There are no showers at the office so I just take it easy on the way to work to avoid getting sweaty.
And there, in a nutshell, is why many commuters like the idea of an electric assisted bike.
The jury is not there as an expert in forensic science
The jury is also not an expert in eyewitness testimony.
Expertise in any subject area that is likely to come up in a trial will almost certainly get you excluded from the Jury pool.
And for some reason, we're not demanding they open the sequencing data on the cancer gene we just accepted that story and we trusted those scientists.
Are you sure we're not? I haven't seen a published genomics paper in years that doesn't have the raw data accessible in some form. It's a requirement for most major journals, as well as from most funding sources. If you want to publish, you release the data.
I agree with you that every moron thinks they can analyze the climate data better than the entire field of climatologists. Relatively few people think they understand particle physics better than the people at CERN; but somehow everyone thinks they're an expert on climate change after reading a few headlines that they instinctively disagree with (although they don't actually understand). Science is rarely a good spectator sport.
And lastly...I'm sorry but if the friggin tree ring data is not valid for assessing temperature after 1960, then it is not valid assessing temperature before 1960.
There's about a million possible reasons why tree-ring observations don't seem to work for relatively recent data. It's possible that newly formed tree rings change somewhat in the 30 or 40 years after they are initially formed until they reach a "stable" form. It's possible that the substantial increases in CO2 in the atmosphere in recent years has altered the way that tree rings form.
All measurement methods have their anomalies. MRI scans are a great way to look at the structure of the brain, but they have substantial distortions, that change from machine to machine. Some of these have to do with the type of machine, and some distortions are due to things like the earth's magnetic field or the building that houses the machine. Those have to be corrected for, and it's standard practice. And, scans of young children don't give the same results, because the brain structures haven't matured, so it's difficult if not impossible to distinguish many brain structures. That doesn't mean it's not a useful method, but one does need to keep the limitations and difficulties of each measuring methodology in mind.
There are very accurate temperature measurements recorded for many places dating back to the late 1700s, recorded using a thermometer. If the tree rings for those areas match very well for the 150 years prior to 1960, but begin to diverge after that, it wouldn't be that outrageous to suggest that the inability to use them as a measurement proxy for recent times is just a limitation of the system.
It would be nice to have perfect measurements for everything. However, for those of us in the real world, all measurements have errors and limitations, and we have to adapt for these. Simply dumping uncorrected, uncalibrated, or inaccurate measurements into the pool of data does not make things clearer.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin