Why statistical models should NEVER be used to make policy

[jafadmin]

Once you start favoring statistical models over pure data, this happens:

https://www.datasciencecentral.com/prof ... ation-bias

"The evidence suggests confirmation bias is rampant and out of control in both the hard and soft sciences. Many academic or research scientists run thousands of computer simulations where all fail to confirm or verify the hypothesis. Then they tweak the data, assumptions or models until confirmatory evidence appears to confirm the hypothesis. They proceed to publish the one successful result without mentioning the failures! This is unethical, may be fraudulent and certainly produces flawed science where a significant majority of results can not be replicated. This has created a loss or confidence and credibility for science by the public and policy makers that has serious consequences for our future."

Which explains: http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/gr ... emails.pdf

And for those who think science is way more knowledgeable today, just go talk to any physicist. There have been zero changes to the standard model since 1973. Every single theory, hypothesis, and prediction made since that time has failed confirmation. (The Higgs was hypothesized in 1964)

[musher0]

Planet
Climategate: independent report clears the IPCC
News
Filed under: sustainable development, Climategate, Muir Russell
By Sylvain Biville, Rue89

Published on 08/07/2010 (1)

After six months of investigation, an independent commission, led by Muir Russell, has ruled out suspicions that British scientists were wrongly accused of manipulating data on global warming. A few criticisms remain about the handling of the case.

Around the world, IPCC scientists continue to work...

The pseudo-scandal helped to derail the Copenhagen summit and succeeded in sowing doubt about man's role in climate change. For the past eight months, researchers at the University of East Anglia have been living like pariahs. Now they can look up. The independent commission of inquiry into the "email affair" has cleared them of any fraudulent practices. "Their rigour and honesty cannot be questioned," said the authors of the long-awaited report, published yesterday Wednesday. The document is supposed to put an end to one of the most distressing episodes in the fight against climate change.

The alleged scandal, dubbed Climategate, began in November 2009, when several hundred private emails from members of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) mysteriously ended up online. This prestigious laboratory, based in Norwich, 170 kilometres north-east of London, is renowned for its global temperature measurements. The CRU therefore has an eminently strategic role. Its data serve as the basis for reports to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the supreme body responsible for predicting the future of the planet.

In one of the emails, dated 16 November 1999, the head of the CRU boasts of having found a "ruse" to "hide the drop" in a temperature curve. With these three words, taken from a fraudulently hacked correspondence, climate sceptics believe they have found irrefutable proof of a global conspiracy against the Western way of life.

Sarah Palin calls herself the muse of the motley coalition of "deniers" who deny the role of mankind in global warming. On December 9, 2009, as the Copenhagen summit opens, the short-lived candidate for the American vice-presidency wrote in the Washington Post: "Climategate exposes a highly politicized scientific circle... This scandal calls into question the proposals on the table in Copenhagen. I have always believed that a government program should be based on sound science, not political judgments.... We cannot say with certainty that human activities are the cause of climate change. What we can say, however, is that the potential benefits of proposed emission reduction policies are far less than their economic cost. And these costs are real.

In Copenhagen, the Climategate will weigh heavily. Saudi Arabia, which as an oil producer has much to lose by regulating CO2 emissions, is using the case as a pretext to challenge the allegedly alarmist conclusions of the IPCC.

In the corridors of the summit (where I was sent by RFI), I remember witnessing the total slaughter of glaciologist Jean Jouzel, vice-president of the IPCC. He was watching several decades of painstaking work to raise awareness of the potentially dramatic consequences of the melting glaciers disappear into thin air under the effect of a fearsome media campaign. By undermining the credibility of the scientific community, Climategate contributed to the failure of Copenhagen. It gave a platform to the "negationists", who are now invited to appear on all television sets.

After Copenhagen, British scientists rehabilitated

After months of media hype, the commission of inquiry into the emails from the University of East Anglia has come to dot the i's and cross the t's, refuting one by one all the accusations of the climate sceptics.

* Data manipulation: false.
The climate sceptics suspected East Anglia researchers were manipulating the figures to make it look like hypothetical global warming. Accusation swept aside: "On the allegations against the attitude of the CRU scientists, we have come to the conclusion that their rigour and honesty cannot be questioned. »
* Retention of information: false.
The climatoskeptics complained about not having access to the data. The board of inquiry's response is unambiguous:" The argument that the CRU has something to hide doesn't hold water. Any independent research has the possibility of downloading the data and writing its own conclusions without having recourse to CRU information. »
* Ostracism: false.
The report rejects the idea that CRU researchers abused their position to prevent the publication of articles signed by climatoskeptics. The investigators found "neither subversion of the (scientific) peer review process nor attempts to influence the editorial policies of scientific journals.

In the face of media pressure, Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, admitted in February that he had considered suicide. Suspended for the duration of the investigation, he was immediately reinstated after the publication of the report. For Vice-Chancellor Edward Acton, quoted by the BBC, the researchers' honour must now be washed away: "Conspiracy theories, untruths and misunderstandings are over. We hope that this rehabilitation of the university's scientists, who have suffered considerably from this episode, will be widely echoed. »
Criticisms remain

East Anglia's climatologists have not come out of this long investigation completely clean. The report questions their "uncooperative" and "defensive" attitude. It also criticizes them for a lack of openness in their work.

But on the whole, the commission's conclusions confirm the two previous opinions on Climategate: that of a parliamentary commission in March and that of an internal committee at the university in April, both of which exonerated the researchers.
Serial reversals for climate sceptics

The climate sceptics are no longer in the wind. They were also thrown back on their ropes on 6 July by another inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government. It validates the IPCC's conclusions on the consequences of global warming. Independently of Climategate, the IPCC has also come under attack for errors in its 2007 report, notably on the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035. "The (IPCC) conclusions are well-founded and do not contain any significant errors," say the Dutch investigators.

In June 2010, a study conducted by the US National Academy of Sciences testified to the isolation of the "negationists" (2). It revealed that 98% of climatologists support, like the IPCC, the principle of an acceleration of climate change linked to human activity, which threatens the future of the planet. The clique of sceptics is therefore made up of only a handful of diehards. Despite the scientific consensus, however, they have managed, from the false email scandal to attacks on the IPCC's credibility, to sow doubt in people's minds.

If the climate negotiations have stalled seven months after Copenhagen, it is because the political momentum in favour of a binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has largely waned, notably under the effect of "negationist" theses.
In partnership with :
Rue 89.

Translated from the French with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Source (3)

Notes:
1) We have to keep in mind that the ClimateGate happened ten years ago. A lot of
water has flowed under the bridge since then.

2) DeepL had rendered the French term "négationnistes" by the English expression "holocaust deniers", which is out of context of course. I corrected it using the term "negationists".
I also removed an "advertisement" mention.
Otherwise, DeepL did a fairly good job, IMO.

3) https://www.futura-sciences.com is an online science magazine published in French.

Futura, exploring the world.

Futura was born in 2001 from the desire to decipher innovations and news from a scientific point of view in order to provide all the keys needed in a constantly changing world.

At a time when mistrust is at its peak and information flows are increasingly complex, Futura is committed today, even more than yesterday, to deciphering major news and innovations around 5 categories: science, technology, planet, health, home.
Our mission

To encourage the development of critical thinking and to accompany every citizen in their quest for truth. Futura wants to transmit the right information, with the only compass being scientific accuracy.
Our passion

Explore the world, at the scale of quarks, at the heart of AI, in the intimacy of connected health, from the top of renewable energies or millions of light years away.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[jafadmin]

But:
1) Their statistical models do hide the "bump" in the 1930's even to this day.
2) If you query the NOAA GHCN data, the "bump" does exist in the data. That was what they "needed to do something about".
3) The IPCC never, ever discloses the fact that their "climate models" vary wildly from the official climate data.
4) The IPCC and the climate alarmist brigade constantly use terms like "science skeptic" and "science denier" to silence those who disagree with them. Every single scientist is a professional skeptic. It's in the job description.
And ..
5) They refuse to allow public peer review. Only their "friends" are allowed to review their work.

Call me whatever you like. I don't care. But those folks at IPCC and their "climate" posse are not behaving like scientists, they are behaving like Scientologists ..

I got into this mess a couple years ago when I saw a report that said the area where I grew up was experiencing it's worst heat wave in recorded history. What? Seriously? When I lived there it was normal to have several days over 100F in the summers. They were claiming temps of 96F were record breaking.

So I decided to find out what they were talking about. I went to the NOAA website and looked up the area on their map and requested the temperature data for that area from the mid 1960's.

I was right. It was hotter than Hades back then. That "report" flat out lied.

So that's when I decided to go down the rabbit hole and become my own climate data center. Somebody needs to, to keep the BS artists honest.

Dude, listen carefully: There is no global warming in the official climate data. The fact that you refuse to look behind the curtain won't change that.

[musher0]

Hi.

A couple of thoughts, in no order.

-- Even if I "looked behind the curtain", I doubt that I have the background to find
anything fishy in numerical data.

Ethnomusicology was my initial "bag", namely studying the distribution of a couple
of folk songs in time and space. Not the same kind of data at all. But some wear
blinders in this field as well.

Folklore being associated with national or group identity, it doesn't sit well with
decision-makers of said groups if you can prove, e.g., that tune X in French-
Canadian folklore (undercurrent: Catholic) has the same melody as the "Old
Hundredth" in the Calvinist hymn book. Or that a variant of a French-Canadian
folk song text can be found in a Chilean trickster tale. National identities think of
their folklore as being eternal, not as having been somehow imported and / or
exported through traceable movements of population. (E.g. the Compostelle
pilgrimage, or the fuzziness of the border between France and Switzerland
during the Renaissance.)

Decision-makers react badly to discoveries like that. IOW, you don't get the
research grant...

So I'm not entirely closed to what you're saying. But I don't think that supposing
a political agenda is helping any.

-- Is that "bump" corroborated in non-NOAA data?

-- Is that "bump" artificial? How did it come to be?

-- As I tried to mention in another thread, "consensus" has a different meaning
in different cultures. For some it means "unanimity arrived at after numerous
rounds of consultations", whereas in this case of climate science it seems to
mean "the great majority of -- and to hell with the rest".

-- Have you tried to discuss your process / results, removing any political
suppositions, with a reliable non-American scientist?
I'm not anti-American, but I think any national or political pre-requisite would
get in the way of real science. You seem to be starting from scratch, so really
go for the "tabula rasa" approach. (Not that I have any advice to give you.)

My hunch is that there is no political agenda. It looks more like plain old human
/ professional pride.

-- After listening to that interview of the Oxford professor (suggested by Flash in
another thread), I came to think that it could very well be that parts of the climate
change models are valid and some other parts are immature.

To use an old folk saying: "The eyes are bigger than the paunch," as is the case
I suspect, with many computer models. Especially when one of the variables is the
ever-changing human. Difficult to make it do the same thing at each iteration, that
one... Let's remember that a computer model is an abstraction (the "eyes"), and it
could be that some experiences or data (the "paunch") cannot be abstracted.

My 2¢.
Regards from Ice Storm country.
BFN.

[jafadmin]

Ethnomusicology was my initial "bag", namely studying the distribution of a couple
of folk songs in time and space. Not the same kind of data at all. But some wear
blinders in this field as well.

Folklore being associated with national or group identity, it doesn't sit well with
decision-makers of said groups if you can prove, e.g., that tune X in French-
Canadian folklore (undercurrent: Catholic) has the same melody as the "Old
Hundredth" in the Calvinist hymn book. Or that a variant of a French-Canadian
folk song text can be found in a Chilean trickster tale. National identities think of
their folklore as being eternal, not as having been somehow imported and / or
exported through traceable movements of population. (E.g. the Compostelle
pilgrimage, or the fuzziness of the border between France and Switzerland
during the Renaissance.)

Very cool field. Very few Americans realize that "Blue Grass" and "Square Dance" music originated in Ireland. Jazz came down the Mississippi with the Acadians, or that "Blues" came from Africa.

[Burn_IT]

What people forget is that all models are based on our current understanding of what is going on. Where it immediately breaks down is when our understanding is wrong or not quite correct.

[jafadmin]

What people forget is that all models are based on our current understanding of what is going on. Where it immediately breaks down is when our understanding is wrong or not quite correct.

Where they break down is among assumptions about the future.

In "climate science", assumptions always deviate from trend analysis, for some weird reason..

.

[jafadmin]

If you have a desktop linux version that has Python with "numpy" and "matplotlib" installed, you can download this gz file and extract it to your desktop or whatever, and have all the tools you need to acquire and analyze the official, unaltered historic NOAA climate database for yourself. That data is this planet's most exhaustive, historical, complete, and high quality data on climate. ALL academic climate research is based on it. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the US was the only nation engaged in the collection of scientific collection of climate data.

https://ufile.io/gqzqazax

It has scripts to: Download current data, Merge the data into a database, Manage dated versions of data, Run queries with Python App, and save output as png/csv files.

The extraction creates the directory tree with all the necessary components. Before running the "gethcn" script to retrieve the initial current data, please make sure your Python installation meets the requirements to run the App.

As you accrue additional data downloads, use the "set-data-links" script to specify a dataset other than the most current one.

The "GHCNPY" directory is the working directory. In there you will find an script called "data-queries". Although you don't need to use it, it does help manage the clutter. Read the code to see what's going on. (The initial un-commented query will query for all the summer data for the last 125 years.)

Everything here is public domain, open source, and distributed as source code. Why? Peer review .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review

You are Linux people. This is in your wheelhouse. Reality matters.

.