I'm not trying to be attacking, I don't understand why you are getting so confrontational... I have not claimed the data is useful.. merely that data that is not very precise CAN be... You attacked my credibility by claiming I don't understand what accuracy and precision are yet you were wrong, I have shown I do and you either misunderstood me or were trying to discredit me blindly.. This is not how civilized folks discuss things, if you don't agree with something I say point it out, fine.... but don't put words in my mouth. I'm sorry if I came off as defending this data.. I don't mean to.. I am defending the scientific method which folks don't seem to understand.
My problem is that people don't understand uncertainty and how it relates to science... They assume that unsure means wrong, or simple that it is an opinion. In actual fact nothing in science is certain so that presumption is flawed.
If you were measuring temperature with lawn darts I'd agree that it is wrong.. but there is a large difference between wrong and imprecise. Imprecise data is still useful, to a degree. I know this because I use it all the time, every scientist has to from time to time. I don't know if this data is useful or not, I'm not an expert in the field.. but the mere fact that it has flaws or that it is not precise does not discount its usefulness. So long as all of the claims are made within the certainty then they are valid.
I could measure the weight of an electron with a bathroom scale, I would find it to be 0, I would be correct to my level of certainty... This is profoundly pointless but it is not wrong. In some respects it at least puts an upper bound on the actual value (that being my resolution).
<Sigh> Sorry, I don't mean to be confrontational, you're a good guy. But again, the data are usefully precise. They MAY be usefully accurate. Problem is, we don't know. This isn't like experimental physics, where experiments are repeatable. We can't reproduce the last couple hundred years in a lab, so we have to come at the problem indirectly. There are numerous methods for indirectly measuring temperature, some of which extend into the present (and can be checked against known, directly measured temperatures) and some of which don't. So we have to test these different methods and see how they correlate with each other. A test which verifies known values is considered good; a test which does not track with known values is considered bad. We're now finding out that our baseline - the known accurate measurements we use to cross-check other methods that may be extended back into the past - is flawed, sometimes unintentionally (e.g. urban heat island effect) and sometimes intentionally (e.g. NASA's "special sauce" by which they massage data decades old to fit with new data into a pre-determined curve.) This is a huge problem in a potentially very important question.
Imagine you have hundreds of gamma ray detectors detecting background radiation for many decades. You use these numbers to establish a baseline for your own experiments in particle decay energy, correcting for the amount of gamma radiation at a particular solar wind strength, sun location, etc. Then one day you find out that these gamma ray detectors are affected by temperature, passing red trucks, CB radios. You have no idea how many of these detectors have been affected, or to what extent, as it differs in each location and from day to day. Then you find out that the guys in charge of collecting and tabulating these data have been changing data from decades before because they "know" the amount of gamma rays are increasing, so those old measurements must be flawed and therefore subject to "correction". See the problem? The methods you developed to measure particle decay were dependent on the historic data.
My argument is not that the data are wrong, it is that they are unreliable. And yes, a systematic bias can be accounted for, even mathematically reduced in effect. Both the NASA data massaging and the problems with measuring stations are not systematic in that they do not affect each datum in a formulaic manner. NASA's massaging can potentially be reversed, if a true and accurate historic record can be determined. But only an in-depth, honest investigation can determine the biases of the measuring stations. Right now the pro-CAGW crowd takes the position that since it is quite hard to do and the results without doing it match what we "know", therefore we conclude there is no significant problem. That's simply not true. I can best compare it to the way every experiment measuring the rate of the universe's contraction returned a deceleration. We
knew the universe's expansion was decelerating because theory predicted and experiments proved it. Problem is, experiments that detected an acceleration were thrown out as unsuccessful. This may be the same. In science as in most things, if you know what you're going to see, that's generally what you'll see. Even repeatable experiments that go against accepted theory must be duplicated before being accepted.
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