I have to wonder whether the NWS is deliberately making it difficult for the public to access historical weather data.

No, I mean the process whereby the scientific understanding of climate change is conveyed to the public by way of such mainstream media channels as television, radio, newspapers, magazines.

“Background and skill (education either academically or experientially or both) requires time and attention which is luxury.”

That raises an extremely interesting point. Notwithstanding the American tendency to overwork relative to other advanced industrial democracies, there are a lot of people who aren’t rich yet have lots of time on their hands to watch TV and, more recently, to engage in the production as well as the consumption of various forms of “content” — e.g., movie exegesis on IMDB, YouTube videos, etc.

Time and attention /are/ luxuries, and a lot of folks have the time and the attention for the kinds of luxuries that produce these kinds of shared artifacts.

I like to imagine what might happen if a slightly larger fraction of that time and attention were diverted to subjects like the one we’re discussing here.

Meanwhile, despite all my bitching, it has been perfect summer weather for a few days. Last night after a bike ride I jumped into Spofford Lake and it was glorious!

Should read:

… with his hope of raising awareness and reaching motivated people …

and:

… reduction of pollution and improvement of quality of life on Earth …

A brief follow-up as unfortunately my time is constrained …

> Your points are very well taken. I have great respect for domain knowledge and peer review.
> I also have a certain amount of sympathy for the critique of amateurism as articulated
> recently by the likes of Andrew Keen.

Until you (and fellow Keene, NH resident and fellow Northern Illinois University (NIU) alum Mike Caulfield who posted a comment to this blog post herein) mentioned Andrew Keen’s name, I was not familiar with him and can not intelligently respond to your comment about his critiques of amateurism.

If you look back at my original comment, I never used the words “amateur” or “expert” nor did I try to draw a boundary between what is considered amateur and expert — that’s an entirely separate conversation topic. I merely called attention to the vagueness of the word “we” and also challenged you to quantify what you meant by “much more” in the context of weather and climate informatics re: “much more interactive and collaborative ways”.

> At the same time I really do think that the gap between what science does and what the media says
> (and what most people understand) about what science does can be significantly narrowed by making
> the data behind the science, and the interpretation of that data, and the conversations about the
> interpretations, a lot more accessible.

The data didn’t seem to be a problem (you found it for Concord) and you’ve already paid for it literally (e.g., your American tax dollars siphoned into DOC and its subdivisions — you knew about this right? So the data doesn’t need any further democratization). I’m not sure what you mean precisely by “the media” but in the context of this blog post topic, I presume you mean the broadcasting of weather news (one to many). A one-to-many model doesn’t support “conversations about interpretations” and this is why for years broadcast TV has gotten away with putting just about anyone in front of a TV camera to make weather presentations (I will not touch on whether such presenters are “experts” or “amateurs” as that is a different conversation topic and time consuming, suffice to say that as long as they have the backstop of NOAA for general interpretation there was is very little requirement for skill and interpretation but I surely wouldn’t want to leave global climate change policy up to the unskilled TV weather presenter who doesn’t have enough background in weather and climate). Your question about swimming in the summers in Keene, New Hampshire is too narrow for broadcast news “media”. Sure, the Internet model (many to many) provides the opportunity for motivated individuals to seek out and participate in conversations about any topic but what about skilled interpretation from someone who has background and experience (let alone derivative conversations about such such interpretation)?

> To turn the question around, do you think we can, as a democratic society, make the kinds
> of policy decisions we need to make — on a range of issues — without narrowing that gap?

A “gap” will always exist between people who don’t have enough background (educational and experiential) to make skilled interpretations and those who do. Otherwise, how do the “we” know what questions to raise? I think the commentator LeBleu followed by Tom Pollard exemplified this point when LeBleu suggested that your original question was probably not the best fit question re: “I think using average temperature and total precipitation is a mistake.” It was very nice of LeBleu to raise a further question and therefore educate Jon Udell about a possible error in the question selection process, but what if LeBleu’s question isn’t deep enough (e.g. in this blog post thread and topic there has been no further uptake on “homogenization algorithms” as originally pointed out by Bob Drake, probably because the educational and experiential background of the commentators and the original blog post author ends right there — this is not a personal criticism or an attack on anyone’s egos).

I don’t think its mostly about access (although there are parts of the world and probably parts of America that are yet struggling to become connected to the Interent and Negroponte’s One Laptop program is trying to solve that problem for example). Background and skill (education either academically or experientially or both) requires time and attention which is luxury. I applaud wealthy, philanthropic good intentioned people such as Al Gore who have the luxury of time to create “media” in the form of documentaries, which documentaries were compiled from sources of democratized data and gratis interpretation of said data by a small handful of skilled persons with enough background in climatology (ever try to design and implement a global climate model in Fortran?), with his the hope of raising awareness and reaching motivated people living in democratic societies which people may take action by speaking with politicians to effectuate policy changes that result in a reduction of pollution and improvement of qualit of life on Earth including those who miss the pasttime of swimming during the Northern Hemispheric summers in New Hampshire! :-)

Cheers,

-Brendan Lane Larson
Meteorologist, Weather Informaticist and Member of the American Meteorological Society.

P.S. Note to commentator Caulfield – to have reduced any “xenophobia” you may have had about global climate change, did you not have the option of taking one of David Changnon’s Climatology classes at NIU? http://globe.geog.niu.edu/Changnon_03.htm

Indeed, mean temperature and total precipitation are weak correlates for “days that people (me especially) would feel like jumping in the water.” For that particular purpose you’d want, in addition to what you suggest, hourly readings so you’d know when warmth and absence of participation coincided with daylight hours, weekends, etc. I wonder how far back those readings go, and for which locations?

“Take the Ledger Poll”

Heh. They could at least report the number of responses in the results :-) Still, for late July, that does look like a high percentage of “not yet but plan to” responses.

from ledgertranscript.com

Take the
Ledger Poll
(unscientific but entertaining…)

Have you been swimming yet this summer?

Yes, many times
[tally] 29%

Yes, once or twice
[tally] 17%

Not yet, but I plan to.
[tally] 38%

No, I don’t swim
[tally] 13%

No, the pool’s been closed
[tally] 4%