Friday roundup
A few items of interest this week:
Katrina Report Card:
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF, not to be confused with the 'National Wrestling Federation', which has no stated position on the matter) has issued a report card evaluating the U.S. government response in the wake of the Katrina disaster. We're neither agreeing nor disagreeing with their position, but it should be grist for an interesting discussion.
An Insensitive Climate?:
A paper by Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Laboratory accepted for publication in the AGU Journal of Geophysical Research is already getting quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere. It argues for a CO2-doubling climate sensitivity of about 1 degree C, markedly lower than just about any other published estimate, well below the low end of the range cited by recent scientific assessments (e.g. the IPCC AR4 report) and inconsistent with any number of other estimates. Why are Schwartz's calculations wrong? The early scientific reviews suggest a couple of reasons: firstly, that modelling the climate as an AR(1) process with a single timescale is an over-simplification; secondly, that a similar analysis in a GCM with a known sensitivity would likely give incorrect results, and finally, that his estimate of the error bars on his calculation are very optimistic. We'll likely have a more thorough analysis of this soon…
It's the Sun (not) (again!):
The solar cyclists are back on the track. And, to nobody's surprise, Fox News is doing the announcing. The Schwartz paper gets an honorable mention even though a low climate sensitivity makes it even harder to understand how solar cycle forcing can be significant. Combining the two critiques is therefore a little incoherent. No matter!
24 August 2007 at 4:00 PM
1) What is Stephen Schwartz’s response to the un-peer reviewed “early scientific reviews”? 2) If a journal allowed a bad anti-AGW paper to be published, then how can I be assured that these same journals didn’t allow bad pro-AGW papers to be published? Do we need a stronger peer-review process?
[Response: There is, its called an assessment process (e.g. IPCC, NRC, etc). See our previous article “Peer Review: A Necessary But Not Sufficient Condition”. -mike]
3) So in the last 100 years, the Sun had zero impact on the change of globally averaged temperatures? How much of the warming in the last 100 years can be attributed to the Sun? The IPCC doesn’t even try to answer the last question, but I get asked that question by the public that I interact with.
[Response: Hmmm? Not sure whom you are referring to as claiming that the sun has had zero impact on global mean temperature. I’m also not sure which IPCC you are referring to. The IPCC Third and Fourth Assessment reports both contained detailed summaries of Detection/Attribution studies that have indeed attempted to estimate the relative roles of natural (solar and volcanic) and anthropogenic forcing in observed 20th century temperature changes. I’d suggest reading Chapter 9 (”Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”) of the Fourth Assessment Working Group 1 report, the full report is available online here. -mike]
24 August 2007 at 4:32 PM
The NWF report is informative in what regard? It is pot banging pure and simple.
24 August 2007 at 4:43 PM
The sun certainly doesn’t have zero impact on temperature. Tung’s study (the one mentioned in that Fox News article) estimates the impact on global temperature from the solar cycle (eg - from solar minimum to maximum over 5.5 years) is about .18 degrees. But note that this is superimposed over the top of global warming - Tung had to detrend the temperature data to filter out the CO2 warming in order to find the solar signal.
Tung’s follow-up paper (http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf) has some interesting conclusions. Independently of models, he calculates a climate sensitivity of 2.3 to 4.1K, confirming the IPCC estimate. And as we’re currently at solar minimum, he estimates the solar warming over the next 5/6 years is going to add double the amount of warming as we head towards a solar maximum around 2013.
It’s ironic that the studies that skeptics quote as proving the sun
is causing global warming (eg - Solanki 2003 gets mentioned a lot) actually conclude the opposite.
24 August 2007 at 4:53 PM
The group write Why are Schwartz’s calculations wrong?
But Schwartz is being published in a peer reviewed journal. How can he possibly be wrong
Are you saying that peer review is not enough 
If that is true then all the science published since the late 20th century must be suspect.
[Response: At the risk of being repetitious, please see our previous article “Peer Review: A Necessary But Not Sufficient Condition”. -mike]
Perhaps the climate models, which only date to the 1960s, are wrong too! Surely, if Schwartz calculations are based on the models and he is wrong then the models must be wrong too.
OTOH, Schwartz is only considering the oceans. 30% of the surface of the Earth is covered with land. ‘No a lot!’ as Paul Daniels used to say. But it is where we live, so for us it is important. The models say that the land areas will warm twice as much as the oceans, So his 1C rise will mean a 2 C rise for us.
But if we look at his calculations, which include recent ocean cooling, one wonders if there is not a flaw somewhere. The Arctic ice has been melting much faster than the models predicted, and perhaps that cooling was just an abberation produced by icy water flowing from the Arctic Ocean. When Schwartz calculated the average ocean warming, he only included the increase in the senisible heat of the oceans, but he should also have included the increase in latent heat from the loss of sea ice.
That would have needed a factor of 80 for every cubic metre of perennial Arctic ice melted, along with the same factor for every cubic meter of ice calved and melted from the base of the Antarctic ice shelves.
The point to note is that this error would explain the slow rise in ocean temperature despite the current CO2 forcing. And when the sea ice disappears then that factor will have to be added to the ocean warming instead of being subtracted from it as happens now. If, using round figures, we assume we have had a warming of 1.0C over the last century, and that another 0.5C has been diverted to melting ice, then the true warming would have been 1.5C. When the ice disappears then the true warming true will be enhanced by the 0.5C that is no longer going into the melting the ice and temperatures will rise by 2.0C per century.
The bottom line is that Schwartz’s calculations are correct.
[Response: Hardly. We’ll have more on this soon, we promise. -mike]
It is the underlying science which underestimates the melting of the sea ice which is wrong.
24 August 2007 at 5:08 PM
Why is the Schwartz paper getting all this attention?
In Equation 1, he assumes that Q ≈ E, then he does a bunch of hocus-pocus and comes out with an equilibrium climate sensitivity and time constant of values in a range to make Q ≈ E. Along the way, he forgets that by only using instrumental records, he has assumed a very short time constant. We do not have instrumental records from the days when Earth was a snowball or all tropical. As Earth went into its snowball stages, as it come out of its snowball stages, as Earth went into its tropical stages, and as Earth came out of its tropical stages, Q did NOT come close to equalling E!
If Q does not approximate E, then the value for dH/dt in Equation 2 is much larger, dT/dt in Equation 3 is larger. Et certa!
Unless he offers compelling evidence for the stability of ocean heat content and the stability of the heat content of polar ice on geologic time frames, Schwartz cannot expect the reader to accept Equation 1.
I would say that a careful reading of this paper in the context of careful remote sensing strongly argues for a higher equilibrium climate sensitivity and longer time constant than Schwartz proposes. Try redoing the math, only instead of assuming Q ≈ E, assume that Q is related to E through various functions of atmospheric physics. Oh, but wait! Then, you would have the global climate models that offer a higher equilibrium climate sensitivity and longer time constants.
24 August 2007 at 5:42 PM
Schwartz’s model seems awfully simplistic; in fact, I don’t see much difference between his calculations and those presented in Sec. 12.6 of the textbook “Global Physical Climatology” by Dennis Hartmann.
24 August 2007 at 5:59 PM
I love reading this kind of material on this blog. Fox is reporting it much differently then the article states it on the right (from that link) and then come to find out those of you who have read his work, conclude that in the end, his end results are that of what the IPCC predicts. They don’t tell you that. Guaranteed my father will come home talking about “they discovered what causes global warming again”. And now I can kill that too with my newly acquired knowledge from you all. Thanks.
24 August 2007 at 6:33 PM
Stephen Schwartz of BNL gave a talk to the Science Club of Long Island at SUNY Stonybrook in 2004. I knew BNL was interested in sequestering CO2 in the ocean so I asked him about ocean acidification due to CO2. He said not to believe everything you see in the Sunday Times. I replied that I was referring to two recent papers in Science. He said don’t believe it until a great concensus of scientists duplicates the findings and agrees. Something fishy about this.
24 August 2007 at 6:56 PM
This is regarding the Katrina “Report Card”.
Who speaks for the Corps?
The Army Corps of Engineers has become an all too convenient whipping post for the failures of the New Orleans levees.
But the levees that were originally built were as much as a public policy decision as were the Corps design criteria. Thelevees were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane which may have been a rarer occurrence than it is today.
The process is that The Corps presents an initial proposal before Congress containing planning , construction, maintainance and other costs for say a 150 or 200 year flood ( a flood that has a recurrance interval, on average, of the specified time period). The Congress makes it’s decision based on it’s budget and against competing expenses in the
budget. Federal funds were requested to bolster the levees several years before Katrina but no money was authorized.
There was a great deal of complacency at all levels of government. After all New Orleans had escaped disaster so
often in thepast, and so there was a mindset among the officials and the public that it would continue to do so. Live and learn.When Rita hit in the Gulf afterward, everyone was better prepared for emergency plans and evacuations.The Corps has many conscientious and dedicated employees, who are willing and able to protect against future foreseeable flooding
but will be constrained by what the decision makers are willing to budget toward that cause.
24 August 2007 at 9:30 PM
re: #9
The Economist has a succinct current story about New Orleans,
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9687404
Among other things, it says:
“But the government has done practically nothing to discourage rebuilding in the most flood-prone areas….In the end, most homeowners were able to rebuild precisely where they were before and still qualify for federal food insurance.”
While I normally don’t read the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial, they had an article by Lomborg today, of which one point was right: encouraging building on some coasts is crazy.
25 August 2007 at 12:55 AM
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/, current issue (Sept 3), has a nice section on solar power, but also an unfortunate editorial by Steve Forbes, praising the (negative) analysis of An Inconvenient Truth by Mary Ellen Gilder (George’s daughter), a *medical school student*, pointing at:
www.oism.org/pproject (a site that RC fans may recognize).
I’ve suggested that “debunking bad papers” might be given a new section, with one thread per paper, to get such out of other threads. This one wouldn’t be worth it … except for being featured in Forbes.
25 August 2007 at 1:24 AM
Just an observation RE 9, et al: Rita was better prepared for because it was done by Texas and Texas cities (though they too had their bad moments). New Orleans and LA, as first responders, get an F- for their response and their bumblings before, during and after Katrina. I find it odd that the entire focus is on the Feds who in fact deserve at least a D if not a C (or C-) for their efforts. (Though nobody could handle a leeve breach.) I think I heard the Mayor of NO is parlaying his total incompetance into a run for Governor… (or maybe Senator, I can’t recall).
25 August 2007 at 7:40 AM
Richard, thanks for the report on Schwartz’s disbelief in the oceah pH work.
Now that’s scary. It’s not fancy physics, it’s physical chemistry.
25 August 2007 at 9:27 AM
Re:9 while you make many valid points, the levees were in fact poorly designed and constructed, and this falls right in the lap of the Corps.
25 August 2007 at 10:12 AM
Respecting B. Buckner’s comment in 14, from the partial plans that I saw in the media shortly after the breach of the levees, the underground supports didn’t go deeply enough into the the loose surrounding terrain and should have penetrated bedrock to prevent overturning. I know nothing about the inspection at the construction sites, but some few inspectors are notoriously lax in accepting shoddy construction methods, too much of a proportion of water inthe concrete for example.But there’s plenty of culpability to go around. Engineers are hardly ever given carte blanche on what they can build. Pressure will come from those responsible for the budget to build at a quicker pace and at less cost.
In addition the government didn’t have it’s priorities straight on spending. The Boston big dig was built at a cost of $15 billion. The estimated cost to upgrade the New Orleans levees to protect for cat.5 hurricand was $2.5 billion.It would have been well worth it. It had been anticipated in the years before Katrina but no money was alloted
25 August 2007 at 10:36 AM
> levees, the underground supports should have penetrated bedrock …
Impractical: “Southern Louisiana has been built up out of sediments transported from the interior of the continent down the Mississippi River. Tens of thousands of feet of these soft sediments overlie crystalline bedrock….”
http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-6ZQPVT?OpenDocument
Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
John T. Christian
Volume 37, Number 1 - Spring 2007
Geotechnical conditions and design flaws both contributed to the failure of the levees in New Orleans.
This is a good summary referencing some 6,000 pages of technical reports on the Louisiana failure.
Short answer: the builders used wishful thinking, optimism, and hope, and called it engineering.
25 August 2007 at 11:00 AM
I also have some posts debunking Schwartz. The basic question is whether scientists (i.e. the IPCC consensus) are overestimating or underestimating climate change. Schwartz’s results would imply the former — but all observations and much recent research strongly suggests the latter. See
http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/21/are-scientists-overestimating-or-underestimating-climate-change-part-i/
http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/22/are-scientists-overestimating-or-underestimating-climate-change-part-ii/
http://climateprogress.org/2007/08/23/are-scientists-overestimating-or-underestimating-climate-change-part-iii/
25 August 2007 at 11:38 AM
“Re:9 while you make many valid points, the levees were in fact poorly designed and constructed, and this falls right in the lap of the Corps.”
And neither NOL nor LA had absolutely nothing to say about it?
25 August 2007 at 11:52 AM
RE: 15 Bedrock is about 2,000 feet below the ground surface, so that was not the issue. The Corps made many rookie, and frankly unprofessional mistakes. They ignored ample subsurface information that indicated the existence of permeable layers beneath the dikes that should have been cut off to prevent a boiling or quick condition that undermined the foundation when water rose on one side of the wall. Also they ignored the presence of soft compressible soils beneath the dikes. The dikes subsequently settled several feet so that they were no longer set at the design flood level, and were subsequently overtopped, something they were not designed to withstand. Overall, their performance was an embarrassment.
25 August 2007 at 12:52 PM
Not directly, only indirectly through the political process, and then only in regard to the big picture, i.e. “how big a hurricane to guard against”, not, say, “what kind of concrete to use”.
25 August 2007 at 12:52 PM
Regardless of whether you attribute hurricane Katrina to anthropogenic global warming, it is likely representative of the sort of catastrophic “extreme weather events” that will become more and more frequent as a result of global warming. (Recall that Houston narrowly escaped an even worse disaster from hurricane Rita.) The moral of the response to the Katrina disaster is that even the wealthiest, most powerful and most technologically advanced nation on Earth is entirely unprepared and unable to respond effectively to such events.
25 August 2007 at 2:39 PM
Do better to hire the Dutch engineers…
25 August 2007 at 4:16 PM
Re #16 “Short answer: the builders used wishful thinking, optimism, and hope, and called it engineering.”
C’mon Hank, you don’t know that. It’s this kind of inflammatory rhetoric that causes and confusion and contention among the public. Since I found Realclimate about 4 months ago, you’ve been among the more cogent and analytical posters here. It seems out of character to state this kind of subjective verbiage. See B.Buck’s more reasoned response in comment #19. Most career civil employees and officers are professional in their work. They don’t make as much as they might outside but there are gratifications in serving the public.
John Mashey is onto something in comment #10. Why keep doing the same thing and risk getting the same results.Eventually a storm greater than Katrina will come ashore,especially since greater magnitude storms have been occurring more frequently,lately. Maybe New Orleans ought to do what Galveston did after a storm surge in 1900 caused 6000 deaths.
They jacked up the buildings and deposited dredged sand beneath the raised structures and built a large seawall for further protection.They could attempt the same in New Orleans to raise some of the lower sections of the city above sea level.
25 August 2007 at 5:30 PM
# 8 Shwartz has a website here
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs.html#preprints
And here is the conclusion of his 2007 paper:
Quantifying climate change — Too rosy a picture?
“The century-long lifetime of atmospheric CO2 and the anticipated future decline in atmospheric aerosols mean that greenhouse gases will inevitably emerge as the dominant forcing of climate change, and in the absence of a draconian reduction in emissions, this forcing will be large. Such dominance can be seen, for example, in estimates from the third IPCC report of projected total forcing in 2100 for various emissions scenarios2 as shown at the bottom of Fig. 1. Depending on which future emissions scenario prevails, the projected forcing is 4 to 9 W m-2. This is comparable to forcings estimated for major climatic shifts, such as that for the end of the last ice age3.”
25 August 2007 at 5:33 PM
“Do better to hire the Dutch engineers…
Comment by David B. Benson — 25 August 2007 @ 14:39″
Or the guys who designed and built this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Barrier
25 August 2007 at 5:37 PM
I thought the answer to the Schwartz puzzle is simply mishandled signal analysis. Starting at the bottom of p 13, he describes the filtering he applied. Without detrending, he gets a relaxation time constant of 15-17 years, which would give a sensitivity much in line with other calculations. But then he applies detrending, which he concedes is a high pass filter. By attenuating long-term effects in this way, he gets a much shorter time constant of 5-7 years, which then leads to the lower sensitivity.
Detrending is quite inappripriate here. His argument for using it seems to be that without it, he gets inconsistent data between the first and second half-periods of data. All that means is that his method cannot resolve the longer term effects properly, and so he removes them. The root problem is that he is trying to find a transfer function for a system by dividing the output spectrum by the input, but the input is poorly known, and has a small range of frequencies.
25 August 2007 at 6:33 PM
Lawrence, when I say ‘builders” I mean the people who hire the engineers, and the politicians who pay for the work and tell the public that it’s good and their money well spent. From that study — based on the first 6,000 pages of reports — it seems like the engineering information was sufficient to say the builders were wrong, and some engineers did warn about the situation. The pressure’s always going to be strong on engineers, as on climatologists, to provide data but not warnings, I imagine.
These huge retrospective studies failures I guess are how they figure out what their professional responsibility is to warn where the builders and politicians don’t want the public to know a failure is likely.
Compare the way earthquake building standards get changed after each major earthquake — there’s a cycle of engineering reports, proposals to upgrade the way buildings are built, a long period of political negotiation, and maybe change or maybe not. There’s a whole academic field studying how this kind of change happens.
Remember this one? http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=6202
“… the Northridge earthquake …. discoveries alarmed the structural engineering community, building codes officials and emergency managers, especially in earthquake prone areas. The findings called into question all building codes developed over the previous 20 years that addressed this type of construction…..”
That’s what engineers can do — “call into question” — but can they do any more?
Climatologists have a tougher situation — they don’t get a “next time” toward which to make recommendations.
25 August 2007 at 6:52 PM
Well I have been ad hom’ed on a bunch of other pro CO2 AGW sites but no one has been able to point out where my facts or conclusions are wrong. Any one here want to take a shot at it?
[Response: Vernon, the reaction you get is probably directly proportional to your reluctance to listen. But here are the answers again. - gavin]
Here are the facts and conclusions:
Hansen (2001) states quite plainly that he depends on the accuracy of the station data for the accuracy of his UHI off-set
[Response: Of course. - gavin]
WMO/NOAA/NWS have siting standards
Surfacestations.org’s census is showing (based on where they are at now in the census) that a significant number of stations fail to meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards
[Response: They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset which is already hugely oversampling the regional anomalies. - gavin]
There is no way to determine the accuracy of the station data for stations that do not meet standards.
[Response: There is also no way to determine the accuracy of the stations that do either. Except for comparing them to other nearby stations and looking for coherence for the past, and actually doing some measurements of temperature now. - gavin]
Hansen uses lights=0 in his 2001 study
Due to failure of stations to meet siting standards, lights=0 does not always put the station in an rural environment
[Response: False. You are confusing a correction for urbanisation with micro-site effect. UHI is a real problem, and without that correction the global trends would be biased high. The Hansen urban-only US trend is about 0.3 deg C/century warmer than the rural trend (which is what is used). Therefore the lights=0 technique certainly does reduce urban biases. - gavin]
At this time there is no way to determine the accuracy of Hansen’s UHI off-set
[Response: The effect diminishes with the size of town, it is actually larger than corrections based on population rises, and it gives results that are regionally coherent and you have yet to show that any objective subsampling of the rural stations makes any difference. - gavin]
Any GCM that uses this off-set has no way to determine the accuracy of the product being produced.
[Response: GCMs don’t use the surface station data. How many times does that need to be pointed out? - gavin]
Tell which facts I got wrong!
Oh and if you did not catch this, it means that GISS GCM is pretty worthless till they figure this out.
[Response: GCM physics is independent of the trends in the surface data - no changes to that data will change a single line of GCM code or calculation. If you want to have a continued discussion then address the responses. Simply repeats of the same statements over and again is tiresome and pointless. - gavin]
26 August 2007 at 6:55 AM
Re #12. Rod. B. Oh, now come on. The federal response to Katrina would have been comic had the consequences not been so tragic. Chertoff didn’t even know there were refugees at the superdome until NPR pointed it out to him.
Rod, I travel a lot overseas and work with lots of foreign nationals on international satellite collaborations. This one massive failure did more to destroy faith in the US federal government than anything else–including Iraq. This was the federal government saying: “You’re on your own.”
26 August 2007 at 9:47 AM
“Climatologists have a tougher situation — they don’t get a “next time” toward which to make recommendations.”
After The Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure( Galloping Gertie) in 1940, Tacoma Narrows Bridge: “Galloping Gertie” Collapses November 7, 1940 , engineers began to pay much more attention to wind stress. Often we learn from our mistakes and miscalculations, though at great expense.
Future climatologists will learn from what today’s climatologists are doing. Hopefully, they’ll be able to fine tune or more fully understand such things as details of parameterizing partial cloud cover inside a model’s cell.
First somebody does something than somebody does it better. The Wright Brothers flight was measured in minutes, and two decades later Lindbergh made a non-stop flight across the Atlantic.
Whether you’re a scientist climatologist or engineer,it smoothes the process if you have the support of those who control the purse strings.Here’s what Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker of the Washington Post had to say on Sept.2,2005:
“In recent years, Bush repeatedly sought to slice the Army Corps of Engineers’ funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, which Katrina smashed through, flooding New Orleans. In 2005, Bush asked for $3.9 million, a small fraction of the request the corps made in internal administration deliberations. Under pressure from Congress, Bush ultimately agreed to spend $5.7 million. Since coming to office, Bush has essentially frozen spending on the Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for protecting the coastlines, waterways and other areas susceptible to natural disaster, at around $4.7 billion.”
As recently as July, the White House lobbied unsuccessfully against a plan to spend $1 billion over four years to rebuild coastlines and wetlands, which serve as buffers against hurricanes. More than half of that money goes to Louisiana.”
Bottlenecks are always found at the top of the bottle. When this Nation has short sighted leaders,we’ll all inevitably pay in the long run.
26 August 2007 at 1:23 PM
Gavin, thank you for your input and I have addressed your responses in-line. I bolded the original post.
Here are the facts and conclusions:
Hansen (2001) states quite plainly that he depends on the accuracy of the station data for the accuracy of his UHI off-set
[Response: Of course. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
Yeah, Gavin agreed with me.
WMO/NOAA/NWS have siting standards
Surfacestations.org’s census is showing (based on where they are at now in the census) that a significant number of stations fail to meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards
[Response: They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset which is already hugely oversampling the regional anomalies. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
i) They do show that the stations are not in accordance with NOAA/NWS guidelines. No one knows what this is doing to the station accuracy.
ii) This is a red herring, it does not matter what they are doing, what matters is no one knows what this is doing to accuracy.
iii)Oversampling does not matter, Hansen (2001) is not about trends, it is about adjustments to individual stations for UHI, TOD, and station movement.
[Response: False. The Hansen study is precisely about calculating regional and global trends. It specifically states that for local studies, looking at the raw data would be better. If you don’t know why a study is being done, you are unlikely to be able to work out why some details matter and some do not. - gavin]
There is no way to determine the accuracy of the station data for stations that do not meet standards
[Response: There is also no way to determine the accuracy of the stations that do either. Except for comparing them to other nearby stations and looking for coherence for the past, and actually doing some measurements of temperature now. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
Gavin, this is another red herring. Hansen assumed the stations did meet the accuracy requirements, it can be shown this assumption is not supported.
So Hansen says that the data from the surface stations needs to be accurate for his methodology to work.
[Response: Hansen appropriately acknowledges that if the data are seriously flawed, then the GISS analysis will have included those flaws. But again you are mistaken in what you think has been shown. No-one has demonstrated that are significant problems with enough stations to change the regional picture. For you “individual non-compliance”=”unusable data”, but this has not been shown at all for a significant number of single stations, let alone their regional average. - gavin]
Further, Hansen made additional assumptions (his definition of rural):
Hansen uses lights=0 in his 2001 study
Due to failure of stations to meet siting standards, lights=0 does not always put the station in an rural environment
[Response: False. You are confusing a correction for urbanisation with micro-site effect. UHI is a real problem, and without that correction the global trends would be biased high. The Hansen urban-only US trend is about 0.3 deg C/century warmer than the rural trend (which is what is used). Therefore the lights=0 technique certainly does reduce urban biases. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
Gavin, I am not confusing anything. You have a nice red herring but I did not say that the currently used UHI off-set does not reduce urban biases. I said there is no way to know the accuracy of the UHI off-set. You have not disputed this, and saying your doing something that you cannot prove is right is not much better than doing nothing.
[Response: First off, the UHI correction is a trend, not an offset. Secondly, you are confused. Where is there a ‘lights=0′ station that is in an urban environment? An urban environment is a city, not a building or a road. Secondly, you asking for something that is impossible. How can anyone prove that the correction is correct? Science doesn’t work like that. Instead, you make assumptions (that rural trends are more representative of the large scale than urban ones), and you calculate the regional trends accordingly. You might dispute that assumption, but at no stage can anyone ‘prove’ that it is perfectly correct. - gavin]
At this time there is no way to determine the accuracy of Hansen’s UHI off-set
[Response: The effect diminishes with the size of town, it is actually larger than corrections based on population rises, and it gives results that are regionally coherent and you have yet to show that any objective subsampling of the rural stations makes any difference. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
Your response has nothing to do with my statement. You then follow up with talking about the census based UHI off-set which Hansen say specifically his methodology is better.
Any GCM that uses this off-set has no way to determine the accuracy of the product being produced.
[Response: GCMs don’t use the surface station data. How many times does that need to be pointed out? - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
yet another red herring. I never claimed that you used surface station data. You use the trends, which are in part, formed by using Hansen (2001) off-sets based on the surface station data. [edit]
Tell which facts I got wrong!
Oh and if you did not catch this, it means that GISS GCM is pretty worthless till they figure this out.
[Response: GCM physics is independent of the trends in the surface data - no changes to that data will change a single line of GCM code or calculation. If you want to have a continued discussion then address the responses. Simply repeats of the same statements over and again is tiresome and pointless. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
yet another red herring. Gavin, you can continue to mischaracterize what I said but it will not change the facts. The facts are that the surface station trends are used by GISS GCM as an input. There is no way with the work that Hansen has currently done in (2001) to know if the trends which use his off-sets are any good. Remember garbage in garbage out?
So your basic response consists of conceding that the surefacestations.org census is showing that a significant number of stations, to date, are not in compliance. You offer nothing to show what the impact of being out of compliance is. You offer nothing to show that if Hansen’s assumptions are wrong, his results are still right. You offer red-herrings as to why this would affect the GISS GCM.
[edit]
[Response: Pay attention here. I said the surface data are not used in the GCM. You insist that they are. Since I think I know what’s in the GCM quite well, I am certain that I am not mistaken on this. If you think I am wrong, please point out the lines of code where this data are used. This is a straightforward point of fact, if you cannot concede this, there is absolutely no point continuing this discussion. - gavin]
26 August 2007 at 1:34 PM
Re: 11
That Gilder essay makes the amusing claim that the Oreskes article should be discounted because it was published in Sciences “Essays” section rather than in the peer reviewed literature. Perhaps she is right; from now on, I’ll only cite surveys that have been peer reviewed.
[/sarcasm]
26 August 2007 at 1:50 PM
I know that sea level was discussed in this group at some length in July. However, with the new evidence that changes in atmospheric and thus oceanic circulation may have obscured changes in sea level (http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12547-flatter-oceans-may-have-caused-1920s-sea-rise.html ) , is there any evidence that the previously apparently static sea levels caused groups to self-censor data on ice sheet melting? That is: Is there ice sheet melting data out there that was not published because it seemed inconsistent with sea level data?
26 August 2007 at 1:59 PM
Re 28 Vernon : “Any GCM that uses this off-set has no way to determine the accuracy of the product being produced.”
Vernon, yet again you prove that you have no idea what a GCM is or how they work.
This is not an ad hom, merely a statement of fact based on your own expressed misconceptions.
26 August 2007 at 2:55 PM
Re #31
This exchange reminds me of a student I once had who was convinced from the very
beginning that anything I told her was a lie. Needless to say, I wasn’t
able to persuade her of much!
26 August 2007 at 3:13 PM
Ray, and what exactly were all those refugees doing at the Superdome besides wondering where the supplies NOL promised were and where the busses NOL promised to take them to safety were? Not knowing most were sitting at the bus lot untouched and now mostly submerged. I don’t say the Feds response was anything great. But the attitude, as you express, that the Feds — not the State, Locals, or ourselves, are responsible to kiss us and make us better is a never winning situation, and not the Feds fault.
26 August 2007 at 3:45 PM
Well I feel better already. A non-peer reviewed blog refuting this study! Oh who to put faith in? A website or a peer reviewed published in a respected scientific journal study? I just can’t decide.
26 August 2007 at 3:55 PM
Vernon’s mission is to anger Gavin, at which point the climate blogger ethics panel in permanent session over at Climate Audit and Climate Science will convict Real Climate of being a very nasty place indeed. If Gavin tires or allows Vernon to keep propagating ignorance, well, that’s fine with Vernon. The whole purpose of the Vernon exercise is to put Real Climate into Zuzwang.
So one needs another strategy: The Time Out Box TM
When you get someone whose mission in life is provocation, send them to the Time Out box. Put a notice on the front page: The following children are sitting in the Real Climate Time Out Box: Vernon. The box would have links to their comments showing why they were sent there. If Vernon decides that there is no future in claiming that surface data is used in GCMs after being told that it was not so, after being asked to provide some evidence, etc. well, he has the keys to the box in his own hand.
26 August 2007 at 4:02 PM
RE 1.
Peer review is a method of insuring that Bayesians don’t get surprised since they share priors with their peers.
Hostile scrunity is the evolutionary test of an ideas fitness.
[Response: Peer review does not go around simply squashing ideas that aren’t agreed on by the reviewer. Instead, it is a review of the logical basis of an idea, not whether the idea is right or wrong, or likely or unlikely. Frankly, it often doesn’t even test that properly. It is a minimum test of an idea’s fitness, not the end result. - gavin]
26 August 2007 at 4:24 PM
Rod (36) I think the supplies were to come from FEMA. No city can possibly store emergency supplies for a disaster of this scale. Yes, the city was supposed to have buses. But the bus drivers all fled. Should have been anticipated.
No one expects the feds to kiss us. But planning for disasters of this scale has to be a federal problem or we will be needlessly duplicating expertise and planning all over the country.
26 August 2007 at 4:34 PM
ref: 36 One good thing happened because of Katrina, local and state officials learned that the FEMA is there to provide assistance, not usurp authority. Calling for the equivalent of marshal law in the wake did not speak well for LA’s and NOL’s planning.
Disaster planning has improved dramatically throughout the country because of NOL. Of course it is easier to blame a federal administration.
26 August 2007 at 4:49 PM
RE 28. Vernon writes, and gavin inlines
“Surfacestations.org’s census is showing (based on where they are at now in the census) that a significant number of stations fail to meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards
[Response: They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset which is already hugely oversampling the regional anomalies. - gavin]”
I’ve pointed this out before so I do not understand why some cannot RTFM
1. Leroy’s study that forms the basis of the new standards for the CRN ( which gavin endorses) indicates that poor siting, like that shown by Surfacestations.org
can lead to microsite errors on the order of 1-5C. RTFM.
Watts and company are relying on the published peer reviewed science. Their Prior is that bad siting leads
to a 1-5C error.
2. Peilke’s study of Colorado sites showed microsite Bias. However, Karl objected that this “micro site issue” while important was limited. Surface stations has shown the issue to be more widespread than Karl Imagined. Kar’s Prior was wrongly assumed to be a rare event type of distribution. So much for priors.
3. The First study of the new network ( the CRN) found that microsite issues ( see the Ashland study) were citical. In this particular case it was siting a weather station by a runway that caused an issue.
Simply, SurfaceStations does not have to Reprove what
1. Karl admits is true
2. Hansen admits is true
3. CRN studies prove.
Namely THIS. The WMO scientists were correct when they established siting guidelines. They expressed a consensus of scientific thought.
In short. WMO have standards for a reason. It is the consensus of scientists that improper siting leads to improper readings. This finding has not been seriously challenged anywhere in peer reviewed literature. Karl called for better siting, HANSEN called for better siting. The WMO calls for better siting. Gavin has called for better siting by pointing to the CRN.
only A siting sceptic could argue that bad siting is ok .
26 August 2007 at 5:34 PM
Which is all meaningless blather. It does not speak to the pertinent question:
Can we draw meaningful conclusions from the historical data we have?
Those same scientists calling for a better network in the future also happen to believe that yes, we CAN draw meaningful conclusions from the historical data.
A bunch of photographs aren’t going to change that conclusion.
26 August 2007 at 6:44 PM
That microsite bias exists is not an issue. That it goes in only one direction is. There are more USHCN sites near trees than airconditioners. Moreover, Peterson has shown that trends at urban sites are essentially the same as trends at rural sites.
26 August 2007 at 6:53 PM
Rod B.,
While I agree that there was failure on all levels, what was new in NO was that the failure reached all the way to the top. The Bush administration’s political appointees utterly failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation–that is clear from the emails. I do not let LA or NO off the hook, but the perception of our allies (and our enemies) is that the government of the most powerful nation on Earth allowed civil society to break down for an extended period of time–and it makes them wonder just how strong we are.
26 August 2007 at 7:01 PM
Steven Mosher,
Let us presume that there is a dataset with a systematic error of unknown origin. Two graduate students start looking for the source fo the error. Graduate student A begins looking at every nut and bolt in the apparatus that is the source of the data. Grad student B looks at the dataset and characterizes the error–maybe looks at the data at different stages trying to find where the error is creeping in and what might be the nature of the error.
I will bet you dollars to donuts (granted, not that great odds given what the dollar is doing these days) that not only will grad student B find the source of the error first, she will also have a better idea of how to correct for it and salvage the dataset rather than starting over. Data are never perfect.
By all means, let us apply the standards to any new stations. However, there is zero chance that the audits of stations will produce evidence of any problem the analyses cannot handle.
26 August 2007 at 7:55 PM
There is an excelent article on Swartze paper at the blog.
The lack of sophistication in the model he use in the study is revealed in this quote from the paper:
Finally, as the present analysis rests on a simple single-compartment energy balance model, the question must inevitably arise whether the rather obdurate climate system might be amenable to determination of its key properties through empirical analysis based on such a simple model. In response to that question it might have to be said that it remains to be seen. In this context it is hoped that the present study might stimulate further work along these lines with more complex models…. Ultimately of course the climate models are essential to provide much more refined projections of climate change than would be available from the global mean quantities that result from an analysis of the present sort.
26 August 2007 at 7:59 PM
Hey, where did the preview button go? I didn’t mean to submit that my last comment yet, that last paragraph is meant to be a block quote and I was only just getting started otherwise …
26 August 2007 at 9:12 PM
This is important, but didn’t (?) get much media attention:
Mine fires in China, India etc., burning coal, put out about as much greenhouse CO2 as US gas consumption. Suppressing them out substantially would have significant impact on reducing greenhouse gas increases.
Link
26 August 2007 at 10:30 PM
Ray, one reason why the feds didn’t fully appreciate Katrina’s situation might be because both LA and NOL told FEMA that the levees were intact hours after they had been breached. Are the critical foreigners the ones who had just been crushed by a tsunami and helped extraordinarily by our military? Or maybe the self-centered French et al because we’re 30 years late with our periodic saving their butts from the Germans? Actually, some of what you and they say is valid. I do not give the Feds high marks by a long shot, and ultimately they have to carry the ball for this scale of disaster. I just think we should appropriately spread the blame. Plus I think Mississippi has put LA to shame with their recovery.
26 August 2007 at 11:19 PM
Does anyone know of a plot over time of total reflected radiation from the Earth back into space (as measured by satellites)?
Presumably this would show a gradual decrease over the last 100 years.
26 August 2007 at 11:51 PM
File this under “the obvious”, but we haven’t had satellites for 100 years…
27 August 2007 at 4:25 AM
Sure we have…we’ve had at least one for 4 billion years! But uh, yes, obviously 100 years is asking a tad much. Was meant to be 10 (although 20 or 30 would be better).
27 August 2007 at 5:56 AM
A bit OT, but here is an honest to gawd email exchange between British Coal’s Richard Courtney and various other deniers on the topic of carbon sequestration:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/08/great-balls-of-dry-ice-deniers-at-play.html#links
27 August 2007 at 5:59 AM
Surely the GCM includes parameters that are calibrated against the surface data?
It seems hard to believe that improved surface data wouldn’t, for example, improve our estimates of CO2 sensitivity?
[Response: They are compared against things like the absolute annual mean, the seasonal change and the diurnal range. But these are much better characterised than the trends that are being discussed. And it’s worth bearing in mind that the errors in the GCM range up to a few degrees or so, and so are much larger than differences any of this will make. Therefore the skill scores are not going to be greatly affected and the code will not change. - gavin]
27 August 2007 at 10:07 AM
#44 Eli:
The problem is that trees are likely to be far more representative of the environment that is being measured, i.e., a given climate in a given region, than are air conditioners unless you are trying to measure the temperature of NYC.
27 August 2007 at 11:03 AM
Gavin, thanks again for this discussion. I removed both comments when there was no response to my comment.
[edit for conciseness]
Vern’s 2nd Response:
So you do agree not meeting the site guidelines will inject 0.8 - 5.4 degree C?
You have not presented any facts to show that the injected error will not cause a bias, remember, I am not arguing that there is one, only that it is not possible to tell.
Finally, per CRN, Hansen’s 250 rural stations are not hugely over sampled since they are putting out 100 to give a 5 degree national coverage. Further, CRN states 300 stations will be needed reduce climate uncertainty to about 95%.
Well, as to whether I understand what Hansen says he is doing, as to the trend vs temperature delta, I could be wrong on this, and if I am, enlighten me, but I understood that Hansen is taking the urban stations, processing them, then the rural stations, processing them for each grid, then on a yearly basis, do the delta between rural and urban for each grid cell per year, then taking those to do the UHI off-set. Then that off-set is done against individual stations as part of GISSTemp processing. (I know I am simplifying this since there is actually urban, semi-urban, and unlighted.) It is not trend vs trend. The only part I really have questions on is which off-set was he doing in what order, or was he doing all variations and then taking the mean?
[edit]
Vern’s 2nd response: Well you did not disagree with this one the first time around but do now. Fine, please show me your evidence that all 250 stations meet site guides? If not then I believe that the 0.8 - 5.4 degree C from failure to meeting site standards far exceeds the few hundredths of a degree C over the past 100 years that Hansen assumes. You presented no facts or logic, just made a statement. Please back that up with facts or studies.
[edit]
Vern’s 2nd response: I addressed the UHI off-set above. I apologize if I did not say it clearly enough but poorly sited rural stations do not give accurate rural data. I did not say light=0 was an urban environment, you just did. I said that light=0 did not give you a good rural environment. CRN says that a good rural site will be: ‘not be subject to local microclimatic interferences such as might be induced by topography, katabatic flows or wind shadowing, poor solar exposure, the presence of large water bodies not representative of the region, agricultural practices such as irrigation, suspected long-term fire environments, human interferences, or nearby buildings or thermal sinks.’
Then you drag out a red herring, there is proof that the stations are not meeting site guidelines. Hansen said that his work needs accurate data to be correct. It can be shown that that assumption is not supported by the stations. You still have not addressed this.
[edit]
Vern’s 2nd response: Gavin, you do use the surface station data, just not directly. In your Present-Day Atmospheric Simulations Using GISS ModelE: Comparison to In Situ, Satellite, and Reanalysis Data (2006) you use the station data to verify that the model is correct. ‘As in the other diagnostics, the differences among the different models are small compared to the offset with observations.’ So you are using the surface station data to make your model better. If the surface station data is wrong, then your model also surfers.
Ok, worthless was a bit much, but if you do not know the errors in the stations, you do not know now much error is being injected into your model as you have optimize against a ‘real’ base-line that may or may not reflect actual climate change.
[Response: First, I am not disputing that microsite effects can offset temperature readings. However they can offset them in both directions, it will be the net effect that matters. Second, the impact of the microsite effect only enters the trend calculation if it changes, not if it is a constant offset (since only anomalies are used). Thirdly, the GISTEMP analysis has a smoothing radius of 1200 km, this means that for the continental US there is nothing close to 200 degrees of freedom in the regional temperature trends the Hansen papers try to estimate. Eyeballing it you would guess something more like 10 or even less. That is why the regional trends are hugely oversampled. Finally, if you look at the GCM comparisons to the CRU data in the paper you cite, you will notice that the comparison is to the regional absolute temperatures and the seasonal cycle and that local errors can be large. The microsite issues are not going to make any difference to that comparison. Trust me on that. - gavin]
27 August 2007 at 11:08 AM
bjc, are you saying the criteria for new stations should _not_ mention shade if there are trees in the area?
Remember, these are not “climate” measuring devices, they’re thermometers for air temperature.
27 August 2007 at 2:29 PM
On the subject of raising the level of New Orleans –
When I was there a year ago we couldn’t figure out why there was so much dirt inside of everything. Then we realized the 1″ thick layer of dirt was silt from the flooding. All that would be needed are another 96 more Katrina’s and the Lower Ninth Ward will be at sea level.
But seriously, there are parts of the Upper Ninth Ward — Musician’s Village, in particular — that are being built at the proper grade. It was really interesting for me to be in one family’s new house looking down on the houses across the street.
New Orleans needs to be where it is, and it’s not going to move because of storms. Further down river is further out into the Gulf of Mexico. Further up river is swamp. Many parts of the city are several feet below sea level, and raising any neighborhood with fill would require completely rebuilding the infrastructure.
The fault for Katrina lies with multiple people and entities. The city cannot be evacuated simply because it there are too few roads out — I-10 to the east and west, the Causeway to the north (the Gulf is to the south — wrong way). There are 6 lanes east, 6 lanes west, 4 lanes north, for a total of 16 lanes. Normal traffic is 2 seconds per lane per vehicle, or 8 vehicles per second. Assume a million people (less than it was), 4 people per vehicle (there aren’t enough buses, including the 100 or so school buses that weren’t used, to evacuate the city), that’s 250,000 vehicles. That starts to look do-able until you figure out the rest of it, and that’s where it breaks down.
The evacuation for Rita had people stuck on the highway, in traffic jams, when the storm made landfall. Many people who evacuated never made it where they were going — the traffic was so bad that they turned around before getting to where they were driving. I live 200 miles from Houston, and the evacuation of Houston wrecked traffic where I live. The only way to avoid another Katrina is to make cities like New Orleans (and Houston) storm-proof.
27 August 2007 at 3:37 PM
Hank:
I agree that the thermometers are there to measure air temperature and for local weather recording purposes, but the data is also being used to build a measure of climate trends and these records are being adjusted for a whole range of microsite effects. But not all microsite effects are conceptually equivalent. UHI, anthropogenic heat sources, asphalt are non-representative of the 5*5 regional climate grids, but trees in a forested region are most definitely part of the climate as is packed earth/rocks in a desert region, viz., weather station at UA at Tuscon. Difficulties obvioulsy arise where a region has a complex, heterogenous landcape or a multiplicity of land uses…then we need to ensure an adequate sampling of the differing land uses/landscapes. It strikes that non rural sites are almost by definition non-representative and as such should be excluded from the data-base, and not adjusted or corrected. If this is done then UHI becomes a non-issue!
27 August 2007 at 3:40 PM
Gavin, thank your taking the time to answer me, and I am enjoying this discussion. I do have a few questions based on you last.
[Response: First, I am not disputing that microsite effects can offset temperature readings. However they can offset them in both directions, it will be the net effect that matters. Second, the impact of the microsite effect only enters the trend calculation if it changes, not if it is a constant offset (since only anomalies are used). Thirdly, the GISTEMP analysis has a smoothing radius of 1200 km, this means that for the continental US there is nothing close to 200 degrees of freedom in the regional temperature trends the Hansen papers try to estimate. Eyeballing it you would guess something more like 10 or even less. That is why the regional trends are hugely oversampled. Finally, if you look at the GCM comparisons to the CRU data in the paper you cite, you will notice that the comparison is to the regional absolute temperatures and the seasonal cycle and that local errors can be large. The microsite issues are not going to make any difference to that comparison. Trust me on that. - gavin]
Vern’s Response:
I am glad that we have reached agreement that microsite affects to stations that do not meet site guidelines for local microclimatic interferences such as might be induced by topography, katabatic flows or wind shadowing, poor solar exposure, the presence of large water bodies not representative of the region, agricultural practices such as irrigation, suspected long-term fire environments, human interferences, or nearby buildings or thermal sinks which surfacestations.org is bring to light.
However, your second point is not valid for Hansen (2001). No study I have read indicates that a surface station that does not meet site guides will change. If there was anything that indicated that the changes would be constantly changing in a random manner, then I would agree with you but there is no evidence of that. The effect, I believe, would be consistent until something changed in the environment. It would be wrong, but it would be consistently wrong. This hurts Hansen (2001) since he is doing the temp delta for the grid cell and there are a limited number of lights = 0 (~250). The mere fact it is wrong in a small data pool will have even larger impact.
I also disagree that there is enough information about the stations to make a case for a binomial distribution. Basically, you’re saying it has an equal chance of being warm or cold but I have not seen any studies to back up that position. That is why I do not believe that until the evidence is collected the Hansen (2001) UHI off-set is valid until further due diligence is accomplished in light of the failure of several of his assumptions.
Your third point about GISTEMP is not quite valid. Why? Because you have already applied the Hansen’s UHI off-set to the stations so no matter how big you make the pool at that point, the data is already tainted. Since you do not know how much, or which one, there is no statically valid way to correct for it.
As for you last point, I have to disagree. Why, because Hansen’s UHI off-set is used. An off-set is applied to individual stations which at this point, there is no way to know if it is valid. Why is Hansen’s UHI off-set wrong, because of the microsite issues. I see no way of fixing Hansen’s work with out studying the lights = 0 stations to determine what the microsite issues are. Once they are known, he can redo his work and you should get an accurate UHI off-set.
Additionally, even with over-sampling at the global level, there is nothing that indicates that microsite problems are a local (USA only) issue. Without a study that actually does and assessment of individual sites, as time consuming or as hard as it would be, there is no indicator that the microsite issues do not cause bias.
Do you know of such a study?
27 August 2007 at 3:42 PM
They learned a lot from the evacuation of Galveston and Houston, which was a total fiasco that easily could have become a human catastrophe had a 5Cat plowed directly into the two cities.
In the weeks between the two storms Texans had a field day mocking the incompetence of LA and NOL. They got a well-deserved comeuppance right on the old kisser. They fared no better, and they had a lot of extra time to get ready.
With the storm about 4 days out a Houston city official pronounced on the news that he knew of no structures in the city of Houston that would survive a 5Cat, and that sent millions of people onto the freeways, which immediately locked up like the worst case of constipation in history. In a few hours there was no gas and no food available along the freeway.
There is no way to storm proof a city. Mother nature is just that darn powerful.
27 August 2007 at 3:53 PM
bjc, are you arguing that all the sites should have shade? or air conditioners (pretty common in the US) The point is that there is a mix, and the shaded sites will be cooler than the unshaded ones. It really has not been shown how close to an A/C unit the thermal sensor has to be for that to have an effect and whether the effect would be a step when it was installed, etc. Otherwise what Gavin said about trends.
27 August 2007 at 5:11 PM
I liked Schwartz’ paper. I could actually follow most of it and his approach is very similar to my own amateur efforts. My results are different, I get the standard result. One source of error is his 20th century temperature increase for which he uses 0.57 C. If I subtract the 2000 CRU value from the 1900 value I get 0.53, which is close to the value Schwartz uses. But that’s not the right value to use. This is because the temeperature series shows short-term one-quarter degree fluctuations, so you have to use the *trend* value. For example in the database I use the temp value is 2000 was +0.277, but the average value over 1995-2006 was +0.377. Similarly, the temp value for 1900 was -0.253 while the average value over 1895-1906 was -0.369. The temperature increase using the single year points is +0.53, but using the averaged values its 0.75. Figure 5 of the linked webpage shows the trend line I constructed using a running centered 20-year linear regression. The change in trend temperature obtained using this measure is +0.78. With this larger delta T the impied forcing is 2.6 watts/m^2 instead of 1.9, which is *larger* than the 2.2 watts/m^2 for the greenhouse effect, implying the sensitivity is greater than 0.3.
Now this is just a plain bonehead error. Another source of error is the deep ocean response. The definition of climate response says it is at *equilibrium* This means deep ocean response has to be included. The problem is the deep ocean response is so slow that it mostly hasn’t taken place over a few decades. In fact you can roughly represent the climate response as a two phase first order response. One is short and the other is much longer. In this case the *apparent* sensitivity obtained by considering short term dynamics is depressed by maybe 20% or so.
So using the same approach by Schwarz we have 2.6 (not 1.9) watts of apparent climate forcing plus the 0.3 watts of aerosol forcing impact he grants magnified by 1.2 to account for deep ocean effects to give 3.5 watts of apparent forcing compared to 2.2 watts of actual greenhouse forcing. In other words the climate sensitivity appears to be 3.5/2.2 = 1.6 times larger than the 1.1 CO2×2 value he favors. The actual value consistent with his own approach is thus about 1.8 C for a CO2 doubling.
27 August 2007 at 5:13 PM
> If there was anything that indicated that the changes would
> be constantly changing in a random manner, then I would agree
> with you but there is no evidence of that. The effect, I believe,
> would be consistent until something changed in the environment.
Parking lots? Weekdays vs. weekends.
Trash burning? Day of the week
Air conditioner? On/off cycles, building hours, thermostat
Water sprinklers? On/off cycles, drought indexes, time of day
Freeways? time of day, day of week
Peeling paint? day/night
Nesting birds? Springtime ….
Nesting bats? Time of day, season of year ….
Spiderwebs? “… along came the rain, and washed the spider out …”
27 August 2007 at 5:24 PM
Vernon, Do not forget that you are dealing with an oversampled system for the purposes of comparison to GCM. Moreover, the way to estimate the systematic errors is from the data–not by examining every station down to the last tree or biulding. This will be true unless every station has a comparable bias–and it is safe to conclude that the amount of oversampling is at least 3:1, so the probability is that there is no information lost.
27 August 2007 at 6:43 PM
Eli:
You really have to give people more credit. All I am saying is that the environment that surrounds the measurement device should be representative of the region for which the data is meant to represent. How hard is that? THe proble with urban settings is that actually are not representative of very much on an area basis. CLearly we are looking at trends not absolute measures, but with an adequate number of representative stations there would be no issue about UHI trends. Don’t you agree? The issue wiuld be moot.
27 August 2007 at 7:07 PM
Vernon reasoned:
“Without a study that actually does and assessment of individual sites, as time consuming or as hard as it would be, there is no indicator that the microsite issues do not cause bias.”
This is plainly false. The temperature records by different actors are not only in agreement with each other regarding on the trend in global temperatures, they are also in agreement with other observations indicating global warming. Would your issue cause signicant bias, there should be a discrepancy and that is not a case.
However, if you have a hunch you could demonstrate otherwise, please carry out the time consuming and hard assessment by yourself and publish the results in a scientific journal. Why harrass professionals to do it for you? They are competent enough to find more relevant topics for their research.
27 August 2007 at 7:08 PM
Hank, If you have proof of any of those things, please present it the evidence. I am going strictly by errors associated with poor sites. Surfacestations.org is showing bad stations that do not meet the guidelines. What else could be happening, I do not know.
Ray, your on the wrong page. This is addressing Hansen (2001) which is does not have that amount of oversampling. CRN says to get 95 percent confidence within CONUS takes 300 stations, Hansen only has ~250 lights = 0.
Also, surfacestations.org is showning a lot of stations do not meet site guidance. We know that failure to meet site guidance injects 1-5 degrees C of error.
Finally, this is not about getting just the trend. It is about getting the light = 0 temperature for all relavent stations getting the temp delta with the remaining urban stations.
So, there is no way to know what the actual temp delta is since we do not know the quality of the stations. This is fully addressed by NOAA/CRN in how they are building a quality climate network.
I just do not think we have 30 years to wait on them so, Hansen, if he wants his UHI off-set from (2001) needs to get funding to validate his stations.
Anyway, Ray, your going after the wrong thing and for lights = 0, there is not over sampling, and sense the goal is to get the actual temp to do a temp delta. It would still be wrong.
27 August 2007 at 7:15 PM
> representative
What data set do you rely on, if you want to find a representative half acre, in your neighborhood? Or if you don’t have data, how would you decide?
27 August 2007 at 7:33 PM
Furry (59), well put.
27 August 2007 at 9:10 PM
RE 71: I agree that furry’s comment is astute. No city in the world is designed to be quickly and efficiently evacuated. However, the reasons why that is may be similar to the reasons why cities are not storm proof either. Cities are accumulations of strucures that corresponded to more immediate needs at a given time, without the specific, conistent risk analysis that would impose one given priority (i.e. storm resistance or “evacuability”) high on the list. Priorities, risks and benefits translate into actions according to how we perceive them at the moment when we do the analysis. If the focus in the design of a city was that, no matter what, you have to have it withstand a cat5 hurricane, then cities would be mostly compliant with that. If the focus was that, no matter what, you’d have to be able to have 90% of the population out of there in 36 hrs, then they would probably be able to achieve close to that. Of course, there would be much groaning and moaning of anti-regulations groups arguing that, historically, the likelihood of such an occurence doesn’t deserve the effort and regulatory burden on the city’s overall structure.
The main problem is the objective reality of risk compared to our perception of it at the time when the risk is integrated in risk/benefit ananlysis. Imagine that you have to design a 747 and the emphasis imposed by management on your department is marketability and production costs. To achieve that, you route hot compressed air through the center fuel tanks. Then an accident happens involving fuel/air mixture in the center tanks exceeding a flamability treshlod because, among toher things, the extra heat afforded by the hot air ducts. That was deemed unlikely enough at the time of conception. Now consider that this led to catastrophic inflight explosion and your son or daughter was on that airplane. You would see that risk in a different light (not necessarily better). Risk assessment (perception) and their politics are the main drivers of curent climate change policies (or the lack thereof). Yet they are highly subjective areas. There are things even more difficult than building accurate climate models. Strangely enough, humans are both best equipped and worst equipped to accurately perceive objective realities.
27 August 2007 at 11:42 PM
Vernon, this is silly. The instrumentation across the world developed over the past century or more, starting with boxes with mercury thermometers and pocket watches and calendars and paper and ink.
Your old car or old house don’t meet contemporary guidelines. Your old education doesn’t. Your old dental work doesn’t. You don’t throw them out, you improve on what’s done now.
The guidelines are for installing new instruments. Once the new network is in place, running in parallel to the old equipment, it allows getting more information out of the old data collection by verifying the existing instruments.
If you want to ruin the ability to know what’s going on — go out there and move instruments around, change their location, change their paint, change their environment, and then declare they now “reliable” — do you understand why that’s foolish?
A consistently biased instrument is as valuable as a perfectly accurate instrument — once you know the bias. You don’t mess with the old gear. You install better gear to the new guidelines, nearby, and run them in parallel
28 August 2007 at 12:24 AM
re: #59 FCH
I haven’t been to New Orleans for several decades, so hopefully you can offer some more insight. I have a concern that is likely to be shared by many, but which of course, is very difficult to get mentioned by politicians and subject to any reasonable debate. As you note, NOL can’t move either upstream or downstream, but the real question is:
How much will it cost, and who will pay for it, to keep NOL viable in:
2020
2050
2100
2200
Americans live there, and of course NOL is a sentimental favorite, but sooner or later economics matter as well:
a) NOL/LA can afford to spend some money on its own behalf, although since LA is a net recipient of federal money, as of 2001, it got ~8B more then it sent, of which 24% came from CA, 16% from NY, 10% from NJ, 14% from (CT, WA, CO, NV). LA also got 10% from IL, 5% from TX, 5% from MI, 4% from MN, 2% from WI, and the latter states would seem to benefit more directly from having LA where it is, although presumably all of us benefit somewhat. The Mississippi River is rather valuable.
b) There are economic benefits to having LA where it is that do not accrue to LA/NOL; I have no idea how LA captures revenue from being where it is, and how close that is to the economic value.
c) The Corps of engineers spends money to build.
(I.e., this is planned work).
d) Finally, there are potential subsidies from the Federal treasury for:
- Disaster relief & rebuild
- Flood insurance [given the pullback of private insurers]
(i.e., these happen less predictably).
There are clear historical facts (*), and some predictions as in:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/01/000121071306.htm
A)* New Orleans is slowly sinking (3 ft/century).
B)* The Mississippi has been known to flood, although NOL has usually escaped that.
C)* The Mississippi really *wants* not to go through NOL, but down the Atchafalya channel, as well-described in John McPhee’s “Control of Nature,” bypassing not only NOL but Baton Rouge. It has generally shifted channels ~1000 years, and last did so around 1000AD. It would have already shifted except for large and continuing efforts by the Corps of Engineers, startimg in 1954 when Congress budgeted money for the Old River control effort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchafalaya_River
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_027_TNY_CARDS_000348555
D) Sea level is expected to rise. Although the following is simplistic, it’s still worth studying: zoom in to LA, set sea-level-rise =0, then +1m, which we probably *won’t* get by 2100, unless these nonlinear melting effects happen.
http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=43.3251,-101.6015&z=13&m=7
Needless to say, don’t go much higher unless you want to get depressed.
E)* NOL certainly gets hit by hurricanes; recall that Katrina actually missed.
F) Temperatures will rise, and (maybe) that will increase the frequency of more intense hurricanes.
Hence, the real policy questions (for which I certainly don’t know the answers):
- how much will it cost to keep NOL viable, and in what form, and for how long? [some of this depends strongly on the actual rate of sea-level rise, a subject of some contention, and one of the reasons it is *very* important to keep refining models and improving their skill as inputs to rational planning.]
- who will pay for it?
- and is the opportunity cost worth it? given $X, is it better to spend the money building big levees around NOL, or to look ahead 50 years, diverting development upstream, and figuring out how to handle the possible jump to the Atchafalaya. Alternatively, if there is $YT available for building levees and dealing with other seacoast issues along the Gulf/Atlantic Coasts during this century, what fraction of it does NOL get? And of course, the world doesn’t end in 2100 either (I hope).
None of this is arguing for “abandon NOL now” as I suspect that is a bad idea, although it seems to approximate what the current administration is doing (without saying so) … but sooner or later, the level, structure, and priority of investment has got to start being debated more publicly.
[Maybe someone knows some good reports.]
Anyway, FCH: you live not too far away, and you’ve been there recently. Any opinions on any of this?
28 August 2007 at 3:16 AM
Hank, that is so wrong it is not even funny. The site guidance from NWS/WMO far preceeded what CRN is doing, but it was done for the same reason. You argument does not address the issues and is just a misdirection.
[edit - no personal comments].
This is not about a trend, it is about the temp delta. Hansen (2001) is doing off-sets. I will agree that after he has the temp delta he finds the trend, but the trend does not matter till then. He is doing urban - rural = UHI off-set. A consistant bias is going to give bad numbers.
Finally, this is not about how accurate the instrument is, but how accurate the station is. If the station is not sited IAW the guidance, then injecting 1-5 degree C of error is not going to get you the actual temp delta.
28 August 2007 at 5:06 AM
re: 73. Indeed it is. The entire surfacestations.org canard has been shown here by numerous comments to be quite unscientific. A very limited sample of station photographs by “volunteers” is not the least objective or scientific. Yet the Vernons of the world harp on it with little if any basis. More important, despite umpteen mentions, the data are almost trivial with respect to the numerous proxies and other *global* data that show the clear global warming trend. The Vernons of the world keep repeating the “noise” ad nauseum as if it were essential facts, go away for a while, and then come back as if the issue is somehow still essential. There is no excuse for the failure to objectively assess what surfacestations.org has done. When one assesses it that way, it is simply a red herring and nothing more.
28 August 2007 at 6:16 AM
Hank:
I think you have the logic reversed. The fact that we use surface temperature data to assess climate implicitly assumes that the stations are representative. My point is that besides any flaws in individual sites, the dependence on stations that are close to major population centers is (a) an inadequate sampling (b) necessarily introduces a potentially confounding UHI trend that cannot be adequately controlled for without sufficient more “representative’ stations and, if you have a sufficient number of more representative stations you wouldn’t need the urban stations that have limited representativeness.
Dan (#75):
The efforts to build a better climate network is proof positive that the network of existing weather stations is flawed in terms of instrumentation, micro-climate effects and geographic coverage. The Pielke and Watts effort is simply underscoring what Karl et al already know, otherwise why the expensive push for an updated network?
28 August 2007 at 7:08 AM
Vernon, quite frankly, single studies do not interest me. But you need to define your terms–95 confidence of WHAT? 300 stations measuring WHAT?
In the end, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the trends observed by Hansen et al. support those seen in completely independent measurements. And even if there were errors in his analysis, they will not be found or quantified by a bunch of amateurs who don’t understand the science traipsing around through poison ivy and photographing thermometers near barbecue grills. The data will tell us what the biases are.
28 August 2007 at 7:25 AM
RE: 75 Dan,
Surfacestations.org census does not have to be scientific, that sir, is a red herring. All it has to show is that the station does not follow site guides. Pictures from ‘volunteers’ is just as good for this purpose as a professional film crew.
You have not addressed my argument. Gavin agrees that failure to meet station siting guides will inject error and that surfacestations.org is enough to tell if the station is meeting the guide or not.
[Response: I said no such thing. That some microsite issues impart biases in certain conditions, does not imply that ever so-called issue highlighted in a photograph actually does or not. Without more information, you just have insinuation, not science. - gavin]
Once again I will state my argument. I do not doubt global warming, I do doubt the direct instrumented ‘accelerated’ warming.
My hypothesis’s is that Hansen’s assumptions in his 2001 work for UHI off-set’s are not supported by the evidence. I have presented my facts and logic which has survived discussions with Gavin.
I would be pleased to hear your analysis of the flaws of my argument. But failing to address any of the facts or logic I presented and calling it ‘noise’ is not. Please produce some facts or logic to support your attack.
Finally, Dan, the fact that Hansen’s UHI off-set could be wrong is not trivial. It is applied to every station in GISTEMP as part of the station adjustment process prior to processing. This means a bias is being interjected that cannot be corrected, ever, since by definition it is applied globally to the data.
[edit]
[Response: You have a very odd idea about what Hansen et al are doing. They detect a clear UHI-related trend and remove it. It what sense ‘can it not be corrected’? Just take the raw data and do what you want to it yourself. The GISTEMP analysis doesn’t preclude anyone else’s analysis, and if you want to do it differently, go ahead. - gavin ]
28 August 2007 at 8:02 AM
Vernon writes:
[[A consistant bias is going to give bad numbers.]]
And to get good numbers out of those bad numbers, you compensate for the bias.
There is no such thing as unbiased data. The fossil record is biased toward creatures with hard parts. The local motion of galaxies and quasars are biased by their red shift. And temperature stations can be biased in their readings. You don’t throw the data out, you compensate for the biases.
28 August 2007 at 8:22 AM
Barton, your wrong on two points. I make no assumption that good sited stations would not have some bias, nor do I make any assumptions on the direction of the bias.
What I do say is that surfacestations.org is showing that a significant number of stations are poorly sited. the impact it is to inject 1-5 degrees C of error per stations. Since Hansen (2001) is doing temp delta, getting the rural (light = 0) stations temp wrong is a critical failure.
I make no claim on whether the Hansen’s UHI off-set is high or low, only that based on our current understanding, there is no proof that it is right. All Hansen needs to do is eliminate the light = 0 stations that fail to meet site guides and redo the math.
Your ‘to get good numbers out of those bad numbers, you compensate for the bias’ is flatly untrue within this context. The bias is Hansen’s UHI off-set which is applied to all stations. Please explain how you compensate for this? If I am misunderstanding you, and your talking about a bias in the rural stations, please show me how to removed this without knowing which stations and now much. Please remember this is not looking for a signal trend, it is looking for the actual temp from the local rural stations.
Finally, this is a huge red herring. Once again, I am not addressing random bias that my exist in stations that meet site guides. Do not know what it is, and for this argument, I do not care.
So other than dragging some fish around, please point out where my facts and logic is wrong in the context of my argument.
28 August 2007 at 8:43 AM
Gavin, once again thank you for taking the time to address my arguments.
Gavin, I believe your statement is just false. Science is based on observation. Are you saying that a picture cannot show whether a station is meeting site guides? That is all I am taking out of this, either the station meets site guidance or not. If it does not, studies show that the site will be off by 1-5 degree C. Which part of this is wrong?
I have a very clear idea what Hansen (2001) is doing. You accepted that I did back in #57 which you did not disagree with me then. I do not disagree that he detects UHI and comes up with an off-set. The problem is with the accuracy. It comes down to the yearly urban temp - rural temp = UHI off-set. Hansen makes the assumption:
The error in station’s sites makes that assumption unsupportable.
Your falling back into if you do not like it, do your own is a sad way to do discourse. Maybe you do not mean it like that but that is the appearance.
What is wrong with my facts or logic? We started having a discussion. I presented facts and logic, you challenged me, I defended. We were coming down to less and less that we disagreed on. Now, I think you do not like my argument, but you are finding less and less you can challenge and do this.
[Response: Your logic is the most faulty. Take the statement above, ’science is based on observation’ - fine, no-one will disagree. But then you imply that all observations are science. That doesn’t follow at all. Science proceeds by organised observation of the things that are important. You cannot quantify a microsite problem and its impact over time from a photograph. If a site’s photograph is perfect, how long has it been so? If it is not, when did it start? These are almost unanswerable questions, and so this whole photographic approach is unlikely to ever yield a quantitative assessment. Instead, looking at the data, trying to identify jumps, and correcting for them, and in the meantime setting up a reference network that will be free of any biases to compare with, is probably the best that can be done. Oh yes, that’s what they’re doing. - gavin]
28 August 2007 at 8:50 AM
Vernon are you trying to claim an improperly sited station will be out by 1 deg C one year, 5 deg C the next?
The notion that the stations temperature readings would jump around like that is absurd. Even if it were to happen there is still usable data in the signal that can be extracted and used. Random noise while not desirable does not remove the underlying trends.
It should be even more obvious that a constant error will not remove the underlying trends either. If a station reads high by 3 deg you can still spot an underlying trend with ease. I.E. if a station is reading 17 deg when it should read 14 and 20 years later it reads18 deg when it should read 15 you still get a 1 deg temperature increase.
To make a difference in the final calculation of the trend you need a trend in site placement issues. Assuming all site placement issues result in higher temperature readings, progressively worse site placement over time will introduce a false positive trend in the final results. Progressively better practices will introduce a false negative trend into the final results, even though the error in the site is positive.
As far as I can tell all the issues that could introduce a false trend into the final results are being accounted for, but if you have some that are not I’m sure the people here would love to hear them. As I noted above though, none of the issues you have discussed so far seem capable of introducing a false trend. What you have talked about so far is simply noise in the data, which isn’t a good thing but doesn’t render the data useless either.
28 August 2007 at 9:02 AM
L Miller, can you be any more wrong. I am not claiming that the errors change at all. In fact, I have stated that I would expect the error from not meeting the site guide to be consistent year by year.
Second, I am talking about Hansen (2001) where he is taking the urban temp subtracting the rural (light = 0) temp on a grid cell basis and getting an UHI off-set. He does this for every year of the time series. From this he develops his UHI off-set trend.
What I am pointing out is that his assumptions are showing to not meet the facts. That injects error at the temp delta point which then gets propagated though out his work.
28 August 2007 at 9:20 AM
I think the more trenchant issues are how do you compensate for “inconsistent” biases and at what point do you discard problematic data. What is very problematic is the domination of the current temperature record by urban stations to the extent that identifying the UHI trend becomes extremely difficult. For example, of the 47 stations included in GISS data set for Brazil, only one meets the stated criteria for rural stations of having a population of less than 10000. That one station is on an island in the South Atlantic!
28 August 2007 at 10:07 AM
> To make a difference in the final calculation of the trend you need a trend in site placement issues. … Progressively
> better practices will introduce a false negative trend into the final results, even though the error in the site is positive.
That’s a simple clear explanation for why it’s important _not_ to go moving the old stations around to “improve” them.
(Cynically, it might be why people are agitating to do exactly that — to screw up the data by “improving” the stations.)
Instead new stations are put in. That improves the old data by adding more, and more accurate, cross-checks.
28 August 2007 at 11:58 AM
Gavin, thank you for your input.
[Response: Your logic is the most faulty. Take the statement above, ’science is based on observation’ - fine, no-one will disagree. But then you imply that all observations are science. That doesn’t follow at all. Science proceeds by organised observation of the things that are important. You cannot quantify a microsite problem and its impact over time from a photograph. If a site’s photograph is perfect, how long has it been so? If it is not, when did it start? These are almost unanswerable questions, and so this whole photographic approach is unlikely to ever yield a quantitative assessment. Instead, looking at the data, trying to identify jumps, and correcting for them, and in the meantime setting up a reference network that will be free of any biases to compare with, is probably the best that can be done. Oh yes, that’s what they’re doing. - gavin]
I really like the way you moved from specific (my argument) to general (nothing to do with my argument) and then proceeded to take me to task for something I did not say. I said ‘science is based on observation’ and are ‘you saying that a picture cannot show whether a station is meeting site guides?’ You seem to disagree with neither of these two facts.
I will admit that I have a hard time following your logic, but your basically saying that since the pictures will show whether the station meets site guidance does not matter because you cannot use them to determine the amount or history of the error. I do not see what that has to do with my argument. My argument is quite simple; either a site is compliant or not-compliant with site guidance. I believe that a picture will show whether the site is compliant or not, which you appear to agree on. If it is not, then I expect based on the studies that the error the site will be reporting will be between 1-5 degrees C, but that does not matter. What matter is the site should not be used by Hansen et al (2001) to determine the UHI off-set.
So I have to ask, what is faulty about my facts or logic?
Here is my argument:
Hansen (2001) states quite plainly that he depends on the accuracy of the station data for the accuracy of his UHI off-set. (You agree with this.)
WMO/NOAA/NWS have siting standards (You agree with this)
Surfacestations.org’s census is showing (based on where they are at now in the census) that a significant number of stations fail to meet WMO/NOAA/NWS standards (You agree with this)
There is no way to determine the accuracy of the station data for stations that do not meet standards. (You agree with this, well actually you seem upset that this is not being provided.)
Hansen uses lights=0 in his 2001 study (You agree with this.)
Due to failure of stations to meet siting standards, lights=0 does not always put the station in a accurate rural environment (You agree with this.)
At this time there is no way to determine the accuracy of Hansen’s UHI off-set (You will not commit to this so where did I get it wrong?)
Any GCM that uses this off-set has no way to determine the accuracy of the product being produced. (You do not agree with this, but since you use the surface station temp as a diagnostic, then it does have an impact.)
28 August 2007 at 12:09 PM
Actually Hank, this is being addressed by the NOAA/CRN project. 300 stations at sites that have been extensively studied to insure there is none of the current problems. It is over at http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/71817.pdf
and specifically:
a. will most likely remain in a stable tenure or
ownership for at least the next century.
b. are not envisioned as being areas of major
development during at least the next century.
c. that will not be subject to local microclimatic
interferences
‘microclimatic interferences such as might be induced by topography, katabatic flows or wind shadowing, poor solar exposure, the presence of large water bodies not representative of the region, agricultural practices such as irrigation, suspected long-term fire environments, human interferences, or nearby buildings or thermal sinks.
It is being done in two phases. Phase I is 100 stations (about half done) and Phase II is another 200 stations. With 200 stations they will reduce climate uncertainty to about 95%.
Once we have this, no more adjusting data.
28 August 2007 at 12:22 PM
82. “Your falling back into if you do not like it, do your own is a sad way to do discourse”
Seems to me a number of attempts have been made to address your concerns. You remain unsatisfied with the answers given. The best route for you to take would be to do as as been suggested: take the raw data and carry out your own analysis. Then submit the results to the peer-review process. At that point the discussion could proceed.
28 August 2007 at 5:02 PM
Vernon,
I think what people are trying to tell you here is that you cannot undermine Hansen by innuendo regarding his data set. If it is your assertion that flawed surface stations systemically bias the data such that Hansen’s UHI adjustment is too low, surely this should be easy enough to demonstrate by closer examination (and here I’m thinking scientific experiment using hard data and even a hypothesis involving a physical explanation. Photos, not so much). Another way of saying this is you have to establish the relevance of the objection to the data, (in the context of systemic bias), before the prevalence. You have not pointed to a study that does this, nor produced any analysis of your own. Why not?
28 August 2007 at 6:20 PM
Re 84 Vernon: “I am not claiming that the errors change at all. In fact, I have stated that I would expect the error from not meeting the site guide to be consistent year by year.”
Which means that the errors can easily be compensated for, something that you have repeatedly been told is done, yet you continue to refuse to believe it.
28 August 2007 at 10:15 PM
Vernon,
It has been told you in plain English several dozens times in this thred only, the microsite issues you worry have been addressed and dealt with scientific manner.
Below the dialogue is in formal form.
Science: A
Vernon: Not A, since B
Science: A do not follow from B
Vernon: A follows from B
Do you realize which side in this controversy has more evidence for his argument?
Do you realize which side has a burden of proof to collect more evidence to support his argument?
Do your realize your insistence to ask the leading climate researchers to carry out a time-consuming study for your argument is very arrogant position?
28 August 2007 at 11:57 PM
Re #87: […since the pictures will show whether the station meets site guidance does not matter because you cannot use them to determine the amount or history of the error.]
One of many things you’re ignoring here (which no one else seems to have pointed out) is that a picture of a site only shows site conditions at the moment it was taken. There are hundreds if not thousands of sites, many with records going back 50 to 100 years. Say you find a site where your picture shows some factor that might cause a bias: when did that factor come into play? Was it there a century ago, or was it built last week? (And of course the reverse: maybe a site meets your standards today, but how about back in 1943, when it was a busy AAF training facility?)
It seems that what you’re really calling for is a record of what the site was like when first constructed, and through all the years between. Now unless you have a time machine you’re not telling us about, it’s going to be impossible to get such a record, so by your logic we should throw away that century of records, and start fresh, no?