That’s what they’re doing, the goal being to transform a graph showing downward temperatures into a graph showing upward temperatures.
The process is called “adjusting the data.” And (surprise!) the math has issues:
The statistical methods used in the paper are so bad as to merit use in a class on how not to do applied statistics.
I don’t think there’d be much interest in such a class.
Comments
10 responses to “Fiddling with numbers”
Many cities around the world, including San Francisco, have been recording mean sea level on a daily basis for over a century. Can you think of any explanation besides global warming for rising sea levels? I can’t. Sea level is a worldwide measurement. If sea level is rising anywhere over time, it has to be rising everywhere. Gravity is very democratic.
“Great Lakes ice cover has been above normal five of the last seven years, and seven of the last thirteen years,” says Steven Goddard website. “It is already far above the normal annual maximum, with another month of growth left.
http://iceagenow.info/2015/02/great-lakes-ice-coverage-normal/
Laser measurements show that the mass gain of the Antarctic ice sheet from snow accumulation exceeded the mass loss by 49 Gt/yr from 2003 to 2009, says a paper recently published on NASA Technical Reports.
That’s 49 billion tons per year!
The Antarctic Ice Sheet is growing at the rate of 49,000,000,000 tons per year!
http://iceagenow.info/2014/10/antarctic-ice-sheet-growing/
Chocolatier, maybe San Francisco is sinking.
Chocolatier: have you ever heard that sea level has been sinking and is still sinking in Scandinavia due to the reverse from the ice age?
San Francisco is not sinking. The city is built on bedrock. Many other cities around the world also record mean sea level. The oceans are rising.
The sea level has been rising for the last 15 thousand or so years:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Sea_level_temp_140ky.gif
Doggerland disappeared somewhere around 9000 years ago. It never reappeared.
Chocolatier needs to look into the Little Ice Age, which ended in the mid-19th century. It was time of colder than normal temps worldwide. During colder times, you get more glaciers and more sea ice. When things warm up, that additional ice melts a bit, returning to the oceans, raising them a bit. And there is not a bloody thing mankind does or can do about either. Cheers –
http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_lia.html
Unsustainable groundwater use is said to be an even larger culprit:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n6/full/ngeo1476.html
More:
http://www.waterworld.com/articles/wwi/print/volume-25/issue-5/groundwater-development-flow-modeling/groundwater-depletion-linked-to-rising.html
Advances in solar desalination could ultimately help recover these losses.
According to an Israeli study, sea levels have been rising and falling for 2500 years.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100126101411.htm
BTW, San Francisco’s waterfront area (including most of downtown), is built entirely on fill, and ship hulls are still there:
http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hpshpb_2014.jpg
http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps4124.html
While much of the city is on bedrock, the unstable fill areas have caused the city to be repeatedly described as “sinking”:
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/09/17/san-francisco-is-sinking/
http://graybrechin.net/articles/1980s/san-francisco.html
chocolatier February 9th, 2015,
Yes. And by how much? Satellite measurements say about 3.3 mm a year. Let us say it continues at that rate (although lately the rate has declined to about 1.7 mm a year) for a century.
3.3mm X 100 = 330 mm. 330 mm/25.4(mm/in)=~ 13 inches.
So a little over a foot a century. A catastrophe. We will all be drowned. If we don’t lift our heads above the water.
I should note that anyone who doesn’t move their head for a century is already dead.