House Science Committee Turns Up Climate Denial Activity
Apparently @HouseScience is now an official climate denial Twitter account. #aas229 #NASA https://t.co/1ydLUzeqH0
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) January 4, 2017
Apparently @HouseScience is now an official climate denial Twitter account. #aas229 #NASA https://t.co/1ydLUzeqH0
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) January 4, 2017
Someone should explain to the congresscritters how to fit a line to that data sometime. Very fundamental statistics.
And it is worth pointing out that while the number wasn’t as great as expected, nor did it approach recent peaks, the number is still positive.
Not every year can set a record. 1998 was much hotter than any year before and was not matched until 2014 I believe. So naturally all the climate change deniers used 1998 as the starting point, as though it were a baseline temperature, and said there was “no warming since 1998” when they should have used at least a running average or a ten year baseline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Personally, I like introducing jitter. Instead of picking 1998 as the starting point, I’d just repeat the calculation for a few randomly selected years between 1993 and 2003 (1998+-5) and see how it affected the results. Or, more to the point, if I were reviewing a paper, I’d try to get the authors to do that sort of thing.
If you chose 1997 or 1999, which were relatively cool, you would get a really fast temperature increase. But really that is also incorrect. The best procedures are either average baseline (a single temperature from which the deviation of each year is measured) baseline distrubution (a more or less normal distribution of all years over a period of 20 years of more, from which standard deviations can be calculated) or running average.
I wasn’t suggesting that you could get more accurate results by simply picking a different initial year. My point was that, by doing the same analysis several times with different initial years, you get a measure of how sensitive the results are to that choice. From what you wrote, the answer would probably be, “very sensitive.”
For different problems, a better methodology may not be possible or practical. I’m in the middle of an email discussion about deriving quantities from Cassini spectra, and we’re in a position where we have to make some assumptions due to limited data. How sensitive are the results to those assumptions? I like varying the assumptions slightly and seeing how much of a difference it makes. It doesn’t give you the right answer, but it determines the uncertainties inherent to the methodology.
Wow, Saturn. That sounds exciting. Hopefully before long we can collect more data to fill in the unknowns. Of course your goal is to discover the truth. For some members of our new Congress the truth is whatever they decide it is. They don’t need no stinkin’ facts, so it is hard to argue with them.
The longer the better. If you average every decade, however, you have an upward trend. In the link, the baseline is the 1971 to 2000 –30 yr average. Choosing a different baseline would not change the trend. The uncertainty, not ‘jitter’ is provided as well.
https://www.epa.gov/climate…
“1998 the El Nino, so its kind of interesting we start at 18 years. We don’t look at a 15 year data set or a 20 or 10 yr data set, we look at an 18 yr data set..If you take off that top really big spike (from El Nino) you start getting that upward bias and this is what people do when you start looking at these arbitrary times”
Edit: The decade average plot is ~6:15
https://youtu.be/UVMsYXzmUY…
The twitter responses are very informative.
https://twitter.com/HouseSc…
One link stands out regarding Roy Spencer, Ted Cruz, Lamar Smith, and James Inhofe on space satellite data. We all know the Earth is warming. Although we are part of the cause, we can be part of the solution and create jobs, but we need to regulate the leakage rate of natural gas since above ~3%, its worse than coal.
They “had literally gotten the sign wrong in adjusting for the affects of the satellite orbits drift on the sampling of the earth’s large daily temp cycle. This meant that a satellite that started measuring at 2 in the afternoon in a few years was measuring at 6 in the evening”.
It should be clear now why the House voted late at night behind close doors to gut its ethics watchdog: to pass unethical, at best, laws to limit liability: short term gain at tremendous long term costs. Its unfortunate voters did not ask What Makes America Great and no fine print was provided. Many, many thanks to all the scientists, BTW.
A long history of denial in Congressional Testimony.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/n…
https://youtu.be/UVMsYXzmUY…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
https://youtu.be/EtW2rrLHs08
It would be really nice to have a comprehensive list of all the members including their age and their educational background. If they are over 60 then they are probably too old to care if anything in the climate changes radically in the next 50 years because they will be gone. It is all about ego, money and power. Sad.
hey, I’m 65
Hey, even we fossils over 60 have kids, some of whom have kids. Even if we didn’t, we haven’t necessarily given up on truth, justice and the American Way.
Well, at least some people over 60 actually care about future generations (e.g. their grandchildren).
I’m 70, I don’t have children, and I care about climate change. Because I think humanity has great potential, even if such a view is difficult to maintain at times (like now.)
As a 73 year old, and a person who can still think critically about scientific issues, I will assume that Barker’s comment was tongue in cheek. If not, and he is significantly younger than most of the responders, we should worry about the future.
Adding insult to injury, the committee responded to someone (fella name of Bronson) who asked if they were ignoring the data that show warming by re-tweeting their original article.
The House Science Committee relies on a blog post by Dr. Roy Spencer. Here is the headline from that post:
And here is the lead paragraph:
He’s working with temperature anomalies for the separate years, and attempting to gloss over the fact that 2016 has a higher anomaly than 1998. This is similar to the trick that was used on a statement by Dr. Phil Jones a few years back: “not statistically significant.”
The headline, however, suggests no significant rise in absolute temperature. It ignores the fact that each new year builds on the years before it — that there is a trend.
I guess I’m missing something. Are you saying the temperature anomalies were not +0.50 and +0.48 deg. C for 2016 and 1998, respectively? Or that a difference of 0.10 deg. C would be required for 95% confidence? If those numbers are correct, then it’s accurate to say 2016 wasn’t significantly warmed than 1998.
If you’re saying that looking at individual years is meaningless, that’s another matter. But that means his statement is irrelevant, not incorrect. I have no problem believing that.
You got it in your second paragraph. I’m saying that he is correct in stating the temperature anomaly for 2016 is not enough larger than that for 1998 to be a statistically significant increase — but that this is irrelevant to establishing whether or not 2016 is warmer than 1998 in absolute terms.
There’s no statistical procedure to compare just two values and say the difference between them is “not statistically significant”. It sounds like what he means is that it is not of practical significance.
But he’s not comparing just two values; he’s comparing the temperature anomalies of 1998 and 2016 in light of the entire 38-year series of anomalies. I’m not questioning his conclusion RE: these anomalies. I’m saying that it doesn’t matter.
One cannot provide a meaningful answer in science until one asks a meaningful question. There is no statistical meaning to the statement that two individual values are “not statistically different” “in light of” the entire series.
The hypothesis in question is “is global temperature rising?” This hypothesis is tested by examining whether, if we propose the alternative hypothesis that global temperature is randomly distributed and is not rising, the entire sequence of annual temperatures could have arisen by chance alone. One can also ask, given the entire distribution of temperatures, what is the probability that the temperature recorded for a specific year, such as 2017, could have arisen by chance alone. I will try to calculate that probability and post it shortly.
Of course there are nonrandom fluctuations in annual temperature, the most prominent being El Nino, a multiyear oscillation in the oceans and atmosphere. 1998 was unusually hot because of an unusually strong El Nino. This makes it particularly deceptive to use 1998 as a “normal” temperature to which all others are compared, unless one is simply trying to construct a false but superficially convincing argument that the Earth is not getting warmer.
I don’t mean to sound argumentative or pedantic. It’s wonderful just to be able to discuss science with people that are interested, when we are dealing with a national leadership that rejects the most fundamental principles of science.
Simply taking the 38 average temperature anomolies reported by Dr. Spencer, the temperature is clearly rising. Can this be explained as a chance variation? Measuring the correlation of the size of the anomoly with its position in the time sequence, one gets a correlation of .691. The probability of a correlation of .691 arising by chance in a sample of 38 values is only 0.00000157.
So we can clearly say the temperature is rising and it cannot be explained by chance. And we didn’t even have to take anyone’s word for it.