All of the data sets for which we do not have trustworthy information regarding their provenance are now suspect. Do you contend otherwise?

Argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Um, no. In this case, suspect data sets are defined as those for which we do not have trustworthy information regarding their provenance. You can’t prove or disprove an axiom.

Tell you what, zuch. I’ll give you a data set, a text file of advice and instructions on how to live your life. I won’t tell you its provenance, other than to give you the filename: From_the_desk_of_Karl-The_Word_of_Hank.txt … and convey the claim that Hank knows what’s best for you. Do you trust the information in this file? Do you act on it?

Mike G in Corvallis: I wish I had another dollar [yes, I’m “driven by money”!] for each comment I’ve read in the past week by an AGW True Believer that tags all skeptics and “lukewarmers” as “denialists.”

They’re effectively (and probably in most cases actually the same. The policies [pr lack thereof] they end up advocating are the same: “Do nothing.” Either because there’s no need … or because we caaaannnnn’t do anything until we know for suuurrrrreeeeee. Just like asking for more “debate” on health care. The aim is to kill any action … for as long as possible.

Argumentum ad baculum. Also an ad hominem attack and a straw man argument. Delightful.

Your call to action reminds me of Sir Humphrey’s syllogism in Yes, Minister:

We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it.

Ah, well. To a True Believer, everyone who disagrees with or even questions the Revealed Truth is either ignorant or willfully evil. Enjoy your life, zuch.

Don’t even have a theory. As Edwards Deming used to say (this is free to you, zuch, he used to charge $10,000 to hear it in person), ‘You have to have a theory. If you don’t have a theory, how do you know when you’re wrong?’

Mike G in Corvallis: Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are private entities. So are Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. So is Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama children attend. 
So, where did you acquire your education, zuch?

Ummmm, the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, for one. But public schools for pre-college and public schools for graduate work. Does this answer your question?

Mike G in Corvallis:

[zuch]: Just keep circulating the memes: “They forged data.” [False]

They contaminated data with “adjustments” that are no longer documented.

Not exactly. They provided corrections based on the Briffa work. You can criticise this work if you’d like, but there it is. And the corrections were noted as well (along with cites to the Briffa paper).

Mike G in Corvallis: They contaminated tree-ring data with “adjustments” based on temperature data to “correct” a divergence between the two that arises from completely unknown causes … and yet they didn’t apply “corrections” elsewhere in the same data set because they assumed that the unknown causes were not in effect.

They didn’t correct the earlier data [or to be more accurate, the correction coefficients were very small], because the Briffa work showed a stronger and stricter correlation for these times for tree-ring temperature proxies. True, the reason for the divergence is not known … but the fact of the divergence is. Ignoring this fact is probably a greater potential source of error.

Mike G in Corvallis: “All the data is thus corrupt. [A logical non sequitur]
All of the data sets for which we do not have trustworthy information regarding their provenance are now suspect. Do you contend otherwise?

Argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Mike G in Corvallis: (E.g., “A clique of oil-industry-funded warming-deniers has taken over an academic journal’s editorial board, and is publishing bad papers by choosing which peers do the peer reviewing according to a bias.”) 

No. Their hired guns go out and put out papers through their captive think tanks and such … and not peer-reviewed.

Mike G in Corvallis: I wish I had another dollar [yes, I’m “driven by money”!] for each comment I’ve read in the past week by an AGW True Believer that tags all skeptics and “lukewarmers” as “denialists.”

They’re effectively (and probably in most cases actually the same. The policies [pr lack thereof] they end up advocating are the same: “Do nothing.” Either because there’s no need … or because we caaaannnnn’t do anything until we know for suuurrrrreeeeee. Just like asking for more “debate” on health care. The aim is to kill any action … for as long as possible.

I do know a AGW sceptic (and a Nobel laureate at that). I wish he didn’t say what he said. But his basic claim is that we simply don’t know. But then again, he’s a SS physicist, not a climatologist. I think he truly is an honest sceptic and not an obstructionist. But there are times when the proper null hypothesis (and the proper default action) is not “no effect, do nothing”. It has to do with the cost of Type I and Type II errors (and any actions based on them). That being said, the mass of studies so far, taken as a whole, are sufficient to reject even a standard zero-effect null hypothesis convincingly.

Cheers,

Mike G in Corvallis: Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are private entities. So are Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. So is Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama children attend. 
So, where did you acquire your education, zuch?

Ummmm, the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, for one. But public schools for pre-college and public schools for graduate work. Does this answer your question?

Mike G in Corvallis: Just keep circulating the memes: “They forged data.” [False]
They contaminated data with “adjustments” that are no longer documented.

Cheers,

If you’re going to object to ‘proxification,’ we can save a lot of money and time.

Yes, I understand that the sat temp series has been ‘adjusted’ 4 times since 1979.

My point is that there are NO global surface temp series earlier than the 21st c., so that all statements (by anybody) of the form ‘it was X cooler/warmer 100 years ago’ are necessarily telling you not only more than the speaker does know but more than he can know.

zuch: Particularly nowadays when science education in the Yoo Ess of Effin’ Aye is declining compared to the rest of the world. You just need to be a good writer (or story teller). The execrable “In Search Of…” and other such creations is just icing on the cake.

Hmm. “In Search of …” was produced from 1976 to 1982. You’re a quarter-century out of date.

I gather from the way you spell certain words that you are not an American, or at least that you didn’t receive your education here. True, public schools in the U.S. don’t do a good job of educating their students about science — due in part to the actions of the teachers’ unions in protecting the jobs of ineffective and incompetent teachers and to selection effects in determining which people decide to become teachers, which people graduate from college with a degree in Education, and which people decide to stay in the profession after they’ve contended with the realities of teaching in a public school.

But the U.S. does not depend entirely on public schools. There are many fine private schools that turn out scientifically literate graduates. For that matter, a significant number of each year’s national science fair winners and high achievers on college admission exams are home-schooled. Some years ago the Los Angeles Times surveyed teachers in the L.A. city school system and found that a significant percentage of them sent their own children to private schools or home-schooled them.

Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are private entities. So are Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. So is Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama children attend.

So, where did you acquire your education, zuch? How are the schools there? I don’t suppose there’s be even the slightest trace of a hint of a whiff of pseudoscience in that culture, would there?

What’s most annoying is that the typical Republican strategery here of “discredit [or slime] the messenger, and you can cast doubt on the whole thing” type attack seems to be working (they kept pounding the drums until the SCLM said, “maybe we’d better take note, just as we did with the two gazillion, give or take a few, teabaggers).

“Teabaggers,” huh? Glad to see that left-wingers don’t “slime” people … BTW, shouldn’t you use “RethugliKKKan” to keep a consistent tone?

Just keep circulating the memes: “They forged data.” [False]

They contaminated data with “adjustments” that are no longer documented. They contaminated tree-ring data with “adjustments” based on temperature data to “correct” a divergence between the two that arises from completely unknown causes … and yet they didn’t apply “corrections” elsewhere in the same data set because they assumed that the unknown causes were not in effect. Do you claim otherwise?

“All the data is thus corrupt. [A logical non sequitur]

All of the data sets for which we do not have trustworthy information regarding their provenance are now suspect. Do you contend otherwise?

“They’re naaaassssttyy people too!!!” [Wow, they’re human. Look at the lawyers here...] They’re driven by politics and money [Talk about “projection”....].

Jebus! I wish I had a dollar for each comment I’ve read in the past week by an AGW True Believer that contends “denialists” are corrupt and/or untrustworthy because they supposedly are funded by the Eeeeevilll Oil Companies. (E.g., “A clique of oil-industry-funded warming-deniers has taken over an academic journal’s editorial board, and is publishing bad papers by choosing which peers do the peer reviewing according to a bias.”)

I wish I had another dollar [yes, I'm "driven by money"!] for each comment I’ve read in the past week by an AGW True Believer that tags all skeptics and “lukewarmers” as “denialists.” Even people who believe in AGW but also believe (as George Monbiot does) that the actions of The Team have set back legitmate research are being tarred with the “denialist” brush.

zuch:

Did you bother to read the linked article? [...]
Please tell me you don’t believe that Holdren’s scenario is plausible.

I’d rather read what Holdren wrote, in context than what someone else, snipping and pasting, says he said.But you didn’t address my point, bolded above.

I provided text that, according to the New York Times column, was a direct quote from Holdren’s book:

For the remaining major means of interference with the global heat balance is the release of energy from fossil and nuclear fuels. As pointed out previously, all this energy is ultimately degraded to heat. What are today scattered local effects of its disposition will in time, with the continued growth of population and energy consumption, give way to global warming.

The quote stands on its own. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and the meaning of “is” is “is” …

So, I ask you again: Do you think the scenario stated in that text is plausible, or not? Is that something a serious “scientist” would warn the public about as a significant threat to the planet’s environment?

But you didn’t address my point, bolded above.

“Still“? This isn’t something he currently talks about. Perhaps he still holds this view, perhaps he doesn’t. I’m not telepathic, so I don’t know. I suppose could query him in an e-mail, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort, I doubt that he’d answer, and even if he did I’d have no way to determine whether he was telling the truth. Feel free to ask him yourself if you’re really dying to know the answer.

My point was that in my opinion the technical pronouncements, then or now, of any “scientist” who would advance that scenario would not be valuable except as entertainment. For all I know, over the years he has changed his hypothesis from waste heat from nuclear power plants will bring on global warming to Alien Space Bats will raise the Earth’s temperature by bombarding the planet with mutant neutrinos. The problem isn’t his ignorance of the facts, it’s ludicrously poor judgment.

As Carrie Prejean said [repeatedly] , “It was the worst mistake of my life [so far....]And I was only 17 [even if I was 20].Can’t we just move on?…. [or if not, can I get the residuals?]”On the Hannnity show, she expressed sincere regret [repeatedly] for her ancient [though recent] lapse of judgement [in retrospect]. But we’re supposed to judge her now, in her wiser, more enlightened, more mature status.Right?Cheers,

WTF? I mean, WTFF? I don’t claim to be Carrie Prejean’s spokesperson, and as far as I know she doesn’t claim to be mine. Why should I care one way or the other about her opinion, or her judgment, or your judgment of her? Has she expressed any opinion at all on climate change? Have you been skipping your meds?

Stephen Schneider was on In Search Of. Was he lying then or now?

Of course that has been a controversy all on its own since the original set of measurements failed to find what the team expected, the heat content was too low, and some suspicious fudge factors were applied to those measurements too.

They are troposphere temps, and if you examine the climate research papers, you will discover that how to relate those to surface temps is a vexed issue, giving the modelers great trouble. One thing is sure, the relationship isn’t linear.

Better yet, just give us a reference to pre-21st c. global surface temperature observations.

Betcha can’t do it!

Mike G in Corvallis: And the readability of his comments should serve as an inspiration to anyone who has to comment code.

You have got to be kidding. Better than some (see, e.g., the abstruse DEC comments I’d mentioned on other AGW threads), but far from what I’d practise or accept myself. Comments aren’t a place to vent (even if warranted). Really. I mean it.

Cheers,

Mike G in Corvallis:

[zuch]: I tend to have a fair number of variables that end up being labeled “foo” or “foobar”. Does that mean my code is completely fouled up beyond repair?

That depends on the code, doesn’t it? Have you made it available for evaluation?

<*zing*> Avoiding my point, are you? The significance of a label is not what it’s called (or what the comments say), but rather how it’s used in the actual program. The ‘fact’, seized on by the foaming anti-AGW crowd, that this is a “fudge” variable, is much overblown. As I’ve pointed out, an actual “fudge” based on observed deviations in tree-ring/temperature correlations, may well be warranted. And that such is termed a “fudge” doesn’t make it the crime of fraud, despite the 110 dB hysterics of the anti-AGW crowd.

Cheers,

Mike G in Corvallis:

[zuch]: [Scientists are allowed to be wrong. The mark of a good scientist is to look at the evidence and change one’s mind if warranted.] If you can show that Holdren still holds this view about impending ice ages, good on ya. You’d probably give him a medal, though.

Did you bother to read the linked article? [...]
Please tell me you don’t believe that Holdren’s scenario is plausible.

I’d rather read what Holdren wrote, in context than what someone else, snipping and pasting, says he said. But you didn’t address my point, bolded above. As Carrie Prejean said [repeatedly] , “It was the worst mistake of my life [so far....] And I was only 17 [even if I was 20]. Can’t we just move on?…. [or if not, can I get the residuals?]” On the Hannnity show, she expressed sincere regret [repeatedly] for her ancient [though recent] lapse of judgement [in retrospect]. But we’re supposed to judge her now, in her wiser, more enlightened, more mature status. Right?

Cheers,

Mike G in Corvallis: And if the evidence can’t be seen because it isn’t released, what is a good scientist to do?

We never published the raw data back in my research days. Maybe a sign of the times that the deep politicisation of public policy has infected science to such an extent so that such is demanded. But FWIW, most of the data sets are available. Why do people keep insisting that the data is not available? Polemic reasons, I suppose….

Cheers,

Richard Aubrey: I recall during the first attempts at SDI, there was a petition against it signed by shoals of scientists, which was supposed to give it heft. I read a few of them. One, which sticks in mind, was employed at Woods Hole. Implicitly, I was supposed to trust an oceanographer instead of my year in Air Defense (Nike Hercules with info on Nike X, Nike Zeus, and Sprint)

Things are easier if you use a nuke with a nice kill radius. But some folks complained that nukes in the atmosphere (or worse, exosphere with EMP) are not nice to children and other living things. Thus “Brilliant Pebbles” type EKV, where we’re not talking horse shoes….

Cheers,

Richard Aubrey: You can’t have “popular” science without some science.

Wanna bet? Particularly nowadays when science education in the Yoo Ess of Effin’ Aye is declining compared to the rest of the world. You just need to be a good writer (or story teller). The execrable “In Search Of…” and other such creations is just icing on the cake.

What’s most annoying is that the typical Republican strategery here of “discredit [or slime] the messenger, and you can cast doubt on the whole thing” type attack seems to be working (they kept pounding the drums until the SCLM said, “maybe we’d better take note, just as we did with the two gazillion, give or take a few, teabaggers). Just keep circulating the memes: “They forged data.” [False] “All the data is thus corrupt. [A logical non sequitur] “They’re naaaassssttyy people too!!!” [Wow, they're human. Look at the lawyers here...] They’re driven by politics and money [Talk about "projection"....]. And it works. Worst of all, it cheapens overall respect for science in general (and that’s not a good thing; you RWers ought to think about how many babies you’re throwing out with the bath water here).

Cheers,

Harry Eagar: guy in the veal calf office sez: ‘Temperature measurements are available for the whole century.’No, they’re not. Global surface temperature measurements do not start before the 21st c.

Thats wrong in multiple ways.

Mike G in Corvallis: Did you bother to read the linked article? At the time, Holdren also was pushing the possibility of global warming, and claiming an urgent need for The Right People to control his fellow humans … but according to him climate change inevitably would come about because the waste heat from fossil fuel and nuclear power generation will significantly warm the planet:

In Holdren’s world the crisis may change, but the solution is always the same. The fact that he is anywhere close to people with actual power is terrifying.

wb: As an editor of a scientific journal, I must second the comment made above by bill with a small proviso. Occasionally a review will find a gross error in a paper or a major flaw in the experimental method used. This may happen in as many as 5% of the papers rejected. Typically papers are rejected because they offer nothing new of significance. As for the accepted papers, the review confirms the significance of the claim, the citation of relevant significant work, and the general appropriateness of the analysis (from the point of view of the reviewer). It would be a mistake to think that the reviewer has confirmed the “truth” of the manuscript. Indeed even for high impact journals, a large fraction of the published papers are eventually found to be incorrect of seriously lacking in their analysis and conclusions. Thus there is certainly a basis for claiming that the peer review process has a tendency to generate “consensus science.” Is it better than alternatives? In this age of electronic publishing, the system of the Arxiv may be better. Put the paper out and let the reputation of the authors rise or fall with the views of readers. This is an experiment in progress. In any case, withholding primary data under some claim of confidentiality certainly undermines the classic scientific method as well as the completeness of a review and assessment by the readers.

Scientific journals make it much too hard to publish a critical comment on a published paper, even if it is clearly erroneous. This description gives an extreme example, but it is not too far out of the normal range.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18773744/How-to-Publish-a-Scientific-Comment-in-1-2-3-Easy-Steps

zuch:
Scientists are allowed to be wrong. The mark of a good scientist is to look at the evidence and change one’s mind if warranted.

Heh. And if the evidence can’t be seen because it isn’t released, what is a good scientist to do?

If you can show that Holdren still holds this view about impending ice ages, good on ya.You’d probably give him a medal, though.Cheers,

Did you bother to read the linked article? At the time, Holdren also was pushing the possibility of global warming, and claiming an urgent need for The Right People to control his fellow humans … but according to him climate change inevitably would come about because the waste heat from fossil fuel and nuclear power generation will significantly warm the planet:

For the remaining major means of interference with the global heat balance is the release of energy from fossil and nuclear fuels. As pointed out previously, all this energy is ultimately degraded to heat. What are today scattered local effects of its disposition will in time, with the continued growth of population and energy consumption, give way to global warming.

You don’t have to take a second look at the evidence to rule this out as absurd — any competent scientist who took a first look at the evidence or scrawled a back-of-the-envelope calculation would have realized how ridiculous the premise was.

Please tell me you don’t believe that Holdren’s scenario is plausible.

I tend to have a fair number of variables that end up being labeled “foo” or “foobar”. Does that mean my code is completely fouled up beyond repair?

That depends on the code, doesn’t it? Have you made it available for evaluation?

Just the snippet here doesn’t tell you what the code is doing (it seems to be an adjustment to some time measurement, but how could I know?), how the interpolation vector data was generated or derived, or much of anything else. Without an analysis of the whole processing, it’s not obvious that this is wrong.

There’s an interesting discussion of the osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro comment over at Eric S. Raymond’s blog:

krygny Says: Wait just a second. Explain this to me like I’m 12. They didn’t even bother to fudge the data? They hard-coded a hockey stick carrier right into the program?!!

ESR says: Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what they did.

You might also want to read the HARRY_READ_ME text file. My hat is off to Ian “Harry” Harris — he seems to have made a magnificent effort to impart some sense and order into the programs and data that were thrust upon him after he joined CRU in 1996. And the readability of his comments should serve as an inspiration to anyone who has to comment code. But what he had to endure … Oh, Harry, I feel for ya!

zuch, see whether you can read Harry’s text file without screaming out in frustration and sympathy …

So.. we don’t have the coefficients files (just .eps plots of something). But what are all those monthly files? DON’T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that’s useless.. take the above example, the filenames in the _mon and _ann directories are identical, but the contents are not. And the only difference is that one directory is apparently ‘monthly’ and the other ‘annual’ – yet both contain monthly files.

Then there are things like this:

An interesting aside.. David was looking at the v3.00 precip to help National Geographic with an enquiry. I produced a second ‘station’ file with the ‘honest’ counts (see above) and he used that to mask out cells with a 0 count (ie that only had indirect data from ‘nearby’ stations). There were some odd results.. with certain months havign data, and others being missing. After considerable debate and investigation, it was understood that anomdtb calculates normals on a monthly basis. So, where there are 7 or 8 missing values in each month (1961-1990), a station may end up contributing only in certain months of the year, throughout its entire run! This was noticed in the Seychelles, where only October has real data (the remaining months being relaxed to the climatology but excluded by David using the ‘tight’ station mask). There is no easy solution, because essentially it’s an honest result: only October has sufficient values to form a normal, so only October gets anomalised. It’s an unfortunate concidence that it’s the only station in the cell, but it’s not the only one. A ‘solution’ could be for anomdtb to get a bit more involved in the gridding, to check that if a cell only has one station (for one or more years) then it’s all-or-nothing. Maybe if only one month has a normal then it’s dumped and the whole reverts to climatology. Maybe if 4 or more months have normals.. maybe if >0 months have normals and the rest can be brought in with a minor relaxation of the ’75% rule’.. who knows.

One caveat with huge lists of signatories to something or other. I recall during the first attempts at SDI, there was a petition against it signed by shoals of scientists, which was supposed to give it heft. I read a few of them. One, which sticks in mind, was employed at Woods Hole. Implicitly, I was supposed to trust an oceanographer instead of my year in Air Defense (Nike Hercules with info on Nike X, Nike Zeus, and Sprint)

Mike G in Corvallis: People like presidential science advisor John Holdren.

Scientists are allowed to be wrong. The mark of a good scientist is to look at the evidence and change one’s mind if warranted. If you can show that Holdren still holds this view about impending ice ages, good on ya. You’d probably give him a medal, though.

Cheers,

zuch:
“Popular” accounts of science are not exactly peer-reviewed science, and tends towards the spectacular (which is what tends to get the interest of the non-professionals as well).Watch out for such.Cheers

Yeah, you gotta watch out for those irresponsible sensationalists who spread the idea back in the 1970s that an ice age was likely in our immediate future.

People like presidential science advisor John Holdren.

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11578

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11542

Agesilaus: Ok straight from the teams code, one of a number of smoking cannons:
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
—————————-
For those of you who don’t know what a fudge factor is, that is a number that you multiply an inconvenient result with, to make it come out as the predetermined value.

I tend to have a fair number of variables that end up being labeled “foo” or “foobar”. Does that mean my code is completely fouled up beyond repair?

Just the snippet here doesn’t tell you what the code is doing (it seems to be an adjustment to some time measurement, but how could I know?), how the interpolation vector data was generated or derived, or much of anything else. Without an analysis of the whole processing, it’s not obvious that this is wrong.

For instance, one might well do such an interpolated “fudge” on strain gauge resistance versus load, thermocouple voltage, etc.

I think others have mentioned that this adjustment [in tree-ring data, IIRC] is known, stated, and discussed in the literature. If so, not obvious that this is a “fraud”.

Cheers,

What climate instability are you talking about? Over the past 600 million years (and probably a lot longer than that), earth temperature has not varied outside a small range of a few degrees, even though atmospheric chemistry has varied by (in the case of molecular oxygen) perhaps 2 orders of magnitude.

Really Doctor. You have proof it wasn’t inadvertently released, as information from this body has been previously. You also must have proof that the information wasn’t released by someone within the organization, a whistleblower perhaps. Let me guess, you have that proof, but you can’t disclose it because of contracts with third parties that you can’t produce.

Currently, there is zero legitimate evidence that this was a “hack.” If you have some, please provide it.

Toodles,

MPS: These emails, so far as I can tell, change none of the facts: all of the overwhelming evidence in support of global warming is intact, and no successful alternative to human CO2 emissions as being the underlying source has been proposed. As such they support the derogatory treatment of certain contrarians, justifying similar treatment to how other scientific disciplines might treat young-earth creationists.

The corpus of consistent evidence and unfalsified theory underlying AGW hypotheses is as persuasive and thoroughly tested as the corpus underlying radiometric dating?

I, for one, welcome our new data fudging, self-selected peer reviewing overlords.

No, they’re not. Global surface temperature measurements do not start before the 21st c.

This one.

And, very likely, the UK FOIA statutes, but the one I link has no climate policy implications. It’s just a plain old law.

; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
—————————-

For those of you who don’t know what a fudge factor is, that is a number that you multiply an inconvenient result with, to make it come out as the predetermined value. This is how they generated the hockey stick.