
WUWT press-release on study of upward adjustment of NOAA temperature data - georgecmu
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/#more-68286
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slurgfest
I deplore the increase of this kind of hopelessly biased political-advocacy
posting on HN. Why not also some articles on Intelligent Design and the
perfidies of the Darwinists? How about some articles about abortion?

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drats
It matters in terms of statistics and machine learning. If, and that's _if_ ,
these guys are correct then the data collection, pre-processing and
normalization can have a large effect on the end result when you are trying to
predict a trend or train a classifier. This is essential to good science and
possibly more interesting to some of us than, say, a new node.js framework or
a standing desk.

The argument they make for classifying the temperature sensors into different
grades seems solid. There is a clear methodology extending from Leroy on how
to class the sites into five different classes depending the surrounding
terrain which we know affects the readings. They have used ground and aerial
photography in giving the stations these classes using this methodology. So
this isn't just a rehash of general Urban Heat Island arguments of the past
it's a new, seemingly methodologically robust, chapter in that debate which
must be answered by the other side. As it stands the best two classes of site
have very good coverage over mainland USA and it's reasonable to compare them
to the worst three classes of site. It turns out there is quite a large
discrepancy between them[1]. This is science, not politics.

But, yes, the science has political implications. On that political side this
is an issue worth addressing if we are going to put trillions of public money
into dealing with the problem posed by climate change, according to the models
which are operating on this very data. Redirecting those trillions has the
potential to put the economic growth of billions of people living in extreme
poverty on hold, no small matter. In light of that arguments like "if I, Prof.
A., open-source my code and data Prof. B. will get a publication I want to
write out before me" seem rather trivial. If your research says the public
should spend trillions, you can expect to show your working and to be
scrutinized heavily in public. On the face of it these results are huge, and I
for one want to see them discussed and reviewed.

I don't think we should just accept arguments from authority - and even then,
only a majority of the authorities, as there are dissenting professors from
institutions like MIT and Cambridge - given the gravity of the consequences.
Data processing, science, institutional incumbents versus disruptive
outsiders, trillions of dollars: I think it is hitting a lot of HN notes
actually.

[1][http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/watts_et_...](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/watts_et_al_2012-figure20-conus-
compliant-nonc-noaa.png?w=640&h=487) And the normalization question is also at
issue here beyond the different classes.

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brc
Strange headline for this press release.

From my cursory skim, it would seem as though a more suitable headline would
be 'applying latest UN/WMO standards to US temperature reduces previously
announced temperature growth by half'.

There's definitely a battle of the temperature-set data papers going on with
this and the BEST results being announced at about the same time. It will be
interesting to see which one stands up to long term scrutiny.

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snowwrestler
Flagged for inaccuracy. Anthony Watts has little scientific training and no
credibility. This is basically a political press release.

edit for spelling

