Global Climate Change Science News

[piscator]

Perhaps that's why people don't believe AGW zealots, when challenged they just hand-wave and stick their noses in the air and dismiss the hoi-polloi as being too ignorant to understand anything.

Sorry it doesn't meet your emotional needs, bro.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares

So, from the brief review of the wiki you cite, it seems that least squares is "described as an algebraic procedure for fitting linear equations to data."

This seems to me to say that it is a process for making linear equations fit the data by manipulating the data.

And what's the point of a line?

[Animavore]

Booker was discredited long ago with asbestos etc.

And Einstein's last published contribution to science was his approval of earth crust displacement and rejection of tectonic plate movement. I suppose that discredits his previous publications.

Guilt by association used to be de rigeur in law courts, but the various consorting squads have been disbanded decades ago. You are no longer considered to be a criminal on account of being seen, intentionally or inadvertently in the company with known criminals. Isn't it about time we stop judging the validity of a theory promoted by a person on the basis of other theories that are held by the same person, which are known to be discredited, and evaluate each on its own merits (or lack thereof) instead?

Booker isn't a scientist though. He's a journalist. And given his previous anti-science stances (for instace his stance against smoking causing cancer) we can legitimately dismiss the crank off-hand.

Why? Either his recitation of the data and the comments from skeptics is accurate or it is not. If you are alleging that he has fabricated either the data or the quotes, then it's up to you to prove this allegation.

As a journalist myself I know full well that my duty is to write an article based on facts and quotes which are stated accurately and are attributed properly as given to me. If credible sources give me information that can be verified by other credible sources it is my duty to report that information, even if it contradicts the conventional wisdom or some other expert's opinion. So long as I present the information as it was given to me and cite my sources, errors in the conclusions stated to me by others is not my responsibility. I report, you decide.

You are free to disbelieve anything you like, as am I and others who disbelieve the AGW propaganda.

But if you are disputing the accuracy of the article, you need to attack the data and the quotes from the sources or the sources themselves, because unless you can prove that he fabricated the quotes, you're attacking him with an ad hominem tu quoque fallacy.

No I don't. Crank is crank.

[Animavore]

Booker isn't a scientist though. He's a journalist. And given his previous anti-science stances (for instace his stance against smoking causing cancer) we can legitimately dismiss the crank off-hand.

Yes, you could - actually should - dismiss Booker as a crank offhand, but I think it is better to judge each argument on its merits. For instance, take Seth. I leave what I think of him to your imagination, and I consider almost everything he posts as piles of steaming, smelly shit, but every now and again he says something that is not. When he does so, I do not dismiss what he says out of hand because of what I think of him or because almost everything else he posts actually is steaming, smelly shit.

For example, at the defunct Richard Dawkins forum he asserted that fewer guns do not decrease the murder rate. Instead of dismissing the claim out of hand, I thought I'll have a look at that. The Australian gun buyback scheme of 1996 was a good spot to test it, and indeed, the anti-gun lobby crowed about statistics that murder by firearms declined by 70 or 80%. Great. On further investigation it turned out that the decades-long decline of murder in Australia had not changed one way or the other. The gradient was the same after the buyback as before. Seth might have been right for the wrong reason, but because I did not dismiss it out of hand I discovered that our anti-gun lobby was misleading us, intentionally or not. Consequently I revised my opinion about the efficacy of removing firearms for the purposes of reducing the murder rate. The matter is of course rather more complicated, but this thread is supposed to be about global climate change, so if anyone wants to pursue that topic, let's do that in the relevant section of this forum.

It's cute as a button that you think I should take a proven liar seriously.

[Animavore]

But just to amuse you all - Here's a debunk of all the above.
http://skepticalscience.com/kevin-cowta ... heory.html

[Tero]

Interesting video. Thanks for posting it. What's the answer to the question at the end: "Why would they do that?" (bogue the data upwards 3 percent)

Because NOAA is a government agency that is subject to political and economic pressure to advance the theory of global warming, that's why. Why 3 percent? Well, obviously so that somebody who is examining the raw data versus the adjusted data can't make a plausible claim of deliberate manipulation of the records. Subtle changes can be put off to various "innocent" factors, including making a mistake, as NOAA and the other AGW conspirators have already used as an excuse several times. They can't just completely fabricate data, they have to make their upwards revision look plausible while still skewing the conclusion in an upward direction.

Can you say "hockey stick graph fraud?"

If there is an intentional widespread conspiracy (even a loose one created by ideological bias rather than central planning) to nudge temperature records upwards, it's going to be subtle because of the small amount of difference between up, level, and down in long-term trends. Therefore straining at gnats over fractions of a degree in long-term temperature change is all they've got to "prove" their theory that we're all gonna die if we don't do something right away. "The sky is falling, the sky is falling" is the mantra over an easily disputable factually observed change in temperatures that now shows evidence of being subtly manipulated to a political end.

And that's all climate change skeptics are doing, disputing the conclusions that haven't panned out according to the supposedly definitive computer models climate scientists are so proud of...the ones in which the margin of error subsumes all possible temperature change less than a year into the future.

This AGW crap is all about power and control and very little else.

The climate changes. It always has and always will. It's been hotter, it's been colder, much colder, and none of the observed temperature excursions, even the ones with the potentially falsified adjustments, fall outside the long-term natural variations in planetary temperature.

Earth abides. We can get along fine without snow. The dinosaurs got along fine for hundreds of millions of years in a much hotter climate, one where subtropical plants flourished at the north pole. Sea levels have been higher and lower. 10,000 years ago sea levels were as much as 300 meters lower, as evidenced by villages of the period found 300 meters underwater in Puget Sound.

The hysteria doesn't match with the facts I'm afraid and whatever is happening, and why, is no emergency that requires, by way of example, destruction of the American coal industry and destruction of 60 percent of our power generating capacity in the next two years of Obama's reign.

It's all politics, power and control and very little more.

The video is self explanatory. Weather stations were put of for weather, where 1-2C is not crucial, weather forecasts are not that accurate. The weather stations data needed to be adjusted for the more accurate climate study. They had to be, for example, calibrated, or compared to neighbors if it was past data.

[piscator]

Seems this "Adjustment" conspiracy is more widespread than even Seth had considered...It even extends to land ownership!

So the task for tomorrow is to mark certain lines and corners of a couple of tracts of land in downtown Austin. I had made a survey of the area sixteen years ago and had done what I thought was a thorough job of retrieving key boundary evidence. Since then many of the more important survey markers have been lost to the general destruction of redevelopment. Early 20th century sidewalks with marks along offset lines run in the 1930's by the City Engineer parallel with the established centerline of a street are mostly gone.

Fortunately, in 1999 I had the sense to set lots of my own survey markers on the theory that some would survive. Some did. I was surprised to see that the hard brass discs were not holding up as well under foot traffic as just the 3/8-inch steel spikes with stamped aluminum washers were. The spikes and washers looked good. They would look better if some parade of idiots hadn't given them blasts of flourescent spray paint to make the stampings harder to read, but as long as there is flourescent spray paint and it is sold without regard to common sense or intelligence, that will happen.

I found my old Spikes and Washers 6, 678, 679, and 680 in place, the first in a concrete curb and the rest in concrete sidewalk, probably soon to be replaced with something jazzier looking.

The task was to (a) check the old control points, (b) establish some new ones (250 and 251) to use for setting out boundary line markers and corner monuments, and (c) connect them into the existing network so that their positions could be determined in relation to all of the other boundary evidence found in place in 1999. There are several ways to have done that, but the easiest was just to add the new conventional measurements to the old network and just rerun the network adjustment in Star*Net.

Considering that the 1999 work was adjusted in Star*Net and the data format remains compatible, all that was needed was to just add the new measurements. As it turned out, the marks were more than reasonably stable horizontally. There had probably been some vertical movements over the last sixteen years, but it wasn't enough to be a problem.

After adding today's measurements to the network, there were some small shifts in the horizontal coordinates of the spike and washer control points as the following lists show:

Code: Select all

1999:

6               10071003.471  3112840.795    481.948 SPIKE.WASHER 
678             10071211.433  3112636.092    476.166 SPIKE.WASHER 
679             10071198.246  3112680.156    476.522 SPIKE.WASHER 
680             10071157.831  3112815.143    479.352 SPIKE.WASHER 

2015:

6               10071003.471  3112840.797    481.943 SPIKE.WASHER
678             10071211.432  3112636.093    476.136 SPIKE.WASHER
679             10071198.250  3112680.156    476.495 SPIKE.WASHER
680             10071157.829  3112815.142    479.363 SPIKE.WASHER

The residuals of the new measurements demonstrated that adding the new measurements to the networks didn't reveal any blunders. That is, you couldn't tell just from the residuals that today's work hadn't been done sixteen years ago and adjusted with everything else in 1999.

Code: Select all

              Adjusted Measured Geodetic Angle Observations (DMS)

From       At         To              Angle         Residual   StdErr StdRes

680        679        678         179-59-07.85   -0-00-04.10     8.76   0.5
680        679        678         179-59-07.85   -0-00-04.65     8.76   0.5
680        679        250          89-37-13.01    0-00-01.51     4.14   0.4
680        679        250          89-37-13.01    0-00-01.51     4.14   0.4
680        678        251          90-15-29.44    0-00-00.94     4.06   0.2
680        678        251          90-15-29.44   -0-00-00.81     4.06   0.2
679        250        251         288-34-37.47    0-00-05.22     7.60   0.7
679        250        6            92-30-21.69    0-00-02.44     3.74   0.7
679        680        6           243-53-35.91    0-00-03.66     4.03   0.9
679        680        6           243-53-35.91    0-00-01.41     4.03   0.3

Code: Select all

               Adjusted Measured Distance Observations (FeetUS)

           From       To              Distance      Residual   StdErr StdRes

           679        680             140.9316        0.0004   0.0065   0.1
           679        678              46.0080        0.0010   0.0063   0.2
           679        680             140.9316       -0.0007   0.0065   0.1
           679        678              46.0080        0.0005   0.0063   0.1
           679        680             140.9316       -0.0014   0.0065   0.2
           679        250             132.7859       -0.0009   0.0065   0.1
           679        680             140.9316        0.0003   0.0065   0.0
           679        250             132.7859       -0.0008   0.0065   0.1
           678        680             186.9278        0.0026   0.0066   0.4
           678        251             117.2215        0.0060   0.0065   0.9
           678        680             186.9278        0.0018   0.0066   0.3
           678        251             117.2215        0.0102   0.0065   1.6
           250        679             132.7740       -0.0023   0.0065   0.4
           250        251              49.9184        0.0042   0.0063   0.7
           250        679             132.7740       -0.0048   0.0065   0.7
           250        6               209.1520        0.0055   0.0066   0.8
           680        679             140.9614        0.0001   0.0065   0.0
           680        6               156.5102       -0.0041   0.0065   0.6
           680        679             140.9614       -0.0028   0.0065   0.4
           680        6               156.5102       -0.0041   0.0065   0.6

Code: Select all

                       Adjusted Zenith Observations (DMS)

           From       To              Zenith        Residual   StdErr StdRes

           679        680          89-07-34.00    0-00-11.60    15.94   0.7
           679        678          91-20-12.54   -0-00-17.96    39.32   0.5
           679        680          89-07-34.00    0-00-14.25    15.94   0.9
           679        678          91-20-12.54   -0-00-18.96    39.32   0.5
           679        680          89-07-34.00    0-00-12.00    15.94   0.8
           679        250          90-58-58.90    0-00-19.15    16.54   1.2
           679        680          89-07-34.00    0-00-16.75    15.94   1.1
           679        250          90-58-58.90    0-00-17.65    16.54   1.1
           678        680          89-13-19.99    0-00-19.49    13.70   1.4
           678        251          91-39-34.98    0-00-02.48    17.97   0.1
           678        680          89-13-19.99    0-00-22.74    13.70   1.7
           678        251          91-39-34.98    0-00-01.73    17.97   0.1
           250        679          89-23-10.28    0-00-19.03    16.55   1.2
           250        251          91-53-20.40   -0-00-12.10    36.43   0.3
           250        679          89-23-10.28    0-00-18.78    16.55   1.1
           250        6            88-07-08.53    0-00-05.28    13.15   0.4
           680        679          91-28-03.36    0-00-07.86    15.94   0.5
           680        6            88-57-46.42   -0-00-10.33    15.00   0.7
           680        679          91-28-03.36    0-00-08.86    15.94   0.6
           680        6            88-57-46.42   -0-00-09.83    15.00   0.7

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kent McMillan @, Austin, TX, Friday, February 06, 2015, 20:06 (2 days ago) @ Kent McMillan

I probably should have underscored the point that the value of having all of the surveys I've made in that vicinity over the years in one network adjustment is that it is possible to give reliable estimates of the relative uncertainties between any two things located by the various surveys over the years, including in particular the phantoms, the survey monuments that no longer exist, but that are perpetuated by the ties to them in the network adjustment.

The other thing that I'd underscore is the power of using high-quality third-party software such as Star*Net to keep the network adjustment viable. Sadly, there are not that many survey application programs that have kept backwards compatibility the way that Star*Net has. Happily, Star*Net has done it, which means that the input data format to a project adjustment run sixteen years ago remains viable and pretty much ready to run with more stuff added.

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kevin Samuel @, Bend, OR, Friday, February 06, 2015, 21:02 (2 days ago) @ Kent McMillan

The other thing that I'd underscore is the power of using high-quality third-party software such as Star*Net to keep the network adjustment viable. Sadly, there are not that many survey application programs that have kept backwards compatibility the way that Star*Net has. Happily, Star*Net has done it, which means that the input data format to a project adjustment run sixteen years ago remains viable and pretty much ready to run with more stuff added.

Amen.
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by rfc @, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 03:46 (1 day, 18 hours, 40 min. ago) @ Kent McMillan

I probably should have underscored the point that the value of having all of the surveys I've made in that vicinity over the years in one network adjustment is that it is possible to give reliable estimates of the relative uncertainties between any two things located by the various surveys over the years, including in particular the phantoms, the survey monuments that no longer exist, but that are perpetuated by the ties to them in the network adjustment.

So , are you saying that if one is going back to a project to take additional measurements, partially because some of the earlier measurements were not as good as they could have been (in my case, not yours), it's better to add the previous data to the "soup", rather than fishing out the bad onions?

If the earlier data doesn't contain blunders but just high residuals, is there a cut off point as to what to keep and what to toss?
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Norman Oklahoma ⌂ @, Portland, Oregon, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 06:35 (1 day, 15 hours, 51 min. ago) @ rfc

So , are you saying that... it's better to add the previous data to the "soup", rather than fishing out the bad onions?

I think that the point is to have a tool for identifying and evaluating the "bad onions" in the first place. Then to make judgments about which of them to keep.

--
Lord, help me be the person my dog thinks I am.
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by rfc @, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 09:08 (1 day, 13 hours, 18 min. ago) @ Norman Oklahoma

I think that the point is to have a tool for identifying and evaluating the "bad onions" in the first place. Then to make judgments about which of them to keep.

Well that's exactly the question: What goes into the judgement? Is it better to have, say a dozen redundant measurements, half of which have residuals say twice the other half, or just dump the ones with the highest residuals? Is there a mathematical way to determine where to draw the line? I may not be asking the question the right way. What constitutes a "bad onion"? Is it relative to the other "onions"? Or just "anything higher than xx" in angle, or .00X' in distance?
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kent McMillan @, Austin, TX, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 09:36 (1 day, 12 hours, 50 min. ago) @ rfc

Well that's exactly the question: What goes into the judgement? Is it better to have, say a dozen redundant measurements, half of which have residuals say twice the other half, or just dump the ones with the highest residuals?

Where a network is built over time, one will usually be dealing with measurements of differing qualities. As long as each installment is free of blunders and is properly weighted, a surveyor would want it all in the adjustment.

Is there a mathematical way to determine where to draw the line? I may not be asking the question the right way. What constitutes a "bad onion"?

As a rule, any measurement with a standardized residual (residual / standard error of measurements) over 2.0 is suspect. A measurement with a standardized residual over 3.0 is presumed to be a blunder. This test requires realistic values of standard errors to work well, obviously.

Over time, movements in marks supposed to be stable can introduce what appear to be errors in measurements. So it's important to devise ways to detect mark movement.

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kent McMillan @, Austin, TX, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 08:27 (1 day, 13 hours, 59 min. ago) @ rfc

So , are you saying that if one is going back to a project to take additional measurements, partially because some of the earlier measurements were not as good as they could have been (in my case, not yours), it's better to add the previous data to the "soup", rather than fishing out the bad onions?

If the earlier data doesn't contain blunders but just high residuals, is there a cut off point as to what to keep and what to toss?

Neither is the case here. This is an area where the challenge is to maintain survey control in known relationships to the now-vanished marks with uncertainties that are as small as possible. The work described yesterday is just what was necessary to integrate two new control points into the existing network.

That integration had two elements (a) verifying the integrity of the existing marks upon which the positions of the new marks were based and (b) positioning the new marks by methods that keep the relative positional uncertainties acceptably low.

A more careful approach would have been to adjust yesterday's work as a separate, minimally constrained adjustment to verify that it passed the chi-square test and was free of blunders. Only after comparing the coordinates of the common network stations to verify that none showed obvious mark movement would a careful person have dropped the new work into the overall network adjustment.

I did something similar by just comparing the coordinates generated by the data collector to prior values.

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Jim Frame @, Davis, CA, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 08:46 (1 day, 13 hours, 40 min. ago) @ Kent McMillan

A more careful approach would have been to adjust yesterday's work as a separate, minimally constrained adjustment to verify that it passed the chi-square test and was free of blunders. Only after comparing the coordinates of the common network stations to verify that none showed obvious mark movement would a careful person have dropped the new work into the overall network adjustment.

I did something similar by just comparing the coordinates generated by the data collector to prior values.

This is similar to what I do with an ongoing network in my city's downtown area. I started it over 20 years ago and add to it regularly; it now encompasses over 50 city blocks. When I perform work in an area, I append the new data to the input file -- identifying it by job number and date -- and run the adjustment. Then I look at the old and new coordinates in the area of the new work to be sure nothing has changed significantly. If I only see changes on the order of 0.02' or less, I accept the new adjustment and move on. So far that's been the case.

One mistake I made in the early years was to start it a 2D adjustment. Back then I would run levels if I needed vertical, and didn't think I'd ever need 3D in the adjustment, so didn't bother. I've been slowly converting the whole thing over to 3D, but it take a lot of effort to dig through old field notes and raw data files to upgrade the network to reliable 3D. I've also been adding some RTK vectors here and there, but so much of the area is obstructed by buildings and trees that I haven't put a lot of time into that yet.

--
Jim Frame
Frame Surveying & Mapping
609 A Street
Davis, CA 95616
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kent McMillan @, Austin, TX, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 09:04 (1 day, 13 hours, 22 min. ago) @ Jim Frame

I've also been adding some RTK vectors here and there, but so much of the area is obstructed by buildings and trees that I haven't put a lot of time into that yet.

When I got survey-grade GPS back in the 90's, one of the first things I did was to tie various points in the downtown network by GPS vectors to check the orientation of the network that had previously relied upon near-geodetic azimuths from solar observations reduced to grid azimuths. I don't envision ever needing to improve the network orientation now, but would rely upon GPS to control some new extension of the network.

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by rfc @, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 17:50 (1 day, 4 hours, 36 min. ago) @ Jim Frame

One mistake I made in the early years was to start it a 2D adjustment. Back then I would run levels if I needed vertical, and didn't think I'd ever need 3D in the adjustment, so didn't bother. I've been slowly converting the whole thing over to 3D, but it take a lot of effort to dig through old field notes and raw data files to upgrade the network to reliable 3D. I've also been adding some RTK vectors here and there, but so much of the area is obstructed by buildings and trees that I haven't put a lot of time into that yet.

Why is 3D more reliable? Does the third dimension add to the number of measurements that are independantly "least squared"?

Also, if using a total station for measurement, would it just be a matter of adding the vertical distance delta from one station to another to have the information in Starnet?
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kevin Samuel @, Bend, OR, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 18:04 (1 day, 4 hours, 22 min. ago) @ rfc

3D is optimal for the combination of GPS and conventional techniques.
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kent McMillan @, Austin, TX, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 18:44 (1 day, 3 hours, 42 min. ago) @ rfc

Also, if using a total station for measurement, would it just be a matter of adding the vertical distance delta from one station to another to have the information in Starnet?

Star*Net will, of course, accept the height difference data in different formats. For most work, the main options are:

a) Slope Distance Zenith Angle HI/HT
b) Horizontal Distance Delta H HI/HT, and
c) Leveled height difference.

As Kevin mentioned, the height component is important when a survey is being computed in a geodetic coordinate system or on a geodetic map projection since the distance between two points of some specified latitude and longitude will depend upon the height of the surface that the distance is to be measured on.

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Bill93 @, 52402, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 20:16 (1 day, 2 hours, 11 min. ago) @ Kent McMillan

Kent is right that distance depends on elevation, of course, but you need to estimate the magnitude of the difference to see how important it is for your particular project.

If you're setting control up the side of a mountain, it can be a big deal. If you have a hundred feet of elevation relief over a mile-long project, then it may not be worth going to any extra trouble to get 3D.

Sure, do it if you are set up for it, it probably won't hurt. But you need to do the vertical measurements carefully. This paper shows that sloppy vertical can degrade your horizontal results.
http://www.cadastral.com/cadspval.htm
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kent McMillan @, Austin, TX, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 20:37 (1 day, 1 hours, 49 min. ago) @ Bill93

Kent is right that distance depends on elevation, of course, but you need to estimate the magnitude of the difference to see how important it is for your particular project.

And the good news is that if you base your elevations upon some ellipsoid height that is in error by as much as 20 ft., the net error in reducing measured distances to the ellipsoid will only be about 1ppm.

Best practice is to record 3D survey data, even if the vertical datum is approximate (but in error by less than 20 ft.) so that in the future when one has GPS capability or does further work to make a good connection to a vertical datum the whole adjustment can be rerun and improved.

--
Best regards,
Kent McMillan, RPLS Austin TX
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Kevin Samuel @, Bend, OR, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 22:30 (23 hours, 56 minutes ago) @ Kent McMillan

:good:
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by Jim Frame @, Davis, CA, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 21:43 (1 day, 0 hours, 43 min. ago) @ rfc

Why is 3D more reliable?

I didn't say it was; I said that it takes a lot of work to upgrade the network to *reliable* 3D. This mostly means making sure that the HI/HR was correctly entered in the field notes and correctly transcribed into the data file, and that I could back in the HI/HR when none was entered in the notes, and that very long shots taken on hot days are properly weighted, and that bench marks are correctly identified and their weighted elevations correctly entered into the data file.

--
Jim Frame
Frame Surveying & Mapping
609 A Street
Davis, CA 95616
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Star*Net 16 Years Later

by thebionicman @, Boise, ID, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 10:55 (1 day, 11 hours, 31 min. ago) @ Kent McMillan

Another advantage to StarNet is the ability to jump multiple versions and still be immediately productive. It is still the awesome Ron Sawyer product. We went from Version 5 to 8 and saved time over fighting Magnet. That includes installation, registration and picking the brains of fellow beer leggers to get the first job cleaned up. Try that with any other survey related software product.
Switching gears- I have long advocated the development of an observation database in a consistent format as opposed to any form of coordinate files. Your point can't be stated strongly enough. A StarNet DAT file can be selected for inclusion in my new project without recreating the wheel. The 'sorting of the onions' has already been done and the weighting determined. If you did it right the first time it will integrate effortlessly now.

--
PLS, ID-WA-UT
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...

[Seth]

This seems to me to say that it is a process for making linear equations fit the data by manipulating the data.

And what's the point of a line?

Shouldn't one manipulate the equation to fit the data? If one is manipulating data, then the data is not reliable anymore because it may have been improperly manipulated. That's the claim here, that the data has been deliberately manipulated to create the desired slope. Even if I grant that least squares refinement is reasonable (which in most cases it is), because it is possible to tweak the data in sophisticated and subtle ways to push it towards the desired result, it's perfectly appropriate to question the manipulation of the data. This wouldn't be the first time some scientists have fraudulently manipulated data to support their pre-determined conclusions.

Follow the money.

Now, if you can show me that the data has NOT been fraudulently manipulated, I might feel differently about it. However, at the moment there is a growing body of evidence that Warmist factions have in fact been fraudulently manipulating data, in addition to simply making shit up, so I'm becoming more and more skeptical as the snow load in Boston continues to rise and the sea-ice in the Arctic continues to expand.

[piscator]

This seems to me to say that it is a process for making linear equations fit the data by manipulating the data.

And what's the point of a line?

Shouldn't one manipulate the equation to fit the data?

No. You have no way to know what the data is yet, other than "Raw". You can't say anything about how much error it might contain and why. As such, you don't have data.

[Seth]

Seems this "Adjustment" conspiracy is more widespread than even Seth had considered...It even extends to land ownership!

Fascinating! I actually know a little about surveying, just the very basics without all the math for adjustments. I still have my Zeiss th2 theodolite which I used to survey fences and find corners on the ranch as well as for construction surveying and layout, amateur-style. I also used it for theodolite rangefinding for long-range shooting a few times.

I used to have a subscription to POB magazine as well and enjoyed the stories of resurveys of old (sometimes really, really old) land surveys.

Anyway, I'm not challenging your expertise at all, I'm pointing out that temperature records from the past are not the same thing as point locations on the ground. You can't reconstruct or remeasure the temperature on July 19, 1899, you have to take what you've got and use it assuming that the scientists of the past did their best to make accurate measurements. Outliers may exist, and they may be calibration errors as mentioned in the video, but then again the measurements may be accurate and anomalous for reasons other than calibration. But even if the video shows how such an anomaly can be detected and resolved, my point remains.

The subject of "correcting" or "adjusting" such measurements is a highly complex mathematical exercise that relatively few people truly understand. That means that those who do understand it, and are in positions of authority, have ample opportunity to introduce false corrections in order to make the overall slope of the line different from what it actually is, and it is quite difficult for anyone who is a non-expert to detect this fraud. As we have seen in the past, climate scientists are NOT above doing such things (the 2009 Climategate incident) in order to achieve a personal, ideological or political goal. And no, I don't believe the 8 committees who reviewed the situation either because all of them had a vested interest in not allowing "climate science" to be denigrated by exposing deliberate fraud. Big bux here boys, really big bux. Lots of motive to lie.

Just like land surveyors of the past lied about their surveys, many of which simply never occurred and were entirely fraudulent. Interestingly, according to the law, those bogus original non-surveys are legally binding. If some public lands surveyor in 1865 just went out and dumped a marker stone where he thought it ought to be and filed the survey with the government, from that moment forward the lines established by that survey are the legal boundaries and markers upon which all subsequent land surveys must be based, whether the original survey was accurate or not.

Up in Central City, Colorado some years ago, a surveyor was doing a boundary line survey and discovered that the point of beginning, a mark on a certain boulder, for all of the surveys upon which the town (and mining claims) were based was incorrect. He discovered the actual original stone marker set by the public lands surveyor prior to the town being platted. The result of this was that a whole row of homes along one side of the town were found to be encroaching on National Forest land, despite their having been there for a hundred and fifty years. The upshot was that the federal government initially told the homeowners that they had to vacate the public lands. Some sort of settlement was eventually negotiated, although I don't know the details. I think they had to buy the encroachment from the government.

So, just as a blunder or mistake can have permanent consequences in surveying, so can outright fraud, and as I understand it, your duty as a surveyor is not to "adjust" the boundaries, but to establish them according to the original land survey by "finding" the original corners and POB, even if that results in a neighbor's structures or improvements encroaching on the boundary.

I can't imagine that there haven't been instances of surveyors acting corruptly to the benefit of one or another party...who pays them off to falsely mark the boundaries, and I imagine that the farther back in time you go, the greater the likelihood that such fraud occurred because, like climate science, surveying is a very small club and always has been, and introducing deliberate errors into a survey, like the Walking Purchase, is hardly beyond comprehension.

But unlike surveying, where one can go back (most of the time) and reconstruct the original survey and detect blunders or fraud, temperature is an ephemeral thing, and once measured, it changes and cannot be reconstructed mathematically. It may be possible to "adjust" a recorded reading as the video suggests, but this assumes that there is no larger agenda of falsifying ALL of the pertinent records by "adjusting" them in ways that favor the pre-determined AGW conclusion.

What this has become is an exercise in public trust, which has been violated so many times that some significant portion of the public no longer believe that they are being told the truth. And every year that the earth's temperature doesn't go up, and with every new excuse pandered by panicked Warmists as to why it isn't doing what it was predicted to do adds to the skepticism.

And I don't think climate-change skepticism is a bad thing at all, given the enormous costs involved in even trying to achieve the "goals" set forth by the political contingent. Obama's "plan" for the US is to destroy our economy and our position in the world economy by using AGW as a stalking horse for destroying our domestic coal production and destroying our energy production capacity by larding providers up with so many unachievable, and unnecessary regulations that they can no longer function. Meanwhile China is firing up several coal-fired power plants every day and they are thumbing their noses at us as they do so.

He said as much in 2009: "Barack Obama: "Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." (January 2008)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4[/youtube]

[Seth]

This seems to me to say that it is a process for making linear equations fit the data by manipulating the data.

And what's the point of a line?

Shouldn't one manipulate the equation to fit the data?

No. You have no way to know what the data is yet, other than "Raw". You can't say anything about how much error it might contain and why. As such, you don't have data.

And how do you propose to resolve this ambiguity in an ephemeral temperature measurement made 50 or a hundred years ago (or yesterday for that matter) when there is no way to go back in time and re-measure the temperature more accurately? Doesn't it become necessary to make certain assumptions about the competence of those who made the original recordings that they did so with as much accuracy as they could muster given the technology available to them? If not, then no raw data from the past means anything.

You made assumptions about the accuracy of the prior data you used to complete your first survey, and then you made assumptions about your own survey in doing a resurvey, in which you refined your results based on new technology and a better understanding of the issues. But you could go out and actually measure an angle and a distance again and again and again to reduce the possibility that you made a blunder. I've turned corners six times and then plunged the instrument and done it all again to help reduce inherent errors in the instrument, and I ran the results through my HP calculator's surveying program to find the most accurate angle possible, but I could go back and do it fifty times over fifty years and come up with the same angle so long as nothing has moved on the ground. You can't do that with temperature records, which is why, I suspect, the scientists who made the records the first time took great care to make repeated measurements and do the "adjusting" right then and there because they knew it would be their only opportunity to do so.

[piscator]

Seems this "Adjustment" conspiracy is more widespread than even Seth had considered...It even extends to land ownership!

Fascinating! I actually know a little about surveying, just the very basics without all the math for adjustments. I still have my Zeiss th2 theodolite which I used to survey fences and find corners on the ranch as well as for construction surveying and layout, amateur-style. I also used it for theodolite rangefinding for long-range shooting a few times.

I used to have a subscription to POB magazine as well and enjoyed the stories of resurveys of old (sometimes really, really old) land surveys.

Anyway, I'm not challenging your expertise at all, I'm pointing out that temperature records from the past are not the same thing as point locations on the ground. You can't reconstruct or remeasure the temperature on July 19, 1899, you have to take what you've got and use it assuming that the scientists of the past did their best to make accurate measurements. Outliers may exist, and they may be calibration errors as mentioned in the video, but then again the measurements may be accurate and anomalous for reasons other than calibration. But even if the video shows how such an anomaly can be detected and resolved, my point remains.

The subject of "correcting" or "adjusting" such measurements is a highly complex mathematical exercise that relatively few people truly understand. That means that those who do understand it, and are in positions of authority, have ample opportunity to introduce false corrections in order to make the overall slope of the line different from what it actually is, and it is quite difficult for anyone who is a non-expert to detect this fraud. As we have seen in the past, climate scientists are NOT above doing such things (the 2009 Climategate incident)

The UK Parliament found 0 wrongdoing in its investigation of "climategate". Newspapers have to sell newspapers in order to generate enough advertising revenue to buy ink and pay everyone. They do that however they want. Que sera, sera.

The subject of adjusting measurements is something we all encountered in high school, or before. Ever hear, "Measure Twice, cut once"? What do you do if the two measurements are different? You measure a third time to resolve the ambiguity and determine which measurement contained the high residual error, no? So I wouldn't get in too big a hurry to put the concept past folks, were I you.

Since you possess a mathematical instrument, can you give the class a brief explanation of what a surveyor means by the word, "Traverse", and in so doing tell us why he would need to have a word like that?
(If you feel like it, you could tell us about the American genius Bowditch and his Compass Rule too, as it is quite practical for dead reckoning.)

In the case of modeling temps across distance, one can replace temperature or delta of temp for the surveyor's Z-axis (which he calls ellipsoidal height), and least squares will adjust the measured values just fine. It will produce demonstrably better predictions (model) of temps along a line between 2 thermometers than simply weighting by the square root of the distance from one or the other.

[piscator]

This seems to me to say that it is a process for making linear equations fit the data by manipulating the data.

And what's the point of a line?

Shouldn't one manipulate the equation to fit the data?

No. You have no way to know what the data is yet, other than "Raw". You can't say anything about how much error it might contain and why. As such, you don't have data.

And how do you propose to resolve this ambiguity in an ephemeral temperature measurement made 50 or a hundred years ago (or yesterday for that matter) when there is no way to go back in time and re-measure the temperature more accurately?

By a standard covariance matrix, which I can then use to de-weight poor observations in the network adjustment.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance

[Seth]

Seems this "Adjustment" conspiracy is more widespread than even Seth had considered...It even extends to land ownership!

Fascinating! I actually know a little about surveying, just the very basics without all the math for adjustments. I still have my Zeiss th2 theodolite which I used to survey fences and find corners on the ranch as well as for construction surveying and layout, amateur-style. I also used it for theodolite rangefinding for long-range shooting a few times.

I used to have a subscription to POB magazine as well and enjoyed the stories of resurveys of old (sometimes really, really old) land surveys.

Anyway, I'm not challenging your expertise at all, I'm pointing out that temperature records from the past are not the same thing as point locations on the ground. You can't reconstruct or remeasure the temperature on July 19, 1899, you have to take what you've got and use it assuming that the scientists of the past did their best to make accurate measurements. Outliers may exist, and they may be calibration errors as mentioned in the video, but then again the measurements may be accurate and anomalous for reasons other than calibration. But even if the video shows how such an anomaly can be detected and resolved, my point remains.

The subject of "correcting" or "adjusting" such measurements is a highly complex mathematical exercise that relatively few people truly understand. That means that those who do understand it, and are in positions of authority, have ample opportunity to introduce false corrections in order to make the overall slope of the line different from what it actually is, and it is quite difficult for anyone who is a non-expert to detect this fraud. As we have seen in the past, climate scientists are NOT above doing such things (the 2009 Climategate incident)

The UK Parliament found 0 wrongdoing in its investigation of "climategate".

And I should believe the UK Parliament why, exactly? They have a dog in the hunt and every reason to cover up and deny.

The subject of adjusting measurements is something we all encountered in high school, or before. Ever hear, "Measure Twice, cut once"? What do you do if the two measurements are different? You measure a third time to resolve the ambiguity and determine which measurement contained the high residual error, no? So I wouldn't get in too big a hurry to put the concept past folks, were I you.

And do you suppose that the data collectors of the past also knew this maxim and did so at the time they took the readings? Why is NOAA correcting what is almost certainly already corrected data?

Since you possess a mathematical instrument, can you give the class a brief explanation of what a surveyor means by the word, "Traverse", and in so doing tell us why he would need to have a word like that?
(If you feel like it, you could tell us about the American genius Bowditch and his Compass Rule too, as it is quite practical for dead reckoning.)

No thanks.

In the case of modeling temps across distance, one can replace temperature or delta of temp for the surveyor's Z-axis (which he calls ellipsoidal height), and least squares will adjust the measured values just fine. It will produce demonstrably better predictions (model) of temps along a line between 2 thermometers than simply weighting by the square root of the distance from one or the other.

Glad to hear it, but what good does that fact do when the temperature reading you're relying upon was taken 50 years ago? You demonstrate that the issue of correcting such readings to reach the best possible prediction is performed at the time the measurement is taken, when other variables can be accounted for, such as improper shading of the thermometer or improper reading of the instrument. That's why you repeat your angles several times with the instrument plunged for half the repetitions, so as to help remove plate errors and other inconsistencies. You do not turn the angle once and then make guesses about the accuracy of the instrument and your ability to read it 50 years later, you do the work then and there, so that down the road you can have confidence in your measurements. I like to presume that the scientists and technicians who made the temperature records in the past probably knew of the issues with making such measurement errors and blunders and they very likely repeated their measurements and applied the appropriate mathematical analysis to their readings in order to record a temperature as close to the true temperature as possible by "adjusting" out the errors at the time they made the measurement.

What I'm saying is that NOAA appears to be going back and double-dipping. They are "adjusting" records that have presumably already been adjusted properly by those who actually took the readings, and I can see no reason for doing that unless they want to subtly skew the results in favor of their political mandate. We are talking about tenths of a degree or less in any one station that, when it's all added up can easily skew the slope of the line from negative to positive. It's not like global temperatures are 50 degrees hotter than they were a hundred years ago.

I question the validity of "adjusting" the "raw data" that I presume has already been adjusted for variables at the time the measurements were taken.

There's plenty of room there for deliberate fraud, and there's plenty of motive for NOAA and every other government agent and agency to engage in such fraud.

[Seth]

By a standard covariance matrix, which I can then use to de-weight poor observations in the network adjustment.

How do you know they were poor observations? Were you there 50 years ago? You want to assume that they were poor observations because other observations conflict with them, but when it comes to temperature, you cannot verify in any way that the observations were poorly made because you weren't there and you can't go back and re-measure the temperature, whereas you can go back and measure an angle or a line again to detect an obvious blunder.

I prefer to assume that the people who made the observations know as much about such things as you do and therefore they checked and rechecked their work and accounted for such possible errors before they finalized the record.

[Tero]

You can go back and adjust temperatures. Say you have 6 points in a circle, and one in the center, all on flat ground. The one in the center is 10 degrees higher than the average of the six. Which one is wrong?