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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."
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 And this is unpublished, and will almost certainly be ripped to shreds when it gets submitted, like most of the other trash he submits.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It's not peer-reviewed.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.)
Comparisons demonstrate that NOAA adjustment processes fail to adjust poorly sited stations downward to match the well sited stations, but actually adjusts the well sited stations upwards to match the poorly sited stations. Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after USHCNv2 adjustments are applied.
So they are claiming that a simple mistake has been made that has the effect of overestimated warming by three times, and that everyone doing this research previously has made this same mistake, and that, despite all of the arguments surrounding climate science and the instrumental temperature record, nobody noticed it yet? It is certainly not impossible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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 ?
AGW wins again on the data.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Nope. Applies to both sides. Guess which side has huge amounts of peer reviewed evidence.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of course, that only applies to one side of the debate.
Which claim is extraordinary? The claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is not extraordinary. The claim that fossil fuels contain CO2 which is released into the atmosphere when burnt is not extraordinary. The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary. These claims have been known and investigated since the industrial revolution (Fourier in 1824 and Arrhenius in 1896) and are widely accepted.
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,
No credentials like, say, a PhD in physics, multiple peer-reviewed publications in Annalen der Physik? You are not seriously comparing Watts to Einstein, no?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yep and here's NOAA's extrodinary evidence debunking Watts' extraordinary claims. It's a blindingly simple statistical experiment that you can do yourself. Here's the youtube video about it that Watt's tried to take down with dubious DCMA notices. It's not a total loss though, it's true he has collected the best database on the condition of US weather stations (which NOAA used to debunk his claims in the pdf). Such a database sounds like it might be useful for improving the stations but the pdf above list several reasons as to why it might not be so useful.
An intellectually honest person (ie: an amateur scientist), would take those sort of criticisms seriously and either rebut them or withdraw the claim. Watts' behavior is little better than a youtube troll, I suspect he gets a buzz out of the attention.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Problem there is that one side controls the "peers."
That's just stupid. Most qualified scientists agree So we can't trust them to review each other's work . If we applied that sort of thinking everywhere there would be no accepted concensus on basic arithmetic.
Not really, since the majority of global warming skeptics seem to base their belief on one of those single dimensional causes:
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record must be wrong, the instruments are faulty or the temperature data gathered incorrectly.
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record shows no warming since 1998 (aka "global warming stopped in 1998").
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: the temperature on Venus (96.5% atmospheric CO2) shows little variation.
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: Anthony Watts did a video of an experiment with CO2 which showed no warming effect.
Belief: Increased CO2 won't contribute to the greenhouse effect. Reasoning: Other planets have atmospheric temperature variations, and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere of those planets isn't changing.
Belief: Burning fossil fuels does not release much CO2. Reasoning: volcanoes release CO2.
There are many variations of these reasons to not accept global warming, but in the end it comes down to either denying that the temperature is increasing, denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, denying that increasing amounts of a greenhouse gas will have any effect on the temperature, or denying that burning fossil fuels increases the amount of atmospheric CO2.
(There is another approach - the "we just don't know" crowd. Well, sorry, but that is not how science works, if you want to overturn the existing model then you have to propose a model that better explains the observed data. You can't just wave your hands in the air and say "your model is wrong but I have no idea why" or "your model is wrong because Obama is a socialist and I don't like the United Nations".)
Is the reverse true? Do you blindly accept the statements from the guys in lab coats even knowing that they've been wrong time and time again?
(No, I'm not advocating religion or disbelief in science. I do advocate learning and thinking for yourself though.)
Hrm. The structure of your sentence suggests these "guys in lab coats" are wrong more often than not and this it is an accepted fact. But as modern science is founded on "guys in lab coats" doing research, and as a beneficiary of their work, I can plainly see that this is not the case. My phone works, my medical presciption works, etc. And of course, nobody blindly accepts anything in science. Peer review, and other "guys in lab coats" recreating the original experiments and publishing their results. You post as a whole seems an supportable attempt to instill doubt in science, despite your otherwise reasonable final sentence.
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
No. Extraordinary claims require the same evidence as any other claim. There isn't a branch in the scientific method that's taken only when the claim is extraordinary. If you disagree, then think about it this way: would you allow your worst enemy to decide which claims are extraordinary and which ones aren't?
~Loyal
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I aim to misbehave.
The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary
This is the controversial claim in the eyes of anyone who understands thermodynamics: is the doubling of CO2 sufficient to increase atmospheric heat content to a degree that will materially affect climate?
"Mean temperature" is a thermodynamically meaningless quantity, and in a mixed material like the atmosphere, which contains a variable amount of water, increased heat content could actually be associated with a decrease in temperature. The response of the climate system is not a one-dimensional "worse/better" thing, which is the way people who don't understand thermodynamics always report it.
There is general agreement that the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the past 200 years has resulted in 1.6 W/m**2 additional power being trapped at the Earth's surface, comparable to the Sun's brightness increasing by about 0.1% or a decrease in the Earth's mean orbital radius of 0.06% (a quarter of the distance to the Moon, to give a sense of scale.)
Recent work on tree-ring density (published last week in a reputable journal) indicates orbital forcings in the past 2000 years that are up to four times the current anthropogenic forcing, and yet the polar bears somehow survived. This work could be wrong, but the anthropogenic effect is so small an input that many people find the claims that it will result in dramatic, run-away climatic instabilities implausible given it is very likely that there have been comparably-sized changes in climate forcings many times over the past ten thousand years due to centuries-long changes in ocean circulation, orbital dynamics, vegetation type and distribution, etc.
Therefore, the claim that an additional climate forcing on the order of 0.1% will be more than a somewhat costly inconvenience is controversial, and as a computational physicist I am depressingly aware of how fragile and complex climate models are. They are far, far more approximate than the financial models that produced the collapse of 2008.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Certainly it's trying to expose local effects around the sensors that have not been accounted for, yes. Clearly, even the well-sited stations have a positive trend (+0.15 C/Decade), so this paper is not arguing that temperature is going down.
There are many potential problems if you cannot trust your surface temperature record. Consider the problem of putting temperature sensors in space. You can certainly image surface infrared emission from space. However, with an atmosphere like we have that's like trying to image and accurately determine the surface temperature of a human body through blankets. In order to get the temperature accurate, you have to calibrate against something you know. The surface temperature record almost certainly provided a check/balance for the satellites since they began telling us temperature. If you note, John Christy (UAH guy) is on Watt's paper as a co-author. That man knows this study impacts his work, he was smart to get involved. Unfortunately, most of the land surface temperature records have nothing to say about 70% of the earths surface simply because water covers most of the planet. So the limits of these networks should be clear, they're devices that tell us the temperature where we live, they don't tell us about Earth so much.
If the UHI affect is real and significant, that's actually good to know. If humans can control local temperature, it's important to know this and quantify just how much we are controlling the local temperature. It could affect everything from climate to building materials used in the future. It means we can begin to lessen the heat waves that rock our urban centers, that saves lives. It also means we can try to adjust our city planning such that we lower air-conditioning energy use when by minimizing how much heat surrounds the habitable zones in cities. Also, Earth has a recent history of dropping into ice-ages for many thousands of years, so if humans can affect the local temperature with technology, our survival may depend on that ability.
However, I don't see Watt's paper as talking about UHI as much as the localized temperature around the sensors.
The politicization of the subject only favors the dirty politicians, it gives them flags to wave to get re-elected regardless of which side they are on. It's best to keep that aspect out of it.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Sorry but the total heat released by chemical combustion (and nuclear power) is so miniscule compared to the energy coming from the Sun that it can be ignored in any first order calculations. A 2008 study by Mark Flanner finds the total waste heat produced by human activities amounts to 0.028 W/m^2 while the total forcing from additional greenhouse gases we've emitted is 2.9 W/m^2, over 100 times as much. Waste heat is just not an issue.
I recall there were some gatekeeping efforts documented in the climategate emails.
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.