Aerages

[SSDD]

Here is a link to an interesting bit of software. It is called AverageExplorer. It was developed by some folks at the University of California, Berkley. The user inputs a search topic and the software can go out and get hundreds, perhaps thousands even tens of thousands of images that match the search topic and then creates an average. Here are a few of the images in the paper which can be found HERE

This one is an average of photos of kids with Santa

This one is an average of Tabby Cats

There are quite a few more on the paper which is not firewalled. Interesting stuff...interesting to me at least. But what does this have to to with climate you might ask. I was just getting to that.

Climate science is essentially numbers....and everything that springs from climate science is numbers...averages to be precise. When we talk about averages in terms of numbers, the number, even though it is an average looks pretty concrete. You can look at the number and in your mind, being a number, it interprets to something pretty definite...even if it isn't.

This software takes images and averages them and the result is very similar to the averages of numbers...in fact, they are the averages of numbers since the photos are converted to numbers before they can be averaged.

When you look at those average photographs, you can see, in reality what an average looks like in terms that we, being visual creatures can really see. An average number looks like a number and you see, and interpret it as a number...a number that has some meaning in your brain. An averaged photograph, which is virtually the same thing as an averaged number leaves you with the impression that you are looking at something familiar, but it is wide open to interpretation as to exactly what it is.

This software gives us a dead on visual that we can translate to what we are really seeing when we look at the averages upon which climate science is based.

An average doesn't really bear much resemblance to anything in the real world, does it? A valuable consideration when looking at this is to note that these average images are made with between 1600 and 17000 or so images....it is easy to see how far they are from anything you might see in the real world....With climate science, the averages go into millions, perhaps billions of individual snapshots....imagine how much further the average of a billion snapshots would be from reality than the average of sixteen thousand.

 

[Crick]

First, fix your subject line.

The averaged images you posted are easily recognizable before reading a word of your explanation. The claim that they are uninterpretable fails. Santa and the children and the tabby cat are clearly recognizable and no one with normal vision would mistake them for anything else.

Your analogy fails because the set of images being averaged and the temperature measurements of different part of the Earth are not equivalent in any regard. The former are independent instars of items of the same class. The latter is an average of parametric measurements made of locations within a system. Both averages have meaning, it is simply not the same meaning.

If I took the Earth's atmosphere, it's oceans and the surface of its continents and mixed them all up in a homogeneous ball of foamy mud, it would have a single temperature. That is the targeted physical analog to the average temperatures climate scientists calculate. If a process, such as greenhouse warming, is raising the temperature of the planet, the temperature of that homogeneous ball will rise.

Arguing that the Earth has no average temperature or that the concept of averaging is without meaning is a complete waste of time. When you stick a thermometer in your sick child's mouth to look for evidence of an infection, is it meaningless? Are you misguided? Are doctor's lying to us about the relevance of that measurement?

Give it up for christ's sake.

 

[SSDD]

I wasn't trying to say that averages have no meaning...but they don't have the meaning that many people attach to them....people see an average number and the number itself has a far more concrete meaning i their minds than the average number suggests.

Point is that the average temperature...average this and average that upon which climate science is based is far more fuzzy and open to interpretation than you warmer wackos would like to have people believe....add to that the fact that 99% of your evidence is corelatory in nature and just about zero actual observed evidence to support your hypothesis and climate science falls rapidly to the realm of pseudoscience where it belongs.

By the way...the title was a play on the topic...didn't expect that you would get it...

 

[flacaltenn]

It is actually the MASSIVE destruction of explanatory detail that is LOST in reducing to the average that is unfortunate and limiting our recognition of the images.... Just like reducing "climate" to a single number limits all understanding of how the planet functions..

 

[Mr. H.]

Researcher: Earth Facing a Long, 'Difficult' Period of Cold

 

[flacaltenn]

Researcher: Earth Facing a Long, 'Difficult' Period of Cold

It''ll all average out in a few thousand years.. No sweat...

 

[Crick]

I wasn't trying to say that averages have no meaning...but they don't have the meaning that many people attach to them....people see an average number and the number itself has a far more concrete meaning i their minds than the average number suggests.

What meaning do you believe "people" are assigning to the Earth's average temperature that it doesn't actually possess?

Point is that the average temperature...average this and average that upon which climate science is based is far more fuzzy and open to interpretation than you warmer wackos would like to have people believe

I'm quite certain that an enormous amount more care and effort is put into the process of producing a single global temperature than you could even imagine. How much variation have we seen in that value? I don't think different averages have varied by more than a tenth of a degree. As to interpretations, you're going to have to provide some of these alternative interpretations that you think people are coming up because I've seen no such thing. And if you plan on bringing in the misconceptions of the ignorant as a reason to deny valid tools to the qualified, you're just going to have to turn around and find something else in the way of an argument.

....add to that the fact that 99% of your evidence is corelatory in nature and just about zero actual observed evidence to support your hypothesis and climate science falls rapidly to the realm of pseudoscience where it belongs.

How about you identify some of this 99% of climate scientist's evidence that you believe doesn't actually qualify as evidence. I'd guess you're going to try to tell us that climate scientists have never established that CO2 is responsible for the warming we've experienced. Go ahead. Try it.

By the way...the title was a play on the topic...didn't expect that you would get it...

Really? What play would that be? Aer, the band? Aero-? I don't buy it. I think it was just a bloody typo but you're too insecure to admit you made a mistake.

 

[jc456]

I wasn't trying to say that averages have no meaning...but they don't have the meaning that many people attach to them....people see an average number and the number itself has a far more concrete meaning i their minds than the average number suggests.

What meaning do you believe "people" are assigning to the Earth's average temperature that it doesn't actually possess?

Point is that the average temperature...average this and average that upon which climate science is based is far more fuzzy and open to interpretation than you warmer wackos would like to have people believe

I'm quite certain that an enormous amount more care and effort is put into the process of producing a single global temperature than you could even imagine. How much variation have we seen in that value? I don't think different averages have varied by more than a tenth of a degree. As to interpretations, you're going to have to provide some of these alternative interpretations that you think people are coming up because I've seen no such thing. And if you plan on bringing in the misconceptions of the ignorant as a reason to deny valid tools to the qualified, you're just going to have to turn around and find something else in the way of an argument.

....add to that the fact that 99% of your evidence is corelatory in nature and just about zero actual observed evidence to support your hypothesis and climate science falls rapidly to the realm of pseudoscience where it belongs.

How about you identify some of this 99% of climate scientist's evidence that you believe doesn't actually qualify as evidence. I'd guess you're going to try to tell us that climate scientists have never established that CO2 is responsible for the warming we've experienced. Go ahead. Try it.

By the way...the title was a play on the topic...didn't expect that you would get it...

Really? What play would that be? Aer, the band? Aero-? I don't buy it. I think it was just a bloody typo but you're too insecure to admit you made a mistake.

Why do we need a one globe temperature?

 

[Crick]

To facilitate your comprehension