I Reject Man Made Global Warming As Fact
By Erick Posted in Policy — Comments (50) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Before I go any further, I'd like to point out that this "report" that came out last week from the U.N. was actually not the report. It was a summary for policy makers drawn up by bureaucrats. The actual report will now be edited to make sure it conforms to the summary. Let's repeat that. The report will be edited to fit the bureaucratically written summary. When that happened a few years ago to the National Academy of Sciences report President Bush asked for on this subject, the liberals and media screamed "conspiracy!" What goes around comes around and what's good for the goose is good for the gander (were this not a family site, I'd end this sentence with the plural form of a five letter word that begins with "B" and itches).
So now, to begin my diatribe against the zealots, I'd like to point out some things.
Algore and all the priests of global warming point out a near perfect relationship between the level of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere and temperatures on the Earth. It is striking in how perfect it is. And despite the lack of sustained proven credibility in paleoclimatology, they've hung their hat on the Vostok ice core sample that shows the same thing. Follow me here. A large number of very credible scientists actually think the ice core shows that during warm periods on earth's surface, temperatures rose and then the gases grew. But you don't hear about these scientists and their research because the media and high priests all label them kooks.
Go get yourself an icy cold 12 oz. Coke from your fridge. Get a room temperature one too. Get two glasses. Pour one Coke in each glass and watch. What happens? The room temperature Coke releases its CO2 rapidly. The cold one does not. So maybe, just maybe, a colder ocean releases gas more slowly than a warmer ocean. Considering man does not release into the atmosphere CO2 and methane at the same rate and yet scientists find a near perfect correlation between CO2 levels, methane levels, and global temperatures, maybe it is the Earth getting warmer, which causes the gas release from the oceans and not the other way around. Maybe this can all be explained by the sun going through a period of increased activity, generating more heat. And maybe that is why Mars is experiencing global warming too!
Read on . . .
Of course the zealots of global warming say this is all nuttery and denial. They are, like Laurie David (as qualified as I am to speak on this matter), beyond debating. Now they just want the rest of us burned at the stake -- despite the CO2 that would be generated.
Next, let's remember that despite what you are hearing now, there is actually huge debate about the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere compared to other times. There are wide variations in reported levels. There is lots of evidence, even from ice cores, that the middle ages saw more CO2 in the atmosphere than is presently there. But again, remember, any scientist who makes this point is labeled a kook. And the sun once revolved around Earth too.
Assume for just one second that global warming is real. Algore, in his "documentary," proposed that a few thousand people a year in Britain would die because of the increased heat. What he failed to mention was that more than twice as many people die in Britain each year due to cold related issues. So, wouldn't there be a net positive, or does this then take us back to the whole population explosion crisis?
Okay, another thing about Algore's movie. He focused on Antarctica melting. Why did he ignore the fact that the most recent tests of Antarctica prior to his movie being released shows that over 90% of Antarctica's ice sheet is growing thicker?
What about the hockey stick? Virtually every unbiased statistician has shown the hockey stick graph to be crap. It started off using tree rings and then used real temperatures, linking the two together as if they were somehow perfectly compatible. Likewise, the graph ignored the middle ages. Why? Interestingly, the U.N. has done the same thing. In 1998, their graph showed that the temperatures in the middle ages were warmer than they are now. When they re-released the graph after 2000, they got rid of that spike. They said "new data" had proven it faulty. When skeptics pointed out that temperatures in the 1930's and 1970's were hotter than today, those bits of data were revised down too based on "new data."
Now, let me borrow from Neal Boortz who lists a number of reasons for his skepticism that I share:
• Because the sun is warmer .. and all of these scientists don't seem to be willing to credit a warmer sun with any of the blame for global warming.
• The polar ice caps on Mars are melting. How did our CO2 emissions get all the way to Mars?
• It was warmer in the 1930s across the globe than it is right now.
• It wasn't all that long ago that these very same scientists were warning us about "global cooling" and another approaching ice age?
• How much has the earth warmed up in the last 100 years? One degree. Now that's frightening.
• The infamous Kyoto accords exempt some of the world's biggest CO2 polluters, including China and India.
• Because many of these scientists who are sounding the global warming scare depend on grant money for their livelihood, and they know the grant money dries up when they stop preaching the global warming sermon.
• What happened to the Medieval Warm Period? In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a chart showing climatic change over a period of 1000 years. This graph showed a Medieval warming period in which global temperatures were higher than they are today. In 2001 the IPCC issued another 1000 year graph in which the Medieval warming period was missing. Why?
• Why has one scientist promoting the cause of man-made global warming been quoted as saying "we have to get rid of the medieval warming period?"
• In the United State, the one country with the most accurate temperature measuring and reporting records, temperatures have risen by 0.3 degrees centigrade over the past 100 years. The UN estimate is twice that.
• There are about 160,000 glaciers around the world. Most have never been visited or measured by man. The great majority of these glaciers are growing, not melting.
• Side-looking radar interferometry shows that the ice mass in the West Antarctic is growing at a rate of over 26 gigatons a year. This reverses a melting trend that had persisted for the previous 6,000 years.
• Rising sea levels? The sea levels have been rising since the last ice age ended. That was 12,000 years ago. Estimates are that in that time the sea level has risen by over 300 feet. The rise in our sea levels has been going on long before man started creating anything but natural CO2 emissions.
• Like Antarctica, the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass.
• Over the past 3,000 years there have been five different extended periods when the earth was measurably warmer than it is today.
• During the last 20 years -- a period of the highest carbon dioxide levels -- global temperatures have actually decreased. That's right ... decreased.
• Why did a reporter from National Public Radio refuse to interview David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma studying global warming, after his testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unless Deming would state that global warming was being caused by man?
But, you know, none of this is up for debate. Don't even point this stuff out. Because you too will be a kook.
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I've had to ban your account. You are not allowed to ask such questions. By the act of even suggesting them, you have proven yourself to be an unstable kook who cannot be taken seriously.
I'm afraid in order to comply with U.N. mandates pursuant to the Laurie David Initiative, I've had to turn your account off.
I'm Al Gore. I INVENTED the Internet. You can't ban me without 427 recounts.
Harry Reid is to ethics reform what HIV was to free love!
Why aren't our carbon sinks ever considered in the amelioration programs ?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/269/5227/1098
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Can't we just stipulate that poor people are hardest hit by pretty much everything?
No disrespect to minorities & women is intended.
Of course women and children are often the poor, so maybe it is always the same women and children hit hardest.
I've been putting up with a faulty central air circuit in my apartment and trying my best to keep the indoor temperature in the high 50's. Thankfully the water heater works and I enjoy mostly good insulation, save for the metal-frame window by my computer.
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
Let's say 2B of the world's "poor" end up dead from GW. That reduces their CO2 emissions, and it reduces the demand on the food chain as well. It will force a bunch of people employed in governments and NGO's to go find work in productive fields because they won't have the poor to keep poor so they can stay employed helping them.
It's an all around winner...
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>5<, etc.
The hype, cynicism and mob think going into this may be the greates failure of non-social science since the german science community rejected Einstein.
the biggest overall failure of science, of course, was the intelelctual acceptance and promotion and coverup of socialism/marxism.
Can you give me your credentials as a scientist?
I'm Kidding.
It does crack me up that people on both sides, with absolutely no background in the hard core science involved, are willing to make such certain statements.
I remember talking with some Peta folks a while ago at a party. They were 100% convinced that there were zero, none, not ever, advancements made in medicine by the use of animal testing. In their mind is was ALL just evil sickos.
I remember the feeling I had in that debate. I get the same feeling now in this debate - from BOTH sides.
The AGW people have a program of regulations lined up that will make FDR's expansion of government look like a neophytes attempt.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Of course on my side, the scientists censor themselves and pass information on to others quietly lest they get punished.
My background:
In college I was planning to major in astrophysics for a while. So I had all the theoretical physics classes for the first two years, as well as some introductory astro and chemistry classes and a number of the calculus classes. Unfortunately, most of the books I'd read as a younger student were not the technical ones filled with the math, and math and I don't get along well, at least on exams (I once found an error in a partial derivative calculation before I knew what they were, and previously successfully explained logs and exponents to my classmates who failed an exam which I aced, then failed the same type of exam the very next day). I finally quit the major when I had classes in vector calculus, differential equations, and the senior/graduate astrophysics class all in the same semester.
So technically, I don't work in the hard sciences, but I understand most of the theory behind it. And I don't take well to these Bill Murray wanna be's telling me "Back off man, I'm a scientist!" I know about Newton, Galileo, Coppernicus, and most importantly, Louis Pasteur who established the modern scientific method. Well, I suppose I should say what was the modern scientific method before the new inquisitorial priests took over. For me the bottom line is that 20 years of bad computer modelling don't overturn Maxwell's well tested equations, yet these very same GW zealots insist that the changes in the sun's luminosity have no effect on the average (and I won't even go into trying to figure our which of the statistcal measures they mean to imply with that vague term) temperatures on earth.
But the problem is even worse than Erick knows. You see, I have a mathematician friend who works on a weather type project. He is the professional kind (who for fun plays with what happens when you work with differential equations containing imaginary numbers and pi) with a masters degree. He's not been working on the project for very long, and the key number their satelites need to calculate is, get this, surface temperature. In the short time he has been there he has found a number of fundamental flaws in their methodology as well as some in their technology.
1) The satelites have their sensors that grab the temperature for a given spot. But you need to know where the satellite is pointing, and they don't actually always know which direction that is. So they do an averaging of the temperatures to correct for that. Except that the averaging process effective assumes whatever is being measured doesn't have "fingers" when you calculate its mean. If the object has fingers, because you've taken the average of the readings, when you are between the fingers, if all of your readings are on the fingers, you assign the wrong value between the fingers because there is no data for the fingers, or it looks like an error.
2) There is an internal device which is supposed to generate a Known constant temperature so the sensors can recalibrate themselves. Except that after careful investigation, he determined that the control varies its temperature depending on where in the orbit and rotation the satelite is. This flaw turns out to be a big problem because they grabbed a "standard" satelite design for this instead of creating their own. So he thinks its a fundamental flaw on ALL weather satelites.
3) His most recent discovery is that in a problem related to the averaging problem discussed above, a prominent physicist attempted to use a symetric matrix calculation to determine whether or not the data fell in the correct collection bin. In order for the calculation to work correctly, all of the eigen values for the matrix must be 1, but 2 of them are 0, so for some values the matrix actually changes the data instead of merely rotating it.
So yes, its all crap, and its being used a political bludgeon to try to control those of us who are capable of exhibitting independant thought processes. If it's not for the children, it's to save the planet. Now let the black shirts with the machine guns search your house for contraband!
That being...
It does crack me up that people on both sides, with absolutely no background in the hard core science involved, are willing to make such certain statements.
But just keep in mind that only one side of this debate is attempting to re-arrange entire economies because their models say so.
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So libs, how's that Congressional Resolution to end The War™ coming along?
...and the Inquisition is at full throttle. We began to see and hear that full transition when people like Gore declared the debate and study had ended. Period.
Serious scientific inquiry isn't possible in such an environment.
...you're saying, high fruit prices don't cause frost in California?
The fact that the terrorism deniers are the first to the junk science party tells you a lot about the real goal.
Let's assume for the moment that man caused global warming is real -- then why isn't the answer to convert all the world's power generators to nuclear power? That's doable and with the new technologies, such as PBMR, it's much more efficient and the PBMR reactors are not convertible to nuclear weapon breeder reactors. China has a program in place to add 200 of these reactors over the next 30 or so years.
and other more environmentally safe/friendly options. I just don't think the doom and gloom of "global warming, we are all going to die" is the case to make.
I think we all want cleaner air to breath, and cleaner water to drink, I think keeping ground water as clean as possible is a good idea.
I think trying to reduce how much trash we use, or trying to recycle or reuse is a worthy goal-because it makes us good stewards of what we have.
But the whole "if you don't do this, we are all going to die" is rediculous.
I would love to see the US do more to encourage nuclear power-but the environmentalists who think we are all going to die from global warming in 40 years also seem to think nuclear power will kill us too.
For more info, look at this Wiki entry on the Nuclear Power 2010 Program, begun in 2002 by the Dept of Energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power_2010_Program
"During my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions from the English-speaking nations across the world." - Thatcher
The polar ice caps on Mars are melting. How did our CO2 emissions get all the way to Mars?
Connect the dots. The footprints of our evil-belching M-O-C are all over that once-serene landscape by now, doncha know?
soli Deo gloria
to explain.
The carbon footprint of the space probes we sent there are the cause of 'global' warming on Mars.
Next issue will be rising temps on the moon as a result of our meddling there. Lunar warming - you heard it here first.
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison
it's like the dying gasp of a skeptic, exhaling all the arguments that have been discredited over the last 10 years.
I'm sorry but the vast majority of facts you've listed are just plain false...
Here are the ones that are true, at least partly:
The report is edited by bureaucrats - including those from the Bush administration. Doesn't mean the conclusions conflict the science.
In the past CO2 rise lagged temperature rise - yes, by about 800 years. No scientist is trying to hide this. It was in the last IPCC report. In the past, CO2 was not the start of the temp rise, but rather a positive feedback mechanism. Not true with today, we've created the feedback.
Twice as many people die in Britain each year due to cold related issues. Perhaps, now if we could only get the rest of the world's populations to move to Britain that might be a valid point. Remember, it's global warming.
The polar ice caps on Mars are melting. Partly true - the south pole is melting, the north on the other hand is growing.
It wasn't all that long ago that these very same scientists were warning us about "global cooling" and another approaching ice age? One or two may have said this for a handful of years. Now we have thousands saying otherwise for a period of at least 10 years.
How much has the earth warmed up in the last 100 years? One degree. OK, and what is the difference between now and the last major ice age? 4-5 deg. Is that frightening?
The infamous Kyoto accords exempt some of the world's biggest CO2 polluters, including China and India. True.
Why has one scientist promoting the cause of man-made global warming been quoted as saying "we have to get rid of the medieval warming period?" Right - and strangely, nobody knows who this mystery scientist is...
Why did a reporter from National Public Radio refuse to interview David Deming. Or maybe it was after he compared carrying firearms to female genitalia - think he might have an ax to grind? What was the word you used - kook?
I'd suggest not using the rest of your factoids in the future, some of them are just laughable.
In your "rebuttal" is apparently as is your willingness to throw out your known facts that every right minded person is suppose to agree with.
in the 1970's or who was sleeping through science and social studies class.
It wasn't all that long ago that these very same scientists were warning us about "global cooling" and another approaching ice age?
One or two may have said this for a handful of years. Now we have thousands saying otherwise for a period of at least 10 years.
It was a heck of a lot more than 1 or 2. I recall watching a couple of films in science class about the coming ice age. I remember science teachers talking about global cooling. I remember Scholastic News type magazines talking about it (although I don't know that it was actually a Scholastic News, but it was in magazines like that).
Now your point that there isn't anyone talking global cooling or ice age currently is a good one-I haven't heard this stuff bout global cooling on a good 20 or so years, but you portrait of the theory not being promoted beyond 1 or 2 scientists is flat out wrong.
1.4 Billion cases of malaria in the years since DDT was banned. 94 million have died. The whole notion of the DDT ban was false, no science, just junk.
Where is the sun? Do we know the sun hasn't brightened in the last 2000 years? How would we know, how could we know?
Some facts to chew on, since the last ice age ended 18,000 years ago, sea level has gone up by 400 feet. You know what you call the predicted future rise, well within the measurement errors. Most of the pack ice has already melted, what remains is a mere remnant of what was 18,000 years ago.
What caused the last ice age to end? Obviously it was global warming, but what caused the global warming 18,000 years ago, and maybe that cause is still working today.
The periods of time where the Earth is as warm as it is today are minuscule compared to the times it was a snowball. Maybe global warming is good? Maybe we are entering the next ice age as was said in the 70s?
Correlation does not mean causation. Oh yeah, one other thing, the Earth didn't begin when you were born, get over it, it's been around billions of years and will be around for billions more years, until the sun consumes it.
DDT is banned - who knew?
We do know the sun hasn't gotten significantly brighter in the last 50 years but temps have risen - how can it be the cause for current warming?
I'm sure coastal citizens would be relieved to know that anything much less than 400 ft. sea level rise is insignificant.
What caused the last ice age to end - changes in Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles), which haven't happened recently.
Global warming good - change is expensive, who will pay?
Phew, the Earth will stay around thank goodness. 3 words - not the point.
is warming, but whether the warming is permanent, a cycle, caused by man, caused by something else, whatever.
I think the argument can be made that the earth is slightly warmer right now than it was in some other point in time, I just don't think you can make a sustainable and provable argument that man did it.
"There are about 160,000 glaciers around the world. Most have never been visited or measured by man. The great majority of these glaciers are growing, not melting"
How can Neal Boortz say that most glaciers have never been visited or
measured, and then claim the great majority of these things, that
have never been visited or measured, are growing ?
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to a kite with a really, really long string.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"...
Senior Writer
Wouldn't satellite imagery be considered as being "measured by man" ?
I went to the link and there's no clarification or further
information given.
Why don't you take the rest of the week and figure it out.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"...
Senior Writer
This one is self-refuting... if you know that they are growing, then they've been measured. Neal should've been a bit more careful on this one.
But then, whatever his other merits, Boortz sometimes sacrifices a bit of precision for polemic.
Actually, Erick, I question your objectivity - any particular reason why you chose Coke rather than Pepsi for your thought-experiment? :-)
Well, since this all happened today, I had to ask a question that I'm trying to go look at in my "spare" time (things the day job interferes with).... and just ask in case anyone might know why....
In all of these discussions, you run into "mean" this and "mean" that.... but in terms of statistics, "means" are rather incomplete without an accompanying discussion of standard deviations around that mean.
I've never touched climatology, but I have a ton of experience in industrial process control and such. So try this on for size....
The National Weather Service chose to define "normal" temperatures by picking some semi-arbitrary 30-year slot (I think it was 1941 - 1970) and averaging the high and low temperatures recorded at each station over that period, and calling that "normal."
Of course, that's arbitrary, and also most definitely does not mean that the temperature "should" hit right on the high and low "normals" every day. What about the standard deviation around that computed mean/average?
I went and found the numbers for a particular early February calendar day for a particular northern city to be named later (if I can ever finish the little project and write it up for sharing). If my trusty HP calculator is working correctly, one standard deviation about the mean for the high temperature data is about 12 degrees (F) while one standard deviation on the low temperature is larger (something like 15 degrees).
I haven't had a chance yet to see if the data distribution about the mean follows a Gaussian-normal distribution (or not). But the bottom line is that the standard deviations are huge.
The problem with "temperature data" is that "real" data can only be comprised of particular temperature values measured at particular times and places (with particular instruments). If you move beyond that (to things like "global mean temperature") to computational analyses over different places and times, information is being mushed together, and the complete statistics (not just "mean" but standard deviations and other friends) are critical information.
In industrial process control, if someone was trying to tell you that they are seeing a shift in the mean of some evolving data set that is much smaller than even one standard deviation, listeners would be, well, skeptical.
Questions to be asked would be things like, "Is there really a systematic trend under all that statistical noise?" and "Are the 'trends' really systematic shifts in the data, or just apparent trends within the random variability of the system?"
Really, I was just wondering about this. Is there anyone out there who might be able to shed some informed light on this?
We don't discuss deviants here, and we certainly don't refer to them as "standard".
Right Thomas?
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The IPCC Third Assesment Report states that global average surface temperatures have risen by .6oC +/- .2oC between 1901-2000.
(see http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/005.htm )If you dig into the report a little you can find that the confidence interval in 95% or about 2 standard deviations. So we can estimate one standard deviation to be about 1oC.
The Fourth Assesment Report states that global average surface temperatures have risen by .74oC +/- .2oC between 1906-2005. I have no idea what the confidence interval is since that is in the report itself. I've seen claims that the confidence interval is now 90%.
I also think that it's important to note that the starting years are different and since 1906 was in the middle of a cooling trend that could account for the new warming rather than the last few years.
1. Statistics don't lie.
2. Statiticians can be bought. (Your last paragraph...)
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question. The +/- .2 most likely refers to their confidence in the model's handling of the input data. GIGO. Whether and how the model takes account of variations around the mean is a different question. Perhaps it does. Probably won't know until long after the Summary and then the Report have had their intended political impact.
I've always found that .2C error margin fishy. In fact I've asked about it before. It would seem that in order to get an error margin of .2 you need temperature readings accurate to .2C which just doesn't seem likely 100 years ago. Not only that the temperature readings from 100 years ago are skewed towards populated areas and major shipping lanes.
Does the analysis include discussion on the error of the measurement itself? Even a normal thermometer is going to have some sort of measurement error: errors on the low and high end of the scale, error in reading the measure, etc. I have to think that the error alone for these ancient samples would be 1-2 degrees itself.
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
From what I've read of the TAR I find no discussion of the error only an opaque reference to a dataset by Jones et al. And like you said an error of 1-2 degrees sounds more reasonable for a temperature recorded in 1906 (or 1900).
All -
Thanks for your thoughts on this problem. All attention tends to focus on the end-result which pops out. As just the small discussion shows, there's much, much more going on.... and the details matter. Indeed, locations of measurements, instruments used, etc., are factors which can have major effects on the results.
The link that Nilram provided above (to grida.no) gets you to the 2001 summary, which includes the infamous (and widely discredited) "hockey stick" graph if you have never seen it before.
In any case, the situation in there with the "0.6 +/- 0.2" seems to still hang in the air. Where it is stated in the text, two footnotes are provided; all footnotes hyperlink to a footnotes page, but trying to go there produces a "page not found" error.
On the right, under the "hockey stick" figure, the caption offers this support:
The Earth’s surface temperature is shown year by year (red bars) and approximately decade by decade (black line, a filtered annual curve suppressing fluctuations below near decadal time-scales). There are uncertainties in the annual data (thin black whisker bars represent the 95% confidence range) due to data gaps, random instrumental errors and uncertainties, uncertainties in bias corrections in the ocean surface temperature data and also in adjustments for urbanisation over the land. Over both the last 140 years and 100 years, the best estimate is that the global average surface temperature has increased by 0.6 ± 0.2°C.
There seems to be three things to distill from that paragraph:
- There are a lot of uncertainities;
- There was a very large amount of "data processing";
- The lead-in to the "0.6 +/- 0.2" seems to be rather, um, semaphore-method.
This is why I asked the question in the first place. The starting point is a wide variety of data, taken from different times and places, and taken using different methods. Even with measurement uncertainities factored in, the data get repeatedly processed, and statistical information doesn't seem to get brought along. It's possible that there could be averaging, and then the averages are further processed and statistics done on the later processing.
But the concern is that it's unclear exactly what's gone on. Given the complexity of the system, it's possible that a full statistical analysis would produce something like "0.6 +/- 4" even for one-sigma standard deviation. Naturally, that kind of statistical spread renders the calculation of a systematic shift of a mean untenable.
I honestly don't know what the complete soup-to-nuts (raw data to final number) process looks like here. It's just worth asking if you've battled with statistical beasts before....
I didn't check these links, does it contain raw temperature data? I'd like to do some statistical analysis of my own and post the results. Would be interested in the average temp data for each year going back as long as they have it. I looked on the web a few months ago, with no luck. Instead we get the cleansed versions. Thanks.
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
I agree - to try to understand any of this "reporting" we need to get the REAL raw data. From the wording, it seems pretty obvious that the work-up was multi-staged - so there's a lot of sequential processing, and I regard the intermediately-processed stuff as not raw.
E.g., if they are trying to use "average" temperatures as raw data.... sorry, that's not "raw." "Raw" means measured.
What's the whole picture?
pjshify posted this link a few months ago:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/
This isn't what I would call raw data its temperatures in 5oX5o grids. I believe it's monthly averages. So the data is processed, in fact some of it is interpolated. Like I said it's not raw but it isn't a global average either.
I believe this is the data used in much of the TAR. The TAR simply refers to the data by Jones et al with no real mention of how the data was collected (at least what I've read of it).
I know this isn't what you're looking for but I hope it is helpful.
If either of you are interested in doing an independant statistical analysis, I'd be VERY interested in seeing it.
Looks like what they have are some sort of temperature change based on some mean? They are measuring "temperature anomaly" which indicates some processing. I would presume that these guys somehow calculate the average temperature on Earth for a given year. An anomaly figure implies some comparison, the question is, comparison to what? Perhaps to the mean of the data set in general? A little odd.
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
I have a story to tell here. Back in 1979 I was a junior mathematician working in and atmospheric research organisation in Australia. GW theory was quite advanced then, and we were testing a hypothesis that warming would cause rainfall in the south to reduce, and increase in the north. That has bad implications for farming, which is mostly in the south.
The short answer is that we found some confirmation, but it wasn't statistically significant (then). It pretty much describes what has happened since, though.
Anyway, I had to hunt up the very raw data. There is a surprisingly large amount, and for a long time, which the Aust Met Bureau was very helpful (then) in providing. There's good data from observatories and lighthouses (often three-hourly). Many post offices with a resident postmaster recorded daily data. But much of Australia is sparsely populated.
I don't remember all the details, but we created a few hundred regions, and did some fairly sophisticated modelling within each. We would use modern satellite data etc to figure a temperature gradient, assume that that applied to historic data, and normalise with the actual readings. This gave a basis for weighting, which in turn gave a basis for a variance calculation.
What you need to remember is that individual readings are scattered, but there is a huge number of them, so even allowing for spatial and time correlation, the variance of the average is quite small.
Answering another of your queries - the individual temperature readings are far from normal (and are not independent of each other in time or space), but ergodic effects mean that as soon as you start averaging they become more so.
btw, I'm sure that none of our calculations made it into currently used data sets.
If Anthropagenic emissions of GHGs cause Global Warming, and explain the current changes of temperature throughout the world, then why did the majority of the current warming trend occur in the early 20th Century? The US industrial output, oil consumption and civilian automobile fleet were all orders of magnitude smaller prior to 1950, than they are today.
Harry Reid is to ethics reform what HIV was to free love!