Thanks.

Is this your way of saying you kind of…

…like me?

You didn’t know what trend lines are and still don’t, but now at least you know that you don’t know.

There’s something to be said for that.

Not knowing what they are, you had a gut reaction and ended up insinuating nasty things about two leading climate scientists.

Not much to be said for that.

Then you *literally* blamed all of this on your gut, mentioned the phrase “I stand corrected” but didn’t use it (let alone acknowledge that you had wronged anyone), and then sought to justify your dislike for the graph by referring to Pielke’s claim that the graph was beside the point.

So, first you assumed Stefan and Gavin were wrong and worse, based on nothing.

Now you are going to assume their graph is beside the point, that with the graph they are arguing against a strawman, based on Pielke claiming this?

The only strawman near that graph is the strawman picture of Stefan and Gavin supposedly not knowing that Pielke *said* he understands that the term of a trend matters. But the facts visually represented in the graph, facts not intended by anyone to be news to Pielke, have *implications*.

If someone might not want to consider these and how they bear on the Tierney-Pielke venture, he or she could, I don’t know, perhaps start talking about how the graph itself is uncontroversial. (Reminder: it’s not intended to be controversial.)

Your claiming you can’t see the trend lines doesn’t mean they don’t exist. (I’m taking it you’ve agreed with this by now, but frankly I’m not sure.)

Your claiming not to understand the relevance of the graph in this context doesn’t mean the graph is irrelevant in this context.

Pielke acts as though he doesn’t understand some of the implications of the information in the graph (or their relation to the graph)–and appears to ignore explanations when offered. So do you.

And there you have it. In addition to treating facts as facts, meaningful conversation requires us to stop and process our mistakes.

Again, why would anyone (including you) want to have a discussion about solutions if what passes for discussion is only so much noise? Or rather, just so much noise interrupted every now and then by insinuations against climate scientists.

If you are for real, work out how the strawman charge is itself a red herring. Ask for help if you need it. Then, acknowledge your mistake, and move on without launching another attack on Stefan and Gavin.

I sense you may want to start talking again about Pielke’s comments on climate sensitivity. Do yourself a favor, and restrain yourself until you’ve had a chance to think about it. If you still don’t get it, ask for help.

To indicate that you actually want help and not just a chance to repeat talking points, don’t repeat them when you ask for help.

I also sense you may want to point out that I said the whole point of the RC post was the weather vs. climate point of the graph. And that Pielke doesn’t dispute this term-of-the-trend-matters point. So then, you might want to say: what’s the point of the post?

If you find yourself wanting to say that, start over (re-reading the beginning of this comment should help, but who knows) or ask for more help. Please, try to avoid making communication-nullifying talking points while asking for help. (They’re communication-nullifying for several reasons. You may want to spend some time thinking about this too.)

I have something to thank you for. This is going to sound sarcastic, and I apologize for that, but that’s pretty much unavoidable at this stage. Nevertheless, sarcasm is not my goal.

I *am* thankful to you for helping me think about the following in a new and more interesting way.

There’s this thing in this old Greek text that’s always bothered me. It’s advice to poets, pretty much. And some of it has to do with don’t do x, don’t do y, or the audience will laugh at you. What bothered me was that the advice seemed to assume not only that the poets did not want to be laughed at, but that this desire was something that should go unchallenged, unexplored: that that’s where we were going to start from.

I now feel more sympathetic toward the person offering that advice to poets way back when. Not that I think that the following is what was motivating him, but anyway: A total lack of concern with making oneself ridiculous, senseless, to the world, if made into a habit, is obviously something that could make meaningful discussion illusory, not to mention what it could do to our would-be quest for it.

Again, you are of course free to say whatever you want. You are also free to choose the kind of person you want to be. Conform to your own choice, if you have to talk about conforming. But why not give it some thought first?

Shorter commenter: “Don’t mind me, I’m trying to sow FUD.”

Best,

D

Draw a chart for yourself with just the 1981-1988 data, using pen and paper or excel.

Look at those data points.

A trend line is the line that tries to be fairest to all the points. Tries to come closest to all of them, at the same time.

How do you get the line, construct the line? It’s an optimization problem. Roughly, you want to add up the distances from all the data points to the line and have that total sum be as small as possible.

If you started smack in the first data point, by default, *that* would be “cheating”. In the sense of not being fair to the other points–why did that one get special treatment?

Sure the trend line *will* end up closer to some of the points than to others. But all the points are weighted equally, and it just happens that some of the data will be right on or close to the trend line.

If you instead decide not to solve the optimization problem and simply choose to start at a given data point, you won’t be drawing a trend line, you will be doing something else. (Playing connect the dots, maybe.)

Using excel (put 1981 through 1988 in the A column and the corresponding temperature values in the B column; you don’t have to get the values exactly right to get the general picture, but be careful with the sign and with the decimals) you can draw a “scatter chart” and then draw the “trend line.”

(You can google these things, or use the excel help function, or I think, maybe, someone in comments recently gave step by step instructions at realclimate for something related and relevant, so try the realclimate search function at the site.)

Let excel solve the optimization problem for you. Then you’ll have made a trend line.

You can probably get a rough idea just using pen and paper, too.

Now, I’m really curious about the following part. I take it you thought you knew what a trend line was, and it simply turned out you didn’t. So it’s not as if you were callously acknowledging to yourself:

“I have no idea what a trend line is, but I don’t think I see one here for 1980, or maybe 1981. So the graph authors must either be incompetent or trying to be deceptive.”

It wasn’t quite that absurd.

Instead, it was more along the lines of: “*I* can’t see all the trend lines they say are in there. *They* must be incompetent or willfully deceptive.”

Hmm.

Paul, we’re not starting in a free for all. We are not starting from scratch in every interaction, reinventing the wheel every time. These trend lines, simple little things, and lots of other fairly simple little things, are not up for grabs each time someone’s knee jerks.

If you feel your knee jerking, try not to jump to nasty conclusions about other people.

Look to yourself: what kind of person do you want to be? You can say whatever you want. But much more importantly, you can be whomever you want to be. You can be someone decent, friendly, and respectful of people who have done nothing to justify your disrespect and shockingly much to deserve vast amounts of it.

Plenty of people find that this approach works really well in communicating.

http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=82

http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=146

These are linear regressions, a method widely used in technology, science, business, Wall Street . . .