I have been perusing the Internet this evening and stumbled upon a site, called "Pete'sPlace". It features an article by the one and only Roy Spencer, predictably setting out his case for the warming being not significant and there being insufficient proof of man's involvement. It included a graph which has been constructed using alternative data and excluding tree rings. So far so good.
Following the link, you end up with a paper produced by a Craig Loehle, who works for the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement (yes, there is such a body).
Now I come to the point of the post....
In Loehle's paper it contains the statements:
- Other sites had data at irregular intervals. This data is now interpolated to put all data on the same annual basis. In Loehle (2007), interpolation was not done, but some of the data had already been interpolated before they were obtained, making the data coverage inconsistent. In order to use data with non-annual coverage, some type of interpolation is necessary, especially when the different series do not line up in dating.
- When missing values were encountered, means were computed for the sites having data.
- The corrected point estimates of global temperature anomalies produced by taking the mean of the smoothed deviations
Having recently experienced the righteous indignation of certain posters here about climate scientists 'manipulating the data' I just thought that the numerous references to adjusting the data were highly amusing, coming from a paper cited by Spencer presenting a sceptical position.
Were this an A-level exam I would be tempted to say "Compare and contrast this approach to that adopted by climate scientists when confronted with similar issues with data.'
Location: South Cambridgeshire
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52.0N 0.1E