37 karma · joined April 6, 2018
But I do have to ask: If that 100F temperature had occurred recently instead of over 100 years ago, how many people would be absolutely freaking out about it? And it would be all over the news, wouldn't it, complete with satellite interviews and talking heads and repeated insistence that "We must do something about climate change right now!"
As it is, though, it's just a historical footnote isn't it? And it seems that some folks are now trying to claim that it never really happened. (It appears to have been truncated out of the HadCRUT temperature data set, for example.) How inconvenient for them, then, there are other folks out there who have gone so far as to dig up the actual handwritten log for the weather station involved, which appears to be in good order.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-E1nQ_W4AEpC7D.jpg
Still other folks have noted that there are other logs out there for other stations which show equal if not higher temperatures, but Fort Yukon is called out as the official record high temperature for the state. I can only assume that investigation showed that those other stations weren't as reliable as Fort Yukon, but the possibility exists that they did in fact experience equally high or even higher temperatures.
It astounds me that the field of climate science is taken so seriously when it appears to actually mostly just be full of hangers-on, also-rans, and wannabes. And I can think of a few big names in it who have little to no scientific training at all.
Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India.
We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though.
The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though.
Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!
That all depends on what platform(s) you're using. For example, IBM still gives you zOS, AIX, the System i OS, and so on. And there are other operating systems for other platforms.
The computing world doesn't begin and end with Wintel, you know; it may seem that way sometimes, though.
As an example of how things are done on the legacy side, I was once dealing with a piece of Power hardware which could be configured as either a Linux system or an iSeries system. There was a USB port in the hardware which was enabled on Linux systems but disabled on iSeries systems, and AFAIK it couldn't be enabled, either. This puzzled me at first, until I found out how USB ports can be used to attack systems and then it made perfect sense - they had chosen to disable the USB port for security reasons.
Yes, there was quite an ugly one not that long ago in fact. A local mega-corporation which still has some mainframes had its main (and redundant) systems just roll over and die suddenly, plus their hot backup systems which were offsite. I don't remember all of the details, but IIRC this was a case of "We [the vendor] knew we had a major bug, and we had a fix for it, but we were remiss about getting it out to all of our customers in a timely manner." This type of thing is shockingly rare in the mainframe world, though.
And to my point, no, you can't claim that the errors in various temperature readings mostly cancel each other out, without having any solid proof of that. Nor can you then turn around and claim that since there are enough errors out there that obviously don't cancel out, that this then gives you the right to set loose a computer program to blindly "correct" those errors, said program having been constructed using whatever models and biases you were operating under at the time. (Those "corrections" may not be anywhere close to accurate, in other words.) But that's exactly the kind of thing they've been doing.
"Legal reasons" was the cover they used to not make this data available to begin with, but some authority or another finally forced their hand here. It wouldn't surprise me to find that they still don't want it out there, and so it may only be available on an on-again, off-again basis, maybe only after somebody complains about not being able to get it. Nor would I be surprised to find that the data itself mysteriously changes over time, as many have claimed. I believe that they have even admitted to such - that they routinely "correct" various data sets, meaning that what you see today may be different from what you see tomorrow.
In any case, I didn't expend a lot of effort the second time around, and the first time around I was mostly interested in what the "official", final data sets were claiming about temperatures (at least at first), because that was what was being put out to the public. And after finding issues with local temps, I ultimately went out and got local data from local sources, completely bypassing the official sources. And one of the first things I discovered was that there was an awful lot of data - both old and new - that was ultimately marked as "missing" in the official records but was sitting there plain as day in the local records. I never did quite figure out what was going on there either, but I have my suspicions.
The whole process just left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and so I don't generally trust anything other than the original station data from the original sources. The HadCRUT4 stuff may be a bit better; I haven't really looked into it but others have and they say it can't really be trusted either.
Having read scientific journals myself on and off for several decades now, one of the things I've noticed is that once a paper gets published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, then that opens the floodgates for other related papers to get published using related data and related methods. And that's true even if the original paper used highly questionable data and highly questionable methods, as so many do these days.
The reality of scientific publishing today is that scientists need something - anything - of theirs to get published in order to build and maintain their professional reputations. And journals need something - anything - to publish; usually something provocative, too, otherwise nobody would bother paying the high fees that they charge. So a lot of what they publish is just their version of clickbait.
Funny you should mention Japan: Back when I did my deep dive, one of the cities in Japan (Tokyo, I think it was) was being held up as a worst case example for warming. And if you looked at the raw temperature data, the warming there was kind of scary enough as it was, but in the adjusted data it was just horrific. And I thought to myself that one of two things was going on here: Either the level of warming that was being claimed to have occurred there didn't actually occur, or that it puts lie to the notion that humans and flora and fauna can't readily adapt to such warming. After all, it's not like Tokyo is an apocalyptic dead zone or anything, now is it?
As to the raw data itself, the last time I checked the raw HadCRUT3 data that I used in my deep dive was no longer available (I kept running into broken links and such), and this data had only been provided under duress in the first place. I didn't really strain any muscles trying to look for it again, though. Nor did I originally have much luck trying to find similar data for HadCRUT4 (again I didn't look too hard), but I have seen passing references to it being out there somewhere.
And by "raw" I mean the data as it originally came in from the various temperature stations, without being manipulated in any way except maybe to get it all in a common format for easy processing. But apparently what I call "raw" and what some other folks call "raw" can be quite different things.
And unlike your situation, when I looked at the HadCRUT3 data (at least the version that existed at the time; I know they made some changes to it afterwards) what I found there was appalling. So either massive fraud was going on at the time, or (more likely) they had just allowed their computer algorithms to run amok on it without really quality checking the final results.
As to stations "not changing during that time period", I forget the details but you should be aware that some folks (not me) have gone so far as to track down a few such stations (those which were well-documented and well-maintained, but with no documented moves or changes), only to find that the algorithms had made adjustments to them anyway! As for the local station that I used, the adjustments were such that it made it look like this station had shifted from condition A to condition B (that it had moved or whatever), then shifted back to condition A, then back to condition B, and so on, and that it shifted by exactly the same amount every time, too. Then rinse and repeat, every few years, which is hardly a realistic scenario.
BTW, all of those changes were warming changes, too. There was never a cooling change that I saw, at least not for my local station nor the handful of other stations that I also checked. The most that I saw was those periodic shifts back from the "adjusted" (warmer) data to the "raw" (cooler) data.
I did that deep dive about ten years ago, BTW, and the local data set I used went back to about 1870 or so - a solid 130+ years of data. I know a lot has changed in those ten years, but I don't know that much has really changed for the better concerning the data or the algorithms being used to process it.
As I believe I've already commented about in this thread, a few years back I did something of a "deep dive" on temperature data, paying particular attention to the temperature records in my own area. What I found there at the time was appalling, and even if I go check Berkeley right now what they show there appears to have little or no basis in reality.
Search my comment history for where I go on at some length about Berkeley (BEST) and the problems I see there. I suggest that you follow the links and go check out some things for yourself.
(Forgot to add) When I reviewed local temperature records myself, dating back to 1870 or so, I did indeed see a real but modest warming trend. But it was nothing like the warming which showed up after you got finished "adjusting" the data, which the climate folks routinely do.
As to deep ocean temps and such, lately those folks have been claiming to measure temperature changes on the order of 1/1000th of a degree per year, if not less. Now I don't know about you, but that just strikes me as BS on the face of it - more "statistical noise" than anything else. There are also claims made about ice melt and such, but if you do the math (the amount of ice claimed to have melted vs. the amount of ice still sitting there), you see that it falls within the same type of range - not even rounding error, just "noise".
These are more lies and half-truths, for the most part. Wind and solar as always quoted on a "nameplate" basis - how much power they can theoretically produce under ideal conditions. But most don't produce anywhere near that, on average, and I suspect that many can't even make their "nameplate" promises either. Add in the fact that they will have to have more traditional power plants as backup for when they fail to produce, and actual costs are easily a multiple of what is currently being quoted, perhaps a relatively high multiple at that.
And why not? You could, you know, lift a finger and go check out for yourself the relevant local news reports about the current and past situation, but you have to go back a few years now to see how it all actually got started.
And pretty much all of coastal Louisiana is naturally subsiding (sinking) anyway. (The same is true for Texas, BTW, including much of its interior.) Flood control projects built on the Mississippi River over the past century have made the problem far more readily apparent today than it would otherwise be.
So it should be no surprise, then, that right now temps may be a bit on the warm side, comparatively speaking. This situation might be quite inconvenient for us, though.
About ten years ago, after some remarkably incorrect statements about local heat levels made by the folks at NOAA or wherever, and then repeated (but very quickly retracted) by our own local weather folk, I went to the trouble of doing a bit of a deep dive on the HadCrut3 data sets. And what I found there was appalling. Other folks did more comprehensive deep dives and found far more problems with it than I had.
I could only do what I did at the time because some authority (I forget who) had finally forced the entire data set to be released to the public, over the strenuous objections of the folks who administer that data. Much of that data has since been hidden again, though, from what I can tell.
That was the older HadCRUT3 data set. The newest one is HadCRUT4, but I haven't done any kind of deep dive on that. (Without digging further into the matter I don't even know if there is enough data publicly available to do the kind of analysis on it that I did on the earlier set.) But other people have, and have noted serious problems with it, and have even written entire books about that. The short version, though, is that there is an awful lot of "data" out there which they're using that is mostly just made up, and what is genuine has been adjusted so much that it can no longer really be considered "data" at all.