mkpdavies

You have explained why using the appropriate scale is important. You have not explaine why PPM is the appropriate scale for this issue.

No it wasn't, it was the choice of the people who created it. I am questioning.

You must learn to read more carefuly.

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Clippo

Mpkdavies, Matt,

I’m still trying to me ‘Xmas friendly’ so please don’t interpret anything I say below as a personal insult.

I have spent most of my life generating data, plotting graphs and trying to make deductions from them. I can’t point you to a maths textbook and say ‘there it is, the ‘rule’ that you must draw graphs like ‘this’ but I believe it is a universally accepted commonsense convention that one ‘full’ scales a graph to cover the max & min values of the displayed data plus a margin on each. In your coloured geographical graph, p,2 of this thread, for CO2 concentration, the author has pretty well done this. (Max value ca 7000ppm, scale 8000ppm, min value near 0 ppm, scale min 0ppm)

If you want to convert ppm values to % values, then fine, but make your full scale 0% to 0.8%. (I think you’ll get the same shaped graph). But you’ll be laughed out of all polite society if you use 0-100% scale to display max & min of 0-0.8%.

Simply put, you can change the units of the measurements if you wish, (why you would want to overturn centuries of scientific convention I don't know), but the mathematical fault you are making is not changing the reference scale to suit.

Another factor which one must take into account is the variability of an individual observation. This is usually expressed as a ‘band’, wider than the individual result or a line connecting the averages of those results. Your p2 graph doesn’t have this band but your later one, p4, for CO2, seems to have a band but no central average line. So again by convention, one builds into the ‘scale’, the opportunity to display the variation.

In the case of gases measurement, analytical methods are pretty accurate on say, a modern sample of air, possibly plus-or-minus 5 ppm or may be even better. That would be much less meaningful that saying plus-or-minus 0.00005% or whatever it is on 5000 ppm. But if you still want to persist in percentages, you would make your ‘full’ scale on your p4 graph for CO2 equal to 0.15% to 0.31%.with at least 0.01% intervals. Incidentally, the banding is quite wide in real terms in this graph – maybe indicative of great variability in the measured results for what ever reason.

I could give you a real practical example of how I and my colleagues use this convention in real life but it would be too long.

You wrote:-
Well, all I can say to that is Con artists do, serious scientists don’t - because the ‘peer-review’ process exposes the fraud in an instant.

I will try to reply to other points raised in this thread soon but it is taking me far too long & my wife is getting very annoyed.

mkpdavies

I'd accept that, if all data is taken into account and not just a convienient subsection. As I said, if you want, you can make stats make all kind of pretty and extreme things if you want. Unless you take it in context of the big picture (IE that co2 makes up 0.04% of the planets atmospere, all spread out across the whole globe), then graphs like these are worthless.

AS I said before, it wasn't serious, other than to show how you can massage the figures to show what you want, if you try hard enough. Polite society = inbred snobs is they laugh at people for asking questions.

I wonder why it is only in the last few years then, that this hysteria has built up then. Mmmmmm. Indeed they were scaring people the other way in the 70's, telling us there was going to be ice ages (which there will be one day). I saw a good film from the time that had everyone starving, because they couldn't grow enough food. People were scared into some stupid things then too, only less so than now.

Sorry, but scientists are just as human as the rest of us. You get just as many who bend the facts to fit their idea, as any other area of life. They have done it though history. Scientist said the earth was flat and they made all kinds of things fit that argument. They also act like sheep like humans too. Only a fraction of people are willing to risk ridicule and question the others. That doesn't mean they are right, but it sure as damn it doesn't mean they are wrong.

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mkpdavies

BTW here is a little proof that scientists make "mistakes"

www.biostat.jhsph.edu/.../topten_worstgraphs/

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Besoeker

I have explained it for the data you presented.
If you can't see that, then I despair of your inability to make any objective analysis of data.
On the shelf above me is a good book on statistics by Walpole & Myers and another by Crawshaw & Chambers. Perhaps your local library will have copies. You might find them helpful.

Clippo

To mpkdavies,
I can't get the link & anyway I didn’t say scientists make mistakes. They do, even the all time greats like Einstein who could never accept quantum thermodynamics.

You wrote:-
you've got a hell of an inferiority complex

Not with peer reviewed practical science, - scientific fraudsters get caught out in the end so the sensible scientists, as I wrote, don’t bother to try it on.

You wrote:-
In all of the GW debate, only the opponents of manmade GW try to hype it up because they have no facts to counter the pro side. So, they resort to diversion & distraction. Certainly, on this forum, you and your accolytes are the only ones calling it hysteria.
(BTW scientific convention in this case meant using ppm, and which has been used for a 100 years or more - where you got hysteria out of this goodness knows).

Why use ppm?
Because in this particular branch of science, it has been found to be the best unit of measure to use for anybody with half an interest in it to practically understand the scale.

For example, would you go into a butchers and ask for 25% of a pound of beef, or a pub and ask for 1/64th of a firkin of beer (probably get told to firkin off!!). In astronomy, for large distances, parsecs are used as a distance measure, at lower distances millions of miles, pilots use mach as an alternative to mph and so on ad nausem.

No, in all spheres of human activity, units of measurement are used that, by convention amongst the practitioners of a specific activity, are understood in commonsense terms.

So, in measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere, ppm has been agreed by everybody in the world to be representative of its’ relative scale - except you it seems.

Clippo

With respect to your graph on p2, (and indeed many of the graphs you have posted on the GW subjects), it seems to me that what you are trying to show is a cause-effect relationship between historical atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature.

I will declare my position on this hypothesis now. I completely agree that there is certainly some cause-effect between CO2 levels & earth temperatures over geological time but it is probably not the only factor.

The point I want to make below is a technical one relating to the pitfalls of drawing conclusions from data whose provenance is not clear.

I AM NOT TRYING TO TRICK OR MISLEAD YOU.

If you accept the cause-effect hypothesis, (& I think you do because in other posts you have even suggested the cause –effect in the reverse direction to usual supposition i.e. the hotter the earth gets, the more CO2 increases), then whether you realise it or not, you are suggesting in mathematical/statistical terms a ‘correlation’ between the two variables, CO2 level & global temperature. This is not at all unreasonable – in all aspects of modern life we say for example that the ‘number of skin cancers reported is related to exposure to the sun or road deaths are proportional to the speed of the vehicles concerned and so on.

Statisticians have derived a logical, numerical measure of this relationship called the ‘correlation coefficient’ or r2. The closer this figure is to -1 or +1, then more reliance you can put that the 2 variables are related. But this does not yet mean they are a cause-effect relationship because the respective variable data points may be derived from a common source or even a chance agreement. Sorting out whether these cause-effect relationships are real can be a nightmare for statisticians.

Now, to your p2 graph. I would say, with my experienced eye, that if you re-plotted the individual time datapoints of CO2 level & global temperature in a true correlation diagram, you would certainly get a very, very high correlation coefficient. When data of this sort this superficially seems to be so highly correlated, alarms bells ring with me & I get very suspicious and I ask myself, how was the data of the 2 variables calculated. To me, your p2 graph is too good to be true. It doesn’t seem to make any allowance for solar/earth orbit/earth rotation variations or the effect of ‘life’, (all of the earths atmospheric Oxygen is generally accepted to have been generated by ?Cyanobacteria? ca. 2-3 billion years ago), or continental drift or asteroid hits or volcanic eruptions and many other variables that have been proposed in the scientific literature.

But ok, I’ll make a guess.
This is a completely hypothetical example. Possibly, one of authors measured isotopic ratios of carbon from rock samples or sediments, perhaps from fossilized shells from differently dated strata and extrapolated that the atmospheric composition of CO2 was X ppm when that shell lived. Maybe the other author, completely independently, thought, ‘ I wonder if the thickness of a shell reflects the temperature in which it lives.’ If so, if I measure the thicknesses of fossil shells I can back calculate the earths temperature when they lived’.

So you see, apparently independent studies have used the same source (shells) for their studies.

Statistically & logically this is completely unacceptable for correlation purposes and therefore cause & effect conclusions.
Alternatively, a third party ( probably not a scientist), has found these 2 sets of data, which may or may not have been derived independently and put them together ‘maliciously’ to fraudulently support their biased viewpoint.

So, I hope you can begin to see why I keep banging on about seeing the ‘original’ scientific paper or whether it has been peer-reviewed?

Where did you get the graph(s) of p2? Was it an original source or journalistically reworked?

mkpdavies

If you don't have an answer, justs say. There is no shame in just saying I don't know.

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mkpdavies

Ah I'm just supposed to accept that with no real data to back it up then. I have to have faith eh, sounds a bit like a religious cult then to me.

Right click and properties will tell you where it is from.

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Besoeker

Then 'fess up any time you like.