Public Data: Hard to find
Jon Udell continues to do great work showing how hard it can be to get (seemingly simple) data - an awful lot of it is locked in a trunk or simply not available online. Take temperature data:
Given all that’s been said and written about climate change, it turns out to be surprisingly hard to get hold of historical climate data. I had to look around quite a while before I found this FTP site where NOAA has parked files full of raw temperature and precipitation data.
He's also blogged recently about crime statistics, which are apparently even harder to get (I noticed this morning that there's a dispute in Baltimore about crime data). It sure would be nice to simply have raw access, so we could draw our own conclusions.
Comments
Crime Data?
[Chris Nelson] July 23, 2007 16:11:12.720
Crime data is a bigger political football than climate data. In my city many crimes don't end up on the "official" logs that are open to the public. Don't want to scare the business and individuals that are moving in...
"If it weren't for bad data, we wouldn't have any data at all."
archiving in general
[Lex Spoon] July 23, 2007 16:54:32.679
Archiving data in general is a pain. The people who are going to care are far away into the future and not personally known to you. Meanwhile you have some more pressing issue with the data in question, such as surviving a bureaucratic inquiry.
For sure it is important, though, especially when there is a public interest in having the data available. In my own corner of the world, I hope that computer science conferences and journals begin to have archives associated with them. It's computer science, for goodness' sake. Can't we figure out how to archive data?
As if that wasn't bad enough...
[greenbes] July 24, 2007 6:02:20.517
The ability of the record keeping organization to gather and analyze data changes over time, so for things like crime statistics you see jumps and drops from year to year that are based as much on record keeping as anything happening in society.
Not about data but another Climate Change perspective
[Brad] July 24, 2007 19:49:58.091
The Great Global Warming Swindle
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566
The Great Global Warming Swindle Swindle
[ Michael Lucas-Smith] July 24, 2007 22:43:33.189
Comment by Michael Lucas-Smith
Unfortunately Brad you've been had with this movie - as have many other people. The data he uses stops in the 80's, the sun theory was disproven by the guys who came up with it, the people interviewed in the film have serious credibility issues (eg: one of the main scientists he interviews still believes that tobacco doesn't produce cancer), the producer has serious credibility issues (eg: he made a movie about how breast implants improve a womans health).
Like any good puff piece, it has a nice blend of truth, half truth and out right lies. This is probably one of the worst contributions to the global warming debate to date - and it's so sad that people keep referencing it instead of checking its facts.
I'm all for scientific scrutiny of global warming and data sources - if you download the data source that James is refering to here and do some analysis of it, you discover that most countries have an average mean temperature rise of 1C in the last 30 years - which is pretty much what the global warming people have been saying, except that they have much more data from many more sources (ocean temperature, stratosphere temperature, sun temperature, ice cores, ground stations, etc). But the scrutiny has to be more reputable than swindlers. Some notable skeptics of reputable character are David Suzuki, for example, who is now not a skeptic.
You can make up your own mind, - but that's the point, you should do it the right way, not just because you saw some documentary. I'm glad that Al Gore's film got scrutinized as much as it did - it's no ivory tower of convincing arguments, however.. this movie "The Great Global Warming Swindle" is the worst kind of rubbish out there.