Is Mike's nature trick a valid scientific procedure?

Question

I recently had a question deleted where I was asking people to prove an increase in the rate of sea level rise from 1900.

From Yahoo: Deleted Question: I challenge any alarmist to prove to me that the rate of sea level rise has increased since 1900?

Violation Reason: Misuse of the question and answer format

I was going to give the person who sent me the wikipedia link the correct answer as they did follow the rules in showing the same data source back to 1900. I think they could argue that there was a spike upwards after 1930 but it seems like a pretty steady rise to me and in no way alarming whatsoever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png

Most of the other answers I read were using "Mike's nature trick" of swapping out data that didn't fit the theory with data that did. They would look at the 2mm/yr rise in tide gauges up to 1996, swap in satellite data that shows it rising at 3.1mm/yr since 1996 and then proclaim that there has been a sharp increase in the rate of sea level rise. Unfortunately, if you keep looking at the tidal gauges AFTER 1996, most of them still show a steady sea level rise.

They would also use proxy data that guesstimated that the sea level rise was quite low before 1900 and then swap in the tidal and satellite measurements to prove the alarming rise in the 20th century.

Mike's nature trick seems like a pretty deceptive way to prove your hypothesis to me. Do you think it's a fair way to present data even if you let people know you are swapping the source of data?

Answer 1

In the law we say that all the relevant evidence must be considered and be given the weight it deserves. Evidence which has been cherry picked obviously should be given less weight, and this is best accomplished by including all the rest of the evidence. I don't know anything about sea level rise, but I tend to give a great deal of weight to the disappearance of the glaciers world wide and I understand some previously inhabited islands have been abandoned. Given the above, however, I am always happy to consider every bit of evidence on both sides of a question as I value truth more than my own comfort.

Answer 2

>>Is Mike's nature trick a valid scientific procedure?<<

Yes. Mike's Nature 'trick' was used above the table in a published paper in Nature, so obviously many scientists don't/didn't have a problem with it.



Using a similar method for putting together an accurate picture of sea level change seems like perfectly legitimate science. For instance, if you only use tide gauges, you need to adjust for uplift or subsidence or you're not going to end up with a very accurate picture, but if you have satellite data that is more accurate, then that should be used when possible. Before satellites and where no tidal gauges were being regularly read, you have to rely on other methods of determining historic sea level change.



>>I challenge any alarmist to prove to me that the rate of sea level rise has increased since 1900?<<

Having a question mark at the end doesn't make that a question. That being said, I don't know why it was removed. Maybe other deniers saw you getting trounced and jumped on the chance to report you for not following the Q and A format??



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Answer 3

You do have to laugh at the nature of denial

SD Claims it's (sea level rise) not happening because he used to live in Florida



Of course just a little while ago he claimed he lived in Alaska and that glaciers weren't declining either'

Then he said he was an Eskimo, pathetic.

https://answersrip.com/question/index?qid=20120527155241AApv7ZA



As to this question, didn't see your previous deleted question, regardless of where SD wants to pretend he lives the tide gauge data is very extensive and is supported by the more recent satellite data, and regardless of SD's fictions and pet hatreds, the data shows sea level is indeed rising.

http://climate.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#seaLevel

The tide data was not kept for climate reasons but for shipping the British Navy (among others) needed accurate tide data to protect their ships and their crews and the merchant fleet also had very expensive cargo's to safeguard, the weak rubbish deniers through up to try and discredit this data is much like their other weak efforts against each part of the full data sets, full of huff and puff but look at deniers excuses closely and they really have nothing which is why they have to rely on blogs and youtube so much, they have no real science to use. Or perhaps you would like to claim Al Gores great Grand Father was bribing them over a hundred years ago.

I find it somewhat funny that deniers tried using the above link when it suited them during a brief drop in sea level rise ~6 months ago, when you tried to claim it showed the end of AGW then when it returned to rising you did your own little "trick" of trying to ignore the sea level issue again, as it (among quite a few different data-sets (like temperature, glacial mass, Arctic sea ice level and atmospheric Co2 levels show the utter nonsense of deniers empty claims.



"Yes, I logged into each of my multiple accounts and reported my question because alarmists were making me look foolish by not providing me with anything remotely proving that there was a spike in sea level rise from ONLY ONE SET OF DATA."



Glad to see you admit it !!!!

Answer 4

I pointed out three peer reviewed article that others posted. One was tide gauge measurements up to the year 2003 that showed a sharp increase in sea level rise. The other two dealt with swamp land deposition as a means of measuring sea level rise back even further. and those were just the ones I looked at. Remember your question regarding 'confirmation bias'? You seem to be one of the most well known in here that shows it. Stop lying and open your eyes.



Ottawa Mike: Yeah, the new HADcrutV4 that included more Arctic station and area where it is warming the fastest is another example. Everything that does not show the planet is cooling is just an example of a socialist plot right? And though I am denied access to the real-science site, probably because the article has been taken down, I am fairly certain that what you're looking at is Envisat unadjusted data that does not includes such things as satellite decay and comparing it to adjusted data that has been adjusted not to show that. I've even provided links that explain the adjustments.



http://envisat.esa.int/handbooks/ra2-mwr/CNTR2-7.htm



would you like to point out the portion where there is an error and come up with a solution?



Ottawa Mike: Have you actually looked at the reasons why temperatures are adjusted? How many of those adjustments are made because of the negative effects on temperature of technology and how many are because of positive effects? Adjustments and the reasoning behind them are well documented. If you have a problem with them instead of looking at the adjustments look at the reasoning behind them and attempt to find an error.



Edit: Your question was clearly answered in your last thread within the rules you set and you just ignored it. There has been an increase since 1900. This was clearly shown in the journals that were posted including the ones that showed tide gauges. and yes you did reject papers. 3 of the papers out of dozens were even reposted in this very thread. Are you going to ignore them too?



Edit: I stated specifically concerning tidal gauges. Not satellite data. You appear to not even understand what "mike's nature trick" is. Also a couple reports regarding deposition features that used neither satellite or tidal gauges. again, you have a problem regarding confirmation bias. You are ignoring things that do not meet your interpretation. Both of these papers do use O-N-E DATA SET. You probably don't even understand what I'm saying because your so oblivious to reality.

Answer 5

Mikes's Nature Trick was the well publicized act of splicing the modern instrumental record to the proxy record. For the period since 1850, the instrumental record is considered to be more reliable than the proxy record. For the time time prior to 1850, we can either use the proxy record of forget about it. The non-instrumental historic record is not reliable because it is subjective. Go ask a bunch of people what they think of the weather when the temperature is between 60F (16C) and 86F (30C). Some people will say that it is hot, and some will say it is nice, and some will say that it is cooler than they like.

Answer 6

The "n" in "nature" should be capitalized as the scientists you are quoting are referring to a published study in the prestigious journal "Nature."



Oddly, despite what many blog-tards think, articles published in Nature undergo the highest scrutiny and are only published if their methods are 100% justifiable and defensible.



And I doubt your question was deleted by Y!A, but more likely by you as several of the answers made you look like a fool.

Answer 7

Sorry to hear your question got deleted, I don’t know why as it seemed perfectly acceptable to me.



This question is a pointless as your previous one, not least because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell me, just what is Mike's nature trick (sic)?



It’s also clear that you have no idea how data are processed, speak to a mathematician or statistician about this otherwise you’ll keep making the same errors in future.



There is no sudden leap in sea-level rises, I don’t know why you’re pretending there is. Here’s the same graph showing both tide-gauges and satellite readings. I can’t see any sudden jump, can you? What I can see is that the rise in sea-levels is the same for both data sets.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Recent_Sea_Level_Rise_png

http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/



Tide gauges or satellites, with or without Mike’s Nature trick – same results every time. It’s very telling when you have to make up your own arguments.

Answer 8

This sea level rising is a bunch of liberal CRAP , I lived in Florida for years and the ocean level stayed the same ! Yes there are tides these are normal and not caused by global warming

and even if the ocean rose 3mm per year , even in a 100 years that would not even be one foot

and that is for a 100 years ,,,, so then how do you know if its gonna fall 3mm after the next 50 years and be the same as now in a 100 years

and who the hell can measured the ocean to 3mm that is about 0.1in the waves are normally about 2 or 3 feet high tides are maybe 10 ft or even a 100 ft like places in alaska or norway so how in the

F U C K can you measure ocean depth to a 0.1in ?

This something where the surface is not a constant and is thousands of feet deep so then you claim you can measure a 1000 ft to 0.008333333333 ft and for that to have any meaning your measuring device would have to be say 100 more sensitive than what you want to measure so then to 0.000083 ft out of a 1000 ft total which means your machine for measuring needs to be capable of measuring

one part in 12 million WOW that a GOD DAMM ACCURATE machine !!!!!!

I say its all CRAP and your machine can't measure that accurate at all !!!

That like saying your speedometer can measure a mile to 0.00528 of an inch , bull F U C K I N G s h i t !!

WHO EVER CLAIMS THEY CAN MEASURE OCEAN LEVELS TO A 3MM ACCURACY IS A GOD DAMM LIAR

AND THE The month to month scatter on the satellite measurements is about 50 cm proving my point of your satellites can't and don't measure to 3mm of sea level

Answer 9

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For me there was no reason for YA to delete your question. I can only imagine YA judged misuse since you categorically rejected the multiple papers provided to you.



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You did not request proof of 'alarming spikes'. You asked just for proof of increase. What you consider to be alarming or not is totally irrelevant, You are not a climate scientist.



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For starters, it is "Mike's Nature Trick" as it refers to the journal Nature. Secondly, there is no swapping out of data that does not fit the theory. If this were the case, the tens of thousands of scientific papers for every imaginable field of science which have used very similar methods would have been found to be invalid ages ago. None of that has happened.



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But the tidal gauges are just 23 (TWENTY THREE) globally whereas satellite measurements cover a much larger area. Surely you are not suggesting that we base important multi-billion dollars economic decisions which could arise from sea level rise study on just 23 (TWENTY THREE) tidal gauges when we have lots of nice and expensive satelites up there which cover a much larger area?



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Proxy data is actually very accurate, particularly when several proxies are used at the same time. Your description that they are just 'guesstimates' is total nonsense. And as I stated in the earlier question, proxies simply have to be used to be able to determine whether the current sea level increase is 'natural' (as in non-GW) or not.



But this is typical science denier behaviour you are (again) portraying here: one day you claim we have too little data about historic sea levels and temperatures (data which can only be obtained through proxies as there simply weren't any thermometers nor tidal gauges 10,000 years ago) and the next day you'll argue that proxies can't be trusted because scientific methods are used to eliminate know errors (known to science, unknown and/or rejected by science deniers).



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That is because you do not know what "Mike's Nature Trick" actually is. For the rest of us, 'Mike's Nature Trick' is nothing more than a broadly accepted, broadly used statistical method, in this case used to reduce known inconsistencies when using different proxy data to reconstruct historic temperatures. In this very case tree-ring data (a proxy source) which is known to be unreliable after 1960.



Here's some more papers for you referring to sea level rise:



- Contemporary Sea Level Rise – Cazenave & Llovel (2010). Excerpt from Abstract: "We show that for the 1993–2007 time span, the sum of climate-related contributions (2.85 ± 0.35 mm year−1) is only slightly less than altimetry-based sea level rise (3.3 ± 0.4 mm year−1): 30% of the observed rate of rise is due to ocean thermal expansion and 55% results from land ice melt." http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-marine-120308-081105



- Anthropogenic forcing dominates sea level rise since 1850 – Jevrejeva et al. (2009) http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL040216.shtml



- An anomalous recent acceleration of global sea level rise – Merrifield et al. (2009)

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009JCLI2985.1



- Understanding global sea levels: past, present and future – Church et al. (2008). Abstract excerpt; " Recent satellite-altimeter data and tide-gauge data have indicated that sea levels are now rising at over 3 mm year−1. The major contributions to 20th and 21st century sea-level rise are thought to be a result of ocean thermal expansion and the melting of glaciers and ice caps."

http://academics.eckerd.edu/instructor/hastindw/MS1410-001_FA08/handouts/2008SLRSustain.pdf

Answer 10

It gets even better than that. When connecting, conflating, comparing, conjoining and merging different data sets, the climate science method of dealing with data that is straying from the party line is to simply "adjust" it into agreement.



Envisat data from February 2012: http://www.real-science.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png



Envisat data from today: http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png



Can you spot the difference? Oh and another observation, "adjustments" to data in climate science is always one way only to produce more warming, sea level rise, whatever is needed for "the cause".



The new HadCRUT version 4 adjustments are yet another recent example.



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Edit@Jeff M: I don't know what happened to my link but here is another one: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/msl_serie_all_global_ib_rwt_gia_adjust1.png?w=640&h=425&h=425



And no, it's not unadjusted data. It was what that graph looked like from the same Aviso link just a few months ago. The Envisat data was adjusted upwards. And their explanation was that they thought the Jason data was accurate so they simply changed the Envisat data to match it.



And yes, I realize HadCRUT4 added Arctic data to get their upwards adjustments. There's always some reason or another for adjusting the data yet it always increases trends.



It's simply remarkable that adjustments don't follow a Guassian distribution which is what I would expect. The question is why don't you find that remarkable?

Answer 11

i'm going to hide the decline on this one. and thank god our english teacher david is here to tell us when to capitalize words, thanks for that davie

Answer 12

No particular reason why your question should have been deleted; it was no more ignorant, anti-science and bogus than thousands of others that were not deleted.

Answer 13

Its called the Big Hammer Effect. If it doesn't fit, make it do so.