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

To: THE WATSONYOUTH who wrote (1072837)	6/11/2018 1:35:25 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 1575357

Manipulating Tim Ball at WUWT Sou \| 8:28 PM Tim Ball is Anthony Watts' pet conspiracy theorist. He's an utter nutter of the first order. He was the first-named author of a book denying the greenhouse effect (pictured right). Anthony Watts never mentions that, although he has a policy that "WUWT is a slayer free zone". Anthony only implements this policy on very rare occasions, and always exempts Tim Ball. Today I'll just write about one thing, and it's not about Tim's main preoccupation (anti-semitic conspiracy theories). This time it's about manipulation. Manipulation is a curious word. It sends shivers down the spine of every science denier yet they flock to blogs like WUWT where manipulation of the gullible is the only stock in trade. Anthony Watts posted an article with the usual nonsense from Tim Ball (climate science is a hoax, a communist plot, a conspiracy for world domination by persons sometimes named, sometimes not). In it, Tim opened with this sentence: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the people who formulated the structure that directed their research, constantly manipulated the dataand the methods to predetermine the results.The first thing to wonder is how thousands and thousands of multiple generations of scientists all over the world managed to conspire to get results that point to the same conclusion: we are causing global warming. That has to be the biggest super duper conspiracy ever, doesn't it. Tim doesn't say how this works, but he doesn't have to. His fans are all conspiracy theorists too, and believe that everyone is out to get them. Oh, except for Donald Trump who can do no wrong even when he's hurting them very badly. The second thing you might wonder about is this bit about manipulating the data. If you're a scientist, you know that working with oodles of data requires one to process them. Manipulating data is what scientists do. What they don't do, unless they are dishonest, is "manipulate data and methods to predetermine the results". Anyone who does that is eventually found out and the result is not pretty. It's not easy to get results to show something other than what the data point to. One must either fabricate data or leave out inconvenient data. Then you'd be faced with having to explain why your results differed from that of everyone else who has collected data. (Science deniers do both which is one reason they cannot get any consistency between their various, usually conflicting, stories.) You might or might not be aware that Tim Ball, in the dim distant past, wrote a couple of papers that were published in the scientific literature. This is an abstract of one of them, co-authored with Roger A. Kingsley and published in 1984, when he had a teaching gig in the Geography Department at the University of Winnipeg: As a result of affiliation between the Hudson's Bay Company and the Royal Society a relatively large number of instrumental temperature records are available from York Factory and Churchill Factory on the southwest of Hudson Bay beginning in 1768. The nature of these records, details of the instruments and information about the observers are presented....So far so good. Tim put together some temperature records he got from a couple of factories on Hudson Bay. But wait. He struck some obstacles: The major difficulty with the records is that the number of observations and the time of observation varied considerably.So what did he do? He *manipulated* the data, using "*adjustment factors". My oh my. That sounds just the sort of thing of which he doesn't approve. Adjustment factors were calculated for all of the combinations using a modern record maintained at the Churchill airport.Using modern temperature records from an airport? An airport, I tell you, where UHI disease is rife. If deniers knew that, they'd never forgive Tim Ball. It gets worse. How many deniers have you come across who castigate scientists for "splicing" records? Well, that's exactly what Tim Ball said he did: By combining the Hudson's Bay Company record with data recorded by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after 1852, and up to 1910, a long and relatively continuous record of daily and monthly average temperatures has been created for Central Canada.Wow! What do you reckon. How can Tim hold his head up among the paranoid conspiracy crowd? Not only did he manipulate* the data, he *spliced* records of two factories with records from the RCMP (which surely are part of the elite swampy establishment about to take over the world). Just thought you'd like to know that Tim Ball, possibly before he descended into utter nutter conspiracy land, briefly worked with temperature records, splicing and dicing them. I won't bother with the rest of his article. It's just Tim moaning to WUWT-ers that CO2 isn't really increasing because, despite all the evidence showing CO2 is increasing, climate science is a hoax. Or something like that. That's mixed in with all sorts of his usual nasty conspiratorial thoughts about scientists who still do science. blog.hotwhopper.com