[correlator]

I enjoyed this and respect citizens who feel motivated enough to look at underlying data..

This type of discourse ("here is what I did and here is what I saw") leaves room to comment and make progress. People can discuss measurement methods, statistical analysis, and other objective things about a tightly scoped project like this.

This is very clear reading the comments in the substack. A comment exchange that reminded me of my days in grad school:

commenter: "What I think can be taken conclusively from this survey is that temperature is quite regionally variable, and there are a variety of different trends over time in these locations. Do you feel that there is some more significant conclusion that can be drawn from this?"

author: "I am hesitant to draw any conclusions. I am more in a state of examining the data itself and asking questions."

[jacquesm]

You can't really draw climate change conclusions from the input data though, that's the fallacy that breaks this whole article at the foundation.

Let me rephrase that to make it even more clear: if climate change to date would be such that it would show up in datasets like these then we would not have needed any climate research to begin with. We're talking about 1 degree average change over a 60 year period across the globe. So that includes the oceans, the poles and a ton of other places where you won't find airports (or thermometers, for that matter).

[correlator]

You're not wrong.

"I don't have the data or tools at my disposal to do this properly" Should not prevent you from trying, sharing, and learning. However, it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds.

[thesz]

The part of "it definitely should prevent you from trying to change other people's minds" clearly tries to change other people's minds.

What data or tools do you have so that you are in the position to change other people's minds?

[correlator]

More complete datasets, a better understanding of how that data was collected and how to interpret it, solid statistical foundations, etc. etc.

People who go out to change minds should be versed in all this and more. But I don't believe they are required to roll up your sleeves and play with some data! :)

[ekianjo]

Counterpoint. Most of the catastrophic predictions from al gore era have not come to pass so this should cause you to doubt the quality of models at hand. If you cant predict anything reliably then its not science.

[olodus]

Counter counter point: Al Gore is not a climate scientist so why would we really listen to his predictions. His most well known movie did have a lie/fault in it (he moved the data to try and show that increased co2 always predates warming if I remember correctly). That does not make climate change fake though and if you listen to the real science most of the predictions has come through. It is just that news media does not always present the predictions accurately.

[itsoktocry]

>Al Gore is not a climate scientist so why would we really listen to his predictions.

Wait a minute, do you think Al Gore was, or even claimed to be, the person doing the research he was popularizing?

[olodus]

I don't know or care who provided him with his information but parts of it clearly didn't pass scientific rigour. Since it seems the claims done by Al Gore was here used to discredit the actual climate science, I felt I needed to comment on that some of those claims by Gore would clearly not been possible to publish in a paper, making it not science.

[jacquesm]

This exchange is quite telling:

Mike E. 14 hr ago edited 14 hr ago

    You maybe missing the trees for the forest. Global or local mean or median    temperature is a nebulous (no pun intended) indicator. It's the increases in daily weather variance, incomprehensibly-fast melting of major glacial masses, rising sea levels, and frequency and intensity of storms, fires, famines, and species' extinctions that are the "forest". These are consequences of anthropogenic GHGs that reduced Arctic sea ice (nearing an inevitable blue ocean event) and increased global sea thermal energy absorption which destabilized the jet stream from more predictable cycles. GHGs lead to a -11 F snowpocalypse in Austin, megadrought in US West and SW, "Hurricane Alley" shifting eastward, 100 F in the high Arctic town of Verkhoyansk, water trains of India, and slumping and melting of Siberian and other permafrost areas releasing absurd amounts of methane.

author creon levit 7 hr ago

    The variance (locally) is shown in the plots. What do you see re: variance?

    "Incomprehensible" glacier movement? As I understand it nine time in the life of the human species the glaciers have advanced to cover much of N. America and then retreated to where there was little or no polar ice at all.

    Frequency and intensity of storms? I suggest downloading the data on all hurricanes for the last ~100 years (as long as they've been recorded) from the NOAA national hurricane data center. I did that. I plotted it. Guess what I found?

    Fires... I lived in Napa California during the big Napa fires. How much was due to climate change, and how much was doe to terrible forest management by the forest service and the state? (don't thin the forests, don't clear dead trees, etc).

    Species diversity is very complicated. A whole different matter. So much to say at another time.

    Famines? Have you looked at famines vs. time for the last 1000 years? Other than the global covid mismanagement disasters of 2020-2022 (lockdowns, etc) famines are becoming a thing of the past - though if we continue killing our soils with mono-crop soy, etc they will recur.

    Arctic (and Antarctic) sea ice is another deep topic.

    Austin was a fluctuation. They happen. Don't kill your local electric utilities - you may want them when things get dicey (or icy :).

    Look into the history of draughts (and floods) over the last 200 years in the W and SW US.. Write a post and send me the link.

    You raise a lot of points. (or less politely, you are shifting the goalposts 12 times in one paragraph). I am just plotting local temperatures for 75-100 years. Nothing more.

After that exchange I'm fairly convinced this article wasn't written with the goal of 'doing science' however misguided.

[ekianjo]

That would not be surprising for someone who invented the interwebs by himself

[ekianjo]

I didnt mention al gore by name but al gore era predictions. Most of it was a big miss.

[olodus]

Yeah sorry, realised later that I had read your comment wrong and missed the "era".

I do still disagree though with that most of the scientific predictions has been wrong. I think a lot of what was pushed as scientific predictions were not really what was said by the scientific community.

[adamrezich]

if it was just Al Gore there wouldn't be an issue. but it keeps happening: https://extinctionclock.org

[correlator]

The majority of published scientific papers have been proven wrong by future discoveries. This is what learning and progress looks like.

[WalterGR]

I don't remember any specific predictions. Could you list some?

[darth_avocado]

As much as I respect people coming up with analysis like this, there is definitely scrutiny needed everywhere. However, there can be flaws in analysis when not done by experts.

For example, I find the chart #3 misleading a little.

> The global median temperature (of the entire dataset) is uniformly subtracted from every data point, to keep things relative to an arbitrary x-axis of 0.

This only means that relative to the median, the temperatures do no fluctuate crazily on an average. This says nothing about the overall trend in global medians, nor does it say anything about the frequency of extreme temperatures. These need to be accounted for because in data visualization, you can use the same data to tell a different story depending on the design choices you made in you viz.

[oezi]

I honestly think he must have messed up in his data processing or understanding the data because his graphs don't match what official climate stats show:

For instance for his Palm Springs example consider

https://oehha.ca.gov/epic/changes-climate/annual-air-tempera...