There once was a time when I looked forward to getting a hold of a copy of Scientific American. Over the years Ive more or less grown away from the journal and graduated to more robust science literature. Over the past years, SA has has come back into focus,and I find it to be disturbingly unscientific in several respects. My most recent disappointment came when I saw the headline stating that 2014 was to be the hottest year measured. Being a skeptic by nature and training, I decided to look at the actual measurements. First I looked at data from MODIS, and to my dismay, I found that the warmest years recorded were 1998 and 2010, and that 2014 was not on track to be the warmest year recorded. So, I went back to SA to see where they and I separated paths. The SA report used GISS, not MODIS, so I decided to take a look at GISS. It is very difficult to determine GISS methodology (lots of hand-waving on their web page, I imagine its complicated), but it looks like GISS is an amalgam of surface measurements and models that provides a range of temperatures (there apparently are several options for ocean temperature, for example). Bottom line-GISS yields different results than MODIS, I suppose people could debate the merits of GISS vs. MODIS; that might be intelligent and useful. Thats not really my beef. My beef with SA is that they ONLY refer to GISS, and even then, in a stunted and misleading manner. No mention, for example, about HOW they measured ocean temperature Im guessing that the historical bucket in the ocean sampling technique is outdated by now, but Im pretty sure there are still no measurement sheds in the middle of the sea. And why no mention of MODIS at all? Is it fair to simply dismiss data because it doesnt conform to your headline? Speaking of headlines, there was not a single line in the text of the article that provided one iota of insight about temperature. It was mostly a meandering narrative about catastrophes that may or may not occur. Maybe I was naive before, when I read SA fervently as a youth. I used to think they had some credibility, maybe even some integrity about science. If they ever did, it is now gone. The current offerings from the magazine barely pass the standards of credible journalism, let alone science.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 02:53:52 +0000
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