Sunday, February 8, 2015

Christopher Booker: The Fiddling With Temperature Data is the Biggest Science Scandal Ever

Not Following the Data

Regardless of whether evolution it true, false, or somewhere in between, one of evolution’s many influences is the enlistment of science to support ulterior motives. In evolution, the science is enlisted to support a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. Simply put, thinkers such as Darwin became convinced that divine creation must be false. It was a purely religious and metaphysical argument. The empirical evidence does not support very well the idea that the biological world arose spontaneously, so evolutionary “science” is needed to reinterpret the evidence.

Charles Darwin was by no means the first to contort evidence to fit a preconceived notion, but since 1859 the creative use of science has become increasingly common. A recent example of this is the theory of AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming). Like evolution the theory must be true, regardless of the science. Hence there is substantial social, career advancement and funding pressures to obtain confirmations of theory. And as Christopher Booker reminded his readers in this weekend’s Telegraph, the data are adjusted to support the theory. It is, says Booker, the biggest science scandal ever:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Even if this is all true, it does not mean AGW is necessarily false. But it is another example of how easily science is enlisted to support preconceived conclusions. Darwin’s friend TH Huxley said we should follow the data, like a child, wherever it leads. Huxley himself failed to do that, and that trend has continued ever since.

9 comments:

  1. Ummm .. the link seems to take me to an American Airlines booking system?

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    1. Well we're trying to do our part to help the economy.

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  2. Okay, I've spent about ten minutes in total looking at the claim that the temperatures have been fiddled with. What I've seen so far is that the GHCNM is completely open about adjusting the data: they call it "Quality Control Adjusted" and "Quality Control Unadjusted". If they're open about the fact that they adjust the temperatures, then I'm pretty sure they would be open about WHY and HOW they adjust their temperatures.

    Have you looked into this issue any further?

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    1. From the NCDC:

      The automated bias correction software (Peterson and Easterling, 1994; Easterling and Peterson, 1995) used to detect and adjust for documented and undocumented inhomogeneities in the GHCN-Monthly version 2 monthly temperature dataset is available via ftp at:

      ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/source/inhomog/

      Please refer to the README text file in this directory for information on this software.

      Easterling, D.R., and T.C. Peterson, 1995: A new method for detecting undocumented discontinuities in climatological time series. International journal of climatology,15 (4), 369-377.Peterson, T.C., and D.R. Easterling, 1994: Creation of homogeneous composite climatological reference series. International journal of climatology, 14 (6), 671-679.

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  3. http://www.homogenisation.org/

    "The action is over, the main conclusions are:

    1. Homogenisation improves climate data and does not cause artificial trends. Because the test was blind and because of the realism of the data, this can now be stated with confidence.

    ...
    "

    The more I look into this, the more I'm convinced this is a massive beat up. The adjustment is clearly a transparent process - what's the scandal?

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  4. Globalwarmingolics are indeed , innocently or on purpose, leading people to crazy ideas about man affecting this globe.
    He can't. Its too great.
    Its a sham by upper class establishment people wanting a cleaner, greener, world and afraid a rising third world is going to cargas us off the planet.
    I'm making accusations but I think its the secret motives behind unproven convictions.
    of coarse they do it in evolution too.

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    1. Instead of flinging ideological feces, why don't you address my comments above (regarding the adjustment mechanism being entirely transparent).

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  5. Glenn: do you know where did all those "fossils" like in 'fossil fuels' got that carbon?

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    1. Uhhh ... I don't recall mentioning fossils or carbon anywhere. If it has something to do with the software the adjusts temperature then by all means, continue. If it doesn't, then don't expect me to engage.

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