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from the we-just-need-a-test-world-to-play-around-with dept.
From The Guardian
Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming often invoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there's a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong.
To evaluate that possibility, a new paper published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology examines a selection of contrarian climate science research and attempts to replicate their results.
Alas the results weren't good for that 3%...
Cherry picking was the most common characteristic they shared. We found that many contrarian research papers omitted important contextual information or ignored key data that did not fit the research conclusions.
The article also notes,
..there is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming. Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that's overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other. The one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking, curve fitting, ignoring inconvenient data, and disregarding known physics.
(Score: 5, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:33PM
Controversy! Federal scientists have been accused of fiddling with the temperature record [telegraph.co.uk]. Sky Marshall Tehat Meru launches an investigation! Would you like to know more?
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/temperature-monitoring.php [noaa.gov]
The most important bias globally was the modification in measured sea surface temperatures associated with the change from ships throwing a bucket over the side, bringing some ocean water on deck, and putting a thermometer in it, to reading the thermometer in the engine coolant water intake. The bucket readings used early in the record were cooler than engine intake observations so the early data have been adjusted warmer to remove that bias. This makes global temperatures indicate less warming than the raw data.
The most important bias in the U.S. temperature record occurred with the systematic change in observing times from the afternoon, when it is warm, to morning, when it is cooler. This shift has resulted in a well documented increasing cool bias over the last several decades and is addressed by applying a correction to the data.
Sky Marshall Tehat Meru has also instituted a new methodology for controlling for location or instrument changes at various sites that cause visible jumps in the raw data. Would you like to know more? [noaa.gov]