Why do scientists have to be so confusing?

Question

NASA says that the year 2007 was the second warmest on record. According to NOAA, 2007 was the fifth warmest, and for the MET Office it’s the seventh.

I know that these organizations calculate the global temperature anomaly slightly differently, and that any difference is within a hundredth or thousandth of a degree and statistically insignificant. What’s important is the fact that the globe is getting warmer, that all linear trends show accelerating global warming,[1] and that a consensus of scientific opinion says that anthropogenic (manmade) greenhouse gas emissions are responsible.[2]

But, do you think that people will be confused by these different reports? Does anyone know specifically how these organizations calculate a global temperature? Do any other organizations bother to do this calculation? Is there anyone who does not trust the results of any/all of these organizations?

[1] http://www.realclimate.org/images/giss-15yr.jpg

Answer 1

I think what it indicates is that those that pretend to know things about the climate seldom do.   Those that pretend warming has only negative consequences are gullible or deceitful in my opinion.

Answer 2

You are assuming that averaging all of the daily high temperatures with all the daily low temperatures gathered at the various airports around for an entire year is a reasonable metric to evaluate climate. I have not seen a single peer reviewed piece of literature that indicates that is a valid metric for evaluating climate. The satellites do not indicate a warming trend, you are more than likely seeing a residual artifact of the amount concrete that exists on the surface of this planet.

Answer 3

It is just impossible to measure any physical quantity exactly. So different measurements will have different errors. That is just one of the reasons science is not simple or easy and why people expecting simple and easy scientific answers are always confused and disappointed.

Answer 4

Scientists aren't confusing. Uneducated people are easily confused. You want everything to be this or that, black or white, good or bad, liberal or conservative.

Nature (the muse of science) doesn't care if you don't get the big picture.

Answer 5

That's what they do, they either convince you or they confuse you. BTW its not just getting warmer, its getting colder too. Baghdad recently had snowfall. There was a storm in Oman and Iran, last year.

Answer 6

I have no doubt some people will be confused by the different temperature records, especially if they're already inclined to seek out inconsistencies (i.e. AGW deniers).

You've already pointed out the reason for the discrepancies.  We're talking about hundredths of a degree difference between the various warmest years, while the error bars are on the order of +/- 0.05°C.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/2...

So it's easy to understand why the various records have the order of warmest years different.  If you look at the Hadley Centre data, the 8 warmest years are seperated by just 0.12°C.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pr...

And with the exception of 1998, these warmest years have all happened since 2001.

The important thing is that all the temperature datasets show the same warming trend.

Answer 7

You hit on a key aspect of the problem (not the AGW problem, but the perception problem).  Science isn't simple, it's complex just like the world around us is complex. It's full of subtleties and details that are hard to follow.  And when untrained lay-people (or even people with some science, but not in the appropriate field) try to analyze scientific data and post their opinions on blogs, confusion in the general population is only increased.

To people who've worked with analyzing large datasets, the differences reported by NOAA, NASA, and MET are normal and to be expected.  A person with a good foundation in science and advanced mathematics, can dig through the information and understand the cause behind those discrepancies, but few people are able or willing to invest sufficient time and energy (thus, the nonsense regularly posted around here).  What's important for the lay-person is that they not miss the forest for the trees.  People who argue about differences in the realm of hundredths of a degree, miss the big picture that all the datasets are indicating the same thing. Warming is happening and the scientists devoted to working with each dataset agree that anthropogenic causes are responsible for a significant percentage of that warming.

Answer 8

NASA and NOAA is different because the numbers for NASA are for the global temperature, NOAA is for the USA only.

Answer 9

Well, one reason that they are confusing is that at least two-thirds of the scientific organizations you cite are wrong. Probably, they are all wrong.