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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, 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 And this is unpublished, and will almost certainly be ripped to shreds when it gets submitted, like most of the other trash he submits.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.)
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.