Maybe, apart from Brian Simpson, none of here is good at advanced mathematics. I mean, we can add up and multiple and do business maths, and some of us know some computing stuff, but maybe not to the coding level, but enough to get us by. Probably even Brian could not solve an ordinary differential equation, let alone partial differential equation using the Taylor power series. (I Googled this, so don’t be impressed.)
Thus, the report, An Audit of the Creation and Content of the HadCRUT4 Temperature Dataset, by John McLean, PhD October 2018, is a bit lost on me. But, it shows real problems with the way that the climate change folk work things out. I was impressed by the real fallibility of the data sets:
“As far as can be ascertained, this is the first audit of the HadCRUT4 dataset, the main temperature dataset used in climate assessment reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Governments and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) rely heavily on the IPCC reports so ultimately the temperature data needs to be accurate and reliable. This audit shows that it is neither of those things. More than 70 issues are identified, covering the entire process from the measurement of temperatures to the dataset’s creation, to data derived from it (such as averages) and to its eventual publication. The findings (shown in consolidated form Appendix 6) even include simple issues of obviously erroneous data, glossed-over sparsity of data, significant but questionable assumptions and temperature data that has been incorrectly adjusted in a way that exaggerates warming. It finds, for example, an observation station reporting average monthly temperatures above 80°C, two instances of a station in the Caribbean reporting December average temperatures of 0°C and a Romanian station reporting a September average temperature of -45°C when the typical average in that month is 10°C. On top of that, some ships that measured sea temperatures reported their locations as more than 80km inland. It appears that the suppliers of the land and sea temperature data failed to check for basic errors and the people who create the HadCRUT dataset didn’t find them and raise questions either.
The processing that creates the dataset does remove some errors but it uses a threshold set from two values calculated from part of the data but errors weren’t removed from that part before the two values were calculated. Data sparsity is a real problem. The dataset starts in 1850 but for just over two years at the start of the record the only land-based data for the entire Southern Hemisphere came from a single observation station in Indonesia. At the end of five years just three stations reported data in that hemisphere. Global averages are calculated from the averages for each of the two hemispheres, so these few stations have a large influence on what’s supposedly “global”. Related to the amount of data is the percentage of the world (or hemisphere) that the data covers. According to the method of calculating coverage for the dataset, 50% global coverage wasn’t reached until 1906 and 50% of the Southern Hemisphere wasn’t reached until about 1950. In May 1861 global coverage was a mere 12% - that’s less than one-eighth. In much of the 1860s and 1870s most of the supposedly global coverage was from Europe and its trade sea routes and ports, covering only about 13% of the Earth’s surface. To calculate averages from this data and refer to them as “global averages” is stretching credulity.”
Look, if it really was true that we were facing an extinction event from climate change, then I suppose with some reluctance we will just have to go back to the caves, or die, as Vic Forbes argued in an excellent piece a few days ago. You see, to prevent climate change by getting rid of the oil base economy, would mean getting rid of modern civilisation, and 99.999 percent of us. If this is to be done, well, you had better have absolute certainty in your science, and of course, science just can’t deliver that. Also, many of us are not going without resistance! So, the case for climate change scepticism is a simple as that; if it was true, then there is nothing we could do about it because the cure is infinitely worse than the problem. So, let’s get back to business. Me, that involves burning heaps of things in my stove to keep warm this Melbourne winter.
I wish I had written this brilliant piece by Vic:
https://blog.alor.org/index.php/letter-to-the-editor-back-to-the-medieval-green-world
All Blog Posts Authorised by K. W. Grundy
13 Carsten Court, Happy Valley, SA.