Global warming--the Data, and serious debate

[grmorton]

I am starting a new thread because I don't want a thread with cut and paste cartoons, so I would ask people stay focused on the data. Anyone can participate, but I would like people to not merely state opinions, but take the data and show why it does or doesn't support global warming.

I am going to respond here to the last thre posts in the Actually the World isn't warming thread here. The first is a reply to Split Rock

I specifially referred to scientists, not politicians or journalists. An ecological collapse is a worse case scenario, and not one proposed as most likely by the climatology community. In any case, even under such a worse case scenario, life on earth would continue, as it always does. Humans would continue existing as well, but civilization would collapse.

James Hansen comes quite close. And by the way, I don't hear those scientists telling the journalists that what they are saying is crap. They never stand up for the moderate view.

Anyway, here is James Hansen

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next President and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity’s control.

Ok, there is a scientist, The only reason you are unaware of them is that you haven't looked for them.

“Klimakatstrophe is the word of the[/font]
year 2007 chosen by the Society for German
Language. It seems preferable to the cozy
term global warming and even James
Lovelock's more threatening term global
heating
Greenhouse gas emissions occur

from a variety of sources - humans even
exhale carbon dioxide. However, for most
of human history, the carbon dioxide
emissions from all sources did not exceed
Earth's assimilative capacity. After 1980, a
rapid rise began in global average
temperature, which led to melting of ice (e.g.,
glaciers and ice shelves). A global tipping
point may have occurred at about 350 ppm
atmospheric carbon dioxide since, at 385
ppm, disastrous climate changes (e.g.,
unusual droughts and floods) have already
occurred. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) reports indicate that,
if concentrations of atmospheric carbon
dioxide continue to increase, other serious
impacts on human society (e.g., sea level
rise) will probably occur. Undoubtedly,
other tipping points or breakpoints are
looming at higher concentrations, such as 535
ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide.” John Cairns, Jr. “Assimilative Capacity Revisited” Asian J. Exp. Sci., Vol. 22, No. 2, 2008; 177-182, p. 178
from dept of biological sciences VPI.

All nations must together protect the atmosphere in order to prevent climate catastrophe. If even one major industrialized nation does not accept its share of carbon reduction, it will sink other planetary efforts and leave an “orphan share” that must be compensated for elsewhere

"Mary Christina Wood, Ed Whitelaw, Bob Doppelt, Alison Burchell “ Nature’s Trust: A Paradigm for Natural Resources Stewardship” American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract 10253

Comparable studies and other evidence are discussed: climate-induced tropical forest dieback is considered a plausible risk of following an unmitigated emissions scenario.

Andrew White,Melvin G. R. Cannell and Andrew D. Friend
, “CO2 stabilization, climate change and the terrestrial carbon sink” Global Change Biology
Volume 6 Issue 7, Pages 817 - 833[/font][/font]

There, some scientists saying we are about to have terrible consequences due to rising CO2. Can we move on from this pedantic point?

I wouldn't trust anyone's economic estimates at this point in time.

And YECs don't trust anyone's geological analysis. Why is your distrust better than theirs?

Past two years? We are talking about a long-term trend here, Glen... a 2 year reversal doesn't help all that much.

The chart goes for 30 years. Go look again at the chart. Clearly you aren't actually looking at the data. That is the entire time when the satellites have been measuring ice extent scientifically. The southern Ice has been growing.
1980 was greater than 1979. 1996's record was greater than 1980 and 2006's record was greater than 1996. What is so hard about looking at the graph?

Then we need better temperature data.

You haven't even looked at the temperature station data have you? We are comparing today's data against older data, and we don't have good data in the past, and we can't travel back in time to get good data. So, while it is easy for you to say that we need better temperature data, how do you propose getting better temperature data for 1880? I think you will have some difficulty there, but what the heck do I know? I don't beleive in time travel.

Skeptisism is great, but can be taken too far. As a scientists, I am more skeptical than most, either because of my training, or because that is the way I am. However, I accept that the Climatology Community is as competent as any other branch of mainstream science.

So, let's look at the competence of these climatological scientists.

I have posted pictures of thermometers next to air conditioners. Is it competence or incompetence that leads them to approve such stations? Below is Happy Camp California which has about 20 air conditioners pointing at the thermometer.

Please answer this question

And lets ask a very important question. How much temperature variation for a yearly average would you expect two thermometers in towns 20-25 miles apart to have? Should, say, two towns in S. Texas, with basically the same elevation and latitude, separated by 20 miles have more than a half a degree of variation in the annual temperature records? Please answer this.

Unless you can provide reasonable evidence that this global scientific community is less competent than others, I do indeed rely on their experience and judgement.

That is why I called you a believer. You haven't actually checked the data and I fully intend to show how incompetent these guys are at measuring the temperature. It will take some time though.

[quote You mentioned the YEC community. There is little comparison, since, as you know, the YEC community is dishonest from the head down. Are you claiming the Scientific Climatolgy Community is equally dishonest, or just imcompetent? [/quote]

Yes.

Again, unless this is a long-term trend, such short-term reversals will help only a little.

Let's first see if the data can justify any claim about the temperature change.

 

[grmorton]

I would be interested. I've not followed this thread for a while. And lately work has kept me much more engaged and busy, but I'd be interested.

Glad to meet you.

I'm a geochemist by training but over the past several years I've worked as an industrial coatings R&D chemist. However I've bumped my "global climate change" knowledge up a bit when I worked as a question writer recently for an oceanographic science bowl competition.

My "oceanographic" experience amounts to a year as a chem tech at a major university oceanographic research org.

STAND:
I am a firm believer that AGW is real. And further that because we know that the [sup]14[/sup]C signature of a large portion of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere bears the hallmark of combustion of fossil fuels, coupled with the known impact of CO2 as greenhouse gas (my years of doing FTIR analyses on coal and carbon kept me in tune with that as every day my non-N2 flushed FTIR picked up that nice little CO2 spike with every scan), and the added import around the "life-cycle" of a given mole of CO2 in the atmosphere indicates to me that the reality of global warming is; at the very least something we shouldhave a concern over and at the very worst, something we are in dreadful danger of.

I won't deny that the isotopic signature is of fossil fuels. What I deny is that the historical land data can be used. Below is a chart of West Point and Poughkeepsie NY temperature records going back to the early 1800s. Note that these two towns which are very very close, don't move in sync for decades. Neither the change in yearly average, nor the absolute temerature difference are stationary.

I recently attended talks by both the lead R&D scientist from BP and Dr. Hansen from NASA at an oceanographic institute here in SoCal. It is, indeed, something we need to deal with on a massive scale and in a very quick order.

Hansen is an interesting guy. I think he would like to put all oilmen in jail. That doesn't endear me to him.

In another note, you cited an article on siting.

There's an interesting article HERE which discusses the poor station location issue and potential adjustments of the data to better remove the bias:

Originally Posted by Peterson

...the close agreement with the homogeneity-adjusted data from the stations with poor siting make a strong a posteriori case that data from the two stations with good siting are indeed representative of the climate of the area. Slight unrepresentativeness may still arise, however, because climatic changes and variations may differ slightly with altitude, latitude, longitude, and natural land surface. The adjustments at the stations with poor siting were, for the most part, independent of the well-sited stations, but changed their composite time series from being very different to agreeing very well with the time series from the well-sited stations, indicating that the homogeneity adjustments applied to the data from the poorly sited stations compensated for bias-producing changes. This result also suggests that the wider set of stations, after adjustment of the data from poorly sited stations, is truly representative of the climate trends and variability of the region.

Peterson, T.C., 2006, Examination of potential biases in air temperature caused by poor station location, American Meteorological Society Pg 1073
​

​

I eagerly went to it because I wanted to see if he would actually show the raw data out of the database. He didn't And he didn't show the bad stations. Typical!

I have the US Historical Climate Network and I pulled up those 5 stations in eastern Colorado, Las Animas, Lamar, Eads, Cheyenne Wells, and Holly. THese towns are all within about 70 miles of each other. These are the stations your article talks about.

With that, look at the chart below. Holly claims to have had an entire year of nearly frozen weather in 1922 (remember these are yearly averages, not daily temperatures). While just a few tens of miles away Lamar and Eads were having much better yearly temperatures. If that temperature is true, then the problem is that all the cattle in Holly would have starved to death in 1922.

Note also that Eads, had bad years in the 1990s, where the temperature dropped dramatically from the towns just around it.

Now, you will say that we can remove these spikes. That is indeed easy because they are so ridiculous. But what can't be removed is the 7 degree F spread across this region of relatively flat ground in Eastern Colorado.

 

[grmorton]

In another note THaumaturgy said

Not necessarily. I'm more than happy to continue on with this one.

I didn't see this until I started this one. I really didn't want to be in a cut and paste comic strip laced thread. I like things a bit more focused

Split Rock has presented some interesting counterpoints as well. I think, in point of fact, that economically there is compelling reason to deal with this topic in an agressively conservative (ie "worst case") scenario.

You might wait for a response before declaring victory. Things usually work out better that way.

Here's some issues to note that are completely independent of any potential bias in human temperature measurements:

Plant Hardiness Zones in the U.S. are shifting north due to global warming:



This is crucially damning evidence against any systematic bias in temperature stations. The plants can hardly be reading the IPCC reports. But again, I don't think this means life on earth will vanish. Just the U.S. economic system (built largely on agricultural self-sufficiency over the past couple centuries) will collapse and that won't be good.

First, off, the earth can warm without it having anything to do with CO2. ARe you aware that the sun has been more active in the past 20 years than at any time in the past 8000 years? From that rag of anti-science, Nature magazine.

"The reconstruction shows that the current episode of high sunspot number, which has lasted for the past 70 years, has been the most intense and has had the longest duration of any in the past 8,000 years. Based on the length of previous episodes of high activity, the probability that the current event will continue until the end of the twenty-first century is quite low (1%)." Paula J. Reimer, "Spots from Rings," Nature, 431(2004), p. 1047

In case you don't know it , when the sun has lots of sunspots it puts out lots of energy. Lots of energy means lots of heat and the earth will warm. So, what you say can perfectly well be true and still have nothing to do with CO2 or AGW

I don't think anyone reasonably expects the CO2 to necessarily mean the end of life. If it went the way of Venus, yes, it would. But as you've pointed out the globe has had higher CO2 levels. However, I find it unlikely that the human race would necessarily be able to survive the attendent temperatures and atmospheric conditions. Especially if our civilization first is decimated.

Well, I quoted some scientific hysteriacs in my reply to Split Rock. I loved Hansen's claim that if we don't do something the climate will slip out of human control. Don't you think that is hugely funny??? When did humanity ever control the climate?

I think we are seeing the ripples before the tsunami (or the "receeding waterline" before the tsunami, to be more technically correct).

Mixed metaphor. Tsunami's are wave phenomenon, and one doesn't always have a withdrawal before the water comes ashore. Climate warming is not subject to wave-like behavior. If CO2 is heating us up, it will not cool us down first. Something else must do that.

In a final note you wrote:

Ecological collapse would necessitate a "stressing" of the system, surely many biological groupings will die out. No different from many other known mass extinctions in geologic history. And we all know that life did not end in most of those.

We agree on that, which is why the hysteria I see in the media, driving those who don't know anything about geological past, to do things that might be ill-advised.

I will definitely have to read this. I am from the Midwest in the U.S. I am from an agricultural state the likes of which is almost unrivaled on the planet earth. It is an amazing thing to behold. America currently produces a huge amount of its agricultural output from my current home-state of California, which, by all estimates, is decidedly not optimum in terms of water availability (it's main advantage is longer or double growing seasons). It should not match the state of my birth but in some cases it does. It is largely a synthetic agricultural system. The key being that when water issues become a major factor and make California's agricultural system completely unsustainable (as it most assuredly will sooner or later), then my home state can still sustain a major agricultural output. It was a breadbasket long before California "forced" nature into being one. It will be one again, unless we shift the "hardiness zones" significantly northward.

I am in the oil industry. I also own a ranch. I will tell you that efforts to curb fossil fuels is so incredibly short-sighted from an agricultural perspective as to be suicidal or auto-genicidal. Run the logic with me. 1.5 million wheat plants are planted per acre on a wheat farm. 30,000 corn plants, likewise. How do you expect to run a 20 sq mile farm planting all those plants without a mechanized tractor? The tractor won't run without liquid fuel. One can't attach an extension cord to a combine. And 1% of world energy use goes to the manufacture of fertilizer. Mostly that energy is oil and natural gas. Cut out the oil and natural gas, and we have no fertilizer. That will mean a 40% drop in crop yields. Since the world has only about 60 days of wheat supply at any one time, such an event will mean many of you will have to starve to death, should we dispense with fossil fuels. Hope you like hunger.

And my real worry is that we are on the very verge of a plummeting oil supply. I have spent my life looking for oil and have found a billion barrels (with my colleagues). That lasts the world 2 weeks. We find 3 barrels for every 10 we burn, so not to fear, soon we will begin to have a world without at least one of the carbon fuels. Hope you like not having those tractors

I should think the large-scale collapse of food crop infrastructure in the Midwestern U.S. would result in significantly more impact than a mere 1.5% GDP.

It won't collapse because of heat. It will collapse because we pull too much water from the aquifers (which has nothing to do with CO2) or because we run out of energy. I have yet to see any reason to think that warming will hurt agriculture. Precipitation is up as the earth warmed over the past few years.

But look even further, we do have the potential of sea level rise and a huge portion of our population is currently on the peripheries of this continent. Large-scale migrations from shore to inland must surely impact our economy. Couple that with the fact that I currently live in Southern California. We won't be able to move the millions upon millions of people just a few miles inland from here...that's a desert. We will move them hundreds upon hundreds of miles inland. Again, a massive stressor on habitable lands.

We are not the cause of the sea's rise. Are you aware that 125,000 years ago, Greenland was nearly devoid of ice and the CO2 level was quite low?

"The last interglacial is an interesting analog for the future, because the Arctic was several degrees Celsius warmer than during the 20th century, within the. scope of projections for the coming decades. However, the analogy only goes so far, because melting of the Greenland ice sheet during MIS 5e was driven mainly by greater summer insolation, not by increased levels of greenhouse gases. During MIS 11 (three inter-glacials before MIS 5e), summer insolation was not very different from that during the Holocene. MIS 11, however, lasted from 425,000 to 375,000 years ago, twice the duration of MIS 5e. This interglacial thus provides a different analog for the future, allowing us to examine what happens to the ice sheet and surrounding land mass when subjected to protracted warmth. MIS 11 cannot easily be studied by looking at ice cores: Any ice this old has long since melted away or has been subject to irreparable thinning and distortion at the base of the ice sheet. On the other hand, a continuous record exists offshore"
Eric J. Steig ad Alexander P. Wolfe, "Sprucing Up Greenland," Science, 320(2008), p. 1595

Indeed the 100th Meridian is, if I recall Cadillac Desert correctly, kind of the demarcation of what is the eastern "productive and agriculturally robust" landscape with regards to water availability and the "high plains and deserts" of the west.

We are not "optimized" in the U.S. Our economy is robust, but massive shifts even in "growing zones" and "population densities" will, I should think, affect more than a mere 1.5% GDP.

But again, I have not yet read the report you linked.

You are correct about the 100th Meridian--the western border of Oklahoma, but population densities have nothing to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Other activities cause lots of babies.

It is a matter more of paying attention to the signal now, while it is smaller, that we might be able to stop the problem as it grows larger.

After a week or so of seeing the data, if you believe that the signal is there, you are a better man than I (or will be a more pollyannaish). Look at the raw data from Colorado I just posted.

All models are best fits to the data, and while there may be uncertainty around any data set, presumably a good "Gauge R&R" helps us understand the source of variability. Models are not merely "black boxes". Each model can, if properly populated, yield information about the validity of the input variables. That is where variance component analysis comes in handy.

I know what a model is. I was in charge of reservoir simulation for Kerr-McGee for 5 years. Models are only as good as the set of assumptions that go into them.

I could not agree with you more. However, I will place the caveat that the data is out there and can be verified. I am impressed by the monolithic nature of the response of the vastness of Climate Research scientists, the majority of whom appear to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. More than mere global warming, but anthropogenic.

When I got into science, the monolithic response to someone saying that there were thrust faults in the Gulf of Mexico would have been termination of employment. Today we know they are there having drilled them. When I got into science, the monolithic response of doctors to the claim that H. pylori was the cause of ulcers, was that that is stupid because it is known that it is stress. Before I got in science, in the 1920s, there was a monolithic consensus in geology that there had been land bridges and continental drift was ridiculous. Monolithic response is a herd mentality. I do a lot of investing. Don't do what the herd is doing or you will get crushed.

Again, to veer back to statistics, with a large enough sample the Central Limit Theorem leads me to believe the majority of scientists who study this are likely not coordinating on a massive error. But, there is always a possibility. It just becomes less likely.

They are ignoring the error. Answer this. Is it competent to approve the location of a weather themometer next to an air conditioner exhaust? Tell me that.

I, in my ignorance of details on this, must rely to some extent on the climate scientists on this. Some of whom I've had the pleasure to meet or work at the same facility as them.

That is the problem we all have, which is why I spot check the data. That is when I got horrified

I've yet to meet scientists who agree on much of anything without a fight over it. That's why I like the robustness of science.

I too love the fight. the grand debate is what is fun.

I think in my previous post I forgot to post Poughkeepsie and West point. Look at the bad trend for decades from stations very close together.

 

[TemperateSeaIsland]

I am in the oil industry. I also own a ranch. I will tell you that efforts to curb fossil fuels is so incredibly short-sighted from an agricultural perspective as to be suicidal or auto-genicidal. Run the logic with me. 1.5 million wheat plants are planted per acre on a wheat farm. 30,000 corn plants, likewise. How do you expect to run a 20 sq mile farm planting all those plants without a mechanized tractor? The tractor won't run without liquid fuel. One can't attach an extension cord to a combine. And 1% of world energy use goes to the manufacture of fertilizer. Mostly that energy is oil and natural gas. Cut out the oil and natural gas, and we have no fertilizer. That will mean a 40% drop in crop yields. Since the world has only about 60 days of wheat supply at any one time, such an event will mean many of you will have to starve to death, should we dispense with fossil fuels. Hope you like hunger.

And my real worry is that we are on the very verge of a plummeting oil supply. I have spent my life looking for oil and have found a billion barrels (with my colleagues). That lasts the world 2 weeks. We find 3 barrels for every 10 we burn, so not to fear, soon we will begin to have a world without at least one of the carbon fuels. Hope you like not having those tractors

This to me is the real reason why we should get off of oil at the very least as an energy source and develop an alternative. Removing our dependence on oil as a feed stock for the chemical industry may be impossible but hopefully bioengineering may help us out a little bit in this regard though.

 

[grmorton]

This to me is the real reason why we should get off of oil at the very least as an energy source and develop an alternative. Removing our dependence on oil as a feed stock for the chemical industry may be impossible but hopefully bioengineering may help us out a little bit in this regard though.

I agree, but, I looked into wind or solar power for my ranch. To fuel my ranch house with the power I use here in Houston where I live, would take $88,000 for wind, and $250,000 for solar. Unless there are some real break throughs, this won't solve the problem. Who has that kind of money hanging around?

Let's go back to global warming.


The Siting handbook says that if you put a thermometer on a parking garage, or roof time it will give you a temperature that is at least 5 deg C hotter. These are the class 5 stations. Anthony Watts has led a volunteer survey of US stations. 13% of them are class 5.

Class 1 Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3
(<19). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at
least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete
surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of
the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.
Class 2 Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. Artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5 deg.
Class 3 (error 1 deg C) Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10
meters.
Class 4 (error > 2 deg C) Artificial heating sources <10 meters.
Class 5 (error ? 5 deg C) Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.

Now if 13% of the world's thermometers are affected by this and the temperature bias is only 5 deg C, what would that mean for the global average temperature? Well, if all thermometers had a 5 degree bias, then the average would also have a 5 deg bias. But only 13% have it, so that would mean that the 13% has a 13% effect on average global temperature. Thus, we find that 13 x 5 = .65 C. If, 100 years ago, there were no parking lots, air conditioners etc, this effect alone would mean that the global temperature would have risen by .65 deg.
Climate at a glance says that the global temperature has risent by about that much since 1880. It all can't be due to parking lots.

So, where lies the discrepancy? Well 70% of the earth is ocean, so lets take only 30% of the 13 percent. That means that 0.195 degrees of the rise is due to class 5 stations. Then if 53% of the stations are class 4 and subject to a 2 degree upward bias, then that means that 0.318 degrees of global warming is due to class 4 bias. These two classes alone can account for .513 degrees C of global warming. Maybe the problem isn't as bad as we think, especially given that the tropospheric temperature measured by satellites don't show warming.

Clearly the answer to this is that proper corrections are made, but, I really do want to know how they know if the air conditioner is running when the temperature is taken. Anyone want to tell me how they know when the airconditioning is running?

A friend criticized the above calculation and cut it down to half the values I calculated. I then pointed out to him that even so, that would mean half of the current global warming is due to air conditioning. Below is a graph from Anthony Watt's station survey which shows the class percentages of the stations they have surveyed.

One other set of questions for Thaumaturgy. I read that article on correcting data stations. I chose a few quotes. First, the meteorologists are aware of how bad the siting is, yet they do nothing about it. Is that an example of competence?

THOMAS C. PETERSON, &#8220;EXAMINATION OF POTENTIAL
BIASES IN AIR TEMPERATURECAUSED BY POOR STATION
LOCATIONS,&#8221; American Meteorological Society, Aug, 2006, p. 1073]
Davey and Pielke (2005; hereafter Davey and Pielke)
performed an excellent analysis of the microclimate
exposures of weather-observing stations in eastern
Colorado that found that the siting of many stations
does not conform to National Weather Service or
World Meteorological Organization siting standards.
Indeed, they concluded that sites with good temperature-
exposure characteristics were in the minority.

They note that for many purposes, the raw data is used as it is:

For many
purposes for which station data are used, the actual
observed temperatures are used directly. However, to
examine the change through time, temperature time
series are typically converted into anomaly time series
by subtracting out the mean temperature from a base
period, such as 1971&#8211;2000 (e.g., Jones and Moberg
2003). Unlike actual temperatures, station anomaly
values can be averaged together without adversely impacting
the time series when a particularly warm or
cold location has some observations missing, because
temperature anomalies are much more geographically
coherent than actual temperatures.

Furthermore, Gallo (2005) found
microclimate-related differences exceeding 0.5°C
in pairs of stations, differences that could not be
explained by either latitude, elevation, instrumentation,
observing practices, or quality of the siting.

Well the earth has heated up by 0.65deg C over the past 100 years, yet we find that the error bar is 0.5 from these guys.

Is it competence that makes their record keeping be so sloppy?

Unfortunately though, some station changes are
not documented in the station history file. A new adjustment
methodology for the USHCN that also uses
statistical techniques to find undocumented changes
is in the evaluation phase (Williams and Menne 2005).&#8221;

Now, when they corrected the badly sited stations, they corrected the trend to match that of global warming. How convenient. They get to chose which stations are good, and then adjust everyone to their trend. That is bad science.

&#8220;The homogeneity adjustments applied to the stations with poor siting
makes their trend very similar to the trend at the stations with good
siting.&#8221;

&#8220;Again, the homogeneity adjustments applied to the stations
with poor siting make their trend very similar to the trend at the
stations with good siting.&#8221;

&#8220;Also,
if the analysis had included the
incompletely homogenized data
from Holly, the results would have
indicated somewhat less warming at
the stations with poor siting.&#8221;

 

[thaumaturgy]

Just found this thread (sorry!) but also right on the cusp of heading into an afternoon's smorgasbord of meetings. Wheee!

I will attempt to get back to this ASAP, but probably not until tomorrow at the earliest.

Thanks for importing the points from the other thread, Glen.

 

[grmorton]

Just found this thread (sorry!) but also right on the cusp of heading into an afternoon's smorgasbord of meetings. Wheee!

I will attempt to get back to this ASAP, but probably not until tomorrow at the earliest.

Thanks for importing the points from the other thread, Glen.

Mei wen ti, as they say in China "no problem". I might as well post the satellite temperature data and see if anyone else wants to comment. The satellite data from Huntsville measures the temperature of the lower troposphere. As you can see the chart goes up and down but over 30 years, the tropospheric temperature is just about what it was 30 years ago, only a tiny tiny bit of net warming

You can get this data from http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

 

[thaumaturgy]

First, off, the earth can warm without it having anything to do with CO2. ARe you aware that the sun has been more active in the past 20 years than at any time in the past 8000 years? From that rag of anti-science, Nature magazine.

Solar irradiance data is something I am relatively unfamiliar with. From what I've read and information based on data from the Physikalishe-Meteorologishe Observatorium Davois World Radiation Center (PMOD) (HERE) there has been negligible increase in solar irradiance since 1978, as opposed to the last 30 years when the global temps have been rising fastest.

According to the Max Plank Institute it looks as if the solar irradiance has been relatively constant since the 1940's

(SOURCE)

Again, I must claim some ignorance of this topic since I am not a radiation physics person.

The folks at RealClimate.org take a measured approach:

This is not to say that there is no solar influence on climate change, only that establishing such a link is more difficult then many assume. What is generally required is a consistent signal over a number of cycles (either the 11 year sunspot cycle or more long term variations), similar effects if the timeseries are split, and sufficient true degrees of freedom that the connection is significant and that it explains a non-negligible fraction of the variance. These are actually quite stiff hurdles and so the number of links that survive this filter are quite small. In some rough order of certainty we can consider that the 11 year solar cycle impacts on the following are well accepted: stratospheric ozone, cosmogenic isotope production, upper atmospheric geopotential heights, stratospheric temperatures and (slightly less certain and with small magnitudes ~0.1 deg C) tropospheric and ocean temperatures. More marginal are impacts on wintertime tropospheric circulation (like the NAO). It is also clear that if there really was a big signal in the data, it would have been found by now. The very fact that we are still arguing about statisitical significance implies that whatever signal there is, is small.
(SOURCE)

The relative importance of solar forcing in the debate may be overstated. Certainly in light of any claims around the role of radiance over the past 3 to 4 decades during a notable increase in temperature.

Well, I quoted some scientific hysteriacs in my reply to Split Rock. I loved Hansen's claim that if we don't do something the climate will slip out of human control.

Well, indeed, if we are directly reponsible for a major forcing in the equation, then most assuredly we must do our part. If we are directly responsible for the unprecedented release of a known greenhouse gas at a rate thousands or millions of times its original sequestration in the fossil fuels, we must take responsibility. "Human control" is possible in that we can ameliorate our impact.

Nothing more. Hansen and others don't mean humans can control the weather, but we can control the parts that we are responsible for.

That's kind of the point, isn't it?

Mixed metaphor. Tsunami's are wave phenomenon, and one doesn't always have a withdrawal before the water comes ashore.

But one often does (and that was my point "metaphor about warning", nothing about the "cyclicity" of CO2 or anything like that:

leading-depression wave: Initial tsunami wave is a trough, causing a draw down of water level. (SOURCE: NOAA National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program History 1995-2005)

Tenacatita Bay minutes before a tsunami struck. Normally, the entire area is covered with water, but the bay was sucked dry by a leadling-depression tsunami. [Courtesy of Josef and Helga Lehemen] A family eating breakfast on their patio felt the earthquake and reported that 15 minutes later, the bay began to empty. The son, who frequently dives for shellfish near the exposed rocks, reported that the "normal" depth at the point of largest withdrawal is 5–6 m.
(SOURCE: American Geophysical Union)

The first wave arrived as expected but it was not noticed by the harbor control. Mr. Macee said he was in his boat when he first noticed the withdrawal. He was able to watch the tsunami from his boat looking at the water elevation change at the piling and breakwater.
(SOURCE: Tsunami Research Center)

Sorry 'bout the aside there. Just defending my "metaphor".

Climate warming is not subject to wave-like behavior. If CO2 is heating us up, it will not cool us down first. Something else must do that.

I did not in any way mean to imply this is "cyclical" in nature. I was merely using the metaphor as "warning". That's all.

We agree on that, which is why the hysteria I see in the media, driving those who don't know anything about geological past, to do things that might be ill-advised.

Well, to be fair to my point, I meant that life and the earth will go along just fine as it has for many giga annum, but we likely won't. I'm rather more concerned for us . Even moreso when I think there is a real possiblity we will be directly responsible for our own demise and the demise of countless other species who, like us, may not adapt quickly.

I am in the oil industry. I also own a ranch. I will tell you that efforts to curb fossil fuels is so incredibly short-sighted from an agricultural perspective as to be suicidal or auto-genicidal.

Believe me I come from a training that set me on a course to wind up in petroleum or coal. I specialized in those areas in my grad school work. I have a soft spot in my heart for all things fossil-fuel, but I am also not looking at this from an economic point of view primarily. I worry that since we :

1. Know CO2 is a greenhouse gas
2. Know we are liberating CO2 at a rate much much faster than it was originally sequestered (balances and rates)
3. Know much of the recent rise in CO2 can be isotopically traced right back to our burning of fossil fuels

we really need to act and, if the climate scientists are correct, then we need to do something.

When you pile on the additional need to deal with limited resources of a finite extent (oil and to a lesser extent coal for the immediate future) it is an excellent time to take note and start turning the ship around. It won't happen over night and there'll always be a role for petroleum and organics in our industries. Maybe just not in a way that it generates huge CO2 loads into the atmosphere.

Run the logic with me. 1.5 million wheat plants are planted per acre on a wheat farm. 30,000 corn plants, likewise. How do you expect to run a 20 sq mile farm planting all those plants without a mechanized tractor? The tractor won't run without liquid fuel. One can't attach an extension cord to a combine. And 1% of world energy use goes to the manufacture of fertilizer. Mostly that energy is oil and natural gas. Cut out the oil and natural gas, and we have no fertilizer.

Don't just limit yourself. You have no plastics or polymers (with the exception of some newer biopolymers). No one is advocating the total elimination of petroleum. But, again, if something can be powered to move around, it can presumably, with the appropriate battery technology, be done using electricity which can be produced any number of ways without carbon combustion (nuclear, wind, solar).

That will mean a 40% drop in crop yields.

ONLY if we wait until the last minute and have no alternative systems in place. If we don't start the process of weaning ourselves off of transportation fuels from carbon we will never get to that point.

Then, ultimately we are at the beck and call of the suppliers and the vagueries of world politics or, ultimately, the depletion of a non-renewable resource.

We will face the issues sooner or later. Who better to do it than the most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen, and when better to start than now?

And my real worry is that we are on the very verge of a plummeting oil supply. I have spent my life looking for oil and have found a billion barrels (with my colleagues). That lasts the world 2 weeks.

Doesn't that shock you? The figures there. All the oil you've been involved in finding burned up in 2 weeks.

We find 3 barrels for every 10 we burn, so not to fear, soon we will begin to have a world without at least one of the carbon fuels. Hope you like not having those tractors

"Peak Oil" or the more prosaic "depletion of a non-renewable resource" is very important to me. I suggest we get off carbon for transportation and energy production as soon as possible if only to allow this precious commodity to last longer. We need it for higher value things like the infrastructure of our chemical industries (plastics, polymers, etc.) rather than merely burning it up so we drive the Hummer the grocery store.

It won't collapse because of heat. It will collapse because we pull too much water from the aquifers (which has nothing to do with CO2) or because we run out of energy. I have yet to see any reason to think that warming will hurt agriculture. Precipitation is up as the earth warmed over the past few years.

It may not hurt agriculture overall, but it will most assuredly hurt our agriculture.

We are not the cause of the sea's rise. Are you aware that 125,000 years ago, Greenland was nearly devoid of ice and the CO2 level was quite low?

Not necessarily germane to the present point. 125,000 years ago I'm sure the sea levels were quite different. Denude Greenland today of all its ice and I'm sure there's a massive impact to U.S. and world population centers.

That's the point. We are not talking about earth 125,000 years ago when mankind was little more than wandering group of grunting primates. We are talking about present day earth when mankind has a vested interest in forestalling the effects of his direct actions.

CO2 is a known greenhouse gas. That is incontrovertible. The relative forcings and the relative "lifespan" of CO2 in the atmosphere once emplaced make it a serious concern. We are directly responsible for planting the seeds of what could be our own demise.

You are correct about the 100th Meridian--the western border of Oklahoma, but population densities have nothing to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Other activities cause lots of babies.

No, that wasn't my point. My point was that sustainable agriculture, in a highly stressed environment, will be where the largest populations will be required to live. Hence it would make California what it once was, a semi-populate desert. And sustainable agriculture will only be of any measurable size east of the 100th Meridian. Populations will shift which will, by definition, carry a cost and will further strain infrastructure in the now more highly densely populated eastern half of the U.S.

I know what a model is. I was in charge of reservoir simulation for Kerr-McGee for 5 years. Models are only as good as the set of assumptions that go into them.

Then you will agree that any model can be assessed for bias and the relative strength of the model lies in full assessment of the residuals as well as an appreciation of the Gauge studies underlying the inputs.

When I got into science, the monolithic response to someone saying that there were thrust faults in the Gulf of Mexico would have been termination of employment. Today we know they are there having drilled them. When I got into science, the monolithic response of doctors to the claim that H. pylori was the cause of ulcers, was that that is stupid because it is known that it is stress. Before I got in science, in the 1920s, there was a monolithic consensus in geology that there had been land bridges and continental drift was ridiculous. Monolithic response is a herd mentality. I do a lot of investing. Don't do what the herd is doing or you will get crushed.

I am fully aware of how science can be mistaken. I, too, know that from being in science since stepping into undergrad 26 years ago. I know it from a solid reading of the history of science. However, I am also aware that, as an earth scientist, as a former oceanographic chem tech, as someone who spent years studying coal and kerogen as well as environmental applications of carbon materials, that there are things we need be mindful of in regards to these things.

I assure you, I am not merely doing what the herd does. I am hardly a complete barefoot pilgrim in these woods.

They are ignoring the error. Answer this. Is it competent to approve the location of a weather themometer next to an air conditioner exhaust? Tell me that.

Not, it is not. But again, as you must surely know from your years as a scientist, models are built from gauge inputs that contain errors. Both human and pure noise. The best we can do is be mindful of those errors so we can better assess our p-values when running the F-tests on the statistics.

 

[grmorton]

Solar irradiance data is something I am relatively unfamiliar with. From what I've read and information based on data from the Physikalishe-Meteorologishe Observatorium Davois World Radiation Center (PMOD) (HERE) there has been negligible increase in solar irradiance since 1978, as opposed to the last 30 years when the global temps have been rising fastest.

Well, one must not stop at merely 30 years. Let's cite one of the IPCC documents and a graph therein. Surely they are not global warming skeptics, yet their chart backs up what I say. See below.


Well the IPCC seems to agree that the sun's output is higher today than even 400 years ago. Since the IPCC's conclusions are indubitable by AGW advocates, I am sure that you will agree that the sun's output is greater

The relative importance of solar forcing in the debate may be overstated. .

There are other problems with the past few years. I do hope somewhere in this reply you will answer the question about the competence of approving setting a thermometer next to an airconditioner exhaust fan.

Well, indeed, if we are directly reponsible for a major forcing in the equation, then most assuredly we must do our part. If we are directly responsible for the unprecedented release of a known greenhouse gas at a rate thousands or millions of times its original sequestration in the fossil fuels, we must take responsibility. "Human control" is possible in that we can ameliorate our impact.

But are we responsible if air conditioner exhaust and urban heat island effects , heating the thermometer, makes it appear as if the earth is warming when it isn't?

Nothing more. Hansen and others don't mean humans can control the weather, but we can control the parts that we are responsible for.

That is the spin-room quality. He said the climate was slipping out of our control. That must presuppose that we actually can control the climate. We can't.

But one often does (and that was my point "metaphor about warning", nothing about the "cyclicity" of CO2 or anything like that:



Sorry 'bout the aside there. Just defending my "metaphor".

That's ok, I expect you to defend what you say. I admire that. I will tell you that given that my daughter-in-law has Malaysian relatives, of whom we were unsure if they were alive or dead after the Indonesian earthquate, I became quite interested in that event. I collected every single video I could get from that event. I can assure you that they don't always start with a retreat of the sea. It all depends upon what direction the water was pushed. If the ocean bottom rises near land, the wall of water doesn't need a retreat. I have spent my life in the area of wave phenomenon.

Well, to be fair to my point, I meant that life and the earth will go along just fine as it has for many giga annum, but we likely won't.

So? the average life of a mammalian species is about 3 million years. We may already be pushing the limit. People act as if evolution stopped with us.

I'm rather more concerned for us . Even moreso when I think there is a real possiblity we will be directly responsible for our own demise and the demise of countless other species who, like us, may not adapt quickly.

Not by CO2. By using up our resources to the point that we run out of energy and start wars over the remaining resources, maybe.

Believe me I come from a training that set me on a course to wind up in petroleum or coal. I specialized in those areas in my grad school work. I have a soft spot in my heart for all things fossil-fuel, but I am also not looking at this from an economic point of view primarily. I worry that since we :

1. Know CO2 is a greenhouse gas
2. Know we are liberating CO2 at a rate much much faster than it was originally sequestered (balances and rates)
3. Know much of the recent rise in CO2 can be isotopically traced right back to our burning of fossil fuels

I don't disagree with this, but what exactly is the temperature change for a doubling of CO2? The earth has seen 3500+ ppm of CO2 and nothing bad happened. That is 10 times more than the present levels. These are the various estimates of the temperature increase for a doubling of CO2. Which is the real one?

Sensitivity estimate Source Date
5 Arrhenius 1896
2.3 Manabe and Wetherald 1967
3 Charny Committee report 1979
1.5-4.5 IPCC 1990
1.7-4.2 IPCC 2001
Steering Commit te on Probabilistic Estimates of Climate Sensitivity, Estimating Climate Sensitivity, Washington: National Academies Press, 2003), p. 7

We cant continue to spew out CO2. We will run out of fossil fuel by the middle part of this century. Heaven help the economy. And if you don't believe the 2050 number, I have never heard anyone say we will escaped the 21st century with any fossil fuel. When oil production drops, and we use more coal, we turn out 200 year supply of coal into a 44 year supply.

we really need to act and, if the climate scientists are correct, then we need to do something.

So far you haven't commented on the actual data. Are you ignoring it? Why does the raw data look like it does? Is it evidence of competence to approve the placement of a thermometer on a hot roof top, or a hot parking lot, or next to an air conditioner? Please answer this.

When you pile on the additional need to deal with limited resources of a finite extent (oil and to a lesser extent coal for the immediate future) it is an excellent time to take note and start turning the ship around. It won't happen over night and there'll always be a role for petroleum and organics in our industries. Maybe just not in a way that it generates huge CO2 loads into the atmosphere.

Don't just limit yourself. You have no plastics or polymers (with the exception of some newer biopolymers). No one is advocating the total elimination of petroleum. But, again, if something can be powered to move around, it can presumably, with the appropriate battery technology, be done using electricity which can be produced any number of ways without carbon combustion (nuclear, wind, solar).

Believe it or not, we only have about a 40 year supply of nuclear fuel. A reactor uses 6 kg/sec of u235. Wind won't supply more than a tiny percentage of energy and to power my ranch with solar would cost about $250,000. That is totally uneconomic. INdeed, when I was looking at solar, the salesman told me not to beleive the wattage on the panel. That is only for the panel in a 70 deg F lab with light perpendicular. When it gets hotter, the output drops. When the light isn't perpendicular, the light drops. And, he told me that the pay out time for solar is 50 years; the life of the panel is 30 years. Solar is a pipedream.


of crop yield drops

ONLY

if we wait until the last minute and have no alternative systems in place. If we don't start the process of weaning ourselves off of transportation fuels from carbon we will never get to that point.

So, I take it you haven't actually priced solar and wind for your place. My ranch would take $88 k to power by wind, but that is only if I can build 80 ft towers because there are lots of trees where my ranch is.

Then, ultimately we are at the beck and call of the suppliers and the vagueries of world politics or, ultimately, the depletion of a non-renewable resource.

We will face the issues sooner or later. Who better to do it than the most technologically advanced society the world has ever seen, and when better to start than now?

Stopping the burning of fossil fuel won't help us

Doesn't that shock you? The figures there. All the oil you've been involved in finding burned up in 2 weeks.

I was the one who gave you that statistic. Of course it shocks me. It is why I bought a ranch. It is why many oil men are doing the same. Stopping the burning of fossil fuels will advance the day that we have to live as our 19th century ancestors lived. There is no replacement for fossil fuel. Period. I was a technology director for Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas. One of the things I did was look at what could replace oil. Energetically nothing would do it. Not hydrogen (where is your hydrogen mine?), not wind, solar or other things.

“ By contrast, the two technologies we most commonly associate with the alternative energy label- solar energy and wind power - together provide less than half of 1 percent of the world total. Indeed, if you add up all the solar photovoltaic cells now running worldwide, the combined output - around 2,000 meg¬awatts - barely rivals the output of two coal-fired power plants.”

By 2012, New Scientists Oc 11, 2008, p. 33 says that wind will only be able to generate 3% of world electricity. that is only about 1.5% of world energy. Big deal.

Oil use is 3952 million tonnes of oil equivalent
Natural gas is 2637 million tonnes of oil equivalent
Coal generates electricity and represents 3177 million tonnes of oil equivalent

Nuclear is 622 million tonnes of oil equivalent
hydro is 709 million tonnes of oil equivalent. What you can see is that oil and natural gas are about 55% of world energy. Wind is 3$ of Coal, nuclear and hydro. Big big big, deal.

"Peak Oil" or the more prosaic "depletion of a non-renewable resource" is very important to me. I suggest we get off carbon for transportation and energy production as soon as possible if only to allow this precious commodity to last longer. We need it for higher value things like the infrastructure of our chemical industries (plastics, polymers, etc.) rather than merely burning it up so we drive the Hummer the grocery store.

coal is what generates our electricity and if we all bought electric cars, we would need a doubling of coal burning. That ain't going to solve the CO2 problem. I am always amazed that people don't actually look at the numbers before suggesting this option.

Not necessarily germane to the present point. 125,000 years ago I'm sure the sea levels were quite different. Denude Greenland today of all its ice and I'm sure there's a massive impact to U.S. and world population centers.

My point is that there were no cars and CO2 was low. And we panic today about a rise in CO2

That's the point. We are not talking about earth 125,000 years ago when mankind was little more than wandering group of grunting primates. We are talking about present day earth when mankind has a vested interest in forestalling the effects of his direct actions.

CO2 is a known greenhouse gas. That is incontrovertible. The relative forcings and the relative "lifespan" of CO2 in the atmosphere once emplaced make it a serious concern. We are directly responsible for planting the seeds of what could be our own demise.

Yes, CO2 is a known greenhouse gas, with an unknown sensitivity to a doubling. The IPCC has used a lot of different values for the temperature response to a doubling of CO2.

Uncertain is an understatement. Again I mention the temperature sensitivities for a doubling of CO2 claimed by various authors in this decade

2.3+/-9 Hoffert and Covey(1992)
1.0-9.3 Andronova and Sclesinger (2001)
1.0-5.0 Harvey and Kaufman (2002)
1.4-7.7 Forest et al, (2002)

And the 2 IPCC reports

1.5-4.5 IPCC 1990
1.7-4.2 IPCC 2001

The low end is no problem, the high ends would be a problem. No one knows. Higher temperature means higher evaporation and more clouds, greater albedo and a negative feed back on warming. No one knows, not even the IPCC. today they use 5.35.


You still haven't addressed t he issue of the competence of the meteorologists approving the siting of thermometers next to air conditioners. Do you approve of this?

Then you will agree that any model can be assessed for bias and the relative strength of the model lies in full assessment of the residuals as well as an appreciation of the Gauge studies underlying the inputs.

I am fully aware of how science can be mistaken. I, too, know that from being in science since stepping into undergrad 26 years ago. I know it from a solid reading of the history of science. However, I am also aware that, as an earth scientist, as a former oceanographic chem tech, as someone who spent years studying coal and kerogen as well as environmental applications of carbon materials, that there are things we need be mindful of in regards to these things.

I assure you, I am not merely doing what the herd does. I am hardly a complete barefoot pilgrim in these woods.

Without commenting on the data I have posted, you are doing what t he herd does. Either respone to the quality of the data and the air conditioner issue, or simply admit that data doesn't matter.

I will post another plot. This is of the temperature trend since 2003. It can be obtained from climate at a glance, a NOAA/Nasa site. Each dot shows cooling (blue) or warming (red). What you will see is that the oceans are cooling since 2003 but the land continues to warm. Why? Does CO2 have zero effect over the oceans? Or is it that urban heat island effect or air conditioners cause the land record to heat, and the oceans have no cities or airconditioners to warm them?

I will also post a record of temperature difference between Hallettsville Tx and Flatonia texas, two towns very close together. What I have done is subtract Flatonia from Hallettsville. living down here I can tell you that never is there a 6 degree change in yearly average temperature over such a short distance in Texas. There is no reason for the sudden drops in temperature.

Now, please respond to the pictures I am posting. Cease ignoring them.


of whether or not it is competent of the meteorologists to approve siting a thermometer next to an airconditioner you wrote:

Not, it is not.

Thank you, I appreciate this. Now, How about the competence of the University of Arizona to have their thermometer in the middle of a parking lot, all the while, teaching their students that this isnt proper? Is that competence or incompetence?
see last pic

 

[grmorton]

I think we should look at Waterville Washington.

Perusing through the www.surfacestations.org site and looking at the stations, it is really easy to find bad stations.

Let's look at Waterville Washington. the report from the surface stations surveyor, who looked at what NOAA's meta data says about this site wrote:


The topological description for Waterville from the NOAA site for meta data is

Gently rolling Wheatland Plateau ends 4 Mi W drops off to riv 7 Mi W. Shade trees

There is also a description of &#8216;obstructions&#8217; on the NOAA site that lists the following

&#8220;Obstruction Type: Office&#8221;
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/m...g2_itemId=6349




Let's see that gently rolling wheatland with an office. drum roll.... first pictures below

Yes, a nice lovely rock garden 4 feet from hot parked car engines, next to an office, and not a wheat field in site. Lovely. Yes, the government is doing such a fantastic job of measuring our temperature that I think we should hand over our health care to them!

Now let's look at the temperature record for this lovely little burg. Somewhere in the late 1980s, global warming came to Waterville with a vengance. I don't need a comparison with another station to know that they did something different--like built a lovely little rock garden to surround their thermometer, and built a parking lot for it?

There is a 12 degree temperature change in this record. But, it doesn't stay constant. Look at 1995 and 1996. They are back to the historical levels, and then it turns around again. What a lovely, trustworthy record of temperatures against which to measure global death by warming. From 1890 until 1986 or 1987, there was not a single swing of temperature of 12 degrees. But by golly about the time the global warming band wagon got rolling, the good citizens of Waterville, Washington, wanted to play their small role in helping the earth warm up. Thanks to you all, good citizens of Waterville, Washington. You, with your 12 deg rise in temperature are vying for a spot on the global warming hall of fame!

Is anyone willing to call a spade a spade here? Or is it only I and a couple of others? Does the religion of global warming have your tongue?
Can anyone say that this data is useful to detecting global warming? It isn't a bias after 1986, it isn't even constant. The swings (I don't know why) start then and don't stop.

This is the kind of stuff that any scientist ought to quickly condemn. Failure to do so causes loss of credibilty.

Here is another piece of evidence pointing to the utter incompetence of the weather bureau to measure temperature. I chose the nearest town to Waterville Washington, you know, the little burg in Washington which underwent a 12-14 deg temperature shift in 1986/1987. As previously noted, no one wanted to know why or what was wrong or did anything to fix the fact that for 100 years the temperature had been hovering between 41 and 44 degrees or so and suddenly it shifted to 56 degrees.

But that isn't the incompetence I want to discuss now. If anyone had compared the waterville datastream with the Wenatchee data stream 22 miles away, and then compared the elevational difference and corrected for adiabatic temperature change, they would have seen that the new data stream tends to violate the laws of meteorology.

Of course, we can't expect mere bureaucrats to understand such nuances.

Waterville is at 2500 ft. Wenatchee is at 1299 feet (according to a google search). That means we should see about a 4.2 deg Temperature difference between the two cities. From 1912 (when Wenatchee's record starts) until 1986, the average temperature difference 5.7 degrees. A little more than expected from mere lapse rate. But, after 1986, there was almost no lapse rate between the two cities.

A competent scientist would have asked 1. are the instruments at fault. 2. is the thermometer reader blind? 3. Did an earthquake happen in 1986 which equlized the elevations? 4. is there something wrong with the siting (like a rock garden and parking lot?)

But noooooo. Our friendly government bureaucrat, believer in global warming, ignored the entire issue and let Waterville data continue to pour into the offices of the bureacracy to fill in those little boxes and help the global warming cause.

Below is the picture of the temperature differences between the two cities. And all you believers in GW who have never looked at the raw data are basing your beliefs on faith in the government bureaucrat who let this kind of crap data go for years and years without asking about the adiabatic lapse rate. If I, a poor geophysicist, can ask these questions, why can't the supposed professionals? Why do they let it continue without FIXING IT????? I respectfully submit that they just don't care.
I have collected raw data out in the field, well logs, seismic etc. When the data looks bad, we find the reason and fix it. The incompetent weather scientists didn't do that. Either they weren't actually looking at the data or they didn't care about the data. Both are signs of incompetence

My point in all this is that we can't know from this data what is happening in the globe's temperature.

 

[thaumaturgy]

the life of the panel is 30 years. Solar is a pipedream.

...

So, I take it you haven't actually priced solar and wind for your place.

Funny you should say that. Exactly yesterday they finally installed the 3kW solar Photovoltaic system on the roof of my house!

It will cover 99.9% of the electricity my wife and I utilize.

Of course, we do live in Southern California where that is possible, it isn't always so efficient elsewhere in the world.

 

[thaumaturgy]

Well the IPCC seems to agree that the sun's output is higher today than even 400 years ago. Since the IPCC's conclusions are indubitable by AGW advocates, I am sure that you will agree that the sun's output is greater

Yes, but note the deviation in the last 30 years when the global temps are climbing at a higher rate and solar irradiance is flat.

But are we responsible if air conditioner exhaust and urban heat island effects , heating the thermometer, makes it appear as if the earth is warming when it isn't?

I am afraid this point is becoming far too important. Indeed, in any model input system there are flawed gauges. Are you now going to state that the majority of the temperature gauges that feed into the model are likewise set in a systematic way such that there is a measurable positive bias?

That will be somewhat more difficult when assessing sea surface temperature measurement and satellite measurements which are usually not near an ac unit.

Bias is, as you no doubt know, often measurable in a specific direction.

That is the spin-room quality. He said the climate was slipping out of our control. That must presuppose that we actually can control the climate. We can't.

Not at all. I don't think Hansen or anyone in their right mind thinks we can control the weather. The only reasonable way to read that quote is to assume we can stop anthropogenic impacts to the climate.

This is a strawman argument. If Hansen had used a metaphor would we then pick apart the validity of the metaphor as "literal" truth?

We cant continue to spew out CO2. We will run out of fossil fuel by the middle part of this century. Heaven help the economy. And if you don't believe the 2050 number, I have never heard anyone say we will escaped the 21st century with any fossil fuel. When oil production drops, and we use more coal, we turn out 200 year supply of coal into a 44 year supply.

With that I totally agree. I am a firm believer in the limited nature of these resources. I also see the potential impact of exponentially increasing our combustion of said resources as an unrelated but similarly important aspect of the same drive to get off the carbon combustion train.

So far you haven't commented on the actual data. Are you ignoring it? Why does the raw data look like it does?

Based on limited time I am still poring over the specific data. I too took some of the various temperature trends recently. I was putting together an example for a statistics training and used temperatures from an historic station in Massachusetts and correlated the data to look at both the R[sup]2[/sup] as well as the F-statistic of the model. Significant in one example, insiginificant F-test in another, both on the continent.

But, again, I am unwilling to draw major conclusions from two data points which disagree.

As you know from your years of modelling that if one looks at any two given points in the entirety of the data one is merely looking at the relative noise. Not the trend.

Is it evidence of competence to approve the placement of a thermometer on a hot roof top, or a hot parking lot, or next to an air conditioner? Please answer this.

Answered already.

There is no replacement for fossil fuel. Period. I was a technology director for Kerr-McGee Oil and Gas. One of the things I did was look at what could replace oil. Energetically nothing would do it. Not hydrogen (where is your hydrogen mine?), not wind, solar or other things.

Actually in my years as a carbon scientist I did work on hydrogen storage and was in attendance at a conference on the topic in Norway several years ago. I used to be a believer in H2, but much less so today. I agree H2 is not the way.

Oil use is 3952 million tonnes of oil equivalent
Natural gas is 2637 million tonnes of oil equivalent
Coal generates electricity and represents 3177 million tonnes of oil equivalent

Nuclear is 622 million tonnes of oil equivalent
hydro is 709 million tonnes of oil equivalent. What you can see is that oil and natural gas are about 55% of world energy. Wind is 3$ of Coal, nuclear and hydro. Big big big, deal.

What I note in your post is that:

1. Carbon based energy is the only reasonable energy source.

2. Carbon based energy is a limited resource

3. We are all going to see, within the next 50-100 years the complete collapse of an energy-based economy

That leaves me with the only conclusion to draw that we are doomed. Is that it?

The only way to move forward is to deal with the development of new energy sources. Even less efficient energy sources will be important.

In addition the slackening of carbon combustion will decrease a known greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

It is, essentially win-win. But it won't happen until we start.

coal is what generates our electricity and if we all bought electric cars, we would need a doubling of coal burning. That ain't going to solve the CO2 problem. I am always amazed that people don't actually look at the numbers before suggesting this option.

Please do be mindful that I did my PhD in coal geochemistry and petrology. I am more than aware of coal's limitations and I fully understand the chemical implications.

The low end is no problem, the high ends would be a problem. No one knows.

This is where the problem becomes more akind to Pascal's Wager.

If we dont' know the possible inputs with any real assurity, then the only rational response from a "game theory" standpoint is to take the more conservative approach.

We know the inputs are dangerous. Like a gun with an unknown number of bullets. One would not then continue to pull the trigger aimed at a large crowd.

I would be OK with drastic cuts in the carbon economy knowing full-well it would impact my daily life and my standard of living. I drive a small car and my wife van pools to work. We are now going as far "off the grid" as we can with a solar unit that is rated to cover 99.9% of our monthly electrical system. If we could we'd supplement our gas with a solar hot water system (too expensive and we use too little gas). But in general there are a million little things we can do.

I don't expect the world to get better overnight. But I do expect us to live much more "modestly" from an energy consumption standpoint.

Ultimately we will be "weaning" ourselves, not stopping cold turkey.

You still haven't addressed t he issue of the competence of the meteorologists approving the siting of thermometers next to air conditioners. Do you approve of this?

Answered already. I find it appalling that anyone would set a gauge in a bad place. I also note that this is the nature of any large-scale analytical study. It must be proven out that the majority of these gauges are thus set and inducing a measurable positive bias.

Then you will agree that any model can be assessed for bias and the relative strength of the model lies in full assessment of the residuals as well as an appreciation of the Gauge studies underlying the inputs.

Indeed.

Without commenting on the data I have posted, you are doing what t he herd does.

Give me time, man! I will readily agree that you and I can take any study and find "bad gauges" employed.

I am unwilling to assess single data points as if they, by themselves, have specific meaning. That is my statistics training.

Either respone to the quality of the data and the air conditioner issue, or simply admit that data doesn't matter.

Please, I beg you, I spend my days dealing with data. I've seen bad and good data and I've seen horrid conclusions drawn from anecdotal data. Let me assess the responses.

Now, please respond to the pictures I am posting. Cease ignoring them.

Give me a day or two, I'm trapped in non-stop meetings this week. But I will get around to it. It is very interesting data.

But again, please do not assume anecdotal data will be impressive. I've got about 350 JMP stats software files on my computer right now that, were I to take two data points right next to each other on the x-axis I'd see dramatically different y-values. That's the nature of statistical data. Two neighboring points mean nothing if the overall trend is significant.

It is the hard reality of where R[sup]2[/sup] meets p-value.

 

[thaumaturgy]

Mei wen ti, as they say in China "no problem". I might as well post the satellite temperature data and see if anyone else wants to comment. The satellite data from Huntsville measures the temperature of the lower troposphere. As you can see the chart goes up and down but over 30 years, the tropospheric temperature is just about what it was 30 years ago, only a tiny tiny bit of net warming

You can get this data from http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

Well, that tiny bit of net warming does appear to be statistically significant (assuming I plotted the proper things, I plotted the "Global" column against the Year column. I came out with an F-test p-value of <0.0001
(F-statistic = 134.97, n=357, df 1,356. Now granted the adjR^2 value kinda sucked at a palty 27%, but clearly the trend was significantly "non-zero".

Well, it's off to "meeting town" again. Sorry, back later!

 

[thaumaturgy]

I eagerly went to it because I wanted to see if he would actually show the raw data out of the database. He didn't And he didn't show the bad stations. Typical!

I have the US Historical Climate Network and I pulled up those 5 stations in eastern Colorado, Las Animas, Lamar, Eads, Cheyenne Wells, and Holly. THese towns are all within about 70 miles of each other. These are the stations your article talks about.

I will grant the annualized average numbers are problematic. Again, a "gauge" issue. Presumably the IPCC did not rely solely on the data from these stations.

But further, not Peterson's point:

Unlike actual temperatures, station anomaly values can be averaged together without adversely impacting the time series when a particularly warm or cold location has some observations missing, because temperature anomalies are much more geographically coherent than actual temperatures.​

Now the treatment of the data should allow for better assessment of "specious" data points. In addition reasonable outliers can be "tested against" (a "Q-test" as I recall).

Examination of
poor siting–induced biases by comparing the absolute
value of temperature observations at neighboring
stations must consider the confounding effects of
general site topography (e.g., exposure to cold air
drainage), observing practices, instrumentation,
latitude, and elevation. For example, it is perhaps
not surprising that the station with the warmest
temperature in Table 1 has the lowest elevation. The
time of day the thermometers are read can make as
much as a 1.4°C difference in mean annual maximum
or minimum temperature in this part of the country

(Karl et al. 1986).

Now looking at Peterson's Table 1 it does not look like the data is too alarming.

If you run the numbers on the means the means taken together have a standard deviation of less than 1degC which amounts to about a 5% relative standard deviation on the Mean Max for all stations. Standard deviation for the Mean Min is about 10% relative standard deviation.

I dont' think I see a massive problem with these stations.

Oops gotta run, more later.

 

[Chalnoth]

I dont' think I see a massive problem with these stations.

Indeed. And even if there were a massive problem with them, we'd still have satellite data and other signatures of warming like sea ice coverage and glacier melt.

 

[thaumaturgy]

Now, you will say that we can remove these spikes. That is indeed easy because they are so ridiculous. But what can't be removed is the 7 degree F spread across this region of relatively flat ground in Eastern Colorado.

I just went onto US HCN and found the data for EADS and HOLLY stations (# 52446 and 54076 respectively). Am I doing something incorrect? The annual average graph I got for these two stations look like this:

I may be graphing something incorrectly but I dont' see any annual averages at or near 20deg F.

Please let me know where the data you got is from and if I am missing something.

Thanks,

 

[thaumaturgy]

I think we should look at Waterville Washington.

Can we look at more than merely single data points? Statistics works precisely because it is an ensemble rather than an analysis of individual data points.

I will readily grant that there is no perfect gauge and the potential for human error is immense. Clearly we can easily find bother "outlier data points" as well as bad gauges and incompetent scientists and technicians.

The key is can we find a systematic bias. In other words, how many badly placed stations are there in relation to the whole? How does this affect the massive efforts that were undertaken to avoid ship-contamination (heat) in sea-surface temps and nowadays the autonimous and unmanned (ie not-ship-bound) data bouys and probes?

Yes, the government is doing such a fantastic job of measuring our temperature that I think we should hand over our health care to them!

In all efforts at full disclosure, I used to be a volunteer for a local California initiative for a single payer healthcare system. Not a government run medical facility but a government funded (ie single payer) system staffed by non-government doctors.

Just so ya know.

From 1890 until 1986 or 1987, there was not a single swing of temperature of 12 degrees. But by golly about the time the global warming band wagon got rolling, the good citizens of Waterville, Washington, wanted to play their small role in helping the earth warm up. Thanks to you all, good citizens of Waterville, Washington. You, with your 12 deg rise in temperature are vying for a spot on the global warming hall of fame!

Anyone who takes a single data point and tries to make a statistically valid comment about global trends should be ridiculed. I am all for that.

Is that what has occured here? Again we need a better assessment of the systematic bias.

I can pull up probably more graphs of good correlations in my personal data sets here around coatings chemistry that have noise upwards of 10% (adjusted R[sup]2[/sup]) and that's OK by me. A 90% correlation coefficient is a happy thing. That means that any single given data point could be wildly off the curve and it's neighbor wildly off in the opposite direction from the line of best fit.

Again, if we have a systematic bias (in the present discussion, certainly a quantification of how many stations are abysmally set and how that weights the data).

Is anyone willing to call a spade a spade here?

I will. This is not good. Again, so what? Statistics works on ensemble data and is therefore more robust than a mere single station.

We must strive to make sure the data is good and eliminate bad "gauges", this is simple statistical common sense.

Or is it only I and a couple of others? Does the religion of global warming have your tongue?

It is not religion. Believe me, I suspect I spend as much time as you and other modelers in assessing the value of data. That's why I've expended so much time in my life over the past several years increasing my stats skills. I have a long way to go, but I am pretty sure it is equally invalid to draw statistically unreliable conclusions from "single points" or anecdotal evidence.

We are in a battle of Type I and Type II errors here.

This is the kind of stuff that any scientist ought to quickly condemn. Failure to do so causes loss of credibilty.

Well, it's a good thing I condemn it then, isn't it?

But noooooo. Our friendly government bureaucrat, believer in global warming, ignored the entire issue and let Waterville data continue to pour into the offices of the bureacracy to fill in those little boxes and help the global warming cause.

Well, to be fair, I'm sure you are assessing a motive without evidence. But more importantly I assume your work in exploration geology has kept you somewhat distant from manufacturing and industrial chemistry. Believe me, there are processes in which the gauge is ignored until something ships out the door that massively fails the spec. I should know, I once had to help figure out why a customer's multi-thousand gallon tank of our liquid product was suddenly a nice solid brown chunk filling the volume of their tank requiring several people go in with pick-axes to hammer it out.

Seems there's some possibility the sodium spec was off on one of the ingredients and it didn't show up until later.

This is statistical process control (SPC) and it can sometimes slip away from companies. It is getting a lot of focus these days and for good reason. To avoid just such a screw-up.

It is highly unlikely that the data was maliciously allowed to accumulate. The fact that you could find information about this individual station is testament to the fact that this is an open-source ideal.

It doesn't forgive anyone's individual incompetence in the field. Any more than I am willing to be sanguine when I see someone make a major decision based on an excel graph in a tech meeting at my job and it doesn't have any confidence intervals on it.

I have collected raw data out in the field, well logs, seismic etc. When the data looks bad, we find the reason and fix it.

Just out of curiosity, how do you "know" when the data is bad?

The incompetent weather scientists didn't do that.

That is an unevidence blanket statement. I assure you I could probably with enough time and effort dig up an incompetent geophysicist for you. I could dig up an incompetent chemist or two for you. Doesn't mean anything other than "people are people" and "scientists are people".

Either they weren't actually looking at the data or they didn't care about the data. Both are signs of incompetence

Again, data assessment on an individual level can be misleading. But you are correct, obvious cases of bias should be eliminated.

My point in all this is that we can't know from this data what is happening in the globe's temperature.

I don't get that from picking a few outliers in the data path. Like I said, I've got some data in which the individual data points swing wildly from the fitted curve but I still get an adjusted R[sup]2[/sup] of 90%. If I were to focus solely on those individual data points I'd probably miss the whole picture.

That's why I like statistics. Central Limit Theorem, dontcha know.

 

[AV1611VET]

Again, if we have a systematic bias (in the present discussion, certainly a quantification of how many stations are abysmally set and how that weights the data).

For crying out loud --- can't someone just call TIME & TEMPERATURE and be done with it?

 

[thaumaturgy]

For crying out loud --- can't someone just call TIME & TEMPERATURE and be done with it?

Not to any absolute, perfect certainty.

 

[AV1611VET]

Not to any absolute, perfect certainty.

What would anyone be doing that would require knowing the temperature to the 10th decimal place?