Thou shalt extrapolate
Jun 28, 2011
Bishop Hill in Climate: Surface

John Cook, of Skeptical Science fame, has an article in The Age, in which he is very rude about Bob Carter:

A Yiddish proverb states ''a half truth is a whole lie''. By withholding vital information, it's possible to lead you towards the opposite conclusion to the one you would get from considering the full picture. In Bob Carter's opinion piece on this page yesterday, this technique of cherry-picking half-truths is on full display, with frequent examples of statements that distort climate science.

One bit of the article that stuck out at me was this:

[Carter] has long hung his hat on the proposition the climate has been cooling since 1998. But with 2005 and 2010 being the hottest years on record, he resorts to cherry-picking which dataset to use. Rather than use temperature records that cover the entire globe, he opts for datasets that do not include the Arctic region, where warming is the strongest. These temperature records underestimate recent warming and are the darling of those who wish to deny global warming is happening.

Now this is interesting. As readers here know, there are almost no temperature stations in the Arctic and the gaps are therefore infilled by extrapolation.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not sure that it is reasonable to get on one's high horse complaining about somebody who prefers to look at, you know, actual data rather than the outpourings of a mathematical model.

Certainly, to accuse them of half truths seems, well, extreme.

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