On Apr 10, 10:52 pm, "Paul E. Lehmann" wrote:
John M. wrote:
On Apr 10, 8:20 pm, "Paul E. Lehmann"
wrote:
John M. wrote:
On Apr 10, 1:43 pm, "Paul E. Lehmann"
wrote:
Bill Ward wrote:
On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:12:25 -0700, Roger
Coppock wrote:

On Apr 9, 8:34 am, Bill Ward
wrote:
On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:04:24 -0700,
matt_sykes wrote:
On 9 Apr, 10:24, Roger Coppock
wrote:
On Apr 8, 8:01 pm, Poetic Justice
-n-

Dog.com wrote:
Roger Coppock wrote:
March ties for 3rd warmest on
NASA's 129-year record.

Why is NASA the official keeper of
the temperature?

NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies offers data, as do several
other
organizations. I use NASA's data
because GISS corrects for UHI using
nighttime earth shine, artificial
lighting, measured from satellites.
IMHO, this method is better than
using census data to locate urban
areas.

That is a feeble way to adjust for
UHI.

The ONLY way to adjust for UHI is to
put a station in a rural area near to
the urban
station to act as a control (being a
sicnetist you wold know this of
course).

Mind you, one you have done that you
might as well ignore the urban station
data since rural data is true surface
temp.

And what happens when you do that?
You get
no warming trend. RURAL STATIONS
ACROSS THE GLOBE SHOW NO OVERALL
TEMPERATURE TREND.

Roger can't comprehend that bad data is
worse
than no data. Unless you're trying to
scare people, of course.

If you have better data, or a method for
UHI correction, you are more than
welcome to present them here. Until then
the data presented above are a better
indication of reality than your
fantasies.

Fantasies aren't science, whether they're
mine
or NASA's. That's
the problem with trying to "correct" bad
data. If it's bad, it can't be
used - it's a fantasy based on invalid
assumptions. Averaging bad data with with
good data hides the problem, but doesn't
fix it.

It is even worse than that. I suspect there
is an
analogy with wine making. I knew of a
winemaker who had a small amount of wine
made from under
ripe grapes. He blended it (10%) with some
good
wine 90%). That small amount ruined the
whole
lot. A "Little BAD Goes a LONG ways". I
suspect
the same is true of data. A little bad or
incorrect can have effects that are way
beyond suspected results.

Such are the musings of a statistical
illiterate. In actual practice, the way to
avoid problems from extraneous or erroneous
data (ie. bad) is to swamp it by using large
sample sizes. If you measure the height of
100 men taken at random, the mean height will
be virtually unchanged should one or two of
them be giants or dwarves.

This is what happens in practice with
temperature data. Very large sample size
ensures that the famous UHIs will have little
effect on the calculated global means.

made a lot of money in the stock market, have
you?

Why, yes, as matter of fact. It isn't
particularly difficult to do. Why do you ask?

I believe I asked Roger

Not unless he changed his pseudonym to John M.

but since you answered,
congratulations. Did you use statistical
analysis or was it blind luck or inside
information? Of course a LOT depends on when to
jump in and when to jump out, doesn't it. Do you
use 30 years of data or merely daily or
hourly?

I bought FTSE 100 stocks, buying in when I had spare cash and whenever
a bear market was showing signs of bottoming (you can never get the
bottom prices, of course, except by chance). Over the years I let the
portfolio increase by not doing a lot of selling, and with the
companies mostly growing in size the dividends increase year-on-year -
as well as stock values.

It's like any form of gambling wherever you have an edge e.g.
Blackjack. Don't try to force the pace because the downs can wipe you
out if you're incautious. Just now I'm quite relaxed about the paper
losses of the last month, and I see most of it has crept back into my
core holdings.