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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (920372)	2/11/2016 11:34:36 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1570288

You don't understand the adjustment process for surface temperatures. "Each UAH adjustment had a particular specific explanation and the UAH adjustments are unbiased -" Same is true for all the other sources. That is not true. Adjustments to surface temperatures are algorithm generated and have nothing to do with anything specific about any particular station. There are thousands of stations, no one is looking at each one every month and saying, gosh, we have to adjust this one cause the recorder looked at it at a different time or someone painted a building nearby or it was moved slightly .. the algorithm doesn't know anything about that stuff. No one is keeping track of minor things like this. The need for adjustment is INFERRED based on statistical analysis. If a particular thermometer has missing data for a period, the missing data is infilled from other thermometers in the region. Further, if a particular thermometer reads outside a range of what other regional thermometers are giving, the need for adjusting that thermometer is inferred. And adjustments made by the algorithm are applied back to the entire life of the station. This is why there are adjustments made every month to historical temperatures. And the individual adjustments aren't explained or even explainable. You have to trust the algorithm. And imo, considering the direction of adjustments (cooling the past, warming the present), I think its obvious they've selected an algorithm that shapes data to make it look more like what their theory says should be. I also think increasing urbanization over time has an effect, with the more urban sites having less missing data, allowing good rural data to be replaced with bad urban data. Mercury to electronic thermometers? BTW this wouldn't even be a valid reason for adjustment. Perhaps the electric thermometers are more precise, but there's no way to really "adjust" past readings to make them more precise. More precise readings from the mercury era don't exist and can't be manufactured. For that matter, I don't believe it would be possible to really accurately adjust historical records for any of the stuff you mentioned. How would we know how painting a nearby surface white affected temperatures (even if someone was noticing stuff like that and they aren't)? How would we know a particular station move affected readings by this or that amount? And the TOD, these are min-max thermometers. As long as you check it every 24 hours, you're going to get the min-max for that 24 hour period. They'd be better not making any adjustments at all. Even if there were inaccuracies recorded in the past, it's an illusion those could be fixed by a statistical process.