Anthony Watts Enforces Standards Among Skeptics

[Jack Hays]

Anthony Watts and his WUWT blog are regularly attacked in this forum by AGW proponents. Watts has been called dishonest in every way imaginable. Personally, I disagree with those claims, but I thought Watts' critics might be interested in an episode when he lays down the law to an errant skeptic.eace

". . . To the uninitiated observer, this “revelation” by Goddard could look like NCDC is in fact “fabricating” data. Given the sorts of scandals that have happened recently with government data such as the IRS “loss of e-mails”, the padding of jobs and economic reports, and other issues from the current administration I can see why people would easily embrace the word “fabrication” when looking at NOAA/NCDC data. I get it. Expecting it because much of the rest of the government has issues doesn’t make it true though.

What is really going on is that the FILNET algorithm, design to fix a few stations that might be missing some data in the final analysis is running a wholesale infill on early incomplete data, which NCDC pushes out to their FTP site. The process gets to be less and less as the month goes on, as more data comes in.
But over time, observers have been less inclined to produce reports, and attrition in both the USHCN and and the co-op network is something that I’ve known about for quite some time having spoken with hundreds of observers. Many of the observers are older people and some of the attrition is due to age, infirmity, and death. You can see what I’m speaking of my looking through the quarterly NOAA co-op newsletter seen here: NWS Cooperative Observer Newsletter
NOAA often has trouble finding new observers to take the place of the ones they have lost, and so, it isn’t a surprise that over time we would see the number missing data points rise. Another factor is technology many observers I spoke with wonder why they still even do the job when we have computers and electronics that can do the job faster. I explained to them that their work is important because automation can never replace the human touch. I always thank them for their work.
The downside is that the USHCN and is a very imperfect and heterogeneous network and will remain so; it isn’t “fixable” at an operational level, so statistical fixes are resorted to. That has both good and bad influences. . . ."



On ‘denying’ Hockey Sticks, USHCN data, and all that – part 1

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Anthony Watts
One of the things I am often accused of is “denying” the Mann hockey stick. And, by extension, the Romm Hockey stick that Mann seems to embrace with equal fervor.
While I don’t “deny” these things exist, I do dispute their validity as presented, and I’m not alone in that thinking. As many of you know Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, plus many others have extensively debunked statistics that went into the Mann hockey stick showing where errors were made, or in some cases known and simply ignored because it helped “the cause”.
The problem with hockey stick style graphs is that they are visually compelling, eliciting reactions like whoa, there’s something going on there! Yet, oftentimes when you look at the methodology behind the compelling visual you’ll find things like “Mike’s Nature Trick“. The devil is always in the details, and you often have to dig very deep to find that devil.
Just a little over a month ago, this blog commented on the hockey stick shape in the USHCN data set which you can see here: Continue reading →

 

[Lord of Planar]

Wow. I did a search for FILNET and found some interesting things. More evidence that hockey sticks don't appear in nature. They are man-made. This is the most comprehensive I found so far, but I haven't read the whole of it yet:

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2009.pdf

 

[Tim the plumber]

I have had the experience of a alarmist creating a sock puppet to pretend to be a skeptic. I believe he was the Forum owner. The 2 people who challenged him were the resident skeptics one of which was me. He did an "asking" and thus was exposed as a fraud in claiming that he was a PhD student of physics. He then deleted his earlier posts where he talked extensive about being a PhD type and only missed 1 such post. I found it.

The Forum which had paid job advertising on it for the Environmental industry closed.

Agents provocateur is an old method.

 

[Threegoofs]

Well, if you want an example of the absolute horse **** that Watts puts on his blog, Tamino has a nice rundown of the latest:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/anthony-watts-and-the-bottom-of-the-barrel/#more-7229

 

[Mithrae]

I have had the experience of a alarmist creating a sock puppet to pretend to be a skeptic. I believe he was the Forum owner. The 2 people who challenged him were the resident skeptics one of which was me. He did an "asking" and thus was exposed as a fraud in claiming that he was a PhD student of physics. He then deleted his earlier posts where he talked extensive about being a PhD type and only missed 1 such post. I found it.

The Forum which had paid job advertising on it for the Environmental industry closed.

Agents provocateur is an old method.

Of course that has nothing whatsoever to do with the genuinely absurd conspiracy theories of "Steve Goddard," unless of course he's been good enough and dedicated enough to spend years fooling Anthony Watts, right-wing journalists and Heartland Institute.

 

[flogger]

Of course that has nothing whatsoever to do with the genuinely absurd conspiracy theories of "Steve Goddard," unless of course he's been good enough and dedicated enough to spend years fooling Anthony Watts, right-wing journalists and Heartland Institute.

I'd take you guys a bit more seriously if you concerned yourselves less about what is right or left on this issue and more about what is right or wrong :roll:

 

[Mithrae]

I'd take you guys a bit more seriously if you concerned yourselves less about what is right or left on this issue and more about what is right or wrong :roll:

The OP was about the absurd conspiracy theory promoted by "Steve Goddard" (real name Tony Heller, according to the speaker's list of a Heartland Institute conference) - the notion of massive/systematic fabrication of data in the USHCN network - which was also promoted in another thread in this forum by MrVicchio via a Christopher Booker/Daily Telegraph article, and Anthony Watts' refutation of it, which is laudable.

Tim the Plumber, for reasons best known to himself, decided to insert an anecdote about an apparently sceptical poster on another forum who he believed to have been an 'alarmist' agents provocateur. This was entirely unrelated to the topic, since 'Goddard' is obviously believed to be a genuine sceptic by his fellow sceptics - Watts, Heartland and Booker - and even taken seriously and promoted by many!

Of course, you don't care that Goddard's ideas are wrong.
You don't care that Tim's post (if intended to imply that Goddard was not a genuine sceptic) was wrong.
You don't care that Anthony Watt's criticism is right.
You don't care that the facts I posted were right.

All you saw is the term 'right-wing' and it triggered your partisan alarm bells. Talk about irony :lol:

 

[Mithrae]

Seems that Goddard insists on standing by his folly, even after Watts' private and now public expressions of concern, and in fact seems to be criticizing Watts not on the basis of facts, but because of the "potential skeptics you have saved from heresy."

Real Science | "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
I made the horrible mistake of correctly counting the number of stations with fabricated data, and using only raw untampered data in my analysis. Another huge sin was pointing out that NASA has changed their graphs.

Thank you Anthony for saving a true believer from the sin of denial. Who knows how many other millions of potential skeptics you have saved from heresy. We certainly didn’t want to sway public opinion against the EPA ruling at this critical time.



For the record, it's worth noting that Jack Hays was one of only two people who 'liked' the OP in which Goddard's claims were promoted from the Daily Telegraph. It's encouraging that he is willing to correct the error.
Ref

My own critique was far less technical than Watts' post the following day. I simply pointed out a fact which any person of moderate intelligence and honest intent should've figured out: That if the USHCN had been unduly manipulated into a false warming trend, other records (such as the UAH satellite record) should show far less warming. But on the contrary, for the roughly 3/4 of mainland US which he analysed, Bob Tysdale found slightly more warming in the UAH data:

So obviously, if the accusations of tampering and scandalous fiddling with the data held any merit whatsoever, a more reliable source should show a much smaller warming trend than the USHCN data (used also by GISS, as Goddard notes). But unfortunately for all you conspiracy theorists out there, Bob Tisdale (author of three AGW sceptical books) has done the legwork necessary to see how patently false that is: The UAH satellite record actually shows more warming over the United States in the period 1979-2009 than the GISS/USHCN record does!

 

[Manc Skipper]

Watts has certainly forced standards down, there's no arguing that!

 

[Mithrae]

Watts has certainly forced standards down, there's no arguing that!

I would argue it.

 

[Jack Hays]

[h=2]On ‘denying’ Hockey Sticks, USHCN data, and all that – part 2[/h] Posted on June 26, 2014 by Anthony Watts
In part one of this essay which you can see here, I got quite a lot of feedback on both sides of the climate debate. Some people thought that I was spot on with criticisms while others thought I had sold my soul to the devil of climate change. It is an interesting life when I am accused of being in cahoots with both “big oil” and “big climate” at the same time. That aside, in this part of the essay I am going to focus on areas of agreement and disagreement and propose a solution.
In part one of the essay we focus on the methodology that was used that created a hockey stick style graph illustrating missing data. Due to the missing data causing a faulty spike at the end, Steve McIntyre commented, suggesting that it was more like the Marcott hockey stick than it was like Mann’s: Continue reading →eace


Steve McIntyre says:
June 25, 2014 at 10:34 am

Anthony, it looks to me like Goddard’s artifact is almost exactly equivalent in methodology to Marcott’s artifact spike – this is a much more exact comparison than Mann. Marcott’s artifact also arose from data drop-out.

However, rather than conceding the criticism, Marcott et al have failed to issue a corrigendum and their result has been widely cited.

 

[Tim the plumber]

The OP was about the absurd conspiracy theory promoted by "Steve Goddard" (real name Tony Heller, according to the speaker's list of a Heartland Institute conference) - the notion of massive/systematic fabrication of data in the USHCN network - which was also promoted in another thread in this forum by MrVicchio via a Christopher Booker/Daily Telegraph article, and Anthony Watts' refutation of it, which is laudable.

Tim the Plumber, for reasons best known to himself, decided to insert an anecdote about an apparently sceptical poster on another forum who he believed to have been an 'alarmist' agents provocateur. This was entirely unrelated to the topic, since 'Goddard' is obviously believed to be a genuine sceptic by his fellow sceptics - Watts, Heartland and Booker - and even taken seriously and promoted by many!

Of course, you don't care that Goddard's ideas are wrong.
You don't care that Tim's post (if intended to imply that Goddard was not a genuine sceptic) was wrong.
You don't care that Anthony Watt's criticism is right.
You don't care that the facts I posted were right.

All you saw is the term 'right-wing' and it triggered your partisan alarm bells. Talk about irony :lol:

My point was that Antony Watts will sometimes have to attack people who are Skeptics because all political "groups" will have their nutters in them and also because there may be plants put in by the other side to push outlandish drivel into the other side's "manifesto".

 

[Ceist]

Anthony Watts and his WUWT blog are regularly attacked in this forum by AGW proponents. Watts has been called dishonest in every way imaginable. Personally, I disagree with those claims, but I thought Watts' critics might be interested in an episode when he lays down the law to an errant skeptic.eace

". . . To the uninitiated observer, this “revelation” by Goddard could look like NCDC is in fact “fabricating” data. Given the sorts of scandals that have happened recently with government data such as the IRS “loss of e-mails”, the padding of jobs and economic reports, and other issues from the current administration I can see why people would easily embrace the word “fabrication” when looking at NOAA/NCDC data. I get it. Expecting it because much of the rest of the government has issues doesn’t make it true though.

What is really going on is that the FILNET algorithm, design to fix a few stations that might be missing some data in the final analysis is running a wholesale infill on early incomplete data, which NCDC pushes out to their FTP site. The process gets to be less and less as the month goes on, as more data comes in.
But over time, observers have been less inclined to produce reports, and attrition in both the USHCN and and the co-op network is something that I’ve known about for quite some time having spoken with hundreds of observers. Many of the observers are older people and some of the attrition is due to age, infirmity, and death. You can see what I’m speaking of my looking through the quarterly NOAA co-op newsletter seen here: NWS Cooperative Observer Newsletter
NOAA often has trouble finding new observers to take the place of the ones they have lost, and so, it isn’t a surprise that over time we would see the number missing data points rise. Another factor is technology many observers I spoke with wonder why they still even do the job when we have computers and electronics that can do the job faster. I explained to them that their work is important because automation can never replace the human touch. I always thank them for their work.
The downside is that the USHCN and is a very imperfect and heterogeneous network and will remain so; it isn’t “fixable” at an operational level, so statistical fixes are resorted to. That has both good and bad influences. . . ."



On ‘denying’ Hockey Sticks, USHCN data, and all that – part 1

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Anthony Watts
One of the things I am often accused of is “denying” the Mann hockey stick. And, by extension, the Romm Hockey stick that Mann seems to embrace with equal fervor.
While I don’t “deny” these things exist, I do dispute their validity as presented, and I’m not alone in that thinking. As many of you know Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, plus many others have extensively debunked statistics that went into the Mann hockey stick showing where errors were made, or in some cases known and simply ignored because it helped “the cause”.
The problem with hockey stick style graphs is that they are visually compelling, eliciting reactions like whoa, there’s something going on there! Yet, oftentimes when you look at the methodology behind the compelling visual you’ll find things like “Mike’s Nature Trick“. The devil is always in the details, and you often have to dig very deep to find that devil.
Just a little over a month ago, this blog commented on the hockey stick shape in the USHCN data set which you can see here: Continue reading →

"A picture is worth a 1000 words"

 

[Threegoofs]

My point was that Antony Watts will sometimes have to attack people who are Skeptics because all political "groups" will have their nutters in them and also because there may be plants put in by the other side to push outlandish drivel into the other side's "manifesto".

This is quite ironic.