Argue if you must about what percentage of global warming is anthropogenic or what interdictions will be necessary. No one denies those are controversial points. However, to claim global warming and climate change are not happening indicates you have not really looked at or understood the data. Not someones opinion truthy summary of the data, but the actual numbers. I have a science background and this is simply not debated anymore. It is has been proven to be the case that the earth is warming overall and is at least somewhat from man.
Then why did they have to fudge the numbers so bad anyways? Just doesn't make a lot of sense.
First, it begins with you - turn your brain on.
Next, read something for people with their brains turned on -
http://www.slate.com...asurements.html
No, Adjusting Temperature Measurements Is Not a Scandal
The latest salvo in the War on Reality comes from the UK paper The Telegraph, which is a safe haven for some who would claim—literally despite the evidence—that global warming isn’t real.
The article, written by Christopher Booker (who flat out denies human-induced global warming), is somewhat subtly titled “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”. In it, Booker claims that climate scientists have adjusted temperature readings from thermometers in Paraguay to make it look like the temperature is increasing, when the measurements off the detectors actually show the opposite. The theme of the article is that scientists “manipulated” the data on purpose to exaggerate global warming.
This is nonsense. The claim is wrong. The scientists didn’t manipulate the data, they processed it. That’s a very different thing. And the reason they do it isn’t hard to understand.
Imagine you want to measure the daily temperature in a field near a town. You want to make sure the measurements you get aren’t affected by whether it’s cloudy or sunny—direct sunlight on the thermometer will increase the temperature you measure—so you set it up in a reflective box. Look: Right away you’ve adjusted the temperature, even before you’ve taken a measurement! You’ve made sure an outside influence doesn’t affect your data adversely. That’s a good thing.
So you start reading the data, but over time someone buys the property near the field, and builds houses there. Driveways, roads, houses leaking heat… this all affects your thermometer. Perhaps a building is erected that casts a shadow over your location. Whatever: You have to account for all these effects.
That’s what scientists do. That’s what scientists did. They examined the data from these thermometers all over the world, and tried to minimize the impact of outside influences. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to trust the data.
How you correct the data is important, of course, and this is where the second claim comes in: Scientists manipulated the data specifically to make it look like global warming is stronger than it really is.
Ah, but we know that’s not true! A few years ago, an independent group at Berkeley took that same temperature data and re-examined it, processing it in a different way. Guess what they found?
Yup. The planet’s warming up, and pretty much just as the other scientists had said. You can read more about this in an excellent article by Neville Nicholls, who is an expert in how meteorological measurements need to be adjusted in this way. There’s more at “…and then there’s Physics” blog and at Real Sceptic, and Skeptical Science has an article debunking this as well.
A graph is worth a thousand words. Here are the results of the Berkeley research compared to various other groups:
[see link for graph]
As you can see, there’s virtually no difference. As long as the measurements are processed properly they show what we know, what we’ve known, for quite some time: The world is warming up, and it’s warming up rapidly.
So, far from being “the biggest science scandal ever”, this isn’t even a scandal at all, and is in fact how science works. You can’t just take raw data off a detector and claim it’s real; if you do so then at best you’d be fooling yourself, and at worst you’d be trying to fool others. And that’s certainly not how science works.
And regarding the reference to the Berkeley (BEST) Project, here's what the project leader, former skeptic, Dr. Mueller, PhD, had to say in the NYT -
http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
Here's the thing, Bruce - there's a lot of old dudes around that are angry that their Ayn Rand fantasies haven't played out so everything has become a govt conspiracy. Eventually, they'll be gone and a lot of good things are going to become possible. In the interim, my advice is to just stop listening to them.
Edited by salsabob, 10 February 2015 - 10:29 AM.
John Galt shrugged, outsourced to Red China and opened a hedge fund for unregulated securitized credit derivatives.
If the world didn't suck, wouldn't we all just fly off?