

Understanding science is not always as hard as you think - yummyfajitas
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/03/did-monbiot-try-to-understand-climate.html

======
carbocation
My favorite approach to reading science papers of all types is to assume the
paper to be bogus, and then read it in order to find out why. If I am doing
battle with the author every sentence of the way, I am forced into reading
carefully and skeptically. If the author still has me convinced at the end,
good on them.

I will say this approach is easier when you have had someone you trust teach
you how to read scientific papers. In undergrad and in med school, professors
would present us with two similar papers both published in top journals and
ask, "Which one is wrong?" It was a highly valuable training exercise for me.
The gist of the message that I got was this: (1) If you really need to
understand the paper, ignore the discussion (and, sometimes, the results)
until you have mastery of the methods and figures. (2) If you are really lost,
read the discussion to see what the author thinks she is showing, then go back
to the results to see if you agree.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Part of the problem is that you have to "Read Like Math" and not "Read Like A
Novel." Papers aren't taken seriously unless they sound serious, and people
like to read adventure stories. Anything else is just "too hard."

People don't know how to read scientific papers. They don't know how to find
the story in the stilted and stultifying prose. They don't know that you can
skim bits and return to them later, you can read through to get the sense,
then return to see the details.

And it's got scary looking equations.

~~~
_delirium
I actually wish a lot of papers in my area (speaking as a grad student) had
more novel-like writing and were less hung-up on seeming formal. I've been
reading a bunch of logic papers lately, mainly to mine techniques and ideas
for an application-oriented use of logic that my thesis is built on, and the
papers parcel out concepts _so_ slowly, and fail to explain any intuition
about them, that it's pretty slow going. It's like 90% proofs that I don't
care about (put them in an appendix) and 10% actual content I might want to
read.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I agree with you, but that's what you have to do to get published. My first
PhD thesis was rejected, although my _viva_ saved me and I was given
permission to re-write. The second version had mostly the same material,
mostly the same proofs, but was written in a style that made it seem harder
and more inaccessible. It appeared more impressive, so it made a better
impression.

Clear, accurate and engaging writing is hard and undervalued.

My advice is: learn to live with it. After all, you don't really have a
choice.

------
lotharbot
Understanding a single scientific paper is easier than many people think.
Understanding something like the temperature trend from 1850, or the growth
trend in artificially-bred corn over the last 100 years, is pretty easy,
requiring little more than grade-school arithmetic.

But in my experience, people don't want to merely understand the existence of
that trend. They want to understand the broader ideas of climate science,
evolution, medicine, etc. That means understanding where the data comes from,
what sort of filters have been applied, what principles account for it, how
those principles have been lab-tested and on what scale, etc.

It's that sort of understanding that's hard.

------
roundsquare
I didn't read the full paper, so I could be wrong but... I think its MUCH
harder to understand than he gives it credit for.

The equation on page 4 is enough to confused people, especially with C_H is
described as "any homogenisation adjustment that may have been applied to the
reported temperature."

It does't appear to be doing any high level math, but lots of people don't
remember that (x^y)(x^z) = x^(y+z) so its going to be hard to get through a
paper like this.

That being said, the number of people who could read this and understand it
does seem to be much higher than I thought before.

------
DanielBMarkham
Okay, I'll bite. Is the raw data available -- with no extrapolation or
filling. Just a big series of: station, long/latt, date, max-temp, min-temp?
Data that no human hand has touched since the original reading?

That would be a wonderful CSV file to play around with. It couldn't be that
big of a file either.

~~~
nollidge
Looked at the paper linked in TFA [1]. Said something about "HadCRUT"
temperature data, so I Googled it. Third link down was [2], which has data
downloads. Also checked wikipedia, which linked to [3], which has that and
many more datasets.

[1] <http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf>

[2] <http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/>

[3] <http://hadobs.metoffice.com/>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Alright I've clicked on all those links, read the text, and downloaded the
files.

I've got files for variations, I've got files for averages, I've got files I
don't know what they are.

Now back to my question: anybody know where the unaltered data, by day and
location, is? Direct link would be awesome.

This isn't too much to ask, right? I mean, if we've been keeping temperature
records, surely there has to be the raw data somewhere in an easy-to-consume
format? (I'm not trying to be cynical or sarcastic. For all I know there might
be good reasons for such data not existing or I might have a case of the
doofus here)

~~~
lssndrdn
There was a thread on HN some time ago and I saved this link, which has some
instructions on where to find the data and a description of the format.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt

I wanted to start a little project to process it but never got around to it.

Hope this helps.

~~~
oconnor0
I've seen claims somewhere (maybe at "Watts Up with That") that no unmodified
climate station data exists, that it's all been modified or corrected to
adjust for something.

Is this data raw?

~~~
hga
Well, it does exist, you just have to go back to the _original_ sources, e.g.
the meteorological organizations of the various countries, militaries, etc.

As far as I know, the position of the CRU is that they have no original
unmodified raw data anymore. Don't know about NASA and NOAA.

~~~
hga
This article claims that 3 out of the 4 datasets available, the ones from the
CRU, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and National Climate
Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN), are not independent
and that the latter two were felt by NASA to be inferior to the CRU's. The
article doesn't have anything on the raw data, however.

[http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa-
heads-...](http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa-heads-knew-
nasa-data-was-poor-then-used-data-from-cru/?singlepage=true)

------
heresyforme
Is that really science? I could follow the same steps to balance my checkbook
in order to determine spending periods.

If they'd created a small model of the Earth and applied what they know in
order to determine the truth of their hypothesis, than yes, I would say
they're doing science. Has the bar really dropped this low?

------
Nwallins
> _subtract the average temperature from the observed temperature for the same
> month ... If it's getting hotter the anomalies will get bigger._

Based on the above, it should be noted that anomalies are signed, and an
anomaly of +5 is bigger than an anomaly of -10, if I understand correctly.

~~~
anamax
> subtract the average temperature from the observed temperature for the same
> month

How are we computing average? The average daily high? The average daily low?
The average of the daily midpoint? The average at 9am? The average at whatever
time the person got around to recording it? These things affect what one can
see in the data and how it relates to reality.

My point is that even simple sounding things aren't necessarily.

------
pw0ncakes
I'm finding this true as well. I was in graduate school for a year and got my
ass kicked. I actually failed at least one course. I was lucky enough to swing
into industry with a better job than most MAs or "ABDs" get so I didn't go
back for a second year.

I kept myself in challenging work and average 10-15 hours per week studying CS
concepts. Now those same subjects that kicked my ass seem not only
comprehensible but beautiful. What was a poorly-motivated technical mess of
symbols (to me) I can now relate to real concepts in CS, and I could play with
them if I needed to. (Godel numbering? Oh, that's Lisp encoded in the
integers. Primitive recursion? It's a for-loop.)

So it seems like I'm "smarter" at 26 than at 22, contrary to stereotype.
Because I have more experience to relate new concepts to, I find it much
easier now to learn new concepts in mathematics and science, except for the
fact that I have 1/4 as much time in which to do so.

The problem is that most people are taught subjects like algebra and calculus
without much motivation and with no prior experience, so only natural ability
and parental expectations can drive people to learn them. Calculus isn't
actually hard, unless your algebra sucks. Algebra is only hard for so many
people because it's poorly-taught and often not well-motivated, so only people
who get a lot of encouragement (often because of natural ability and a
developed inclination to solve puzzles) learn it.

The lesson I take away from this is that education (about sciences, but also
literature and history) isn't something that should occur only for those who
are too young to be economically useful; it ought to be an ongoing process.

