[DrCaleb]

commanderkai commanderkai:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

The story, and similar ones posted in places like 'The Guardian' are all based on a new study by the RMS. It's actually the first sentence in the article... "A new study by British and Canadian researchers shows " which links to the study at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 7/abstract

I'm against using blogs of any sort for the Newsbot thing, no matter the issue at hand. I just see it as a slippery slope. You can obviously post blogs, but in my opinion, it's not proper to put a blog post through the Newsbot.

Don't take it personally either, I've pointed this out to a few people in the past. *Shrugs*

It's not personal. I recall the discussion about using blogs as news items, and that was because people were writing their own stuff and passing it off as 'news'. But the whole term 'blog' has changed since then. Often staff reporters on a news agency will keep a 'personal web log' or 'blog'. Is it herasay if it comes from an actual reporter? If it's a non-technical summary of a peer reviewed paper - is it not 'news'?

As I pointed out, RealClimate had exactly the same story reprinted as several major 'news' organizations. Does it really matter where it's published, if all the information comes from a politically neutral organization (The Royal Meteorological Society)?

[N_Fiddledog]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

As I pointed out, RealClimate had exactly the same story reprinted as several major 'news' organizations.

Does it? Show me. Here's the first sentence...

$1:

Obtaining the globally averaged temperature from weather station data has a well-known problem: there are some gaps in the data, especially in the polar regions and in parts of Africa.

Link me to the major 'news' organizations where I can find that sentence. Now it's true the study is covered in other places. The global warming skeptic blog WuWT covers it for example, but I can't find 'exactly the same story'

I'm actually not opposed to being able to use the RealClimate POV on a study as news. In my personal opinion some blogs cover climate stories better than mainstream outlets - much better. My point though, is if RealClimate is acceptable, then so is WuWT. My original point was if a blog is used to introduce its POV on a study, another blog offering a counter view is acceptable as critique. That's what started this.

Let me try to show you why RC is not objective journalism though.

Let's look at this paragraph.

$1:

The “Arctic hole” is the main reason for the difference between the NASA GISS data and the other two data sets of near-surface temperature, HadCRUT and NOAA. I have always preferred the GISS data because NASA fills the data gaps by interpolation from the edges, which is certainly better than not filling them at all.

Here's what he's not telling you. There's another reason somebody submitting to RC might like NASA GISS. RC is pretty much Gavin Schmidt's baby. Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeller for NASA GISS. The guy who invented the infilling technique he's talking about is named James Hansen. He's also connected to RC. He quit NASA GISS last year to become a full time anti-coal activist, but he still supports the temperature manipulation techniques he invented at GISS, and as far as I know, he still has connections at RC. So yeah, people who submit to RC more often than not prefer Hansen's GISS temps.

BTW Hansen went to the clink three times as a result of his love of protesting with celebrities. This was while he was creating the temps at GISS. Gavin Schmidt got in trouble for linking from official NASA sites to his private blog at RC. They're not supposed to do that.

The infilling technique Stefan is talking about in his RC post is not some sort of universally loved method, although that seems to be what he's saying. If he is trying to say that, he's lying. Hansen's technique of smearing selected temperatures all over the Arctic has received much criticism. Look into that at a site where it's explained in more than a paragraph, and you'll see why. And hey, if you do that try to find out why he wouldn't use what seem to be perfectly useable Canadian temperatures at some Arctic sites - instead preferring to invent numbers for the area.

In any case what Stefan did there is not objective journalism. That is a biased point of view from a web blog that is known to have a very strong one.

[DrCaleb]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

As I pointed out, RealClimate had exactly the same story reprinted as several major 'news' organizations.

Does it? Show me. Here's the first sentence...

$1:

Obtaining the globally averaged temperature from weather station data has a well-known problem: there are some gaps in the data, especially in the polar regions and in parts of Africa.

Link me to the major 'news' organizations where I can find that sentence. Now it's true the study is covered in other places. The global warming skeptic blog WuWT covers it for example, but I can't find 'exactly the same story'

From links on the first page:

TG Daily:

$1:

Observational data on which climate records are based cover only 84 per cent of the planet – with Polar regions and parts of Africa largely excluded.

The Weather Channel:

$1:

“It turns out that we only have surface measurements over about 84 percent of the globe," said Weather Underground's Dr. Jeff Masters, noting that there are no direct measurements of temperatures in places like the Arctic even today, especially across its vast stretches of sea ice.

Global News:

$1:

However, due to the limits of global weather stations, there are important gaps in data that make the models incomplete. The Arctic and Antarctic are two such places.

ARS Techinca:

$1:

If you want to take someone’s temperature to see if they have a fever, you know where to put the thermometer. (Sorry, infants.) But where do you take the temperature of Earth’s climate? Inconveniently, the answer is “everywhere”—you need measurements covering the planet to properly calculate the global average surface temperature. That’s no big deal for Europe, where a local weather station is never far away, but it's much more of a problem for the North and South Poles where records are hard-won. A new analysis shows that how you deal with this problem makes a difference in what temperature you end up reading.

Building a global temperature dataset is a huge undertaking, because that’s only the half of it. Lots of careful corrections need to be made to the raw measurements to account for things like instrument changes, weather station placement, and even the time of day the station is checked.

They all say basically the same things, just slightly different. But, you'd have known that if you weren't already biased against it and had read any of the links I posted.

[N_Fiddledog]

If I hadn't read the links you posted how would I know they were not as you seemed to suggest "exactly the same story reprinted". They may have been describing the same study, but so were skeptic sites. Skeptic sites also described gaps where data was unavailable or ignored. Unlike the cheerleaders of the magic math math study however they were not convinced making up data with math tricks to replace the missing data was credible.

Hey, here's a surprising one though. Do you know who Steve McIntyre is?

He's the mining engineer I mentioned earlier who understands the math of climate controversies. He makes a habit of driving warmists crazy by understanding it too expertly. I've been waiting for him to get around to looking at this Cowtan & Way study. He started posting on it today.

http://climateaudit.org/2013/11/18/cotwan-and-way-2013/

He surprised me though. He's not as immediately opposed to it as I expected him to be. He hasn't really gotten into the math though. There's just one thing he's a little suspicious of. This...

$1:

While I don’t object to the use of kriging or similar methods to estimate values in missing gridcells, I don’t see any benefit to altering values in known gridcells, if that’s what’s happening here. (I haven’t parsed their methods and don’t plan to do so at this time.)

This is cool though. In the comments section one of the authors of the study just popped in. McIntyre and Way are talking things over now. It's worth a look. This kid Way needs to be careful though. Steve's not too interested in the nitty gritty of the math yet. If Way pisses him off though, that's going to change.