In a statement to Polifact today, NCDC made the following statement:
“… our algorithm is working as designed”
One wonders though, about these sorts of things that have been found wrong in their data file for USHCN, which is represented to the public as “high quality”.
Here are few other things that worked as designed:
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940):
Early NASA Rockets (1950’s-60’s):
The Titanic (1912): On 14 April, the RMS Titanic, described by its builders as practically unsinkable, sinks after hitting an iceberg.
The de Havilland Comet (1952): Twenty-one of these commercial airliners were built.The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents, including 13 fatal crashes which resulted in 426 fatalities. After the conclusive evidence revealed in the inquiry that metal fatigue concentrated at the corners of the aircraft’s windows had caused the crashes, all aircraft were redesigned with rounded windows.
Mariner 1 (1962): The first US spacecraft dispatched to Venus drifts badly off course because of an error in its guidance system. The error is a small one — a wrong punctuation character (a hyphen) in a single line of code — but the course deviation is large. Mariner 1 ends up in the Atlantic Ocean after being destroyed by a range safety officer. It has been called “The most expensive hyphen in history”
The Mars Climate Orbiter (1998)
![marsClimateOrbiter[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/marsclimateorbiter1.jpg?quality=83)
The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the surface of the planet, because its orbit was too low.
The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software produced results in an “English system” unit, while a second system that used those results expected them to be in metric units. Software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings calculated results in pound-seconds. The trajectory calculation used these results to correct the predicted position of the spacecraft for the effects of thruster firings. This software expected its inputs to be in newton-seconds.
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed.
The NCDC Climate at a Glance plotter for the public (2014):
While being told that “all is well” and and that “our algorithm is working as designed”, it is easy to discover that if one tries to plot the temperature data for any city in the United States like Dallas Texas for example you get plots for high temperature, low temperature, and average temperature that are identical:
Try it yourself:
Go here:
Change settings to go to a statewide time series, pick a city, and what it does is and it gives you data where the min temp, avg temp and max temp that are the same. It is unknown if it is even the right data for the city.
h/t to WUWT readers Wyo_skeptic, Gary T., and Dr. Roy Spencer
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They got what they asked for: BS.
“Working exactly as designed. Designed to provide evidence that global warming was an issue of the utmost political importance.”
Agree, to promote an ide(ology) and a narrow political Agenda.
Planned Obsolescence was also a great track by 10,000 Maniacs.
richardscourtney says:
July 2, 2014 at 12:18 am
“and now in the UK and much of the EU the scare is continued by the ‘rabid right’ supported by the political center and left ”
Well Richard some day you will have to explain to me what differentiates the EU “rabid right”, in your words, from social democrats (or INGSOC Fabians) – as they both want the exact same high tax, big government, mass immigration, transgendered, welfare state policies.
From what I have read and seen over the last few days and this NCDC typical of today, forked tongue debacle about caps it off, due to the constant and never ending undocumented, un-explainable, near randomised “adjustments” there is no longer any actual provable long term on ground unadjusted, uncorrupted and untampered temperature data available that could provide a true indication as to temperature trends whether up or down over the last century and over any shorter time period within that century both in the USA and globally.
When I think of those thousands of observers over the last hundred plus years who faithfully collected that data through rain and snow and cold and heat and dust and flies and etc in the belief that they were assisting in weather forecasting and recording the weather for posterity to exam and research and then pass that data in it’s all embracing truth onto future generations, I have nothing but total contempt and disgust for those so called climate scientists who have been entrusted with the stewardship of that data and paid rather handsomely for doing so,
To deliberately alter and corrupt that data after all the work all those observers did down through the last dozen decades is truly a massive blight and indelible stain on both the climate alarmist scientists involved and on climate science in it’s totality and a complete abrogation of climate science’s responsibility to ensure that the data in it’s pristine, uncorrupted and unaltered form should be preserved for future generations to exam and delve into for their own research purposes.
It is a telling indication of status and mentality of climate alarmist science that it should treat the prime data collected over all those years by dedicated observers with such utter contempt that it is prepared to stoop to outright corruption of that precious data just to satisfy it’s own extremely self centred and totally selfish elitist agenda without any thought for future generations and their needs and requirements for accurate historical data from the long gone past.
richardscourtney says:
July 2, 2014 at 2:10 am
I agree totally with what you are saying and the main point of this article. However, the deaths of 87 soles is a tragedy in itself but it is not correct to say that over 400 deaths occurred because they didn’t. The figure of 13 fatal hull losses and 426 fatalities caused by a design fault is not correct and a dreadful slur on those who worked on this plane.
Stephen Skinner:
re your post addressed to me at July 2, 2014 at 3:29 am.
For the record, yes, I agree.
Richard
About the max/min/avg issue: As you probably have noted, they have changed to [i]nClimDiv[/i] dataset in March. And on their ftp site they clearly say they are planning to have max/min temps up in mid-June. Apparently these are not still up.
I really fail to see any issue in this?
tttt:
I write to answer the question you ask at July 2, 2014 at 3:49 am where you write in total
The “issue” is that USHCN is publishing and using data which is plain wrong.
You say they claim an intention to provide corrected data in “mid-June”, but there is no stated (or obvious) reason why they would not now publish correct max., min, and average data. When taken in the context that they ‘adjust’ all their data each month, their claimed intention is rightly being treated with scorn especially when in answer to a question they have replied that they are doing what they intended to do.
Richard
ROM says: July 2, 2014 at 3:05 am The Raw data is not lost, there are plenty of records around with that data.
It is the Final data that is totally currupted.
Obamacare works as designed.
Lysenkoism worked as designed.
N*az*ism worked as designed.
Bruce Cobb says:
July 2, 2014 at 4:18 am
Obamacare works as designed.
Lysenkoism worked as designed.
N*az*ism worked as designed.
I think this is stretching the imagination to link Obamacare with Nazism. Surely there are those who push AGW who will make the same loose association between unrelated events because it will get an emotional reaction that they want. Such as trying to associate those who are sceptical of AGW wildest claims with Holocaust deniers, creationists etc.
You may not like Obamacare but how do you link this to Nazism?
Apologies generally as this is off to the side of the general topic (again).
Let’s just throw out all these adjustments and go back to the Raw record.
There are too many questions about the accuracy of the Final adjusted dataset.
Let’s start collating the Raw data in the correct way and start presenting that from now on to the public and to decision-makers with the proper caveats.
“Our algorithms are working as designed.”
This is a classic statement by the higher ups in a bureaucracy in hull down, protect the agency mode.
Just speculation on my part, but, I find it hard to believe that they could validate the entire record this quickly. What they appear to have done is checked the software and pronounced it ‘good’. I would further speculate that the folks Anthony was corresponding with did not put out this statement, nor would they agree with it. Having been an IT Security geek in the Federal Government I personally saw this behavior at several agencies trying to cover the fact that our systems had become a playground for Chinese Intel hackers (and Russian and Israeli and …).
Heck, I ‘designed’ a model that emulated airliners landing at an airport based on fuel usage, etc to order the landings. It worked ‘as designed’. The only trouble was it was landing planes with negative fuel (which would have been a tad bit of a hard landing pretty short of the runway I’m thinking). Again, the algorithm worked ‘as designed’, unfortuantely the design was, as my Prof diplomatically put it “inelegant”.
Other posters are absolutely correct “Our algorithms are working as designed.” is a meaningless statement that implies correctness where none is warranted.
A C Osborn says:
July 2, 2014 at 4:10 am
I have no computer or coding expertise but to ask a couple of questions particularly as NASA has lost a heck of a lot of data already from it’s early space and rocket days due to cleaning out of rooms full of tapes and etc as well as changes in data archiving codes where the older codes when accessed could no longer be read because the machines and expertise for the code used for past archiving were no longer around.
So how much of that original weather data as recorded by the observers and even later electronically is still actually around and accessible?
Has anybody ever taken a look at that side of the system?
Where is the hard data archived or is it all now digitised?
If digitised stored where ?
[ A few major companies have recently lost very large amounts of valuable rchived material due to glitches in the Cloud system And Phil Jones seems to have conveniently lost lots of inconvenient climate related stuff as well. ]
Wherein the system is the backup data stored ?
What systems are in place to guarantee and maintain both the future viability and absolute accuracy of the original data through various transitions in coding systems as written down by the observers of the data and it’s ready availability for access by any potential user of the data?
What systems are in place that will very accurately transpose archived and digitised data into new formats and archival systems as they appear over the times ahead.?
And for that matter how much of the archived data has been lost because it can no longer be read due to the complete loss of the protocols and coding systems used in the original data archiving.
In view of the casual corruption of the data that we are witnessing on every front in the climate alarmist ideology, I have a very strong suspicion that not much attention has been paid to actually carefully archiving the original data for future generations after it is downloaded into the NCDC’s and etc systems.
For another major and utterly inexcusable example of gross corruption to the original data as it was recorded by observers, duck over to Lucia’s Blackboard “How not to calculate temperatures part 3” and have a look at ;
Bob Koss (Comment #130615) June 27th, 2014 at 4:16 pm
and his comment on the Key West data
Just like the IRS is working exactly as designed.
“… our AlGoreithm is working as designed”
quote of the week ( year ) . Priceless.
The design goal was to show a temperature rise so we could get out Bonus.
Is it time for us to start talking about calculated temperatures when talking to the warmistas.
i.e. ‘if the calculated temperatures are as you say then your prediction may well be correct,
but with the measured temperatures, there is no chance’
temp says…
“So my question is… can’t someone ”
Why can’t you? You have time to post blog comments. Go do it.
What in the heck are all these crazy mostly irrational adjustments to the temperature record supposed to prove or achieve in any case?
The whole NCDC temperature adjustment debacle is taking on the appearance of a bunch of self indulgent mad scientists messing with some numbers to no known purpose or benefit to anybody just to prove to themselves that they are smarter than the ordinary guy who has to pay for this stupid scam.
The only purpose for all these temperature adjustments is for the climate modellers to have a standard temperature to initiate their models and for climate scientists to use up whole forests of trees writing papers on how the temperature has risen 0.05 degrees in the last ten years leading to a chance of catastrophic warming by 2221.
And thats about as a useless a bit of data tampering as it is possible to achieve given that the climate models have yet to predict anything that has any relationship at all to how the real climate has actually behaved.
This whole climate alarmist thing is taking on the characteristic of a gigantic wank by a group of academic elitist climate scientists who have become so enamored of their own personal prowess and intellect that they can’t see just how much increasing contempt they are creating amongst the common folk for their self centred personal indulgence at those common folk’s expense.
hunter says:
July 1, 2014 at 9:25 pm
Guns always shoot where they are pointed, too.
—————————————————————-
Even when empty!
They did not say what the design was.
Stephen Skinner says:
July 2, 2014 at 4:37 am
Bruce Cobb says:
July 2, 2014 at 4:18 am
Obamacare works as designed.
Lysenkoism worked as designed.
N*az*ism worked as designed.
I think this is stretching the imagination to link Obamacare with Nazism.
============================================================
Agreed. However is well into the Muslim Brotherhood – who DO have well documented links to the Nazis in the 30s and during WWII.
Just saying.
“however is well” … “however HE is well”