Monday, July 28, 2014

Joe D’Aleo's Two-faced Use of Data

Joseph D'Aleo is hereby cited for violating Rule #1: If you don't trust the temperature data, you can't use it to deduce something like a "pause."

On a post today on WUWT, titled "Should you trust NOAA claims about May and June records?" D'Aleo wrote:
NOAA and NASA (which uses data gathered by NOAA climate center in Asheville) has been commissioned to participate in special climate assessments to support the idealogical and political agenda of the government....

The National Climate Data Center and NASA climate group also control the data that is used to verify these models which is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. At the very least, their decisions and adjustments may be because they really believe in their models and work to find the warming they show – a form of confirmation bias.
Yet just a few weeks ago these data were good enough for D'Aleo to conclude:
Global warming has ceased for 12 to 20 years (depending on the data and region). As the Atlantic cools and all these three factors synchronize, look for temperatures to accelerate down.
That's a clear rule violation. So was this from February, where he used the USA48 data to write, "For 19 going on 20 years, global warming has stopped." So was this: "For example, global temperatures stopped warming close to 17 years ago and have cooled since 2002." Or this: "Models suggest atmosphere should warm 20% faster than surface but surface warming was 33% faster during the time satellites and surface observations used."

D'Aleo clearly accepts the data when (he thinks) it shows cooling, and rejects it when it shows warming.

D'Aleo's WUWT post also had a violation of another Rule, when he wrote:
The satellite data from RSS and UAH only available since 1979 also shows no warming for over a decade (two in the RSS data)
which is a clear violation of Rule #2: If you're going to cherry pick your data set (RSS), and your starting year, to show a "pause," you have to acknowledge the "anti-pause" that happened from 1998 to 2008, where the "18-year" trend was greater than the canonical 0.2 C/decade.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

And I'm adding a third Rule: Trends over a decade, or two, are conclusions about noise. But most of us are studying climate.

Joseph D'Aleo is guilty of violating all three rules. His penance? A week reading RealClimate from their earliest to latest post. No skipping any, either.

2 comments:

caerbannog said...

A few years ago, D' Aleo co-authored this hatchet-job with Anthony Watts: http://www.virginiaclimate.polyrad.net/surface_temp.pdf

Excerpt:

"All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends."


D' Aleo lies like a rug.

Anonymous said...

D'Aleo is a clown. Readers and authors of WUWT are clowns. Neanderthals in clown suits.

No disrespect intended for Nanderthals.