Maintaining the Consensus

I’ve been thrown out of better for less.

It has been an odd week for me. I’ve been tossed from two more pro AGW internet sites in the last day. First there was the Huffington Post’s online comment where the um … reporter Michael Coniff was blasting conservatives for not looking at the data. Now I admit I was a little strong worded in my reply but only to the point where I was direct, no swearing or misleading statements.

Michael Conniff is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Post Time Media Inc., the leading community blogging company; the editor-at-large of Aspen Peak magazine; and the host of “Con Games,” the #1-rated radio talk show in Aspen and Vail.

Here’s a few of the comments he gets paid to make.

The ability of conservatives to remain numb and number to climate change runs into a cold hard slap in the face with a double dose of data from the ends of the earth.

Data from NASA, the University of Colorado’s (CU) National Snow and Ice Data Center, and other research organizations — encompassing both Antartica and the Arctic — is about as damning as can be to those who prefer to bury their heads in the snow.

Conservatives, of course, tend to be all but immune to inconvenient data of climate change, citing marginal studies and anecdotal evidence scientifically proven by looking out your bedroom window. The difference now is not just the overwhelming data and the word of eminent scientists but the satellite video and computer renderings in your face of what’s going down. Like watching a baby in the womb, the enhanced views visible in time-lapse photography render the skeptic all but defenseless, left to rely on rigor-mortis rhetoric and blowhard bluster in the face of fact after fact from those who actually know jack.

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CON GAMES: Double-Whammy Puts Right on Thin Ice

Someone dropped a noconsensus link on this page which led to clicks here so of course I had to reply to this. After all, arctic and Antarctic sea ice are new specialties of mine and as some have noted, I have an ever so slight conservative streak about me which I don’t care to hide.

I didn’t save this post unfortunately so you’ll have to take my word that it went something like this.

I’m a conservative and I have looked at the data at my blog LINK.

Have you ever taken the time to look at the data? Or are you just a friggin reporter with no knowledge about what you’re reporting?

Are you aware that the antarctic sea ice has grown by 25,000 km^2/month? LINK

Do you know that the Wilkins ice shelf didn’t actually break off yet? Do you know it is a veritable ice cube in relation to the rest of the continent located in the peninsula which is known to be the primary warming area of the antarctic?

Well forgive the paraphrasing, I admit it was a bit harsh but it was late and the guy doesn’t have a clue. Apparently, it was too good a shot against his article.

The comment was clipped, snipped and shipped RC style.

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Now the second site didn’t exactly clip me. I found out about this after I wrote the above. . Deep Climate was posting on some obviously bad curve fitting which (barring a natural freezing disaster) is definitely going to look stupid to the ‘fitters’ in about 5 years. It’s pretty humorous.

The LINK TO DEEP

Here’s the graph Dr. Deep is having a problem with.

The red line follows the curve but mathematically, it’s purely noise at the end. It’s a spline curve fit which does absolutely everything possible to fit the trend regardless of the appropriateness relative to noise. The crux of Dr. Deep’s post is that the endpoint isn’t real and he’s right. The data is real but the curve gives a false smoothness to it. Just imagine a spike upward even to 0.2 degrees after the end and you see what I mean. Stuff like this is actually funny to me so as you’ll see below that’s what I wrote.

But here’s what the good doctor did to prove his point:

He extended a spline fit. (I’m nearly 100% sure if this is a cubic spline but it may be a 4-8th order least squares polynomial). But either way, as soon as the curve exceeds the last data point it becomes pure noise with absolutely no mathematical meaning in this universe. I bet you $10 that he did it by hiding an artificial point below the EXCEL graph which he manipulated until we couldn’t tell the difference – but I’m just an engineer so what do I know. — Well , except that the spline needs that point to define it’s matrix.

You’ll notice that I just agreed with him though (because he was right) while pointing out that this graph had no meaning.

Here’s what I said:

It is pretty funny what he did. I could have a lot of fun with posts like that, Tamino would blow a gasket.

Extending a polynomial fit always results in bs, immediately after the last data point so this last graph is not surprising at all and doesn’t discount the otherwise humorous math in my opinion.

[DC: “He”? Do you mean MacRae? Or Gunter or Spencer? The polynomial fit was “bs” before I extended it, although extending shows how ridiculous it is. It seems you’re pretending it was all a joke on their part. If only that were true … sadly and pathetically, they are all quite serious.]

There is something reasonable to be said for non-linear fits though. I don’t find the argument that only a linear trend can be used particularly compelling. There is shape there, although I’ve heard the AGW argument to the contrary.

[Jeff, have you actually read any of the IPCC reports? Or looked at the Hadley CRU website? It appears you don’t realize that binomial smoothing is standard for the longer surface data sets. Linear trends are applied to the satellite data only because of the shortness of the record. You should also check out Tamino’s posts on “lowess” smoothing
e.g. this one. Perhaps a properly tuned lowess fit would be an improvement on the linear trend – I might try that some time.

But not all “non-linear” fits are created equal. Of course, a higher order polynomial is bogus and misleading in this case; the undue influence of the end point makes that clear. And the intellectual dishonesty is compounded by Spencer’s apparently deliberate omission of the linear trend. But if you want to defend that sort of thing, go right ahead.]

Yup, he was right again. I didn’t explain myself enough and was judged by other’s labels. How funny is the ‘undue influence of the endpoint’ comment by Dr. Deep knowing that he hid the real one below the graph?

Anyway naive as I am, I was happy for a logical attack as anything else on an AGW blog. They haven’t been very open to discussion, it’s like Counters on the other thread, if you’re not talking about what they want, it can’t exist. So I tried again.

Jeff Id // April 10, 2009 at 2:57 pm

Dr. Deep jumps to the conclusion that I am saying fraud to IPCC and Hadley. Actually Hadley is one of the two groups that I know manipulated the endpoints of their graphs through different filtering. I’ve only seen the hadley site one time (still a rookie) where they openly discuss the change in filtering so this was an acknowledgment that Dr. Deep knows the truth well enough to recognize an offhand reference.

Well, I’ve already read his blog policy at this point so I carefully worded my reply, after several days it disappeared. So I wrote:

Some reason for the snip?

[DC: I moved your last comment to unthreaded per my comment policy].

After several minutes of searching I found it with the other comment on his blog’s first open thread.

Deep Climate // April 15, 2009 at 1:36 am

Another reply to the doc, awaiting moderation as I write.

Jeff Id // April 15, 2009 at 3:10 am

No need, you convinced me not to post.

I explained that if you don’t bring up the IPCC I won’t either. I also explained that I agreed with the post you had made along with your clear misunderstanding of high order polynomial fits. Try doing it more, you’ll see I was right about extrapolation.

I was honest and open about my thoughts and this is your response. — I actually respected your comments in the past, this response though is pathetic.

You even resorted to false name calling. I actually believe in AGW I just haven’t found the evidence supporting the magnitude or required actions.

If you apologize I’ll reconsider, until then I know which context I should take your posts.

Well that’s about it. Apparently, I’m too stupid for tamino, I need to take matlab for Real Climate, I committed libel at Deep Climate and was simply snipped by the huffy post.

I must be really, really dangerous.

It seems that suppression of question is the nature of the consensus………