Links to which I will refer:

• Darwin Airport Temperature Data
• San Diego Lindbergh Field Temperature Data
• Darwin Airport Google Map
• Lindbergh Field Google Map

So what are you looking at with the first link? Sure, it's labeled "Darwin Airport", but it's a temperature data set that covers the years 1882 to 2008. The blue line is actually data points taken from two distinct locations: the Darwin Post Office (from 1882 to 1941) and the Darwin Airport (established in 1941 to fight the Japanese). The red line is supposedly what the temperature was at the Darwin Airport site.

So why don't the lines match? Well, the obvious difference (before 1941) is an adjustment made because of the change in location.[1] That there should be an adjustment is defensible. It's the magnitude of the adjustment that is suspect.

The weirdness between 1950 and 1980 appears to be some sort of statistical homogenization. According to Eschenbach's analysis (see Figure 5), the Darwin Airport data was adjusted because it didn't match three surrounding stations that have since shut down.

Now compare this to the Lindbergh Field data, which covers 1849 to 2008. (You'll need to change the start date to 1849 to see the entire data set.) The airport was established in 1928. Notice that there is no adjustment to this data, even though the station probably moved, and increasing urbanization caused the airport to close a runway in the 1960s.

I'm going to poke a little harder into the why of the difference in adjustments, but right now the only thing that I can see is that the San Diego unadjusted data confirms a warming hypothesis, while the Darwin data does not. But I'm a cynical and suspicious person, remember.

[1] The Economist had a rebuttal to Eschenbach's arguments. While I don't find their arguments all that convincing, they do go into more detail about the old Darwin Post Office.

I've already mentioned that I dislike the so-called Health Reform Bill. As if I needed another reason, I point you to page 1020 (via Professor William A. Jacobson):

(C) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THIS SUBSECTION.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.

(D) WAIVER.—This paragraph may be waived or suspended in the Senate only by the affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members, duly chosen and sworn.

Uh, right.

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UPDATE: For those of you who haven't seen the pork this bill has produced, check the New York Times, Michelle Malkin, and Gay Patriot.

Well, I found some data. I think.

As luck would have it yesterday, Eric Berger interviewed James Hansen (head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Science, and U.S. government climate science supremo). One of his statements caught my eye:

We learned our lesson a few years ago. Our analysis consists of using data from three different sources, for land measurements, ocean measurements and for polar measurements. Those are all publicly available data sources. But the people who provide them don't necessarily keep the records. A couple of years ago we started storing the data we get from these sources. We also published our computer code because I thought, because of all the objections of contrarians I just thought I should publish the computer program.

I haven't dug through the program or the data, but it is (in fact) available here. There was an interesting side link that discusses GISS's raw data, and its methods for transforming it. That page is worth a read, because it's quite enlightening. My favorite line (emphasis added):

This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a 'climatology') hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.

Whoever wrote that web page recognized the same problems that poor Harry* faced when dealing with raw station data: it just ain't very good. Of particular interest is that the admitted margin of error in calculating average global temperatures is about the same as the amount that the Earth is supposed to have warmed in the last 150 years.

I did a little further poking, and came across this article discussing the interdependence of data. In short, their conclusion is that the UEA CRU's dataset overlaps with NASA GISS's on the order of 90-95%.

So what does this mean?

My take is that satellite measurements are the only really accurate data we've got. Because that data only covers a relatively short period of time (and doesn't look like a hockey stick), I don't think it's proven that we're going through a period of excessive warming.

There's still the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If everything works the way that AGW theorists claim, then we might still be in trouble. However, this article from Richard Lindzen discusses the holes in those assumptions.

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It's also worth mentioning the original "hockey stick" that started this all. It was based on a combination of real temperatures and tree ring data. It's got a major problem, though: the last 40 years of tree ring data don't match the measured temperatures at all, which means that the tree ring data is probably not that reliable, either.

There's a good description of this data "grafting" here.

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*The East Anglian programmer.

Climate change data dumped

Phil Jones was quoted in e-mail 1107454306 in 2005:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send [it] to anyone.

Excuse me if I don't believe that the raw data was discarded back in the 1980s.

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We're beginning to see a pattern: NZ’s NIWA accused of CRU-style temperature faking

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Also, a deficiency that this scandal has pointed out: No One Peer-Reviews Scientific Software

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Finally: watching TV tonight, a commercial for Hopenhagen showed up, and I found myself channeling Cuba Gooding, Jr. (and he ain't dead yet!):

Show me the data!

I don't know how much you're seeing about the so-called "Climaquiddick" or "CimateGate" in your neck of the woods, so I figured I'd post a few important links about it.

For those of you who haven't heard about it, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was supposedly hacked last week. The CRU, for those who don't know, is one of two institutions that's responsible for the "most complete" climate change data. (The other being NASA-GISS.) I say "supposedly hacked", because there's reason to believe that this wasn't a hack into their servers — after examining the data that was released, observers are beginning to believe that this was an inside job.

Most of the original posts and news stories I saw focused on the e-mails that were contained in the zip file that was found on a site frequented by Russian hackers. These e-mails contained evidence of Scientists Behaving Badly, including possible criminal activity.

But bad as these e-mails were, they weren't any sort of smoking gun. No, the major evidence was the CRU's code that was included in the zip file.

Global Warming was faked.

Basically, the code lays out the step-by-step algorithm by which the CRU discarded and altered data, along with the programmer's comments and objections.

Three important links:

• Climategate: hide the decline – codified


• Eric S. Raymond on the East Anglia CRU's Global Warming Fraud


• Climategate: The Skeptical Scientist’s View

And if that's not enough evidence for you, Glenn Reynolds has been aggregating links to this story over on Instapundit.

Now, I'm not 100% convinced. More like 85%, because I haven't actually stepped through the FORTRAN code myself. Other coders have, and have published snippets of highly questionable code. When coupled with the e-mails, it paints a very sorry picture of the CRU and the "most respected" climatologists.

To say I'm pissed off is an understatement.

... over at HillBuzz:

Thank you former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush

If you have been reading us for any length of time, you know that we used to make fun of “Dubya” nearly every day ... parroting the same comedic bits we heard in our Democrat circles, where Bush is still, to this day, lampooned as a chimp, a bumbling idiot, and a poor, clumsy public speaker.

[...] we will always be grateful for what George and Laura Bush did this week, with no media attention, when they very quietly went to Ft. Hood and met personally with the families of the victims of this terrorist attack.

FOR HOURS.

The Bushes went and met privately with these families for HOURS, hugging them, holding them, comforting them.

If there are any of you out there with any connection at all to the Bushes, we implore you to give them our thanks ... you tell them that a bunch of gay Hillary guys in Boystown, Chicago were wrong about the Bushes ... and are deeply, deeply sorry for any jokes we told about them in the past, any bad thoughts we had about these good, good people.

You may be as surprised by this as we are ourselves, but from this day forward George W. and Laura Bush are now on the same list for us as the Clintons, Geraldine Ferraro, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and the other political figures we keep in our hearts and never allow anyone to badmouth.

Sa-lute!

... because this hurts my head.

The Dead Zone: The Implicit Marginal Tax Rate

To say that antipoverty programs in the United States are perverted may be an understatement. When you take into account the loss of means-tested benefits (e.g., cash assistance, food stamps, housing subsidies, and health insurance), and the taxes that people pay on earned income, the return to working is essentially zero for those in the lower two quintiles of the income distribution.

If I have to explain it to you, then I have failed:

Harvard Yard: Home of American Heroes

Kudos to those who served.

(And a Bronx Cheer to the current administration of Harvard.)

One of the things being thrown around in the health care debate is a reference to studies that rank "quality of health outcomes" internationally. While the studies I've looked into seem reasonable enough, there is something worth pointing out about them: any study that purports to rank health care quality has to compare a number of disparate not-so-connected statistics, and resort to using a table of weights. This is a useful tool — see how key it is to doing a trade study — but it's ultimately a subjective one.

In other words, if you accept the results of the study, you're tacitly agreeing with the authors' priorities.

For my part, I haven't seen a table of weights that I've liked. For example, the U.S. system is consistently ranked number one in responsiveness.* Many Americans would rank this as their A-number-one priority — you can hear it in the voices of people angry enough to shout about it — and yet most studies don't agree with that.

(Also, we're talking about rankings, which are inherently inaccurate anyway. Even if I score a 98, and you score a 97, and Joe scores a 52; we're still one-two-three, even if third is not a passing grade, and second is an A.)

And since I'm on the topic of statistics: comparing international life expectancies and infant mortality rates is also a tricky business. Infant mortality is not measured the same way in every nation, and life expectancy is notoriously multi-modal**. They are useful tools, but not precisely accurate ones.

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*This is also one of the choices we make that drives the cost of care up. Spreading specialists all across the country, and owning the helicopter to take you to those specialists, ain't cheap.
**For example, male U.S. life expectancy is skewed lower because so many 19-year-olds have cars. If you survive your teenage driving years, you're probably going to beat the average life expectancy pretty handily.

You're probably going to see less of me on LJ for a while.

Not only has work gotten a little busier, but the DNS there has decided that Livejournal's method of prepending domain names is objectionable, and takes forever to resolve.

I'm not ignoring folks specifically, just so you know.

... apparently wrought by SEIU union members. (Those would be people employed by your government.)

Here's the coverage over at Hot Air. Please note the video of the incident about halfway down.

Y'know, at this moment in time, I don't care about the specifics of the debate. When the folks supporting the President's plan are resorting to violence against dissent, my automatic reaction is to fight back.

Deep Space Sparky: Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies

Applied Sparky: RFID Blocking Wallet (Though I'd rather have one manufactured by these guys.)