I wish I could have filmed my recent trip to the National Climate Data Center in Asheville. I met with four scientists with differing specialties: ocean currents, meteorology, quality control, and educational outreach. The conversations did not at all go in the direction I thought they might. We talked some about the normalization of data, how, for example, data is adjusted to consider the amount of impermeable surface or albedo at a collection site. One of the things I had not thought about is that most data collection sites are airports. Airports are usually built in a relatively rural area (think RDU…) and the cities and towns grow up around them and thus change the baseline for temperature data. So good climatologists have to adjust these data over time in an accurate way. So that’s one of the things that often comes into the discussion when climate change is questioned. How accurate are the models we use to adjust these values? (Pretty darned accurate, actually…)

I think the funniest comment was that climatologists are often accused of being in a giant conspiracy to bilk world-wide governments out of money. One of the scientists grumbled that “three people can’t even keep a conspiracy quiet. How would the entire world-wide community?”

The biggest A-Ha moment may not seem like much, but it really is, in the climate change “debate.” Weather reporting in the US and worldwide are biased toward what happens on the east coast…because that’s where Washington DC is. Having recently spent some time in the midwest, this is totally true. So anytime the weather in Virginia doesn’t quite adhere to a suggested or assumed trend, we hear all about it. (I was in Europe in December and only remember reporting on Virginia’s weather while we were there!)

We talked about how to talk to my students about bias in statistics on blogs and elsewhere. And we pretty much decided that the “Skeptical Science” site from Australia is pretty darn good!

Well worth the drive…