Ruled Out-Of-Bounds

Many of the people here at work are Global Warming skeptics, and they like tweaking Global Warming acolytes (people like myself).

This week, the tweaking revolves around the sentence (highlighted in bold) in a recent paper in Nature (Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year, Steig et al., Vol. 457, 22 January 2009):

Our reconstructions show more significant temperature change in Antarctica (Fig. 2), and a different pattern for that change than reported in some previous reconstructions (Fig. 3). We find that West Antarctica warmed between 1957 and 2006 at a rate of 0.17 +/-0.06 deg C per decade (95% confidence interval). Thus, the area of warming is much larger than the region of the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula warming averages 0.11 +/-0.04 deg C per decade. We also find significant warming in East Antarctica at 0.10 +/-0.07 deg C per decade (1957-2006). The continent-wide trend is 0.12 +/-0.07 deg C per decade. In the reconstruction based on detrended TIR data, warming in West Antarctica remains significant at greater than 99% confidence, and the continent-wide mean trend remains at 0.08 deg C per decade, although it is no longer demonstrably different from zero (95% confidence). This is in good agreement with ref. 6, which reported average continent-wide warming of 0.082 deg C per decade (1962-2003) and shows overall warming in West Antarctica, although statistical significance could not be demonstrated owing to the shorter length and greater variance of the reconstruction. We emphasize that, in general, detrending of predictand data lowers the quality of reconstructions by removing spatial covariance information. The detrended reconstruction therefore represents a conservative lower bound on trend magnitude. Although ref. 7 concluded that recent temperature trends in West Antarctica are statistically insignificant, the results were strongly influenced by the paucity of data from that region. When the complete set ofWest Antarctic AWS data is included, the trends become positive and statistically significant, in excellent agreement with our results.

One co-worker writes:

This has to set a record of some kind for the most incomprehensible sentence ever written. I’ll buy lunch for whoever can use this sentence most creatively in a paragraph not more than five sentences long.

So, in response, I wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutter%27s_Fort

(based on what I remember of a tour guide’s talk at Sutter’s Fort, where I learned that the reconstructed walls occupy about 30% less land than they originally did in the 1840’s):

In 1891, when the “Native Sons Of The Golden West” began their reconstruction of the outer walls of the ruins of Sacramento’s Sutter’s Fort, their intention was to rebuild exact duplicates of the walls. Running out of money, however, the restorers settled on a more-compact plan that required less land and fewer materials, thus establishing a trend among restorers towards more-compact reconstructions. Frontier purists argued for greater fidelity to the original plans, of course, and worked for a detrended reconstruction, particularly within the walls of Sutter’s Fort, where original floor plans were still available. The evidence of this clash-of-views is still present at Sutter’s Fort. The detrended reconstruction therefore represents a conservative lower bound on trend magnitude.

Alas, the rules of the contest have been arbitrarily changed!:

Any submissions that reference or cite Wikipedia will be summarily rejected, without detrending or reconstruction.

To which all I have to say is: "Waaahhhh!" I guess I didn't count on Wikipedia resistance!

Here is a blog post (citing another blog post) regarding Wikipedia's propensity to eat the world (which would tend to suggest we should all display a bit more Wikipedia resistance).

Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.