When Peter Sinclair made Anthony Watts the subject of his "Climate Crock of the week" video, Watts response was to attempt to suppress the criticism by making a bogus copyright claim against the video. Naturally this hasn't worked, with Desmogblog reposting the video. Better see it in case Watts tries again. Also of interest is Roger Pielke Sr's harumphing about the video.
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I just watched it. Anthony is out to lunch on this.
There is an excerpt of Watt's interview on Beck;s show. Just enough to allow Watt's to explain his project - and that excerpt would be copyright by Fox, not Watts.
There are shots of the cover of Watt's Heartland pamphlet, and of station photos from the project - shown to illustrate while explain Watt's claims about the siting issues.
There are some photographs of Watts, and some images of the web page at the radio station where he works.
It's hard to imagine a more clear-cut example fair use - each image minimally illustrates either the short explanation or the criticism of what Watt's is claiming, and that is precisely the point of fair use.
Good on you, Tim, for posting about this.
It's ridiculous on WUWT seeing the endless claims on climate conspiracy, stifling of debate and ridicule being pointed towards the scientific community - whereas one, single youtube-video criticising mr Watts gets to be taken down on false claims of copyright issues.
So much for free debate, eh?
Well noted, too, that Roger Pielke Sr has seen fit to comment on Sinclair's video aswell. I mean, Pielke Sr is getting worse by the day. It serves only to reduce his credibility when he starts to associate himself with such masters of climate science such as Watts, Dick Lindzen and the rest.
Too bad that his climate metric of ocean heat content in joules is seemingly being taken very seriously. The guy is posting about that climate metric of his in approx. every other post of his.
He's got a point that oceanic heat content should be monitored aswell - and is being monitored - but that it, and it alone to be the prime metric of climate change? I'm sure a scientist of his education and experience should realize that oceans are a lot slower to experience changes in temperature, lot slower indeed compared to glaciers around the world, surface temperatures, habitat changes in animal and plant-world alike etc.
I don't know. Somehow I've got the mental image of Pielke Sr begging for attention, and when he isn't getting enough of it, he turns to denialosphere to make new friends. Don't know if I'm correct in my estimation, but that's the feeling I get.
Sad really.
I watched the video from Desmogblog.
It becomes easy to understand why Watts would want to take it down.
I mean, all that careful work auditing, suspecting, denying, photographing, planning - would be for nought? That's gotta hurt.
And the connection with Heartland institute - Watts is having a laugh with that. I looked at the NIPCC -report that they published, and even *I* was able to point at errors at the very first pages. I'm not going to read all 800+ pages of it, I'd rather go and point sharp things at my eyes than read the NIPCC.
Regarding the video, I suspect that lakes, fish, birds and glaciers are part of algore's plot to deceive us all and rip away our freedoms and money. Don't know about you, but I'm locking and loading already.
How do you know Watt's did it and not say one of his readers? I only ask because that's probably what I will be asked if I repeat this.
> How do you know Watt's did it and not say one of his readers? I only ask because that's probably what I will be asked if I repeat this.
> Posted by: Mike Steven
The take-down notice has to be served by the person claiming copyright and it can't be a nom-de-plum.
If it wasn't Watts, then someone is in big trouble:
1) You Tube for being fooled
2) The protester for identity theft
3) The protester for the *criminal* sanctions of a fraudulent take-down
Didn't you know about that last one?
Well, easy to understand, all it says is that if you KNOWINGLY produce a false notice (and we all know how much of an impediment to abuse of process THAT is!) you are liable for federal restraint.
If you are saying you're A Watts and you aren't, that can hardly be unknowing, can it.
And if this turns out to be not A Watts, then the DMCA takedown notices in future can be ignored by You Tube because the current identification and verification process doesn't work. So can be ignored. And only started again under a signed legal notice from a legal institution. Who then carry the can for verification that the person is who they say they are.
[Anthony Watts relying on his blog](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/26/lindzen-on-climate-hysteria/#comm…) after being asked, why he filed a DMCA claim:
>I donât care to discuss my reasons here as they are private and unrelated to this discussion. Google agreed that complaint was valid and removed the video. â Anthony
I consider this proof, that it was indeed Watts and not an imposter. Watts also does not seem to be aware, that youtube will take down videos when receiving DMCA complaints without checking the validity of the claim.
Typo, first line: "relying" should be "replying".
So, I've just watched the video and I really can't think why Watts has taken it down except for the section with the graph mapping the stations watts and his supporters have mapped against the rest of the stations. That short sequence blows everything that Watts has ever posted on his site right out of the water and into high orbit. Thats really gotta hurt.........
Watts is indeed aware that YouTube takes down videos without checking the claims. I posted a response saying exactly that - it did not survive moderation.
Of course, nothing I post over there survives moderation...
Lee, if Watts is aware of that, then he lied when he said:
Google did no such thing. They took it down automatically as they do with all DMCA complaints that are filed with them, without "agreeing that such complaints are valid".
Validation comes about when the poster of content asks that the material be reinstated.
Lee: You must be wrong. Why, just yesterday slashdot posters were saying it's only realclimate which censors people they can't answer. Watt is a real scientific blog, you see.
Folks, feel free to help along the [Streisand Effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) and vote up:
* [On Digg](http://digg.com/environment/The_video_that_Anthony_Watts_didn_t_want_yo…)
* [On Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/95oiv/the_video_that_globa…)
Vanna White successfully sued for an ad using the image of a cute, unexpressive android flipping letters.
Watch out! If you're doing something that shows a Keystone Kops Junior Science League screwing up their research in a laughable fashion, you might be next to get DMCAed by Watts.
After all, if the buying public sees "clueless moron doing cargo-cult scientism on the intertubes," they think "Anthony Watts!"
For a moment there I thought his recent post entitled [Global warming to threaten California fruit and nuts](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/28/global-warming-to-threaten-califo…) was surprising self-referential..... but no such luck.
And Pielke, Sr., is a creepy thug who gets way, way more slack from the reality-based community than he merits.
For those unaware of what the DMCA means in this context, attorney and frequent DMCA-clasher dprjones has an excellent introduction in lay English.
Good to see the video's mirrored, 'twas a brilliant take down of Watt's claims.
> Lee, if Watts is aware of that, then he lied when he said:
> > Google agreed that complaint was valid and removed the video.
> Google did no such thing.
Watts lied.
Well, why not?
Everyone who issues a DMCA takedown notice and has a press release about it says the same thing.
Hey Mark, I don't see what is the 'big deal' is here ? I'm sure it is all just a lot of harmless fun for everyone concerned ! ;-)
If I can comment generally on the land based 'weather station audit' generally though, from a 'sampling' point of view, this sort of check looks like it was well and truly required.
I assume most of you guys probably don't accept that around towns and cities there is an appreciable 'heat island' effect that may have affected surface temperature measurements in the recent past ?
> I'm sure it is all just a lot of harmless fun for everyone concerned ! ;-)
Nope, it's no fun playing with a retard ;-). You don't understand what's going on and just notice the attention.
>I assume most of you guys probably don't accept that around towns and cities there is an appreciable 'heat island' effect that may have affected surface temperature measurements in the recent past ?
I assume your knowledge of this as good as your knowledge of CO2 in the net radiative balance. Can I also assume you have a "source" who has shown you that there is an urban heat island bias in the surface temperature data which you can't share with us because you are opposed to all forms of authority?
Shorter Billy Bob Hall:
The fact that Watts tried to take down the video with a bogus DMCA complaint shows that Watts's scientific claims are absolutely correct.
[insert Liberal Fascism joke here]
> I assume most of you guys probably don't accept that around towns and cities there is an appreciable 'heat island' effect that may have affected surface temperature measurements in the recent past ?
So, you've simply ignored the NOAA report that charted data from 70 stations that SurfaceStations.org identified as 'good' or 'best' against the full dataset of 1221 stations which produced near identical results and the conclusion, "Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf
"B-b-b-but heat island effect!"
I would note that Pielke Sr. mentions two peer reviewed studies based on Watts Surface Stations work.
Billy Bob Hall:
On the contrary, I imagine that most people with a scientific frame of mind accept that the Urban heat Island effect is very real, as are the effects on temperature measurement of many other aspects of the local environment around weather stations.
Otherwise what would be the point of NOAA spending so much effort identifying such effects and compensating for them. There is no appreciable difference between the temperature trend of the corrected data derived of the subset of best stations and that shown by the corrected data derived from all stations (as shown at 5:20 in this video). But if you were to plot the uncorrected datasets then a difference would probably be apparent. Especially if you compared the best stations to the uncorrected data from a set of urban stations.
> I would note that Pielke Sr. mentions two peer reviewed studies based on Watts Surface Stations work.
> Posted by: bigcitylib
But neither of them are the NOAA one, I would say.
PS are they peer reviewed or did Monkton (a peer, kind of...) review them?
Maybe they were reviewed by other denialists. That's their peer group too.
Well, I don't think the NOAA thing was peer reviewed, and I doubt Pielke Sr. would mention a E&E style peer-review job. These are upcoming papers employing Watts survey. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody found the material therein useful for something, although it would be difficult to imagine anything differing from the NOAA report if that was the focus of the papers. Remember, John V already tried something similar to the NOAA report at CA, and got the same result.
As an aside, Watts is already up to 82% of the network surveyed and has still not attempted any analysis (ala the NOAA report), even though he promised to at the 75% mark.
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2009/01/97-stations-to-go.html
Watts has already indicated that the result he's likely to get will match GISS. But on the other hand, as soon as he actually produces a result, the jig is up.
>I would note that Pielke Sr. mentions two peer reviewed studies based on Watts Surface Stations work.
>Posted by: bigcitylib
In case you missed the "stay tuned" bit, Pielke Sr. is talking about papers that as of now have not even been published.
wrote my reply before seeing bigcitylib @ 10:27
Has anyone checked to see what kind of difference? I've always thought that the UHI thing was a little off because it wouldn't result in much of a trend, especially not one that matches what we've seen over the last 30 (and more) years. I mean, it's not as if concrete and asphalt produce increasing amounts of heat.
I'm pretty sure an analysis has been attempted. But it probably doesn't show what Watts wants it to show, so it won't make his blog.
Re: the very good Climate Crock of the Week videos.
I can't seem to watch any YouTube videos right now.
Maybe a UK problem??
Hmm, seems the Youtube videos are there, but i get a black screen at the start.
Sirs,
Eli Rabett owns the copyright on harumphing and Pielke in the same sentence and requires you to take down your post lest we set a flock of bunnies upon you (with law degrees). All those surprised the Senior has donned the harumphing cloak raise your paws.
Mark,
"But neither of them are the NOAA one, I would say."
The NOAA paper was not peer reviewed but merely an in house attempt at a hatchet job And not a particularly good one at that!
l Rbtt, Wh dn't y hp w nd d smthng mr cnstrctv lk rttng r fndng cr fr myxmtss?
So, Dave Andrews, would you care to compare the statistical analysis done by NOAA vs. the statistical analysis done by Watts in his report?
Why do you find the statistical analysis done by Watts more compelling than that done by NOAA or, earlier, CA denizen John Van Vliet (known as JohnV)?
"The NOAA paper was not peer reviewed but merely an in house attempt at a hatchet job And not a particularly good one at that!"
This perfectly describes Watts work as well.
But since you're willing to accept amateur analysis, consider John V, who did an earlier version of this analysis on ClimateAudit and reached the same conclusion as NOAA later would.
(humor)
re# 34 Eli
Bunnies with law degrees: wimps, unless they're like the one in Monty Python & Holy Grail.
On the other hand:
For many years, I used to visit OZ+NZ a few weeks each year on business. I used to visit the folks at Weta Digital, starting when they were a garage shop, and ending when they weren't. (I.e., I was working for SGI, and they used a lot of our computers).
Since they knew me, they showed me footage from LoTR about a year before the first movie came out, but the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement, of which I've signed many) was fierce, as was common amongst movie folks.
Even fiercer was the verbal admonition:
"Tell nobody anything this, or we'll send after you our special halfbreed orc-lawyers",
a threat only they could make...
Two questions:
Has anybody here knowledge of the methods used by NCDC to correct the temperature trend of the problematic sites?
Does anyone here know why there is a difference of about 0.27 degr.C since 1940 for the US (based on the same stations?) by NCDC vs. GISS/NASA?
36 Dave Andrews,
A wonderful example of shining wit (Spoonerism ;) ).
Yeah DavidCOG (#23), you would also think that with all that money slushing around looking for the non-existent anthropogenic CO2 'global warming' signature, that they could spare a few dollars to help buy some new thermometers and fix the dodgy weather stations and maybe even add a few more in order get some real (not factored) data.
You'd think with 30Bn a year subsidy for oil that Exxon et al could afford their own temperature network to get the "real data".
> Why do you find the statistical analysis done by Watts more compelling than that done by NOAA or, earlier, CA denizen John Van Vliet (known as JohnV)?
> Posted by: dhogaza
Because he "knows" that AGW is false. He doesn't know why and that is just proof there's a conspiracy: someone's putting pressure on science to hide the conspiracy and conceal the truth.
Goodness. Lets say that a particular station is affected by some cement (Urban Heat Island Effect). Then for each of this years temperature readings at that station, we have:
T[i] = R[i] + U,
where i is just an index - eg if we measure temperature once a week, then i ranges from 1 to 52. T[i] is the measured temperature, R[i] is the "real" temperature, and U is the bias due to UHI.
Let T*[i] = R*[i] + U be the measured temperature T*[i] for the same week i but in the previous year. If we compare this years temperature to last years by taking differences, we get:
D[i] = T[i] - T*[i] = R[i] + U - R*[i] - U,
and so
D[i] = R[i] - R*[i].
Yep. D[i] only involves the "real" temperature because the U term, the UHI term, cancelled out.
Converting this to a statistically sound procedure is more than possible. There are also ways of directly estimating U for a given station, and in this case we can use the estimate for U to determine and get an estimate of the real temperature R[i] as T[i] - U', where U' is our UHI estimate.
Now I appreciate that NOAA and co. apply a more sophisticated approach - the UHI U may be a function of time for instance - but surely the sceptics among us can at least appreciate that it isn't difficult to remove the effect of UHI from the temperature anomalies.
Donald [#45]
That would be possible IF there were no changes over a long period (but a different bias for sunny/bad weather seasons still is possible). But what happens with a temperature difference good/bad stations if one (or more) things happen over the years with the bad stations:
- shrubs/trees growing and shadowing the temperature unit
- increased number of buildings around
- change in instruments
- change in position, due to new instruments
- increased (air) traffic (at airports)
If one needed a lot of volunteers to see that so many stations don't fulfill the own NOAA guidelines, how can NOAA calculate any of the above corrections if they don't know what really happened with their stations?
And BTW, why maintain 1200+ stations with a lot of adjustment and maintenance trouble, if 70 good stations show the same result? If it was that simple...
"But what happens with a temperature difference good/bad stations if one (or more) things happen over the years with the bad stations:"
Since change doesn't mean "it goes only one way" then these changes, unless deliberately crafted, will have a random result on the temperature measurement at a station.
That results in a wider confidence limit of what the real trend is, but doesn't *create* a trend.
"And BTW, why maintain 1200+ stations with a lot of adjustment and maintenance trouble, if 70 good stations show the same result? If it was that simple...
Posted by: Ferdinand Engelbeen"
Because you have more measurements and, since they are not collocated, they are not biased by any local phenomenon and so will produce an average that is more accurate than if you had fewer stations.
BTW did you read anything about NOAA's paper from NOAA itself, or just from WUWT? Because the NOAA paper says why they expected some change in the graph: the 70 stations do not include stations in entire states in the US.
Shorter Dave Andrews:
Watts issued a bogus DMCA complaint. Therefore the person being suppressed is actually Watts.
* * *
Shorter Billy Bob Hall:
I say this again -- the fact that Watts tried to take down the video with a bogus DMCA complaint shows that Watts's scientific claims are absolutely correct!
Conclusion: The DMCA is the Gettysburg Address of Liberal Fascism.
Anthony Watts has written a post about the process.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/30/on-climate-comedy-copyrights-and-…
and here is Monbiot on deniers claiming "censorship".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/30/climate…
the explanation on the similar trend shown by good and bad stations given on WuWt is:
So, essentially, NCDCâs graph is comparing homogenized data to homogenized data, and thus there would not likely be any large difference between âgoodâ and âbadâ stations. All the differences have been smoothed out by homogenization pollution from neighboring stations!
i wonder how microsite effects explain the current [arctic sea ice situation....](http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png)
Mark [#47/48]
There may be reasons why an upgoing trend (CO2 induced or not) has a different outcome for a non-compliant station than for a compliant.
- A shadowed station normally will show a smaller trend.
- A station on an asphalt rooftop will show a bigger trend (at least if there are more sunny days in the trend).
One can hope that both types of trend bias will compensate for each other, but one never can be sure. Only by comparing neighbouring stations to each other, there is some compensation possible. That is what GISS/NASA did, and their trend since 1940 is about 0.27 degr.C cooler than NOAA...
I did read both (as I always do) and Dr. Pielke's (peer reviewed) work about neighbouring stations. To my surprise, even "good" stations are "adjusted". Seems rather strange to me:
http://www.climatesci.org/publications/pdf/R-318.pdf
From Dr. Pielke:
"So, essentially, NCDCâs graph is comparing homogenized data to homogenized data, and thus there would not likely be any large difference between âgoodâ and âbadâ stations. All the differences have been smoothed out by homogenization pollution from neighboring stations!"
Ah wtf?
That does not make sense, since under Watts logic, homogenization cancels out the effects of bad stations, thus meaning you wouldn't have to hunt them out. Especially since the data Watts is talking about is temperature anomalies...
Then again, he does make the mistake many on the net do, and assume a username is perfectly unique on the net. When, a username like "green man" and permutations there-in are going to be rather common in order to attack Peter.
/facepalm
Then cometh the fanbois. And I thought internet gaming forums were bad.
And Watt's defence of his DMCA claim doesn't work, per fair-use arguments, which is why both Sinclair's use of the Anchor Man clip, and the bits from Watts's book are legitimate. Then again, double standards. /shrug
Wow. Anthony's post has a stalker vibe to it.
{#46]
And BTW, why maintain 1200+ stations with a lot of adjustment and maintenance trouble, if 70 good stations show the same result? If it was that simple...
Because the primary purpose of the stations isn't for climate change investigation, it's for day-to-day weather observation and forecasting.
To add to Harold's post above, the new network of stations meant to provide a more accurate set of data for climatology work won't contain anywhere near 1200 stations.
Mark:
Actually my silly question to DaveA has an even easier answer, because Watts' report contains no analysis whatsoever. Boils down to the same thing - DaveA's convinced Watts' report is more convincing than the NCDC analysis because of his faith that AGW is false. My guess is that he hasn't read it and doesn't even realize it contains no real analysis, thus my question ...
Hmmmm .....
Little rationality or respect for the law here (at this site).
I guess there is some comfort in the fact that some things never change.
(I wonder if *this* comment will get through, 'uncensored'.)
Hmmm... _Jim has me wondering. Perhaps he has been censored. Perhaps Tim's censorship style is to change the comments he doesn't like from brilliant prose to nonsense. I must admit, that would be a smart and funny way to censor people.
"One can hope that both types of trend bias will compensate for each other, but one never can be sure."
Yes one can.
Absent any deliberate modifications, the spread of data around the genuine signal is wider.
This is called "statistics".
As someone who sells my photography to the magazine and book market, I have total respect for copyright law.
I also know what "fair use" means. To respect the law means respecting all of it, and it's anthony that is showing, if not disrespect, then ignorance about US copyright law.
Fair Use doctrine exists *explicitly* to protect reviewers, critics, and the like from actions like Anthony's.
Since you are clearly ignorant of copyright law, here is Section 107 of the US Copyright Law, which defines Fair Use:
Don't come back until you understand it.
Mark [#58]
While my knowledge of statistics is rather rusty, I have a background of process chemistry, I can understand that there is more spread with badly situated stations (see sunny vs. cloudy days in an asphalted parking lot), but also a larger warming trend, if there are more sunny days over time. Probably on the other side, less spread of the data for (too much) shadowed locations and in that case maybe the same or a smaller trend as a "good" station. See the different trends of nearby stations at Dr. Pielke's blog of July 3. The raw trends vary from -0.47 to +0.48 degr.C/decade over a period of 20 years. Even after adjustments, the difference still is larger than 0.4 degr./decade...
I still don't see how one can compensate for such differences or how that can be averaged out (as much too low as too high trends?), without a detailed knowledge of the local situation or a comparison to nearby "good" stations. In the latter case, the "bad" stations are of no practical value at all.
50 Sod,
Has anyone read Watts's post and the fanboy comments? It's truly bizarre. These people are so delusional (or dishonest?) that I'd struggle to parody them.
Greenman is simply telling us what we know. There is no invective there at all, other than the title of the series (Climate Crock), yet Watts makes the most personal attack possible. Why is that? It's amusing that his kind shriek AD HOM! AD HOM! every chance they get.
60 Ferdinand Englebeen,
Never mind all that. Explain why the temp graph of the "chosen" 70 sites is so VERY close to that of the whole adjusted set, as shown in the video. I suggest that the people working with this data know something of their subject!
Do you?
@46, Engelbeen:
"And BTW, why maintain 1200+ stations with a lot of adjustment and maintenance trouble, if 70 good stations show the same result? If it was that simple..."
Because these are the stations that existed in the past, before we knew they would be useful for climate analysis in addition to their primary use as weather stations - and we can't go back and create different and new stations in the past.
And because they continue to be needed and used as weather stations, so the data continues to be generated.
The data exists - why would it not be used?
Pough writes:
The idea is that as cities expand and more buildings go up, the sensors are surrounded by more surfaces that reflect heat/light back to them. However, it's an effect that's been understood for a long time, and every serious analysis of it says the effect is A) trivial and B) already compensated for in the published analyses:
Hansen, J., Ruedy, R., Sato, M., Imhoff, M., Lawrence, W., Easterling, D., Peterson, T., and Karl, T. 2001. "A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change." J. Geophys. Res. 106, 23947â23963.
Peterson, Thomas C. 2003. "Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found." J. Clim. 16(18), 2941-2959.
Peterson T., Gallo K., Lawrimore J., Owen T., Huang A., McKittrick D. 1999. "Global rural temperature trends." Geophys. Res. Lett. 26(3), 329.
> but also a larger warming trend, if there are more sunny days over time.
Isn't the denialist always going on about how more temperature = more cloud ???
If there's more cloud, there's less sun.
Correct?
Now, please prove your theory that there are more sunny days over time. Then prove these are enough sunny days extra to explain the increasing temperature.
Good luck.
Perhaps, Ferdinand, you might like to read Enric Aguilar's Powerpoint presentation and Moisselin and Mestreâs review on data homogenization. There are quite a few such refs, easily locatable with Google. There's one by Moberg and Alexandersson from 1997(?) in IJC IIRC which I can't find now. Perhaps you can.
I wonder if Watts contacted ABC about the use of the Mole title frame, or MGM about the use of the Wizard of Oz clip. Or the authors of the numerous images that he uses to illustrate his award winning blog. I somehow doubt it.
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/online_best_practices_in_…
"Video makers have the right to use as much of the original work as they need to in order to put it under some kind of scrutiny. Comment and critique are at the very core of the fair use doctrine as a safeguard for freedom of expression. So long as the maker analyzes, comments on, or responds to the work itself, the means may vary. Commentary may be explicit (as might be achieved, for example, by the addition of narration) or implicit (accomplished by means of recasting or recontextualizing the original). In the case of negative commentary, the fact that the critique itself may do economic damage to the market for the quoted work (as a negative review or a scathing piece of ridicule might) is irrelevant."
"[use of copyrighted material to illustrate an argument or point] generally should be considered fair use and is widely recognized as such in other creative communities. For instance, writers in print media do not hesitate to use illustrative quotations of both words and images. The possibility that the quotes might entertain and engage an audience as well as illustrate a video makerâs argument takes nothing away from the fair use claim. Works of popular culture typically have illustrative power precisely because they are popular. This kind of use is fair when it is important to the larger purpose of the work but also subordinate to it. It is fair when video makers are not presenting the quoted material for its original purpose but to harness it for a new one. This kind of use is, thus, creating new value."
Give Ferdinand some air folks, while he is on the wrong side of history, he understands the issues and the data as well as any of us and has some good web pages on CO2 mixing ratio measurements. He is NOT a Beckie.
Reading Ferdinand's "thoughts" is quite as painful.
If he doesn't want smothering in scorn, he should try working things out a little more rigorously before posting.
I mean, the last two have been humdingers (pushed "o" instead of "i" and damn me if it wasn't still appropriate).
You have to stand down, Eli.
Mark is now handling all questions of righteousness, in all the major climate blogs. Hasn't he cleaned yours up yet?
I suspect he's got the time because the iron-fisted masters may have begun be censoring some of his frequent karmic adjustment sessions over at RC. If so, that just means he's got time to plow the wider field, administering well deserved karma for everyone anywhere he sees the need. The rest of us are superfluous.
When perfection is needed, the universe provides a master.
Remember, the appropriate response is:
"Oh, please sir, may I have a little more?"
More carrots please, sir. Oh yes, and a few vowels for Dave.
[#66] Thanks Lewis,
Interesting reading and I can understand that making a reliable trend out of the historical measurements is a tremendous task!
Even with the current measurements, homogenization is not easy and I wonder how NOAA did it in their comparison of the 70 vs. 2000+ stations...
By searching Moberg I discovered that Europe had a large homogenization project in a search for extremes in temperature and precipitation:
http://www.knmi.nl/publications/fulltexts/kleintank_2002.pdf
Eli [#68], thanks for your comment. You know that I am a -moderate- skeptic, but to both sides of the fence. What I want to see is the science behind it all: what is real and what is colored by what one want to find...
Mark [#65],
One doesn't need to give proof of more sunny days to show that different badly situated stations give quite different trends. Just have a look at the raw and adjusted results of the five adjacent stations which Dr. Pielke published at his blog of July 3rd.
But if you insist: we now have an extremely long solar minimum. That has a direct impact on cloud cover in the US (but the opposite over the globe):
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20010712cloudcover.html
The long-term trend of solar activity was up to a very high level until about 1945 then leveled off, but remained very high until about 2000, but is now low for a long period, not seen in near 100 years.
Climate models project that GW will move the jetstream more northwards, thus less clouds in general, but more clouds in some parts of the world, in this case the US... The influence of clouds on temperature is mixed, depending of where (tropics vs. poles) and seasons (polar winter vs. summer).
Nor does the possibility that the quotes might make the subject look like a friggin' idiot...
FYI dhogaza, you seem to be responding to a quote-mining SPAMbot who lifted some chunks from cce's comment #67.
dhogaza,
I don't have any 'faith' as I've explained to you on numerous occasions across several blogs.
I have a lot of questions, however. One of which is how on earth do you think your dismissive attitude and that of others here,like Mark, can ever win anyone over to your argument?
Perhaps some people realise that an argument is best evaluated by the quality of its content, not the attitude of its proponents.
That may not occur to everyone of course, some may judge personal manners as the best guide to truth.
That would seem a bit odd to me.
> I don't have any 'faith' as I've explained to you on numerous occasions across several blogs.
Well, technically, I suppose, you could be right, DA.
You have no faith IN something but you sure as heck have an unshakable belief that AGW is wrong.
> One doesn't need to give proof of more sunny days to show that different badly situated stations give quite different trend
But *you* do if you want to say that the warming trend is from there being more and sunnier days over that time.
Counted up the sunlight days for the stations on average, have we?
> I suspect he's got the time because the iron-fisted masters may have begun be censoring some of his frequent karmic adjustment sessions over at RC
Wow, Hank.
See a specialist.
Seriously.
And you also claim to understand science, which is also a false statement.
Watts has broken the law. The people who put up the video in the first place must file a DMCA counter-notice to begin pursuing justice.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID132
http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf
This is what you can get from Watts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_MYyc-PtH4
Watts has not only left the Grandia-posted Sinclair youtube untouched, he's even linked to it in his explanation of copyright issues, to show his fearlenssness, or something like that.
Clearly then, copyright is not the principle behind his scuttling of the original Sinclair video, otherwise he'd have asked for a takedown of Grandia's mirror of it, too.
I see the minions over at WTFWT are all agog over Master Watts' view of the whole kerfuffle. Of course they view him as some sort of lone messiah standing up for truth, justice, well-sited weather stations, and the American way of emitting CO2.
Watts is one of the most immature, dishonest, bottom-feeding pups in the denialsphere. He makes McIntyre look like a saint, and that's quite an accomplishment.
@Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Rather than analyzing the techniques by which stations are "corrected" with rural data, I would suggest reading David Parker's following papers:
Parker, DE. 2004. "Large-scale warming is not urban" Nature, 432:290
Parker, DE. 2006. "A Demonstration That Large-Scale Warming Is Not Urban" Journal of Climate, 19:2882-2895
Parker uses a very elegant argument - something that Pielke Sr. has hitherto ignored with his own (laughable) papers on this - to point out the UHI has almost no effect on global surface T records. It's definitely worth a read.
-----------
@Derecho64:
Why waste your time going to WTFSTFUAW? They - like McIntyre, Singer, Dyson etc. contribute nothing of significance to the AGW science or policy. I'd do something more worthwhile, like rather watch the Ashes. :)
If it really is a bogus DMCA claim, Watts should be taken down in the same style that Thunderf00t took down VenomfangX.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_MYyc-PtH4
Watts apparently does not understand that when you take down a video due to a copyright claim and give no reasons, even if you do actually have reasons, it looks a lot like censorship. So he was for some reason surprised when people reacted strongly to the removal of the video in question.
He should have known that a copyright claim on a video would draw attention to it. It's not like it's never happened before. (See the post above me.)
well at least it is pretty clear, how the "analysis" of the surface station data will work:
a clever cherry pick of adjustments, methodology of comparison and stations selected will surely leave us with the desired result.
please hold your breath!
Hi, Ferdinand! You've come a long way since the days when you used to post most of your stuff on John Daly's crackpot "Still Waiting for Global Warming" site.
You write:
Let me give you a tremendously oversimplified example which nonetheless illustrates the principle. Say you have five thermometers hanging on your back porch, and one frosty morning they read -5, -6, -5, -5 and +7 C. Is that a clue that the last one might be reading off?
Now let's suppose the next day at the same time they read -4, -5, -4, -4, and 8 C. Looks like even the "bad" one is reporting the trend correctly, if not the absolute value. So it's still useful; you just have to adjust for its known bias.
See?
> a clever cherry pick of adjustments, methodology of comparison and stations selected will surely leave us with the desired result.
No, there'll be a completely different analysis. Probably based around some method of fraction of sites that are badly placed for climate study. With an aside to the climate monitoring network (ignoring when it actually started to be created) being created as proof that this data is admitted by the AGW scientists as being wrong, else why spend all that money making a new network?
If an analysis doesn't show AGW wrong, it isn't done.
Barton [#90]
I still am a -lukewarm- skeptic, be it that there may be some warming caused by the extra human induced CO2, but I am very skeptic about all the doom and gloom of what we may expect from that (probably small) influence of CO2 on climate...
About your example: I am well aware (have been in process automation...) that if you have a lot of measurements, not one pair of them will show the same (absolute) values, but in general will show similar trends (but not always! If e.g. a termocouple doesn't touch the thermowell wall, you will see a quite different trend).
In the case of good/bad stations, we see that adjacent stations show different trends, with differences up to twice the trend, even with different signs. And that is a real problem. Even with the help of some good compensating algorithm...
40 Ferdinand,
I shall be asking Tamino that very question. I'd be amazed if *he* doesn't.
46 Ferdinand,
"And BTW, why maintain 1200+ stations with a lot of adjustment and maintenance trouble, if 70 good stations show the same result? If it was that simple..."
Eh? These are *weather* stations. The network was set up to record and help predict local weather. 70 might be enough for climate trends but weather is a different matter!
54 Harold,
I should have read ahead!
84 Barry,
Watts knew that Youtube are obliged to automatically take down a video if there is any copyright claim against it, regardless of the strength of that claim; it is then up to the creator of the video to contest the take-down.
He knows that Grandia is under no such obligation. Grandia will simply call his bluff; in fact he has already done that by hosting it, putting the ball back in Watts's court.
85 Derecho64,
That whole thread is bizarre, isn't it? Some of the gushing is embarassing. The whole thing needs fumigating and hosing down.
Former Skeptic [#96],
I have read now both the Parker pages and McIntyre's comment on them. Parker nor McI show what I was searching for: the difference in temperature trends within urban settings (homogenized, but not corrected for UHI effect) and outside urban settings. I don't see why one need to look at proxies for UHI like calm/windy days, when the real trends can be calculated.
As far as I have tried a few cities and their rural neighbouring stations for the raw data (pre-homogenized), there are huge differences and even opposite trends.
Dr. Peterson (who did write the internal memo shown in the video), showed in the past that there were no differences in urban and non-urban trends, but the determination of (non-)urban was rather sloppy...
But that is not the current discussion: what is the influence of badly situated/maintained stations (urban or rural) on trends and how these are (or even can be) corrected.
Mark [#79],
Don't you think that a 2% change in observed cloudiness over a solar cycle is equivalent to an opposite 2% change in sunshine hours? And that a trend in cloudiness over the decades results in a trend of sunny hours/days?
Eli rather suspects that NOAA and GISS run programs that compare selected stations they have confidence in against the rest as a fast sort of quality control. Also (without bothering to look it up) they probably look for outliers against all nearby stations to pick up bad data entry and such, which explains why the 70 station study could get off the ground so fast.
@Ferdinand Engelbeen:
I don't see why one need to look at proxies for UHI like calm/windy days, when the real trends can be calculated.
It's not a proxy per se; UHI theory is pretty explicit about wind impacts on UHI. If it is windy, there will be little/no difference between urban and rural near-surface T, especially for minimum T.
Parker therefore argues that if there is a urban bias in T, you will see it clearly with windy vs. non-windy uncorrected station T data. He showed pretty conclusively, over both space (290 stations, worldwide distribution) and time (daily min and max T taken from 1950-2000), that local impacts from "urban bias/UHI" are negligible when seeing the global picture.
Which is why when you say this:
But that is not the current discussion: what is the influence of badly situated/maintained stations (urban or rural) on trends and how these are (or even can be) corrected.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees.
> Don't you think that a 2% change in observed cloudiness over a solar cycle is equivalent to an opposite 2% change in sunshine hours?
You have to have the SAME PATTERN as that, oh, 2% change each year increasing.
Have a look at this graph:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
Now, to get graph increase from sunnier days you would need n% increase in 1970-1980, 2n% 1980-90, 3n% in 90-2000, and 4n% in the last decade.
Please show that the number of sunny days has done so.
Which trend, Ferdinand? There are so many to choose from, e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?q=trend+in+cloudiness+over+decades
Which trend, Ferdinand? There are so many to choose from, e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?q=trend+in+cloudiness+over+decades
PS, one place to look for longterm information on cloudiness would be the astronomy data sets, which pay a lot of attention to how much of each area of the spectrum is being blocked at any particular time by whatever's in the air. This sort of approach isn't simple yet, e.g.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/512824
It's not an area I know anything about; but I've wondered why the climate work doesn't often refer to this kind of data set.
The other thing that cracks me up about Watts' Fan Club - they claim he's being restrained, adult, and mature. Those are not three words I'd use to describe him. "Juvenile", "petty", and "silly" are far more apt. It's hard to believe that Watts is an adult - he acts much more like a 14-year-old teenage boy.
With bloggers of Watts' "stature", the denier movement is doomed. He can keep prattling on and on, but unless he rapidly and permanently changes his behavior, he'll never gain any credibility whatsoever.
Hank [#102-104],
A good oversight of insolation (a better and easier parameter than cloudiness) is in the supplementary information of "From Dimming to Brightening: Decadal Changes in Solar Radiation at Earthâs Surface":
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/308/5723/847/DC1/1
an article by Wild e.a. in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5723/847
The minimum solar incidence was in the late 80ies, after that, the solar energy reaching the surface increased again, except in India (but the number of observations there declined).
Interesting also is that the magnitude of the changes in insolation is in the order of 5-20 W/m2. Compare that to the expected near 4 W/m2 from a doubling of CO2...
Mark [#102],
Even if a step change of 1% more solar input at the surface (that is about 2 W/m2) simply is maintained, the temperature of the surface would rise with about 0.5 degr.C until a new radiation balance is reached... That is even without the impact of any (positive) feedbacks like water vapour.
The solar cycle is good for +/- 0.1 degr.C variation in ocean surface temperature, each transition in only 5 years time, while the cycle at the top of the atmosphere is only 1.3 W/m2 change (thus less at the surface).
Mark,
No, I see a lot of questions that relate to AGW/Climate Change and which lead me to conclude that it is yours, and dhogaza's unquestioning belief in it that is wrong.
> No, I see a lot of questions that relate to AGW/Climate Change...
> Posted by: Dave Andrews
And how can all these questions relaing to it lead to you seeing unquestioning belief?
After all, questions are not statements of belief.
> Even if a step change of 1% more solar input at the surface (that is about 2 W/m2) simply is maintained, the temperature of the surface would rise with about 0.5 degr.C
No it wouldn't.
It wouldn't take 50 years to reach that equilibrium. It would take vastly less than a day to do so.
So your 1% has to be stretched out somewhat consistently over 50 years. 0.02% each year on average.
Only then would your sunshine hypothesis explain the temperature changes.
> The minimum solar incidence was in the late 80ies, after that, the solar energy reaching the surface increased again, except in India (but the number of observations there declined).
???
How can the sun not shine with equal strength over the earth on a continental scale???
And where is your astrometry showing that pattern? We're at a minimum of solar activity NOW.
And we're still WAY hotter than any year in the 1980's.
111 Mark,
I assume the reference is to global dimming, i.e., when global particulate pollution reached a peak. Wasn't this the main observation behind the (minor and much exaggerated) theories about global cooling/mini ice age?
Without that, where would the temps be now?
Mark [#110-110]
I think there is some misunderstanding here: the general increase in temperature from a momentary increase in solar insolation (that is what is absorbed by the surface, not reflected by the surface or clouds, nor absorbed by the atmosphere) needs 30+ years to reach most of the equilibrium, mainly due to the heat capacity of the oceans. That is what should be measured by well placed thermometers on the surface. These show the result of solar cycles, cloud cover changes, greenhouse gases, aerosols...
Any thermometer placed on an asphalted lot will show Tmax temperatures composed of the same previous increase + a momentary bias, directly correlated to the increase of solar insolation (at the surface, not TOA - top of atmosphere).
The link I provided to Hank Roberts shows the changes in amount of energy (solar + IR) reaching the surface over the decades at many places of the world (the US is only present as Hawai and American Samoa?). That includes the effect of the solar cycle, but also cloudiness, aerosols and greenhouse gases. That variation over the decades is much larger than from the solar cycle alone. Thus IF (and only IF) more energy hits the surface, the asphalted station will show an immediate trend jump for an immediate change in insolation (e.g. if there was an immediate change in cloudiness) or a long term divergence in trend for a long term change in insolation, compared to stations which are nicely placed.
As there is a general change in the amount of energy hitting the surface (relative fast down before 1985, slowly up thereafter), one can expect that the badly placed stations will show a larger upward trend since 1985 than well placed stations. Regardless of urban/rural surroundings. In how far that influences the UHI effect, that is a related but different point, as the effect may be less pronounced than for an asphalted station.
Thus the comparison of Parker for UHI effect is related, but not directly equal to the "bad stations" effect. The Parker/UHI points need more time to have a deeper search, but I will be away for a few days... Thus more on that later.
Thanks for the level of interchange up to now.
Ferdinand,
Since you are linking readers to in global dimming trends, you will no doubt have been interested in the [aerosols emission](http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_reports/PNNL-14…) trend.
I was also hoping you could cite your source for the claim that:
> the general increase in temperature from a momentary increase in solar insolation (that is what is absorbed by the surface, not reflected by the surface or clouds, nor absorbed by the atmosphere) needs 30+ years to reach most of the equilibrium,
But, Ferdinand, look at the work on aerosols.
It's not simple, and you can't just count energy reaching the ground.
For example, the early coal burning in temperate latitudes had different consequences that current coal burning closer to the tropics, I recall reading.
I mentioned that paper over here:
http://atoc.colorado.edu/~seand/headinacloud/?p=135#comment-10106
The whole site there doesn't get enough attention, and is well worth reading.
I literally was shocked to finally see a picture of him. I pictured a 20-year-old TV weatherman at best. Aren't there programs now to guess the emotional age of the author of a piece of writing?
> I think there is some misunderstanding here: the general increase in temperature from a momentary increase in solar insolation (that is what is absorbed by the surface, not reflected by the surface or clouds, nor absorbed by the atmosphere) needs 30+ years to reach most of the equilibrium, mainly due to the heat capacity of the oceans.
Yes, there is some misunderstanding here.
You're wrong and misunderstand the physics.
How does the UHI of a small block of concrete get out over the ocean 50 miles away WITHOUT letting go of that radiation in the more normal direction of UPWARD???
Have you ever head of a sea-breeze?
Warm land. Air rises as it is warmed. Ocean air comes in to replace the air rising.
Rising air loses heat and gets pulled out to sea AT A HIGH LEVEL to replace the air lost over the sea.
Now, how does that air that has cooled and is sitting maybe a few km above the ocean warm the ocean?
> Wasn't this the main observation behind the (minor and much exaggerated) theories about global cooling/mini ice age?
Maybe, but that is taken into account and STILL doesn't explain why 2008 is warmer than even the warmest year pre-1998. Reduction in aerosols has not been a consistent % each year since 1980 from the 1980 peak. It dropped by magnitudes in a few short years.
Derecho64: âThe other thing that cracks me up about Watts' Fan Club - they claim he's being restrained, adult, and mature.â
The thing that cracks me up about the Wattsâ Fan Club is the incessant boasting about their âcivilityâ, all the while accusing warmers of nazism, communism, cultism, lies, scam, hoax etc.
It takes a particularly sanctimonious form of rank hypocrisy to remain so oblivious to the bile thatâs under oneâs feet.
Anthony has another "july was cool" topic up.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/02/roundup-of-some-interesting-july-…
now all you need to do, is factor in the effects of the surface station project ("error>5°C") and you will understand, that we are not moving towards a new ice age, but that we are actually in the middle of one already!
all you need to do is ignore reality, of course....
I particularly enjoyed how he waves away the massive, record-setting heat wave we've experienced here in the PNW and up north through Alaska and the Yukon as being due to a weather station's being situated at SeaTac, more or less.
This global cooling is so pronounced that Portland just broke it's all-time record for highest 3-day average daily temperature - twice - and 90F+ days in a row (9), with Seattle and a bunch of other places setting various records, too.
119 Derecho64,
I've compiled a few quotes from the Watts thread for anyone who doesn't want to go there. It's not for those with weak stomachs, though.
(If Tim doesn't want this here and removes it, I'll understand. ;) )
122 Me,
That should've been 105 Derecho64, 119 Brendan H.
re 122: Great. Next time I need an emetic, I'll just pop over to wuwt.
Eugh...
> Jimmy Haigh (04:05:06) : Excellent work Reverend Anthony.
Truly Watts Is The Messiah.
Jimmy should know: he's followed quite a few!
Uh, in my post up there, I accidently pasted in something from elsewhere, oh well.
This was meant to be there:
referencing sod's post...
Uh, Patrick, that's known as too much information ...
dhogaza #121,
If somebody had posted a similar comment to yours at WUWT about their local situation but with the emphasis on how cold it was, you would have been the first to cry, 'but that's weather not climate' - hypocrite!
It's not climate. The fact that it's not climate has nothing to do with the fact that I found Watts' attempt to hand-wave it away as being due to the existence of a thermometer at SeaTac to be amusing.
The second part of my post was partially my laughing at all the "there's global cooling because it's cold in Chicago" crap I've been reading at WUWT, and to underscore the fact that regardless of Watts' handwaving attempt at dismissal of the new records set at many places in the PNW, it really is *bleeping* hot here. By our standards.
The fact that I know it's weather, not climate, doesn't mean that I need to state the obvious every time I post.
The fact that Watts posts factoids under "weather, not climate" tags doesn't mean that he actually believes it, either. If he didn't, he wouldn't bother.
Mark Byrne [#114], Hank Roberts [#115],
Was a few days at the Dutch Veluwe (large heather fields, lots of bike routes)...
I doubt that global dimming has much to do with aerosols: there was as much global dimming in the SH (even in Antarctica) as in the NH, while 90% of the emissions of human aerosols are in the NH (and aren't interchanged, the ITCZ is an effective barrier for aerosols). Seems to me that this has more to do with cloudiness than with aerosols.
Moreover, while Europe (and the US) has reduced much of the SO2 emissions, that didn't result in a huge increase of temperature at the places of largest influence, see:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/aerosols.html
And while in Asia SO2 emissions increased with 20% (China probably far more), dimming reduced there since 1990...
See further my comment on aerosols at RC from some time ago:
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=245 (comment #6 and following discussion).
Anyway, the direct effect of global dimming and reverse is that all surface had a reduced impact of energy, which reversed at about 1990.
Any change in direct energy impact gives a change in temperature: rather fast on land, but much slower in the upper oceans, as the specific heat content of the oceans is much larger. That can be seen in the amount of heat necessary to warm/melt different parts of the earth, see the second graph of Levitus at:
http://www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/posters/P-GC1.1_Levitus.pdf
I once saw the effect of a sudden increase of CO2, which needs several hundreds of years to come to a new equilibrium, but most of the change is in the first 30 years. What is true for CO2 is true for any change in forcing... But can't find the graph back in a short search...
Mark [#117],
The changes measured in the reference of "from global dimming to brightening..." in #106 is how much energy is reaching the surface. That was decreasing until about 1990 and increasing thereafter. While there are a lot of differences in these amounts, depending of latitude, the trends worldwide were/are more or less similar.
The effect of a similar change in energy reaching the surface depends of the kind of surface: on solid ground, the effect will be rapid, for the oceans, it will take a lot of time to warm the upper layer (about 200 m) of water. Most of the warming where a new equilibrium between incoming and outgoing radiation will be reached in about 30 years, mainly as result of the time needed to change the ocean heat content.
But the same change of incoming energy will have different effects on asphalt, concrete, brick walls and grass. That is what should give different trends for good and badly situated stations...
>But the same change of incoming energy will have different effects on asphalt, concrete, brick walls and grass. That is what should give different trends for good and badly situated stations...
No. Different transient responses, yes. Different trends, no.
>But the same change of incoming energy will have different effects on asphalt, concrete, brick walls and grass. That is what should give different trends for good and badly situated stations...
No. Different transient responses, yes. Different trends, no.
LB [#132/133],
With an increasing trend of incoming energy (whatever the source), I am pretty sure that the endresult (and even more the transient response) will be higher for a station on an asphalt parking lot (at least for Tmax) than on grass...
Ferdinand,
The wind will blow.
http://www.agu.org/eos_elec/2008/ohring_89_23.html
Supplementary material to âGlobal Dimming and Brighteningâ
-- lots of details, seems to be publicly available;
Behind a login barrier is the actual EOS article:
âGlobal Dimming and Brighteningâ
Eos, Vol. 89, No. 23, 3 June 2008
Pointless to have this discussion in the Watts topic; is there a better place for it?
Has anyone noticed that Ferdinand is confusing a high temperature with a rising temperature?
Re #135-137
Some additional remarks:
Maybe this is not the right topic, but as the 70 good stations vs. all the bad stations was the only real interesting part of the film, I think it is relevant to look at that part here.
Let us see what happens with good/bad stations if there is an upward trend in incoming energy reaching the surface. According to different sources, there was global dimming until about 1990 and brightening thereafter. From 1990 to current, the increase is about 3 W/m2/decade or about 6 W/m2 increase since 1990.
The albedo of grass is about 0.25, of asphalt about 0.1 (fresh asphalt is around 0.04!). Or a difference in absorbance of about 15%. Of the 6 W/m2 increase in energy reaching the surface, thus about 1 W/m2 more is absorbed by asphalt than by grass over time. That surely will show in the temperature trend of a station positioned on an asphalted lot. Less for minimum temperature (where much of the extra heat content would be lost at night) than for maximum temperature and less on windy days than on calm days...
Thus I wonder why there is no difference found between good and badly situated stations, unless part of the trend is already compensated for, beyond the necessary homogenization.
Thus I wonder why there is no difference found between good and badly situated stations, unless part of the trend is already compensated for, beyond the necessary homogenization - F. Engelbeen.
Duh, because the effect is incredibly small. Exactly what in the video did you not understand?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Have a read under "Current Analysis Method".
>{comments on surface albedo variability
>Thus I wonder why there is no difference found between good and badly situated stations, unless part of the trend is already compensated for, beyond the necessary homogenization.
Certainly it's clear in the data that location of the individual stations is not critical in determining the long term trend at a point. There's a very good reason for this. Anyone with a background or education in some micrometeorology should be surprised if the immediate local albedo did play a significant role.
Consider the parcel of air delivering the temperature which is subsequently measured. Where was it when in warmed up (or cooled down)? Most likely not over the location of the actual temperature measurement. Surface air movement is moving around these parcels of air, and so the temperature measured at a stationary location is a function of the integrated albedo of all the surfaces the air parcel has passed over. These will vary significantly unless either there is very little air movement or the station is located in a large area of consistent albedo (ie: a large sandy desert).
Does this answer your question?
Dappled Water [#139],
From GISS:
GISS compensates for the difference in trends of UHI/non-UHI stations. And they have compensation rules for stations whch show a deviating behaviour. If NCDC did the same, what does the comparison between the 70 "good" stations and the 1200+ "all" stations show? That they used a good correcting algorithm, not that it doesn't matter (it doesn't, as long as you have a few good stations left!). In that case, Anthony Watts is right to say that one compares "cleaned" good stations with "cleaned" all stations, thus of course one doesn't find a difference...
Further, GISS and NCDC still have different trends for the US: +0.27 degr.C for NCDC since 1940...
JohnV's analysis of Watt's early stations compared unhomogenized data, and found no significant difference between best stations and all stations.
The fact is that the only two analyses of the impact on trend of station quality 'data,' show no difference between best stations and all stations.
Watts promised his own analysis when he hit 75% of stations. His own analysis is conspicuously missing, even though 75% was some months back. He claims he is waiting to get a paper published - where is the progress report on that? Watts has a long history of making promises to deal with open questions, and then failing to get around to it - in fact, he banned me and went back and scrubbed every post I'd ever made there, precisely because I asked him when he was going to get around to some of the updates he had promised.
Anthony is saying that the existing analyses aren't valid. He has the data, he is asking people to leave the analysis to him, he has promised to do the analysis, he has not reported anything about such an analysis. Anthony has a history of failing to keep his promises about such things.
Y'all have the data you wanted - sufficient for preliminary analyses for a couple years now, and for final analysis by Anthony's own standards, for several months.
If you want to continue arguing that station siting has an impact on the trends, then y'all are going to have to either get Anthony off his butt, or convince him to release the data and do the analysis yourselves, and show that it has an impact on the trends. And if y'all won't do that, then have the decency to stop claiming or implying that station siting has a significant impact on the trends.
Lee,
John V's analyse shows a slight difference (about 0.1 degr.C over the past century) between "good" and "bad" situated stations, but as he said, there is a discrepancy between geographical spread of the good and bad stations. The same problem for the Peterson comparison, where several states are missing in the "good" count.
Better have a similar comparison as Dr. Pielke did by looking at several stations in the same neighbourhood. These should show similar trends, but by far don't:
http://www.climatesci.org/publications/pdf/R-318.pdf
But that is a lot more work to do than just averaging the bulk...
Kenneth Fritsch did a more complete analyses, based on the CRN 1-5 classification of stations and found a huge difference in trends:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3169 comment #79 and following. This is based on the official classification of station quality, which probably overlaps with the work of Watts and volunteers.
I see that Watts and JohnV are having a [little discussion](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/30/on-climate-comedy-copyrights-and-…) about JohnV's analysis.
It starts near the end of the thread; I can't find a way to link to an individual comment.
Shorter Ferdinand Engelbeen:
JohnV and Peterson's analyses of surface station trends don't include the whole of the US. A better comparison would be to use data from an even smaller fraction of the US!
Also, Fritsch shows there's a difference between "good" station and "bad" station trends. He doesn't state whether he used the homogeneity-adjusted data or the unadjusted data -- therefore, his results are perfectly rigorous!
> That was decreasing until about 1990 and increasing thereafter.
Yet temperatures were increasing until 1998 and have stayed high since then.
A lack of correlation DOES prove lack of causation.
Mark [#146],
Do you mean between CO2 levels and temperature? Just kidding, but as usual, one need to look at the long(er) term trends. The important point still is that on the basis of physics, a badly situated station should give a different trend than a good station. That can go both ways: a shadowed one will give a smaller trend and an asphalted one a larger trend, in either direction. Thus even if one doesn't find a difference now (because both deviations compensate each other), that is no guarantee that it will not differ in the future, if stations are added or deleted or changed (physically or in status).
Shorter Ferdinand Engelbeen:
Even if both the "good" temperature measurement stations and the "bad" stations show the same warming trend after homogenization correction, there's still a very strong possibility that the warming trend in the "good" stations is caused by the badness of the "bad" stations!
Therefore, Watts was absolutely right in making his bogus DMCA complaint.
TS at #144 - you didn't warn us that the Watts thread was so gross!
As an aside, despite Watts protestations that he doesn't censor, I've been removed several times from threads there, for what are really quite innocuous comments that simply point out inconsistencies in his postings. I do not even bother there anymore - which I guess is his point.
Hardly makes for a representative discussion however.
The news that he is preparing a 'paper' is mildly interesting though - that should be one to add to the [menu](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/08/two_weeks_from_blog_post_to_pa…)...
bi-IJI [#145, 148]
Of course one need to take the highest number of good stations, but one need to compare these to the badly situated stations in the own neighbourhood, not to all stations, including the trend of states where no good stations were found (yet). That is the best way to do. That is what Dr. Pielke has shown for a small subset of stations.
Fritsch (and RomanM later) probably used "areal edited" or TOBS corrected data, thus not corrected for station moves etc., they found an influence of classification and of urbanisation. The "homogenised" series of NOAA seems to be corrected both ways: "good" stations are corrected with "bad" ones and vv. (that may explain the difference in trend between NOAA annd GISS). Thus it is a good point that they haven't used that dataset.
But let's see what Watts produces as comparison between good and bad, with a more complete list of stations, then it's time to shoot at his (classification) data and/or methods.
If they made a similar film of me (little chance someone does, but you never know), I shouldn't have bothered to react, and surely I wouldn't have ordered a retraction of any kind. It doesn't help (except if you are a politician, then it doesn't matter, as long as one is in the media either way...) and only makes things worse.
@ BernardJ:
"The news that he is preparing a 'paper' is mildly interesting though"
Don't hold your breath.
Anthony has a long list of promised analyses that he's never quite gotten around to. And a history of banning people who ask him about it.
---
@ Englebeen:
The proper comparison is not between the 'good' and the 'bad' stations.
It is between the 'good' stations with all appropriate TOBS and etc corrections applied, and the currently released corrected temperature analyses.
Remember, the criticism is that the current analyses don't properly deal with the effects of station siting. It don't matter a hill of beans if there is a difference between 1,2 and 3,4,5 stations, if the corrections in the released analyses do an adequate job of handling that difference.
149 Bernard,
I'm sorry but I assume that everyone here knows what to expect. ;-)
As I keep telling anyone who'll listen, it's futile trying to have a rational discussion with the denizens of WattsUpWithMyBrain. A large proportion of them deny the most basic physics and, of course, they really do believe it's all some leftist/green conspiracy to take away their freedom. I admire anyone who tries to educate them without losing their composure in the face of such arrogant idiocy, but it really is pearls before swine (actually, pigs are pretty bright so perhaps that's unfair to pigs!).
Did you see my collection of quotes at post 122?
In another thread, my old pal Nasif Nahle is trying to lecture Leif Svalgaard on the meaning of heat!
Ferdinand E writes: "a badly situated station should give a different trend than a good station."
You STILL don't get the difference between a high temperature and a rising temperature, do you?
What totally escapes me, is how those imbeciles can even suggest that the urban heat island effect could cause a warming trend over the course of years. Is their notion that each year another air conditioner is sited next to each station?. Contractors surreptiously return multiple times each year to lay more concrete, bitumen and build more structures beside the station?. Each and every one of them, year after year?. Yeah, sure, whatever. Morons.
Barton [#153]
I have tried to show that if there is a trend in incoming radiation, caused by solar, GHGs, clouds,... that this will have a different effect on different surfaces, depending of the albedo. With different albedo, one will see different absolute temperatures ánd different trends.
A darker surface will retain more heat during the day (and release that at night), but also will retain a larger part of an increase in incoming radiation (1 W/m2 since about 1990 for asphalt against grass) than a lighter surface. Thus it is both: absolute temperature ánd trend.
However you haven't shown that any trend is of the right shape and magnitude to make the changes you want to ascribe to it.
Oh, but Anthony has brought out the heavy artillery - Evan Jones - to help out.
(I'm sure many of you have run across Evan the Imbecile on various climate blogs)
Ferdinand,
You are making a gross over-simplification. It is the Harold Pierce, Jr. fallacy that local surface air temperatures are solely dependent on local radiative properties. The air is in constant motion, even on calm days. It self-organizes into large coherent masses we call weather systems. These are the source of local temperature variations and, over enough time, trends.
LB [#158],
Have a look at
http://www.ejournal.unam.mx/atm/Vol21-2/ATM002100202.pdf
a 2008 study about the differences in temperature of surface and air at 2 m height above different surfaces (asphalt/concrete, grass and soil) in Erzurum, Turkey.
In windless, sunny days of August, the differences are up to 11 degr.C higher at 2 m level for air temperature above AC vs. grass at peak time (1 PM), and still over 3 degr.C higher at 6 AM.
Mark [#156]
Have a look at the above reference and think about what will happen if there is a trend in incoming (solar) radiation, e.g. as a result of more or less clouds. Will that change the differences or not? Will that result in different trends or not? See the evolution of the differences over a day...
Ferdinand:
Yilmaz et al's (2008) paper takes place in clear and calm weather conditions for ~16 days in August 2005, the hottest month of summer.
How can it support your previous posts about long-term trends under different weather conditions (e.g. windy conditions), radiative forcings (e.g. winter) etc?
Actually, I have a more relevant question for you. What exactly do you mean by "trend"? Like what BPL (#153) says, methinks you are still confused between high temps and rising temps.
FS [#160],
If the same input of energy (solar + GHG only in this case) gives a quite huge difference in temperature, what will happen if there is a change in energy input? For a smaller input (e.g. on cloudy days), the difference will be smaller, even might be zero. The same in winter conditions. But in average over a year, there still will be a higher temperature measurement over asphalt than over grass.
If there was no trend at all in energy input over the years, the yearly average difference would remain the same. With a positive trend in energy input (more GHGs, more solar activity, less clouds,...), the average difference would increase, thus the trend of a measurement over grass would be less increasing than over asphalt.
Viewed from another angle: Let us assume that there is only a difference of daily average 5 degr.C during sunny days, like the 16 days of the previous investigation. On all other days, the difference is zero, due to better air mixing, clouds, rain,... Thus the yearly average measured over asphalt is about 0.22 degr.C warmer than over grass.
Now, for some reason, the number of sunny days increases from 16/year to 18/year. This will increase both average temperature measurements, but the one over asphalt now with two extra days with +5 degr.C more per year, compared to the one over grass. Thus the yearly average difference increases to 0.25 degr.C.
In total, there is change in absolute temperature, both trends go up, ánd a difference in trends, as the trend over asphalt goes up 0.03 degr.C more than over grass...
Engelbeen, we get it.
You have an untested hypothesis for an effect that may or may not exist.
FE,
Let's suppose we have two objects whose temperature is determined solely by their albedo. A has an albedo of 0.5, it's very bright. B has an albedo of 0.1, it's very dark. These objects have no atmosphere to circulate heat, are not in contact, and are orbiting 1 AU from the sun.
Let's take the solar constant as 1366 W/m^2. The temperature of A is 234.25 K and that of B is 271.33 K, considerably higher!
Now let's say the solar constant jumps to 1370 W/m^2. Now A is at 234.42 K and B is at 271.53 K. A rose 0.17 K and B rose 0.20 K. It's a larger increase for B! An urban heat island effect! Hugely artificially exaggerated by the conditions and numbers I'm using, but there nonetheless. The cities are heating 0.03 K per time unit faster than the countryside.
Now let's say the people observing temperatures, like those at NASA GISS, CORRECT THE URBAN TREND TO MATCH THE RURAL. Is there still a UHI? Does it matter? Does anybody but crackpots care?
Here's some more on the subject by people who have actually done the math:
Hansen, J., Ruedy, R., Sato, M., Imhoff, M., Lawrence, W., Easterling, D., Peterson, T., and Karl, T. 2001. "A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change." J. Geophys. Res. 106, 23947â23963.
Parker, DE. 2004. "Large-scale warming is not urban." Nature 432, 290.
Parker, DE. 2006. "A Demonstration That Large-Scale Warming Is Not Urban." Journal of Climate 19, 2882-2895.
Peterson, Thomas C. 2003. "Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found." J. Clim. 16(18), 2941-2959.
Peterson T., Gallo K., Lawrimore J., Owen T., Huang A., McKittrick D. 1999. "Global rural temperature trends." Geophys. Res. Lett. 26(3), 329.
Guess what all of them conclude?
Lee [#162],
Have a look at the raw and adjusted data at GISS stations data: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
And try a few towns/airports against stations in the neighbourhood marked as "rural". Quite an eyeopener. I wouldn't know where to begin to cleanup that mess...
Barton [#163],
The effect is quite more pronounced, as it is about a difference of 15 W/m2 in average worldwide from brighting to dimming and back (probably more due to cloudiness changes than direct solar changes), that is about 10% of the average solar energy directly hitting the surface.
But still, the NASA/GISS corrects the urban trends by comparing to neighbouring rural trends. That doesn't mean that there is NO UHI! only that the GISS control allows for a reasonable good compensation of the UHI effect for the USA. But that doesn't imply that the same mechanism works fine for badly situated (either rural or urban) measurement devices...
In contrast, the mechanism that NOAA uses seems to simply average all neighbouring stations, which means that rural station trends are "uplifted" to match the average... Maybe that is the cause af the difference between GISS and NOAA trends.
Further, what seems to be a good procedure for the US, doesn't work for the world trend. Simply have a look at all stations in the 30N-30S band (50% of the earth's surface!). And try to find a rural station with a reasonable trend over a few decades...
About the Parker and Peterson articles which compared rural/urban trends, well you may not like CA, but their critique is that both made a mismatch in rural/urban stations, so that there is a huge overlap between the two. See:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1857 and
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1859 for Peterson.
Parker used only airfield data for "urban" trends, many of which started far from or at the edge of towns 50 years ago, but many have rapid growing (sub)urban sitings nowadays. In how far that changes the trends is unknown.
And forget the "global" comparison, there is very little to compare in the (sub)tropics...
Will be away for the next weeks, traveling around in Iceland...
Iceland ought to make the tinfoil hat bearable, methinks.
Best,
D
@FE:
1) I'm sorry, but you are still confused. You mix-up large-scale forcings (top-down) with micro-scale (bottom-up) forcings -- Further, you can't just rely on the surface energy balance (Rh+Re+Rg) to account for site differences as turbulence in the urban canopy layer affects advection as well - remember you are measuring air temps and not surface temps. LB pointed that out in at #158.
Try reading Arnfield's (2003) Int Jour Clim paper reviewing 20 years of urban climatology as a start to educate yourself about micro-site/UHI work. It may help.
2) Now you are talking about global scale problems instead of issues in the USHCN/GISS/NOAA. To answer that, have you tried reading Easterling et al (1997) in Science, or Jones and Moburg (2003) in Jour of Clim? They both examined trends in Tmin and Tmax ~5000 stations worldwide with no significant differences found i.e. little impact by UHI/micro-scale site issues worldwide on surface T.
3) The CA links you posted mention nothing relevant on Peterson's stuff and nothing but a passing mention on Parker's work. Try again.
You know why serious scientists do not like CA? Do you know the history of the "auditors" to royally [screw up basic meteorology](http://atmoz.org/blog/2008/08/08/the-anatomy-of-a-climateaudit-post/) and have a totally biased agenda? (notice there is no post by McI on the statistical blunders in the McLean et al. paper recently? You would thought that with his "expertise", McI. would be chomping the bit). It also says a lot that McI. can only criticize Jones and Moburg (2003) for their data sources (i.e. from Iran, Syria, North Korea MOs) with a glib insult on data quality rather than disagree with their conclusions.
How mature of McI. - it's his (i) inability to get past his errors in critiquing the MBH 1998 paper (ii) his overestimation of his climate knowledge and (iii) his annoyingly pompous and poor writing style that drove me away from following discussions at CA anymore. But hey, don't let that stop you from wasting your time there.
Bottom line is, when you return, stay away from them if you wish to have serious discussion.
As an addendum to my post above, [RealClimate](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/resolving-technic…) have also pointed out the bias and buffoonery in CA:
..."There is however a different way of criticizing scientific papers that is prevalent in blogs like ClimateAudit. This involves challenging, âby all means necessaryâ, any paper whose conclusions are not liked. This can be based on simple typos, basic misunderstandings of the issues and âguilt by associationâ though there is sometimes the occasional interesting point. Since these claims are rarely assessed to see if there is any actual impact on the main result, the outcome is a series of misleading critiques, regardless of whether any of these criticisms are in fact even valid or salient, that give the impression that every one of these papers is worthless and that all their authors incompetent at best and dishonest at worst. It is the equivalent of claiming to have found spelling errors in a newspaper article. Fun for a while, but basically irrelevant for understanding any issue or judging the worth of the journalist."
'Nuff said. Ok, back to Watts and his surfacestations folly.
FE,
The huge variation you cite is over the 11-year solar cycle, so it wouldn't affect the TREND, would it? The difference in illumination between night and day is even huger -- 1,000 watts per square meter in some locales -- but that doesn't affect the trend either.
To all who tread the miasmatic marsh that is the settling lagoon of Ray's thread...
...I second the sentiments of Barton and others. There is no point engaging Ray, because he refuses to address the points of others. If no-one speaks to him here, he will only have himself to speak to, and that's a conversation that would go nowhere fast.
If there are others here who have questions regarding Ray's distorted views on matters, for example on why money is not a directly proportional representation of energy over time, or why CO2 is not the manna from plant heaven that Ray imagines, ask them on one of the Open threads where Ray is not permitted. That way you will get an answer with much less bandwidth hijacked by Ray's lunacy.
If he feels the need to respond to such questions he can do so here, and thus not feel that he has been censored. There's no point engaging him directly though, because he does not incorporate adjustments and counter-evidence to his world view, and he has demonstrably incorrect understanding about many fundamental points. And before you say anything Ray - yes, I frequently do so.
Resist the temptation to further engage with Ray.
He is a tar baby.
Dang! Posted to the wrong thread!
The video has now been restored by youtube. Climate Progress has a post on it [here](http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/19/youtube-peter-sinclair-anthony-wa…).
What is the probability of a forthright mea culpa from Watts?
Low, I suspect...
He must be grinding his teeth to stubs at all the extra publicity that he has garnered for Sinclair.