regions where human habitation numbers are very low but record keeping is still at the required world standards [ we hope ! ] and comparing those station’s adjustments with the actual hard data record might likewise be very revealing.
And exactly that has been done very comprehensively for many years by the Rockhampton
[ Queensland ] based blogger Ken Stewart on his blog “Kenskingdom”.
http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/
As he is quite low profile in the skeptic blogger world nobody seems to have had a decent look at Ken’s long work on the many quite extraordinary and unexplainable, unexplainable except by the Australian BOM, adjustments and alterations, always towards warming of course, to most of Australian station data that has now been a regular feature of the BOM’s Australian temperature data for many years.
Congratulations to Steve Goddard / Tony Heller for his work in uncovering the data modifications going on.
I was also taken aback by Anthony’s strident criticism of Goddard that seemed to be to border on something more than just the criticism of Goddard’s findings and methods. I am pleased and appreciate that Anthony has written the above article to set the record straight.
I donated to Heller’s site and suggest other readers should do the same. We need competent people to respond to the current AGW lunacy.
So if the powers that be wanted to warm temperatures up a bit, all they would have to do is remove the station that is reporting the lowest temperature trend in an area and then estimate temperatures for that removed station from the warmer stations that remain. The end result would be a bit of warming. Is there any way to verify that such a clever and devious trick is not being used to manipulate temperature data?
I wonder how much information will be obtained once the fix is in. If the adjustments in general are proper, this should make no difference to temperatures.
Data modification is exactly what was wrong with climate science Michael Crichton told U.S. Senate in 2005. And rightly so because now it turns out that fake temperature values are not jusy to;erated but utilized by the global warming gang. I ran into it in 2010 while doing research on my book “What Warming?” It turned out that HadCRUT3 was showing warming in the eighties and nineties when satellite data showed that global mean temperature did not change for 18 years (Figure 24 in the book).. They gave it an upward slope of 0.1 degree Celsius per decade. The same fakery is still going on. I put a warning about this warming into the preface of the book and two years later they, along with GISTEMP and NCDC, decided to not show it any more and aligned their data with the satellites. This was done secretly and nothing was said about it. But looking at present temperature records it appears to have been a passing thought – they still show warming where none exists. Further examination of their temperature data revealed that all three of these data sets had been subjected to computer processing that left its traces in their database, apparently because of an unanticipated consequence of some kind of screw-up. These traces consist of sharp upward spikes that look like noise but are found at exactly identical sites in HadCRUT, GISTEMP, and NCDC temperature datasets. These three supposedly independent data sets come from two different continents. The spikes are prominently visible at the beginnings of years 1980, 1981,1983,1986,1988,1990,1998,1999,2002,2007, and 2010.This you can check yourself simply by comparing their temperature plots with parallel UAH or RSS satellite plots. Clearly all three databases were computer processed using an identical software not more than four years ago. We were told nothing about it but since their data show a greater upward temperature slope than satellites do during the last 35 years I associate this procedure with illicit co-operation among the three data sources for the purpose of creating the impression of a a greater global temperature rise than justified by temperature measurements. And this triple alliance has the advantage that they can refer to each other’s data to confirm their fake warming.
I trust you’ve informed Ronald Bailey of this development.
Best gets their data from the hardcopy station sheets???
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Nick Stokes says: June 28, 2014 at 3:48 pm
“Sometimes Nature just has a warmist bias. I’m not on top of the details here, but it seems cables are supposed to have near zero resistance. Positive resistance will reduce the voltage. Negative will increase it. ”
Just the opposite. E(voltage) = I(current) X R(resistance) Also, the colder the wire (conductor) the less resistance it has. Sensors provide minute changes so the cable length maximum to control unit is critical for accuracy. Cable protection from temperature variations is also important. Usually low voltage lines fail only when open (broken).
Anthony, I cannot understand your latest response to me. You say:
The Polifact story never said a word about the idea 40% of stations or data being missing. It clearly described the idea it was checking:
It specifically quoted Steven Goddard and referred to one of his gifs:
The entire piece was about this claim of his. It never talked about missing data. And while you claim Zeke’s post was about Goddard’s claim regarding missing data, his post was actually about what the Polifact post was about:
Zeke’s post was not about this “zombie” data. The Polifact piece was not about this “zombie” data. The “zombie” data wasn’t an issue for any of Goddard’s critics. They were discussing Goddard’s methodology, not anything related to the bug you highlight in this post..
As for arguing with Zeke, you claim Goddard was right while linking to a post Zeke wrote criticizing Goddard. If Goddard had been right on the topic they were covering, Zeke’s criticism of him must be wrong.
REPLY: and I don’t understand your reasoning, especially when you are claiming things I’ve not said, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree. -Anthony
Can anyone imagine Michael Mann writing a post like this?
“… I was so used to Goddard being wrong, I expected it again…” Great example of why ad hominem arguments are invalid.
You say:
Now that the wall is down, NCDC won’t be able to ignore this, even John Nielsen-Gammon, who was critical of Goddard along with me in the Polifact story now says there is a real problem.
====================================
I think you will be unpleasantly surprised by what NCDC is able to ignore.
So bad data is more abundant than good data, thus it will have more weight in infilling procedures and will obliterate the climate signal.
I mean, what is up with all those zombie stations? That is ludicrous.
Hundreds of climate scientists collecting quite munificent salaries plus generous grants to use the best of scientific technologies and techniques to define and accurately record the global historical temperature records and trends.
Hundreds of millions of dollars spent by governments to fund some of the most powerful computer systems in the world to help determine those global temperatures and their trends.
Close to a Trillion dollars [ out of an annual global GDP of $70 trillion dollars ] already spent over the last half dozen years on climate science, global temperature record keeping, heavily subsidised wind and solar system scams, all to try to mitigate and prevent a claimed catastrophic warming, a claimed warming that is based on the output of all those hundreds or thousands of climate scientists and multi million dollar computers that claim a catastrophic global warming is under way.
600,000 thousand Germans plus British plus ?? elsewhere numbers of people being cut off from power each year due to their inability to afford the rapidly escalating costs of power due to the stringent demands of climate scientists that the dangerous warming as seen in the global temperature records must be stopped at all costs by making CO2 producing fossil fueled power unaffordable and therefore to no longer economical and therefore seeing to the demise of the fossil fueled power generating industry.
A few tens of thousands of quite avoidable deaths each year of the elderly and the poor from hypothermia and / or infections brought on by the inability to afford to heat their living quarters and who because of the increased cost of power had to a make a choice of whether to heat or eat.
All this from those hundreds, possibly at most a couple of thousand highly paid, highly rewarded climate scientists.
And now a couple of dozen unpaid, highly proficient, regularly denigrated and abused and often much worse, skeptical bloggers have proceeded to analyse without any reward or pay the same temperature record keeping of those highly paid climate scientists.
And who are possibly on the way to undermining maybe destroying the entire claims of a major warming under way by pointing to the increasing number of major flaws and outright f—-ups in the global temperature data recording systems
Cock ups and flaws that have been created and promulgated by those very climate scientists who were so highly paid for so many years to ensure as an accurate global record of temperatures and temperature trends as was humanly possible to produce were in place so as to have a totally trustworthy base as the underpinning of the entire discipline of climate science and all it’s predictions and numerous claims.
Three years ago we were still being told ad infinitum, that the science was in and could not be challenged.
And here we are with the entire basis of the claims of all of climate science now being suspect in the extreme as it’s very basis, the global temperature record and it’s keeper organisations systems are now being thoroughly dissected and found seriously wanting if not completely corrupted.
The cost to humanity in lives and treasure and societal dissension that the incompetency of the highly paid keepers of the global temperature record have imposed on humanity for nigh on two decades is almost beyond reckoning.
Joe Bastardi;
That we think that a degree if warmer where the mean temp is -20 in the winter has the significance of a drop of .5 degree on average in the tropical Pacific temps, is folly to me.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’ve been banging that drum until I grew weary. Robert G Brown mentions that issue from time to time also. The sad part is that even if we could normalize by converting to an energy flux metric, we’d still have muddy results because the calculations would be predicated upon muddy temperature and humidity data. But once the temp/humidity data gets sorted out, in my view it is still meaningless until the issue you mention is also addressed (and I expect the wrangling about the “right” way to do it will make this current matter seem almost tame).
Congrats to all who have participated in this discussion. Be they right or wrong or confused, they have brought a major issue to light. Change is on the horizon, and not just a correction of the science, but a watershed moment as to how science progresses in the internet age is upon us.
Or simply stop using USHCN data at the end of this year and go with CRN data from then on. There is much less damage that can be done to CRN data. Let the past be what it is, stop adjusting the living daylights out of it, “freeze” it and use CRN going forward.
This has been a very interesting day reading the post, links and then the numerous comments. Make that a very informative day. My thanks to everybody.
Since I am handling the sale of some property, missed out on a family trip to the east coast this month, and will miss another one next week to Mexico. But with some of the money that would have been spent on travel this summer, tip jars on various sites will get a donation.
There is a link between estimating our temperatures, scheduling for the VA, counting the homeless, figuring out the percentage unemployed, determining the GDP, checking the inflation rate, or even measuring income inequality. When one drills down into verifiable data, the reality is a ways from the political view. As had often been noted here, the thermometer at the airport lets me compute density altitude at the runway, and is essential to flight safety. Many of the data points for the other public questions referenced above are equally precise and useful numbers. It is the political repurposing of the data, for needs from bonuses to policy support, that motivates distortion. It appears that this kind distortion has become a way of life for many, and is viewed as neither wrong nor unscientific.
It is interesting that sometimes precise and accurate date points can lead to awful result when combined inappropriately, while someone like Joe Bastardi, who has done far more OBSERVATION that most folks, may not have “data” to three decimal places but seems to detect trends that are testable and make appropriate predictions, that are also testable.
Joe makes a living, because, on balance he makes more good calls based on his observations than most folks, and some whose business depends on the weather are willing to pay him for his work.
The folks who terrify kids with dead polar bears, also make a living from their work. QED
Finally, Anthony doesn’t make much if anything for the blog, which may be why he can afford to be honest.
(1) They hauled off Bernie Madoff for 150 years. He falsified data for 18 years so that he could…ensure 10% per annum for his clients in their homogenized portfolio returns.
(2) The sub-prime housing crisis was caused by control fraud; i.e. fraud by those in control. The CEOs were paid bonuses—their principal earning engine–based on the number and amount of loans completed. So their brokers (also paid well; many recruited from MacDonalds and Burger King the day before) filled in income, and re-estimated appraised house values to raise the value of the loans, and hence all their bonuses, which they were churning out at a rate of 10,000/month in some cases. It took two to three years—time for the homeowner’s mortgage payment to adjust 2X, 3X–for the CEO to become spectacularly rich before he declared the mortgage bank bankrupt, closed the operation down, and opened another one.
[The CEOs of mortgage banks didn’t have to worry about federal bank charter rules or repercussions. US mortgage banks are only regulated by the president of the NY Fed. NY Fed prez Geithner, however, ignored the FBI’s warning in open testimony in September 2004 that there was a 90% “epidemic of mortgage fraud” (CNN).]
Good analogy, Anthony.
it seems to this dunderhead, that the data available is not up to the task for which it is required. Bastardi is right, time to look elsewhere.
ZOMBIEGATE!! YES!!!!
It is a stretch to call this the scientific method. It hasn’t been peer reviewed. And the author isn’t a climate scientists. According to academia, this automatically disqualifies the finding.
Only recognized academics, that peer review each other are qualified to participate in the scientific method. In that way errors are prevented.
This entire matter should be the subject of congressional hearings and investigation. I hope that maybe say Anthony, Goddard, Bastardi and LIndzen etc can bring it before the necessary people .I’m sure John Boehner could be persuaded to start proceedings prior to the election
More important than the zombie data are the adjustments to the past. any accountant that changed the past would end up in jail. especially if the adjustment didn’t balance out to zero.
errors are random. they should balance out to zero. if you are adjusting errors, your errors should also balance out to zero. if they don’t, you are likely cooking the books.
Good job of shooting the messenger. Not so much on the CYA. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall – Proverbs 16:18.