Global at the expense of regional - Throwing out the baby with the bath water

When you interpolate, you average which can be called smearing if you are looking for detail.  I had a client show up with a brand new Kridged version of NOAA ocean bottom charts and wanted me to show him how to bottom fish.  My first advice was to throw that smoothed crap away and get a "real" chart, that shows all the warts, wrinkles and bottom "features."  The world and the ocean bottom isn't as smooth as a baby's butt.  Those "warts" are beauty marks to a bottom fisherman.

Climate products are the same deal Lucile.  California for example has paleo, observational and anecdotal evidence of century long variation in precipitation extremes.  The winter of 1861 and 1862 is known as the Great California Flood.  For a few months there was Lake San Joaquin and quite a few home owners abandoned their first floor and built on top.  Cities tried to increase their elevation by 15 feet or so, just in case.  Then there are decade long droughts that make the flood wary folks look stupid.  Nature is good at that, making people look stupid, often in very cruel ways.

Since "Global" Climate Change is the catastrophic cause of the day, smart people that nature tends to have an affinity for making look stupid, are putting all their eggs in the global basket while neglecting the mundane local and regional baskettes where people tend to live.  Using long range interpolation tends to make local and regional pictures of past climate look rosier that reality.

Think about this, "The Little Ice Age was a regional event."  Wonderful, "Globally" it didn't exist so all you morons with regional concerns are wasting your time worrying about that kind of stuff happening again, think Global!!  Ever wonder why there is a populist movement?

Now that there is a new administration in town, "Globalists" are going to have a lot of explaining to do.  I expect to see climate scientist types out there counter protesting natural gas pipelines that reduce emissions and are a bridge to those elusive energies of the future.  Perhaps a few fighting for sensational press releases of "it isn't as bad as we thought" research to calm the irritable masses.

Will we actually see any rational leaders emerge?  Stay tuned.

The War on Science!

The NOAA ERSST temperature product is still hot news.  John Bates, the NOAA whistle blower, has outed himself and contends that NOAA didn't follow procedure.  Procedure is pretty important in government service and since the NOAA historic ocean temperature product is liable to be around for another one to two hundred years, revising history can be a problem.

The Hadley Center in the UK also produces temperature products using different methodology, so theoretically, these are two independent temperature products.  As time goes by, more and different means of determining temperature "globally" come to be and if everything works out as planned, the new "history" will complement the "old" history unless there is some exceptional discovery of screw ups, accidental or intentional.  So maintaining an accurate archive of data and methods so that 23rd century scientists can use 21st century data which includes 19th century data can understand exactly what the hell went on is the noble goal.

Global tends to get the focus because of politics.  The polar regions with sparse data gets a lot of attention because sparse means uncertain, new products should reduce uncertainty in these poorly covered areas.  The tropics should be close to rock solid, so any new version should have very little impact on the historic record in the not sparsely cover areas like historic trade routes. 

Above is the difference between the new and improved ERSSTv4 and the formally cutting edge ERSSTv3b.  Something appears to be wrong when there is 0.4 C difference peak to valley reducing to near perfection at the point highlighted for political purposes, 1950 to 1999, pre-"pause" being compared to 2000 to 2015 post "pause."

In typical back patting and cover your ass fashion, defenders of the science steer the debate towards the most modern portion of the historic record and avoid discussion of the real issue of the integrity of the historic record as a whole.  "Fixing" part of the record to the detriment of the rest of the record without explaining or even recognizing the difference appears to be evasive.  Evasiveness in politics is normal, in science, not so much.

Asking what the fuck happened to the rest of the history isn't declaring a war on science, but evasiveness can lead to war.