Socrates Paradox

 The American Physical Society (APS), in its policy statement on global warming, states that the evidence for global warming is “Incontrovertible”. 

The full statement is as follows: “Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes. The evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.” (more…)

My background is engineering, not computer science.  But engineers think that they can do anything, so in that spirit I tried my hand with R to analyze the US climate data.  My approach was as follows:

1. Download the monthly average raw minimum and maximum temperatures from USHCN.
2. Missing data is indicated by -9999.  Change this to NA.  R will ignore NA in calculating slope.
3. Calculate the slope of the annual average temperatures for each station.  I am skipping calculating a “Normal” temperature for each station and the “Anomaly” since my goal is to calculate the slope of the temperature data for each station.  Using slope will work because all of the stations that I have are about 100 years or longer.  I spot checked the slope calculation using Excel.  For Excel to work I had to clear the cells that had “NA”.  Results were identical.
4. Calculate the average for each state.  I did this both using R and Excel and got agreement on each state to 9 decimal places.
5. Using each state’s area from “World Almanac”, calculate an area weighted average slope for max and min temperature for the US.  This final calculation I also did using both R and Excel.

The results surprised me.  They showed a slope of .0001 for max temperature and a slope of .00815 for minimum temperature.  This equates to .01 degrees F per hundred years for maximum temperature and .8149 degrees F per hundred years for minimum temperature. 

The R program used is MMFinal02.r

The data files are:

1. 9641C_201012_raw.min  (9641C_201012_raw.min.gz)
2. 9641C_201012_raw.max  ( 9641C_201012_raw.max.gz)
3. ushcn-stations.txt (ushcn-stations.txt)
4. StateAreas.txt

Mark Twain may not have originated the above quote, but he popularized it.  He would be totally blown away today by Computer Models.   Statistics are a tool.  A chainsaw, in the hands of a skilled lumberman, can be a very productive, labor-saving device.  In the hands of a homicidal maniac, it can be a deadly weapon. (more…)

One of the frequently mentioned fingerprints of man’s role in global warming (AGW) has been that the temperature data shows that evening low temperatures have increased more than daytime maximum temperatures.  The reasoning is that the greenhouse gasses reduce the radiational cooling that occurs at night.  At first, this seems reasonable because radiational cooling is greatest on clear nights.  Clouds reduce radiational cooling and since greenhouse gasses and clouds perform the same function at night, the theory seems logical.

Let’s look at the physics of the radiation transfer and warming.  (more…)

Shub Niggurath Has a posting on his site and on WUWT on Nature’s policy on making researchers make their computer code available.  I have a previous posting on this site on data availability. We need a volunteer effort like Anthony Watts Surface Staions to audit journals, determine the availability of data, methods and code and publish results. I would be willing to subscribe to one journal such as Science and request information on papers, and I’m sure many others would. I also have this site here which no one reads which could serve as the place to publish results.  Any volunteers??

When I wrote the posting looking for scientific standards, I thought that my problem was that I had not been able to find where the standards were defined.  NAS has just put out a book, “On Being a Scientist” which is available here: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12192&page=1

The first sentence of the preface says it all, “The scientific enterprise is built on a foundation of trust.”  WRONG!  Science is built on quality data that has been scrupulously collected, natural laws and principals which can be replicated and verified by others and documentation that allows others to build on previous work.   (more…)

Thanks to www.consumerenergyreport.com

Senator David Vitter has introduced legislation (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/08/a-bill-for-climate-data-integrity-the-public-access-to-historical-records-act/) giving NASA responsibility for establishing and maintaining the temperature records as follows: “The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall establish an official dataset on the historical temperature record.”  (more…)

It has been mentioned on this site as well as several others the difference between scientists and those that work in the real world of engineering, computer science, statistics, medicine etc.  So when this week I came across a reference to an ASME standard, it raised the question of what standards govern scientific research.  I did not find very much.  The US federal government standards mainly cover reporting of the financial aspects of the work.  The Code of Federal Regulations, Title 45, Chapter 4, National Science Foundation, in section 698 has a definition of Scientific Misconduct. It includes some interesting information.

(more…)

The more I look at the Royal Society’s report, the worse it gets.  They use the term “strong evidence” both in the Introduction and Concluding Remarks.  In the Introduction, they state:

“2 There is strong evidence that the warming of the Earth over the last half-century has

been caused largely by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes

in land use, including agriculture and deforestation..”

And in the Concluding Remarks they state:

“57There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human

activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last

half century.”

Note that they shift from “caused largely by human activity” including several activities, to “greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause”.

(more…)