John S. | April 16, 2012 at 9:50 pm |
One is amazed by what you believe you can deduce about a stranger on the Internet, when you so disparage readings ‘mainly from the Internet’.
Alas, that you use so little of the Internet in forming the foundation of your deductions, else you may have noticed that Mosher and myself have a longstanding and rather bitter difference of opinion on exactly the views of his that you attribute to me. I’ve called some of his work “Harry Potter Statistics,” and excoriated his practices of using snippets of impossible to verify Canadian data without understanding the limitations of his source, in a manner not dissimilar to what you say BEST does. (Which, considering Steve Mosher’s close connections to a small part of the project, it’s not hard to see why you may be confusing him for the whole project.)
Note, that’s his statistics, his practices, his opinions and his views. As a human being, I’ve never met Mr. Mosher. I don’t know him personally, I have nothing against him, for all that we have a wide chasm between us of beliefs and attitudes, and I regard highly his determination, cleverness and resourcefulness, as well as respect his professional achievements and substantial body of support for the advancement of science.
Though he is a polemicist (and worse.. he’s good at it), he reminds scientists to take seriously their obligations, rather than to take themselves too seriously.
You, on the other hand, appear to seriously believe you’ve set out your case in enough detail that we can all psychically guess what you mean without you being under the least onus to say what exactly that is.
How is one to take such voodoo argumentation as anything but superstition, or less?
Now that you’ve supplemented your hand-waving with actual detail, the epithet ‘superstition’ is clearly inappropriate.
‘Elitism’, it appears, is more apt.
Internet sources aren’t good enough. Seven levels of statistical validation of methods and open peer review aren’t good enough. The idea that there may be other experienced statisticians in the world who might have handled larger and more complex datasets than your particular favorite ‘experienced geoscientists’ (who remain nameless?) never occurs to you. The idea that there may be other factors than were considered by Oke some four decades ago with less than one percent of the data currently available to BEST, and other qualified geoscientists lately before BEST, never occurs to you. (While Socrates, who also originated the UHI idea, somewhat before the 1800′s and not in London, goes uncredited by you.) The idea that your personal reading, that apparently ended when Jerry Maguire shouted, “Show me the money!”, might have been supplanted by more recent developments never apparently occurs to you.
If incisive analysis is required for science, then your argument is doomed.
Rejecting mathematical truths and replacing them with outdated opinion is the act of an old guard that cannot come to grips with time passing them by.