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Surfacestations: NOAA Has Overestimated Land Surface Temperature Trends
New submitter BMOC writes "Anthony Watts of Surfacestations project (crowdsourced research) has finally yielded some discussion worthy results (PDF). He uses a siting classification system developed by Michel Leroy for Meteofrance in 1999 that was improved in 2010 to quantify the effect of heat sinks and sources within the thermometer viewshed by calculation of the area- weighted and distance-weighted impact of biasing elements to calculate both raw and gridded 30 year trends for each surveyed station, using temperature data from USHCNv2. His initial claims are that station siting is impacting the surface temperature record significantly, and NOAA adjustments are exacerbating that problem, not helping. Whether you agree with his results or not, recognize that this method of research is modern and worth your participation in the review. Poke holes in publicly sourced and presented research all you can, that's what makes this method useful."
Who the heck would write a whole Slashdot article about un-peer-reviewed results? Geez...
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
The research has classified all the surface stations into 5 classes of relevance, from "reliably close to environment" to "poorly sited" in order to evaluate whether and how much the location of the thermometer and its proximity from airports, cities and so on would skew its measures over time. The end result is that there is a warming over time, but that warming is +0.155 C / decade using the best surfacestations, and twice that (+0.309C / decade) if you use them all.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
No, he's a well known denier (probably *the* most well known among lay people). He's not a climatologist; he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California. And this is unpublished, and will almost certainly be ripped to shreds when it gets submitted, like most of the other trash he submits. He's funded by the Heartland Institute (a conservative organization that takes industry money and uses it to push various forms of denial of interest to them, including things like global warming denial (funded by Koch Industries), denial of the links between tobacco and cancer (funded by Philip-Morris), etc.)
Actual published, peer-reviewed work analyzing his "work" has reached precisely the opposite conclusion.
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
It's not peer-reviewed. Everything else he's submitted for peer review on the matter of climate change has been ripped to shreds; why should this be any different?
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California
A weatherman. In some countries, weather presenters are called meteorologists, but in general you need to have a graduate degree (heavy on math and physics) involving actual meteorological research to be called a meteorologist. Watts' highest completed education is high school, as far as anyone has been able to make out.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Odd when you consider how much whining about how the data CRU et al had should be released NOW from you deniers.
Watts had said he would publish a preliminary paper when 60% complete. When 60% complete, Watts diodn't publish. NASA took the data WATTS had collected (you know, the "raw data") and did the work.
Showing that there was a slightly higher warming trend if you took Watts' "best sited" stations than if you included them all.
Which was why Watts had clammed up.
(PS Watts has had to massage the figures. He openly admits he made "corrections" which to every denier was "proof" the CRU/NASA et al were "cooking the books" on the data.)
Disclaimer: I did work in atmospheric science for 15 years.
I understand all this talk about adjusting temperature results for urban sprawl around the measuring stations, but bear in mind that those stations are weather forecast stations, never intended as climatology primary source of inputs. So why don't we simply use a better designed system, such as a thermometer a couple of feet inside the ground: depending on the depth you can average out the daily thermal cycle (a few inches) or even the yearly cycles (a few feet). And there you have your reliable long therm^Hterm trends without any supercomputers or fancy models.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I have personally sent money to the surface station project (as have many others - it's crowd funded). In no way is he "funded" by the Heartland institute because of the one off unrelated project he's done with them. Why do you post lies, knowingly?
AGW wins again on the data.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
For a long time people have been pointing out that ground based met. stations were showing much more warming than met. balloons and satellites. The urban heat island effect has also been well known.
;-)
The problem is that some people have willfully ignored the instrument problems because it suited their agenda.
Watts noticed the specific problem with station siting and he, along with many others, has been documenting it. That part is uncontroversial. Using the methods of Leroy 2010, Watts is attempting to quantify the problem. He isn't a scientist and isn't used to publishing. That may be a problem for him. On the other hand, he had help with this paper and I expect that his co-authors will improve its quality a lot. The paper is up on his web site and many scientists have made helpful comments. By the time it is finally submitted, it may actually be a good paper.
Not that it'd even matter anyway, as meteorologists aren't climatologists, and actually deal with very different phenomena. It's the difference between a biologist and a paleontologist.
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
Do I really need to link wikipedia or a dictionary for you? It's not a vague term; it's a very specific term. A climatologist is a person who studies climate - aka, long-term changes in averages of weather (weather being short-term fluctuations in things like temperature, precipitation, etc). Climate is the signal, weather is the noise. The difference between a climatologist and a meteorologist is the difference between a paleontologist and a biologist.
Correct, it debunks Watt's previous claims. Which is why he had to change them. And will almost certainly get debunked again. He's only ever had one paper published with his name on it, and it amusingly totally undercuts his own claims, arguing that there's no statistical difference in warming trends between good and poor sites and that if anything the global warming trend could be higher than the surface record.
Because something is not perfect, it's irrelevant? Is that what you're trying to say? If I write something on a napkin, it's just as good as if experts in a field meticulously review all of the claims of a carefully constructed and controlled study?
That claim is absolute rubbish.
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
Referee's Report on the submission "Re:Peer Reviewed != True" by BMOC.
The article is to be commended for its brevity and clear layout.
However, it seems that the author makes the claim that peer-reviewed scientific papers do not contain evidence, a claim for which no reference is given and which we find to be unsubstantiated. We invite the author to consider that the "methods" and "results" section of a paper detail a set of observations. Short of performing every experiment and collecting observations personally, it is unclear to us what the author considers evidence to be.
Further, the author is clearly unfamiliar with the content of the referenced material. Indeed, with regard to the Sokal affair, the journal in question was neither a) scientific nor b) peer-reviewed. From the author's own reference:
Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies,
and further,
At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.
In light of the above issues, which we feel are fundamental to the article and could not be addressed in a rewrite, we recommend against publication.
The system (basically) works.