The scandal of fiddled global warming data

[BlasterBates]

Here is peer reviewed research which Steven Goddard was reiterating. i.e. that the US was warmer in the 1930's

http://http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

Just because it's on a blog doesn't mean to say the assertion is not peer reviewed.

[speling bee]

Here is peer reviewed research which Steven Goddard was reiterating. i.e. that the US was warmer in the 1930's

http://http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

Just because it's on a blog doesn't mean to say the assertion is not peer reviewed.

Excellent. It's the peer review we were looking for. Glad we got there. Thank you.

This looks like the bit you are referring to:

The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years.

[pjclarke]

Exactly. Post the blogs and say that they have not been peer reviewed so they are not necessarily wrong.

Indeed, Sturgeon's Law tells us that 90% of everything is crap, on the internet probably more. I could find you websites written by folks with PHds, with lotsa charts and sciency stuff proving the blueberries cure cancer, or evolution is false. Peer review is a useful first filter, published articles (should) have been reviewed by experts in the field who will only recommend publication if

1. The evidence and reasoning support the conclusions being stated and
2. The study is a significant addition to knowledge of the subject.


Publication will bring the study to the attention of other subject matter experts who may well be blissfully aware of the blogosphere; who if they can rebut or improve on the study, will submit a comment for review and publication, and so, in theory, the debate and our scientific knowledge advance. Which is why the literature, rather than unreviewed books and blogs, are the best place to look for the latest understanding of any branch of science, and why, if an argument made on a blog has merit, it should be submitted to a journal for scrutiny. But publication is just the first step, the literature at any point in time is just a snapshot of our best understanding, as Einstein almost said 'it only takes a single man to prove me wrong'. To be part of that understanding a study needs to be published and to survive without rebuttal. A crude measure of 'rightness' is the number of citations a paper attracts, some studies that meet the two above criteria will be cited by many authors, others sink without trace.

So being published in and of itself, certainly does not make a paper 'right'. There are several examples of howlers slipping through the net, for example Soon and Balliunas 2003 was so flawed it triggered the resignation of half the board of editors of the journal that published it. Another favourite trick is to cite a paper, and fail to acknowledge later work that refutes it, as was done by the Spectator in a front-page piece on sea level rise . The Speccie cited a paper on sea level in the Maldives by Nils Axel Morner, without mentioning to their readers that it had been completely debunked by two subsequent papers in the same journal.

Pseudo-sceptics like to quote a comment made by Phil Jones found in one of the hacked CRU emails

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

as evidence of a team of 'insiders' gatekeeping the literature, but this is to misunderstand peer-review, nobody gets to redefine it and its also an example of the system working as it should: both the papers were in fact included and discussed in the report, and both have since sunk without trace.

[pjclarke]

Steven Goddard shows the difference between the fiddled data (peer reveiwed) and the raw data (peer reviewed).

and where is the evidence for the other half of 'Goddard's claim, as repeated by Booker - a 3c per century rise in the US? I'll help you out, here's the latest NASA chart ...



It seems a large part of the difference was actually due to the correction of a software glitch

[pjclarke]

One problem is that most people think "peer reviewed research" is always right....and therefore there's no point arguing.

PLOS Medicine: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

I've got round to reading that, and it is fascinating. But it refers to quite a narrow subset of medical research, that which is evaluated by a test of statistical significance (p-values) and uses specialised statistical definitions of 'true' and 'false'

Research findings are defined here as any relationship reaching formal statistical significance, e.g., effective interventions, informative predictors, risk factors, or associations.

Also, this 2005 study was superceded by another in 2013 which produced a contrary result

Here we adapt estimation methods from the genomics community to the problem of estimating the rate of false discoveries in the medical literature using reported P-values as the data. We then collect P-values from the abstracts of all 77 430 papers published in The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The British Medical Journal, and The American Journal of Epidemiology between 2000 and 2010. Among these papers, we found 5322 reported P-values. We estimate that the overall rate of false discoveries among reported results is 14% (s.d. 1%), contrary to previous claims.

So I am not convinced that the paper is either accurate or that one can extrapolate the conclusion to other, less stats-based disciplines.

[BrilloPad]

Threads about AWG - its a winner every time.

[speling bee]

Threads about AWG - its a winner every time.

AGW
it's

[pjclarke]

AGW
it's

Actually in any decent thread it is 'CAGW'.

Pseudo-sceptics like to prefix the well-defined AGW with the subjective 'Catastrophic'. This has the effect of raising the bar and introducing a value judgement. Ask them to define 'catastrophic' in terms of an actual number of degrees Celsius increase and the inevitable result is



HTH.

[speling bee]

Actually in any decent thread it is 'CAGW'.

Pseudo-sceptics like to prefix the well-defined AGW with the subjective 'Catastrophic'. This has the effect of raising the bar and introducing a value judgement. Ask them to define 'catastrophic' in terms of an actual number of degrees Celsius increase and the inevitable result is



HTH.

Still, there's no smoke without fire.

[pjclarke]

Sceptics at war

'Goddard ' demolished Part1

There was no nefarious intent here, NOAA/NCDC isn’t purposely trying to “fabricate” data as Goddard claims, they are simply trying to be able to figure out a way to make use of it at all. The word “fabrication” is the wrong word to use, as it implies the data is being plucked out of thin air. It isn’t it is being gathered from nearby stations and used to create a reasonable estimate.

'Goddard' demolished Part 2

The blogger Steven Goddard has been on a tear recently, castigating NCDC for making up “97% of warming since 1990″ by infilling missing data with “fake data”. The reality is much more mundane, and the dramatic findings are nothing other than an artifact of Goddard’s flawed methodology. Lets look at what’s actually going on in more detail.

'Goddard' demolished Part 3

Unfortunately some folks who really should know better paid attention to the pseudonymous Steven Goddard, which spawned a whole slew of incorrect articles in places like the Telegraph, Washington Times, and Investor’s Business Daily about how the U.S. has been cooling since the 1930s. It even was the top headline on the Drudge Report for a good portion of the day. This isn’t even true in the raw data, and certainly not in the time of observation change-corrected or fully homogenized datasets.

Part 1 is by Anthony Watts Zeke Hausfather, who authored Parts 2 and 3, used 'Goddard's 'raw data only, no gridding' method for the global land area rather than US Only dataset:



and observes: ' It appears that the world’s land has warmed 2C over the past century! Its worse than we thought!'



http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014...e-temperature/
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014...atures-part-2/
On ‘denying’ Hockey Sticks, USHCN data, and all that – part 1 | Watts Up With That?