Saturday, September 19, 2015

Another Turd from Tony Heller (AKA "Steve Goddard")

Tony Heller -- the real name of the blogger Steve Goddard -- is so angry no one takes him seriously anymore that every other post of his (literally) is covered with spittle as he rants and raves that all climate scientistgs are criminals and frauds who have Satan over for tea.

Problem is, Heller has thoroughly earned his disreputation, with boneheaded errors like this [retraction] and this, for which even Judith Curry called his analysis "bogus."

Heller produces turds like clockwork. Here's yet another:


This is another lie, as only Steve Goddard could produce.

The Hadley Center's HadCRUT4 data series for the Southern Hemisphere is here. Here's the explanation of their file format. Notice what it says about columns 11 and 12 (click to enlarge):


If you can't read that, the last bullet item is:
Columns 11 and 12 are the lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval of the combined effects of all the uncertainties described in the HadCRUT4 error model (measurement and sampling, bias and coverage uncertainties).
Thus, the 5-95% confidence limits for the HadCRUT4 SH global temperature anomaly for January 1850 are -1.055°C and -0.058°C (top line, far right) -- a huge range in accuracy, with error bars ~ 90%, and definitely not the 0.001°C Goddard claims. (Without knowing the instruments involved -- which Goddard does not -- we can't say if the precision is warranted or not. In any case, the number comes from a model, not from raw measurements.)

The effect on long-term trends: zilch.

There's a reason everyone but the Heartland Institute has dismissed Goddard as a crackpot....

2 comments:

dave said...

Thanks, I think, for the update on the execrable Steve Goddard. Nasty piece of work.

But why mention Tony Heller? Poe's law surely applies...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Massimo Ippolito said...

I've discovered here the peer reviewed twitters, congrats