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Politics : Politics of Energy
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To: Brumar89 who wrote (14837)12/8/2009 1:07:29 PM
From: RetiredNow  Read Replies (3) of 86355
 
Data is adjusted all the time in science and statistics, and that doesn't invalidate the homogenized data, rather, it makes it more accurate. I'll give you an example.

My team was involved in a data collection exercise on a business process we were trying to improve. The data samples that were coming back were highly skewed and didn't jive with what common sense told us we should have been seeing. So we went back to the source of the data and found that the several work groups of people who were entering the data had received bad work instructions and were entering the data incorrectly. Other work groups were entering it correctly. So the data was mostly correct, except for the anomalies we were seeing. So we isolated those anomalies and removed them from our trend charts. The result was more in line with our expectations and we were able to create a predictive equation out of it and an improvement plan that helped the business.

So this is a classic example of data scrubbing to get a meaningful result that can help with an improvement plan. To a layperson it may have looked like we were deleting data that skewed the results away from what we wanted them to be. However, in reality we were simply removing corrupt data. It may very well be that the data scrubbing occurring with climate change data is exactly this kind of thing. However, leave it to the laypeople among the GW denier group to claim it is fraudulent activity to purposefully manipulate the data to prove the GW theory.

This is the danger of letting politicians and lay people dictate the course of scientific debate. They simply are not educated in statistics and scientific theory enough to make accurate assessments. Instead, they should rely more on scientists and the conclusions those scientists reach.
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