The Dog Ate my Data

Derek D (18:57:49) :

john (16:52), I’ll explain. All statistics are junk science. They are laden with human assumption and never represent facts. Statistics are not needed to calculate the speed of an object in motion, determine if a building will stand, or tell you what you see in a microscope. That is science. Observation, measurement, mechanisms and reproducibility. What you’re seeing is the opposite and that is the precise reason why you question it.

What constitutes “the data” here is a choppy dataset from a hodge podge of weather stations, arranged in disproportionate number around the coasts of a continent the size of the US. A dozen different people have come along and applied their own unique set of assumptions to massage the data in a manner that they are sure is the ‘right’ way. And be they alarmists or skeptics each will claim the high ground, and a scientific ‘truth’ thus hinges on who can massage better or scream louder. Many have already pointed out that Eschenbach’s assertions about the proximity of other weather stations are embarrassingly and verifiably wrong, but the whole exercise ceased to be scientific long before that.

The earth has major geologic events every 50-100 million years. It has a 100,000 year orbital precess in which the both the radius from the sun and axial tilt go from a maximum to a minimum. This causes ice ages and interglacials on a 20,000/80,000 year cycle. Within this time there are 800-1000 year warming and cooling cycles where temperature and CO2 levels rise and fall in oscillating intervals. The deep Atlantic ocean currents oscillate in multidecadal cycles while the Pacific oscillates on decade cycles. Typical sunspot cycles run ~11 years, El Ninos and La Ninas happen in ~4 year cycles, and cloud formation changes randomly by the minute. This in addition to the fact that the sun, our main energy input, goes through internal energy cycles that we cannot fully predict. To think that 100 years of sketchy temperature station data is going to lead to an accurate composite prediction of future climate and temperatures within fractions of a degree is pure foolishness. The complex and differential forces acting on the earth in different timescales deserve more than just an extrapolated straight line. Its an insult to our intelligence no matter what the conclusion.

Much ado about nothing.