I’m battling combind EvID ad Vundo on Vista just know, so I know what crashes mean. (Anyone help? Vista and the anti-virus people have not cracked it yet).

Never mind the last email becaue I’ve made some progress in mapping UHI in Melbourne. It was done by BoM som years ago, I know the name of the then project leader and I am in the process of asking for the results.

Motivation is to add more ROW to USA data. Australia has lots of high quality station data. Do you have the CD of 1,200 stations with daily recording starting as early as 1860s? If not I’ll try to get you one. It’s the least I can do to reward yor time, persistence, skill and diligence. I’ve been waiting for the present term of staellite temps to lengthen and be de-contraversialised because then you can do better comparisons.

I also have a paper on surveying the Earth including data on satellite errors (unpub). About 12 pages of .pdf. Shall I send it or are you still having bug problems?

sherro1@optusnet.com.au

You can cut NASA some slack on the shuttle computers. I’m involved in the aeronautics industry, and I can assure you that getting a computer designed and then certified for flight is a difficult and expensive process. I can imagine that building one for the shuttle would be even more difficult. So as long as the computers were doing the job, I don’t see why they would even think of upgrading them.

About the only reason to upgrade would be lack of spare parts, as the equipment gets obsolete, or an increase in what the computer is expected to do.

Many scientific nerves in my body scream “NO” at the approach of using bad data and hoping it averages out. That’s only one step away from astrology.

Suppose you were to examine thousands of sites in this manner and in every case the algorithm made “wrong-headed” adjustments but always got the trend right?

The 4-colour map problem might have been “solved” by throwing around thousads of numbers, but many of us regard that as a second class proof.

One tries not to work with trends, because they ultimately need pinning to a reference value. It is much better to work in absolutes. Trends in sea level height, for example, can be detected (perhaps) in the noise at some sites, but other sites give different trends. Isostasy, etc, many other effects exist to affect the trend – when the absolute value is the final need.

Keep logging, Anthony.

I take your basic point about the importance of method over result. As Wegman put it, WRONG METHOD + RIGHT ANSWER = BAD SCIENCE. (Or something close to that.) And yet in science results ultimately do prove the method. Suppose you were to examine thousands of sites in this manner and in every case the algorithm made “wrong-headed” adjustments but always got the trend right? Would you still consider the method “all wrong?” Perhaps the main take away of your work should be not that the algorithm is wrong-headed, but that getting the absolute temperatures right is not a necessary intermediate step when calculating corrected trend lines. Strictly from a trend point of view, whether you adjust older temperatures warmer or newer ones cooler by a commensurate amount is of no consequence, is it?

Stepping back a bit, considering that this algorithm looks only at temperature series and geographic location, how could it have any conception of right or wrong (headed) adjustments? It seems obvious on its face that expanding such an algorithm to incorporate detailed site-specific data could only improve it. But if you had that data, why would you need such an algorithm at all? You would just apply the corrections directly and be done with it.

It seems to me that the only valid way to assess an algorithm like this is to accept the inherent limitations of its design. If the initial formulation was something like, “What can we do about making site adjustments without actually having site-specific data,” then it seems a bit daft to criticize it for not making use of site-specific data.

I don’t mean to take any position on whether the GISS algorithm is accurate or not. Given its limitations maybe it can’t possibly be accurate in a systematic way. But your criticisms seem to be off. If you repeated this work at many sites and demonstrated many instances of error than you could make the basic scientific point that, well, whatever the method, it doesn’t work and you have the data to prove it. But here you’ve given one result and the algorithm’s trend line matched it. (And in the Cedarville case you don’t give trend lines.) The fact that the intermediate data (the absolute temperatures) seem wrong is not in itself proof that the method is “all wrong.”

#14 Apologies for making you repeat yourself. I’ve only been coming to this site regularly for a few weeks and have only just scratched its surface. (BTW, do you have an acronym list anywhere? ROW = rest of world?)

REPLY: The station history files have always been available, and could be used instead of the lights and brightness ratings Hansen uses now

There is a paper in here somewhere waiting to be published.

A cigarette paper waiting to be smoked?

Is it possible to obtain the data that you used to prepare the graphs, Anthony? I would very much like to look at the actual numbers regarding the step functions, because I am very interested in detection of abrupt changes in temperature time series. Are you able to release the numbers, please?

Robin

REPLY: The data is on the bottom of the pages at GISS that I link to (see the original GISTEMP plot)