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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."
No wait, I read that wrong. It says there is a +.155C warming/decade using the best (classes 1 & 2) stations, +.248C using the worse stations (classes 3, 4 and 5), and that, somehow, NOAA managed to get a +.309C / decade result out of them, by adjsuting upwards the bad stations in order to make up for their poor fidelity, and THEN adjusted upwards the good stations so they would match the poor, adjusted ones.
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 And this is unpublished, and will almost certainly be ripped to shreds when it gets submitted, like most of the other trash he submits.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,
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.
Which is exactly what the peer-review process does. Which is why you never trust non-peer-reviewed work. I can write whatever I want about anything, make it look like a paper, and then send it out to the media. Which is precisely what happened here.
You're walking down precisely the opposite road. Even one peer-reviewed paper on "remarkable claims" isn't enough - that's just the start of a process that can only be confirmed by a series of followup studies, spawning a process that can lead to dozens or hundreds of papers before one can feel confident in the truth of the matter.
This here is *zero* published results.
And the scientific process is the peer-review process, which this has not undergone, and will almost certainly fail like Watts' other "work". If he even bothers actually submitting it instead of just saying that he's going to.
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
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.
Attack the work, not the man or his (lack of) credentials.
AFAIK, the work is relatively simple statistical analysis of time series data. No advanced science required. I have not looked in detail, but they claim that the adjustments made to climate data are biased.
If this is an erroneous claim, it should be easy to demonstrate.
To elaborate on the problem, I started reading the "paper" and he's outright misleading right on the first page. He says that siting in peer-reviewed works showed an effect on minimum temperatures but no effect on the mean. The actual papers show a small increase in minimum temperatures, but a much larger *decrease* in maximum temperatures. I'm also noticing in the paper him mixing in peer-reviewed cites with non-peer-reviewed cites without even commenting on the fact that he's doing so, which is a huge no-no.
Basically, his previous work not having shown what he claimed it showed after the peer-reviewed process got ahold of it, he simply changed his formula until it showed a different result. Which will almost certainly get likewise ripped up.
Here's the reality of the situation. The many papers published on the subject of the land record and all of their reviewers are not idiots ignorant of Watts' rogue genius. The issues that he "raises" have been discussed and analyzed for ages. Because of these issues, nobody just takes the raw data and submits it as a result. There are all sorts of calculations to detect biases and compensate for them, and all of these adjustments are analyzed with higher-precision real-world data to see how well they work, as well as cross-correlated with totally different lines of measurement. One study, to pick a random example among many, broke the data down between windy days and calm days, as the urban heat island effect dramatically diminishes on windy days. The calm results were then compared with the windy results to see if they reached the same conclusion.
Of course, it should be obvious that Watts is wrong just by even a rudimentary look at the surface warming trends. Notice where they're strongest, generally? Sparsely populated areas. We're supposed to believe that the extreme warming of Siberian or Canadian tundra is due to a "urban heat island effect" not visible in, for example, New York, Tokyo, London or Los Angeles?
Needless to say, you don't just have to judge based on your eyes; this has been statistically analyzed and published as well.
"... Sean Hannity, whose surgery to remove those bolts from his neck was apparently successful,
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 ?
The BEST study that made headlines all over the globe, including here on Slashdot just a few days ago, isn't peer reviewed yet either.
Both should thus be treated with the normal caveats for pre-prints.
it's in my head
But he didn't attack the man. He merely pointed out that he's not a meteorologist. In my country when I see somebody on TV forecasting the weather that person is a meteorologist, they have spent years studying the weather and know a lot more about the climate than I do. In the US they're just an actor reading from a script.
The US does _have_ meterologists, who might know something about the climate, but this man is not one of them.
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.
Am I understanding you correctly here? "Because the foundation of the world's scientific knowledge has failed at times before, its worthless and we should trust random things written by people with no credentials that no experts in the field have reviewed as much as everything else"?
I just wrote on a napkin, "The world is flat". Clearly that's as good as peer-reviewed science because of Andrew Wakefield.
"... 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,
Publishing is quite political, and journals are often reluctant to publish controversial findings.
Journals like controversial findings, for the same reason that newspapers up-play their headlines: it attracts attention. Furthermore, a shoddy paper with a controversial conclusion will often spur a slew of debate and comments, each citing the original paper, and thus raising the journals impact factor.
Further, larger / more prestigious journals are extraordinarily reluctant to publish a paper if the author hasn't already published enough in the past, again, regardless of the papers actual quality.
This would be relevant if the paper had been disregarded for not being in a prestigious journal. It wasn't, it was disregarded for not being in any journal. There is always a journal that will publish the paper, it is just a matter of trying until you find it and/or are lucky with the reviewers.
Be honest and let the findings stand or fall on their own merit, not your opinion of the author or how he decided to make his findings available.
The way the research is published often raises some question: If it is good enough to pass peer review, why hasn't it been tried? There is a reason why "science by press conference" is a derogative.
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.
Does this mean that for balance we have to start including YECs, flat earthers, etc as reviewers in studies? Cause that's definitely how the scientific method works.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
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.
The mathematicians are suppressing my brilliant papers proving that 2 + 2 = Chocolate. Help, I'm being repressed!
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I seem to recall that there was a big article and discussion here about the BEST study...before it was peer reviewed.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
However, the claim that human emissions of CO2 surpass all the volcanic activity on Earth evidently is extraordinary. The claim that CO2 levels now are geologically high is extraordinarily false (we've had way higher CO2 levels during the Jurassic, for example. And much warmer temperatures, with global averages above 25 degrees. Biodiversity endured.). Actually, there's clear evidence that we're on a cool period; global temperatures are highly correlated with the formation and breaking of supercontinents, and we're between supercontinents).
There should be more geologists in climate sciences. Their long-term view should be considered over the "OMFG we've had 10 warm years we're burning the planet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" alarmism. There are various cycles of global temperatures, ranging from hundreds of millions of years to tens of thousands. A short term (~100yr) variation is nothing.
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.
I think the purpose of this site is to look at how the original data is collected and check the quality of it. I read through the paper and all they did was re-evaluate the sites to a new standard Leroy (2010). The previous standard looked just at how close heat sources/sinks were from the thermometer. The new standard takes into account not only the distance but area of the heat source/sink. This makes sense to me. It also brings up questions about the roles that shade and vegetation will have as something that needs more study.
This isn't about a large scale heat island effect. It is about a much more local one. If you had a thermometer in a field for 100 years and then built an asphalt parking lot around it you will have an increase in temperature even if it is still in a rural area.
Also it brings up a problem with a sensor that was installed at airports and used for automated data gathering.
I think the importance of this study lies more with how those in the field receive it. A real scientist would be interested if someone pointed out an error in their data collection. A politically motivated individual would brush it off without a second thought saying it isn't relevant. Time will tell.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
You're only a sceptic if you can be convinced (by reasonable evidence) that the original claim is true. Otherwise, you're a denier, and discussing the issue with you is a waste of everyone's time. There are some classic signs that indicate you are a denier, not merely a skeptic. A general pattern is someone from completely outside the field making extraordinary claims that everyone else is doing it wrong. There's usually a conspiracy from the "experts" to shut them out. It's a constantly evolving theory, where the conclusions never change, but the reasoning always does. And, of course, there's usually a lot of funding from an organization with a vested interest in opposing the the original science. Watt is really no different from the Intellegent Design folks or Jenny Macarthy and the vaccine-autism folks, and he's only a short step from the Time-cube guy.
That's an interesting hypothesis but there's no evidence to support it either. Has "Global warming" become so politically charged that it is impossible for any descenting scientist to publish their rejected papers too? Because while I've often seen this claim of bias in publishing, there doesn't seem to any evidence to support it.
Just think about it, if there really were all kinds of papers rejected for political reasons, I'd think that a group like the Heartland Institute would channel some of their money into publishing their own "heretical" journal. I think the reason the Heartland Insitute hasn't done that, is because there's not enough rejected papers to make the endeavor worthwhile, let alone enough high-quality papers. They seem to use up their entire supply of dissenting opinions at their NIPCC conventions.
I suspect this argument is a manifestation of the False consensus effect. The rationale is: it's inconceivable that no scientists agree with my position, so therefore someone must be silencing them. It allows a person to maintain self-confidence in the face of evidence that says 97% of the scientists involved in research in this area agree with the basic premises of global warming (and 2% are unsure).
Fanatically anti-fanatical
This is good. Now, as the next part of the exercise, can you find the "one dimensional" thinking among many who subscribe to AGW? I would suggest you add in the implications of that logic as well. Let me get the ball rolling:
Belief: Increased CO2 will cause runaway global warming. Reasoning: Venus is 95+% CO2. Implication: continued output of CO2 will take us to a tipping point situation that will result in $badthings (some alarmists go so far as to claim human extinction, more level headed people worry about rising sea levels and changing weather patterns).
Belief: CO2 emissions can be decreased through application of carbon taxes. Reasoning: You get less of what you tax. Implication: imposition of a tax reduces carbon emission, but raises prices of commodity goods, the governments that collect the tax money then spend it on goods that are produced using fossil fuels, meaning no net decrease in CO2 emissions, more poverty, and already impoverished people will have less food.
Belief: Global warming is bad for the poor, therefore not global warming is good for the poor. Reasoning: the opposite of a bad thing is a good thing. Implication: Silliness. The opposite of drowning is dehydration. Neither is good, obviously. In this case, it is bad for people to be forced to move, but it is arguably much worse for them to starve.
Your list is good, because it contains testable predictions. Clearly, mankind puts out a great deal more CO2 than volcanoes, so that is not a valid argument against AGW. However, other things come out of volcanoes, and as far as greenhouse gases go, CO2 is the ultimate lightweight. You can only get weaker effects from diatomic and mono-atomic gases. I would be interested to see what else comes out of volcanoes in quantity.
No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No!
Peer review doesn't 'put the weight of authority behind' the results, and it *does* serve a scientific function. The purpose of peer review is to (attempt to) validate that the methodology used in the experiment/study doesn't have any significant flaws overlooked (or ignored) by the person/team publishing the paper under review.
The only sociological function of peer review is to minimize the amount of flawed science being published. (I say minimize because it is possible for bad/flawed science to slip through peer review. The larger the pool of well-informed reviewers, the less likely this is to happen.)
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.
There is a problem when the definition of 'climatologist' is effectively 'someone who studies the effects of AGW and recommends policy to mitigate it'.
There would be, but that's not the definition of a climatologist. It's also not the selection criteria to be a peer reviewer for a climatology journal. (And, for that matter, climatology journals are not the only places to publish peer-reviewed climatology papers.) It's just what you imagine the selection criteria to be, which is very different.
I really doubt anything useful can be taken from such a model
It's a real shame we don't have a systematic way of investigating the accuracy of a model and are forced to rely on the gut feelings (I mean, doubts) of random people on the Internet.
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.
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.