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The Telegraph reports "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever"
From the article:
"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."
It seems that the norm in science may well be to cherry pick the results, but the story points to evidence that some climate data may have been falsified to fit the theory.
Sure, it's clickbait, but we've recently discussed cases where science and scientific consensus has gotten it so very wrong. Can we trust the science if we can't trust the data?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday February 09 2015, @10:43PM
Paraguay is the one in Cowtan's youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRFz8merXEA [youtube.com] But there's a bit of a fight over the global data too, in particular of one of the graphs in teh above youtube: http://www.sealevel.info/Cowtan_unintentionally_vindicates_Booker.html [sealevel.info]
That latter page contains a couple of bogosities: 1) he measures the trend of a graph simply by taking the end-points 2) he *divides* two gradients to evaluate how much the fiddling is.
To see how invalid the latter is, consider the following graph, containing raw and adjusted data:
|----------------------------------------------------------=============================================
|
|
|
|
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the lines is supposed to have gradient 0.0001, and the other is supposed to have gradient 0.00001.
So the change caused by the fiddling is one of increasing global warming by 900% (i.e. multiplying it by 10!)
Were the lower line to have gradient 0, then the fiddling would have had an *INFINITE* effect - it's the biggest fraud ever in teh whole of science!!!!!!!
I'm not saying I support the 3% figure, I've not done the maths, but I certainly don't support the 34% figure. If Booker used the same technique, then Booker's just as wrong, as Cowtan seems to claim.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday February 09 2015, @10:56PM
"The superhuman cock-ups of Christopher Booker"
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/oct/13/christopher-booker
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves