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by danielmarkbruce 15 days ago
By choosing what data to show. There is a lot of data to choose from in climate science. How do you think we end up with such strong arguments on the issue? Cherry picking is as big a problem in climate science as anything else.
1 comments
DoctorOetker 15 days ago
a lot of those thermometers have been operating for years or decades, in order to cherry pick each year again, you'd have to censor traces that were still used the year before, so at least such cherry picking should leave measurable traces

can you identify cherry-picked "retired thermometers" from this dataset and earlier ones by the same source(s)?

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Naracion 15 days ago
I believe they were responding to your "confirmation bias, how?" question, rather than the narrative around thermometers. So from that lens, the confirmation bias is choosing to show temperature (objectively measured with assumed-reliable instruments / thermometers), but arguably choosing to hide other kinds/categories of data.

Fwiw, I am not backing them up, since I do not know what other data they might be referring to (and I am not very knowledgeable in topics within climate science).

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DoctorOetker 15 days ago
You're surprised in the context of global warming that the physical quantity of temperature was selected? The temperature quantity itself was cherry-picked?

Does anyone besides you expect them to demonstrate global warming but please without mentioning temperature - that's obviously cherry-picked of course... /s

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danielmarkbruce 15 days ago
1 - the area was cherry picked. 2 - only this year's data is highlighted in red - the data from last year wasn't highlighted. It's hard to know if this is a trend or it's just a weird year. 3 - the time horizon is cherry picked. Why mean on a given day rather than the mean for a week?

Imagine someone else cherry picks the line that is really low and highlights it. Or they pick a different area which shows cooling. Now you have some idiot claiming global cooling.

The thing about cherry picking is that it works so well. When someone pointed out the cherry picked data, you couldn't even come to the conclusion it was cherry picked. And you are on hacker news. Imagine the really really silly people.

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