Random Thoughts About Global Warming

[flippyshark]

Well said, Moonliner. There are so many good reasons to pursue alternative energy, promote clean air, restore natural habitats and so on, even if humans are not causing climate change.

I've read about the hacked emails. I see that one researcher stepped down from his post for suggesting a "trick" that skewed data - something I agree is best brought to light. Bad science is bad science. But much of the fuss is simply about attitude. The emails contained insider chat in which global warming skeptics were called idiots, and so on. Totally irrelevant to the actual science. (Such name-calling takes place out in the open, in comment sections on websites on all sides of every issue, for instance.)

I have a long way to go before I can even pretend to have a grasp on earth science and the data supporting or not supporting climate change. Ultimately, the facts will speak for themselves. Real science has great self-correcting mechanisms. Public discourse and private chatter, not so much.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by flippyshark

I've read about the hacked emails. I see that one researcher stepped down from his post for suggesting a "trick" that skewed data -

Except if you dig beyond the one-liner that was cherry picked out, he wasn't doing anything that falsified data or affected the conclusions of the research in question. He was just talking about selectively graphing the data that most clearly demonstrated the conclusions of the research.

Would it have been better to print the entire raw data (again, going past the one-liner, that's exactly what his colleagues replied to him with)? Perhaps. But boy do I understand where the dude is coming from. When facing people who walk outside in January and say, "Look, it's 32 degrees today, take THAT global warming!!!" I can appreciate the urge to avoid printing a graph that might, to people who don't have a grasp of statistics, appear to show a downward trend in temperatures.

No, it's not good scientific reporting. But it doesn't change the reality of the data behind it. It was just one guy trying to avoid having to justify his conclusions from spurious misinterpretation of the data by masking out the bit that could be misinterpreted. The guy is still an ass, but it's hardly a smoking gun that brings down the entire theory of global warming.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Would it have been better to print the entire raw data (again, going past the one-liner, that's exactly what his colleagues replied to him with)? Perhaps. But boy do I understand where the dude is coming from. When facing people who walk outside in January and say, "Look, it's 32 degrees today, take THAT global warming!!!" I can appreciate the urge to avoid printing a graph that might, to people who don't have a grasp of statistics, appear to show a downward trend in temperatures.

Sigh, sometimes I hate being right.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

This is why weaker-willed people have the urge to pretty-up the data. Even 100% conclusive data showing global warming WILL have bits that, read by someone who doesn't grasp the concept of statistical trends, "contradict" the conclusion. So it's tempting to look at it and say, "I know that the entire data set supports my conclusion, but people without the analytical training I have are going to misinterpret the full data set, so why don't I just tailor the data I publish so that to the untrained eye it matches the conclusion which I know to be right."

Again, it's a bad decision to make. The doffuses who succumbed to this temptation were correctly called out for it. But if you have to continually start each conversation by contradicting idiots that think a snow storm negates global warming, you'd start to really really wish the snow storms would stop.

[Stan4dSteph]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Sigh, sometimes I hate being right.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html

This is why weaker-willed people have the urge to pretty-up the data. Even 100% conclusive data showing global warming WILL have bits that, read by someone who doesn't grasp the concept of statistical trends, "contradict" the conclusion. So it's tempting to look at it and say, "I know that the entire data set supports my conclusion, but people without the analytical training I have are going to misinterpret the full data set, so why don't I just tailor the data I publish so that to the untrained eye it matches the conclusion which I know to be right."

Again, it's a bad decision to make. The doffuses who succumbed to this temptation were correctly called out for it. But if you have to continually start each conversation by contradicting idiots that think a snow storm negates global warming, you'd start to really really wish the snow storms would stop.

What did you mean to link? That's the Google buzz article.

Daily Show and Colbert Report had some great segments on last night and ripped on the morons who see the current snowstorms as evidence against the warming trend.