An Iain Dale post seeks to show "no evidence of any warming trend" using data from the Met office. The problem is that the methodology has no statistical basis.
With the failure of global leaders to get a legally binding agreement in Copenhagen, you would think that all those engaged in the debate would place a premium on good evidence. Not so Iain Dale.
The prominent Tory blogger posted last night a message from one of his readers, who sought to show “no evidence of any warming trend” using data from the Met office. The only problem is that the methodology has absolutely no statistical basis whatsoever although that didn’t stop Iain Dale in the comments saying:
“As far as I can see Victor has calculated the figures very well. I have now been on the site to check myself. Not sure how a “professional” coudl do it differently to him. But feel free to try!”
Giles Wilkes, a trained economist, has done exactly that on Freethinking Economist. He also puts Dale’s folly in context:
“I haven’t checked out Iain Dale’s CV, but I suspect it does not include a period studying statistics. Because he seems to believe in a recent post that taking one month every ten years from one location in the UK is a sufficient reason to justify statements about the effect of carbon dioxide throughout the entire globe over a 150 year period”
Meanwhile, in a detailed post, Unity on Liberal Conspiracy shows what the real trend in Oxford looks like using the data more accurately:
When Left Foot Forward has got things wrong in the past, we’ve been grown up enough to admit it. But will Iain Dale do the same?
And while pseudo statistics continue to be used to argue against the scientific consensus on climate change, a far better use of all our time would be spent taking action to abate our global emissions – for example, heeding Claire Spencer’s advice and signing a petition to reduce food waste and therefore 10 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions
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17 Responses to “Will Iain Dale acknowledge his climate error?”
willstraw
Frank – I don’t think there is any suggestions that the Met have manipulated the raw data. Indeed, it is the same data set that Victor used to produce his phoney results.
Victor – I understand that this debate elicits strong emotions but this is anti-intellectual claptrap. Being a trained statistician or economist means you have been taught that it is not statistically robust to cherry pick points in time ten years apart to draw any conclusions. The whole point about temperature increases is that there is variation. The general trend of global temperatures is upwards (by 0.74C over the last century) but there is huge variation year-by-year, country-by-country, and town-by-town.
Your methodology is no better than determining who the best football team in England is by seeing who won the league every 10 years. Going back to the 1950s, you would have Chelsea (1955), Man Utd (1965), Derby (1975), Everton (1985), Blackburn (1995), Chelsea (2005). Extrapolating as you have done I would conclude that Chelsea were the most successful post-war team and wouldn’t have a clue about Liverpool’s 1970s and 1980s domination or Man Utd’s since then.
Henry – well said.
Pickled Politics » Hysterical Iain Dale runs away when confronted with ‘facts’
[…] Straw posted on Left Foot Forward, asking: Will Iain Dale acknowledge his climate error? – the answer should be obvious: of course not. Dale wouldn’t do […]
harry
here’s the data for oxford. mean annual data 1900-1980 from the met dataset released a couple of weeks ago. pity it doesn’t go past 1980 but there is no increase in temperature over that time and no correlation with CO2 (although this is not global mean temperature and I don’t have any point to make)
1900 10.11666667
1901 9.483333333
1902 9.375
1903 9.825
1904 9.483333333
1905 9.633333333
1906 10.13333333
1907 9.533333333
1908 9.783333333
1909 9.125
1910 9.725
1911 10.76666667
1912 9.966666667
1913 10.4
1914 10.43333333
1915 9.55
1916 9.591666667
1917 8.975
1918 9.9
1919 8.9
1920 9.975
1921 11.1
1922 9.2
1923 9.633333333
1924 9.808333333
1925 9.708333333
1926 10.18333333
1927 9.666666667
1928 10.2
1929 9.541666667
1930 9.958333333
1931 9.466666667
1932 9.808333333
1933 10.325
1934 10.50833333
1935 10.275
1936 9.766666667
1937 10.175
1938 10.74166667
1939 10.19166667
1940 9.591666667
1941 9.558333333
1942 9.533333333
1943 10.64166667
1944 10.14166667
1945 10.81666667
1946 10.01666667
1947 10.13333333
1948 10.59166667
1949 11.20833333
1950 9.933333333
1951 9.841666667
1952 9.7
1953 10.15833333
1954 9.733333333
1955 9.775
1956 9.25
1957 10.59166667
1958 10.01666667
1959 10.94166667
1960 10.28333333
1961 10.6
1962 9.058333333
1963 8.833333333
1964 10.04166667
1965 9.516666667
1966 10.06666667
1967 10.30833333
1968 9.825
1969 9.991666667
1970 10.18333333
1971 10.19166667
1972 9.825
1973 10.19166667
1974 10.1
1975 10.46666667
1976 10.63333333
1977 9.925
1978 9.575
1979 9.225
1980 9.508333333
harry
just have to add that liberal conspiracy have munged it aswell by assuming the mean temp over a time period is an average of the mean_max and the mean_min. which it isn’t unless you make some heroic assumptions.
however if you plot the mean annual temperatures (listed above) then it looks almost exactly the same as the graph constructed by liberal conspiracy between 1900 and 1980. ie no correlation with CO2.
however, all this talk is crap because a single station is a meaningless proxy for global temperatures
Richard Blogger
Will,
Years ago when I was a research scientist (an experimentalist) I remember once when talking to a theoretician pointing out how complicated the theory was at the intermediate part of the work she was doing. I pointed to one term saying “but we all know that that part is zero, can’t you just remove it?”. She got quite animated at this point and told me straight that however complicated the theory got she had to consider everything that could affect the experiment. The terms that I thought were zero could have been affected further on in the calculation by another factor and so could have provided some contribution to the final result.
It was only after the theory was complete that she would start to look through for parts that had no contribution and remove them, but she would still mention why they had been removed in the final paper. Assumptions can only be made at the end.
This is how science works: you put together your theory and only at the end do you actually see what the theory says. Too many non-scientists seem to think that theory is made to fit the facts. That is not the way it is. If the theory does not fit the facts then it is wrong, simple as that.