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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Catcracking says:
July 2, 2014 at 5:40 am
The design goal was to show a temperature rise so we could get out Bonus
==============================================
Not good enough. They should take a leaf of of the UK Met Office, who award themselves huge bonuses regardless of how well their forecasting works. For the record, this is an organisation that for thirteen of the past fourteen years “forecast” (or, rather, “hoped that”) UK temps to be higher than they actually were.
“Bonuses all round!!” is the cry, “after all, it’s only taxpayers’ money, and there’s always more where that came from”.
/rant
I would love to see the business requirements document for those algos
@Stephen Fisher Skinner,
I made no such link, but you did. Interesting….
Over the years….and no one has noticed?……bullcrap
“never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence.”
“working as designed” eh. Mendacity on parade.
Watts, you are at Taranto’s yesterday column:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/best-of-the-web-today-free-speech-movement-1404243186
Congrats, but we need more.
Here is the thing, the Scientists are all being absolutely truthful, accurate and factual, just as Politicians are always absolutely truthful, accurate and factual. I am not being sarcastic they really are absolutely truthful, accurate and factual. They defined the terms.
It really is us skeptics who are lying, sloppy, false and most importantly ignorant of the definitions.
For example skeptics like to talk about absolute temperature. That’s nice, it sounds good, but it is absolutely meaningless. If I read a thermometer right now it reads 82˚ is that the absolute temperature? No! All it takes to falsify is someone somewhere else getting a different reading on their thermometer.
Boom! Just like that skeptics are underwater swimming for their lives. So we skeptics scream out averages! Yes averages are the absolute temperature! The Scientists just shake their heads sadly and calmly explain that it is the change in averages, anomalies, that are real, and they are right.
The skeptics head is spinning. “If absolute temperatures aren’t real how do you get something that is real by averaging something that doesn’t exist?” “Simple,” the scientist explains, “We use the laws of large numbers, statistics and computer modeling.”
“But what if your original data isn’t complete or inaccurate?” The skeptic asks.
“It doesn’t matter.” The scientist replies. “Our methods always produce the same results. The errors are too insignificant to matter.”
The Scientists are right.
Why did they send their statement to Politifact?
“My software: no error”. Famous last words before your system crashes (or a paperclip appears).
Reposting to get Anthony’s attention 🙂
Anthony, you are at Taranto’s yesterday column:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/best-of-the-web-today-free-speech-movement-1404243186
Congrats, but we need more.
If you like your Al-gore-rithm, you can keep your Al-gore-rithm. Besides, what does it matter now?
What Goddard and Homewood and others are doing is a well-respected procedure in financial accounting. The Auditors must determine if the aggregate corporation reports are truly representative of the company’s financial condition. In order to test that, a sample of component operations are selected and examined to see if the reported results are accurate compared to the facts on the ground.
Discrepancies such as those we’ve seen from NCDC call into question the validity of the entire situation as reported. The stakeholders must be informed that the numbers presented are misrepresenting the reality. The Auditor must say of NCDC something like: “We are of the opinion that NCDC statements regarding USHCN temperatures do not give a true and fair view of the actual climate reported in all of the sites measured.”
I’m going to assume something like the following has been done:
Find a continuously reporting, well sited station.
At the “raw data” level, remove this station from the process for a period of time representing a break in that station’s reporting.
Now do whatever process is done to the “raw data” and then run the “working as designed algorithm”.
How accurately did the final adjusted data match what that perfectly good station actually reported?
Just wonderin’.
Here is the proper working of their software. I have taken data snapshots of a station in Oberlin, Ohio over the past several days. They are not changing the temperature monthly. It changes just about EVERY DAY. As an example, I give you the year 1936 in Oberlin, Ohio. Station number USH00336196. I picked 1936 because of the whole “hottest month ever” fiasco. I picked Oberlin, because it has a full and complete “record”, even though the station was officially closed in February of 2010, after reporting stopped in May 2009! Enjoy:
06_26_2014 USH00336196 1936 -678E -768E 379E 560E 1626 1922 2287 2253a 1948 1135 173 88a 006_27_2014 USH00336196 1936 -678E -768E 379E 560E 1626 1922 2287 2253a 1948 1135 173 88a 0
06_29_2014 USH00336196 1936 -700E -793E 357E 539E 1605 1901 2266 2232a 1927 1114 152 67a 0
07_01_2014 USH00336196 1936 -702E -795E 355E 537E 1604 1900 2265 2231a 1925 1112 150 66a 0
07_02_2014 USH00336196 1936 -698E -792E 358E 539E 1606 1902 2267 2233a 1928 1115 153 68a 0
It’s very interesting that in carrying out post-incident root cause analysis of all of these errors from the past, it was public disclosure, openness and cooperation that were key to finding the sometimes incredibly small problem that resulted in catastrophic failure. But when Government is involved, it is not so much the root cause that is the biggest failure but the secrecy, protectionism and condescension with which bureaucracies act and operate. NCDC is no different. We must keep the pressure on or they will just move on.
Anybody know what this is about?
http://www.cfact.org/2014/07/02/its-coming/
maybe FOIA? or just the NGIPCC conference?
Working as designed or as directed?
“… our algorithm is working as designed”
Why, yes… it is following the political line and purpose…what a surprise.
To those lamenting the corruption of temperature data, and especially to those wanting to preserve the original data:
John James Cowperthwaite, British social servant: from Wikipedia:
“He returned to Hong Kong in 1945 and continued to rise through the ranks. He was asked to find ways in which the government could boost post-war economic outlook but found the economy was recovering swiftly without any government intervention. He took the lesson to heart and positive non-interventionism became the focus of his economic policy as Financial Secretary. He refused to collect economic statistics to avoid officials meddling in the economy.” (Emphasis added)
The result was, I believe, the fastest growing economy on the earth at the time, growth that went on for decades. Cowperthwaite was onto something. As others have stated repeatedly, this effort to determine a single temperature for the earth at any point in time is ridiculous on its face and, as Cowperthwaite indicated would happen, attempting to do so has led to damaging meddling in the economy.
I realize science requires data, and uncorrupted data at that, but there are always politicians hovering, looking to meddle at the slightest excuse. And when those same politicians are funding the science, the meddling is inevitable.
ntesdorf says:July 1, 2014 at 10:09 pm
You nailed my response with ‘SNAFU’, but then that is SOP for the gov’t.
Dougmanxx says:
July 2, 2014 at 7:58 am
Here is the proper working of their software. I have taken data snapshots of a station in Oberlin, Ohio over the past several days. They are not changing the temperature monthly. It changes just about EVERY DAY.
====
100%…..Doug keep repeating that until people stop saying “monthly”….every time they pull a record, it changes it….that can even be several times a day
“Working as designed” may not mean what you think it means. It means the algorithm works the way it was created to work. It does not mean it’s scientifically correct or it provides the correct results.
“Working as designed” means somebody created a list of the requirements and the software matches those specifications. Are the requirements correct? Are the results correct? Those are entirely different questions.
Goddard explains it all here a very lucid well presented exposition. A very clear speaker should represent the skeptic side on media
https://soundcloud.com/jim-poll/wjr-2014-07-02-1025am-stevegoddard-readscience-proc02
Chernobyl also worked as designed. When you take an inherently unstable reactor design and shut off safety systems and do things the manual tells you not to do, it melts down.
Every time your Windows 95 system blue screened and crashed, it was working exactly as designed. The problem was the design was faulty. I had a computer instructor years ago who when a student started complaining “It is not supposed to do that” the answer from him would be something like “well it obviously is supposed to do that. Now you need to find out why it is doing that rather than what you wanted it to do.”
This is pure civil service reaction to a major blunder, especially after they have been under considerable pressure from outsiders and government concerning the quality of the US temperature record. Having laid this bare, don’t let them get out of it with this bull. Let’s get this data destroying algorithm out into the open, too, analyze the heck out of it and lambaste it publically! It should be revealed far and wide that the temp record of the US is changed every day!!! I suspect they have taken perfectly good stations out of service because they don’t show warming and replaced this data with their higher temp gradient fill-in and algorithm warming gradualism.
Isn’t there some kind of auditor general or something to report all this to. No more mister nice guy, Anthony – these guys and their confreres have trampled all over your good faith before. This is an outrage – not science at work. And they can’t even take refuge in being incompetent now. I’m amazed that the algorithm itself hasn’t been presented at these House Committees on the topic. How on earth can anyone ever do a meaningful study if the data changes daily. I think the dismantling has to be monitored by independents and not let these guys “fix it” themselves.