As climate denier heads explode over the loss of the "hiatus", one simple question shuts them up

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Sunday June 07, 2015 · 3:02 AM PDT

2015/06/07 · 03:02

What would you recommend we do about it? Leave a known bias in the data or correct the data for the bias?

This week the online journal Science Express published a paper by Karl et al. that corrected a few biases in the global temperature record. Most of these corrections were to the sea surface temperature record, data collected by ships and buoys. The upshot was that any evidence for a so-called "hiatus" or "pause" in global warming during recent years vanished in the statistical haze.

And climate denier heads exploded all over the internet.

(Those who have studied the statistics always knew that the apparent slowdown was not statistically significant in the first place. In other words, it was never there to begin with.)

During this firestorm, primo denialati Anthony Watts had an email exchange with Dr. Tom Peterson, one of the co-authors of the hated Karl et al. paper. Follow below the fold for the quick coup de grace.

h/t Sou at Hot Whopper.

Here was Tony's initial email (emphasis added, to show how over-the-top deneir thinking gets when anyone challenges one of their canonical miracles).

Dear Dr. Peterson,
This latest paper, Karl et al. 2015 is an embarrassment to science. It epitomizes president Eisenhower’s second warning in his farewell address about science and politics becoming hopelessly intertwined, and thus corrupted.
In my last telephone conversation with you, I stated (paraphrasing) that “I believe you folks aren’t doing anything fraudulent, but you are doing what you feel is correct science in what you believe is a correct way”.

After seeing the desperate tricks pulled in Karl 2015 to erase “the pause” via data manipulation, I no longer hold that opinion. You needed it to go away, so you prostituted yourselves, perhaps at the direction of higher ups.

This will be NCDC’s Waterloo, and will backfire on all of you terribly on the world stage. Take a lesson from Yamamoto’s own observation after he bombed Pearl Harbor. Take a lesson from what is on WUWT today.
How sad for you all.

Anthony Watts

In the face of such overwrought hyperbole, Dr. Peterson calmly replied (emphasis added on the unanswered question that skewers Watts):

Dear Mr. Watts,
As you might imagine, my views about our paper and our motives are somewhat different than yours. To explain why, I should start by explaining my views on what science is and how it works.

Here https://www.youtube.com/... is a 14 minute TEDxAsheville talk I gave in January on What is Science. While I can't do justice to a 14 minute talk in a single sentence, the bottom line is that science is the result of tests.

So let me give you two examples from our paper. One of the new adjustments we are applying is extending the corrections to ship data, based on information derived from night marine air temperatures, up to the present (we had previously stopped in the 1940s). As we write in the article's on-line supplement, "This correction cools the ship data a bit more in 1998-2000 than it does in the later years, which thereby adds to the warming trend. To evaluate the robustness of this correction, trends of the corrected and uncorrected ship data were compared to co-located buoy data without the offset added. As the buoy data did not include the offset the buoy data are independent of the ship data. The trend of uncorrected ship minus buoy data was -0.066°C dec-1 while the trend in corrected ship minus buoy data was -0.002°C dec-1. This close agreement in the trend of the corrected ship data indicates that these time dependent ship adjustments did indeed correct an artifact in ship data impacting the trend over this hiatus period."

The second example I will pose as a question. We tested the difference between buoys and ships by comparing all the co-located ship and buoy data available in the entire world. The result was that buoy data averaged 0.12 degrees C colder than the ships. We also know that the number of buoys has dramatically increased over the last several decades. Adding more colder observations in recent years can't help but add a cool bias to the raw data. What would you recommend we do about it? Leave a known bias in the data or correct the data for the bias? The resulting trend would be the same whether we added 0.12 C to all buoy data or subtracted 0.12 C from all ship data.

You are, of course, welcome to share this with your readers (or not), as you deem appropriate.

Regards,

Tom

Watts briefly acknowleged receipt of this email, but had no response to the critical question. Nor will he.

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As climate denier heads explode over the loss of the "hiatus", one simple question shuts them up

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