Thursday, May 10, 2012

Grandpa Jumps the Curve

How could Eli have forgotten the longest running shark jump of them all, the Heatland Expert good Dr. Roy Spencer, over at Heartland Expert Anthony Watts' blog,

 The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
 What could be better.  Ready for those sub-zero (Celsius of course,  no ethical scientist uses Rankin) summers in thirty or so years bunnies.  According to Mom Rabett, 1910 was a very hot year.


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8 comments:

  1. Joel10/5/12 6:02 AM

    I love Heartland Expert Anthony Watt's way of deflecting criticism of this post. "Yes, I'm promoting this here, but you can only criticise it in this far-less read location. Praise and uncritical acceptance are, of course, welcome."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10/5/12 8:00 AM

    Shouldn't 'Heatland Expert good Dr. Roy Spencer' be named 'Coolland Expert good Dr. Roy Spencer'?

    --cycnicus

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous10/5/12 9:39 AM

    Cycnicus,

    Indeed.


    Heartland: Coolland Luke warmers

    "What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach..."



    ~@:>

    ReplyDelete
  4. Roger Jones10/5/12 10:07 AM

    Good Lord! It's a step change.

    or as Eli would say, "What a jerk!"

    ReplyDelete
  5. Greg10/5/12 2:03 PM

    Here's the truly brilliant part of Heartland Expert Dr. Spencer's third order polynomial. Because of the noticeable dip from 1980 to 1985, the 3rd order poly will always predict a cooling future, no matter how much more (roughly linear) increase is added on the end. Add two more decades of linear-plus-noise warming, and the polynomial will still predict cooling. It's like a stopped watch that's not even right twice a day. I wonder if he's fooling himself, or just fooling gullible readers. I guess he has some explanation for not using a 2nd or 4th order poly :-)

    -Greg

    ReplyDelete
  6. Dikran Marsupial11/5/12 4:01 AM

    I pointed out to Roy that the polynomial fit in his plot was being misused by others (giving a link to an example), despite the caveat, and asked Roy to delete it.

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/04/uah-global-temperature-update-for-march-2012-0-11-deg-c/#comment-42759

    The responses from the other contributors there made my point quite nicely that it was being taken seriously, caveat or no caveat (which he doesn't bother to put on the main UAH update page).

    Personally I think this is deeply irresponsible behaviour. There is more than enough misinformation in the climate debate already without adding more for "entertainment purposes".

    ReplyDelete
  7. J Bowers11/5/12 4:33 AM

    Dikran Marsupial -- "The responses from the other contributors there made my point quite nicely that it was being taken seriously"

    A job well done, then.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous12/5/12 3:57 PM

    Here's some background on higher-order polynomial fitting of the UAH record, first done by Alberta engineer Allan MacRae (as far as I know).

    http://deepclimate.org/2009/04/09/the-alberta-oil-boys-network-spins-global-warming-into-cooling/

    Spencer only added a fourth-order polynomial to his UAH monthly update after a correspondence with MacRae, so this seems the likely source of the idea.

    Interestingly, the official UAH update reports a linear trend, but somehow that gets omitted from Spencer's chart.

    ReplyDelete

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