I’m going to be a bit spotty online in the next 10 days as I’m visiting family and friends in Phoenix and Colorado Springs. Don’t ask me why a Canadian would leave a lake in Ontario for Phoenix in July. I have no answer other than perhaps Rumpole’s. I’m probably going to see at least one CA reader in Colo Springs. I’ll probably have time for a coffee in either spot if anyone wants to email me offline.
UPDATE: Steve has asked me to post a few items in his absence, such as interesting USHCN sites, so CA will not be without fresh material for the next 10 days. – Anthony
Climate Audit 
41 Comments
becuase there are no vicious, blood-sucking mosquitos in Phoenix and Colorado Springs.!!!!
Vancouver’s best kept secret: No vicious, blood-sucking mosquitos in the summer time!!!
If you’re in COS on the 20th, stop by CJ’s Sport’s bar and I’ll buy you a drink! Our pool team is playing out of there supposedly.
Mark
If you run out of things to do in Phoenix give me an e-mail. And don’t forget the Idso’s live here in Tempe (or did the last time I checked.)
mmMMmmm…The cool of the mountains. I like that area around Colorado Springs.
Not far southwest of CS, there’s a nice stretch of road
that runs along side the Arkansas River for some miles. Pretty.
She who must be obeyed.
Plllllllease, don’t leave us alone with the new Mann-paper ;-)))
enjoy your holidays !!! 🙂
Have a good trip. For the next week or two, Phoenix temps will be ranging near the high end of their normal range.
In the unlikely event that you get bored or antsy to loook at the data, I see the GHCN Version 2 data is now available (free) from NCDC, check here. Based on the annual means, their new “adjustment” for the NYC CP raw data is now all positive ranging from +1.4°F at the start of the record to about +2.4°F at the end. It should be interesting to see how they reconcile that with Version 1.
Really cool today. 62 when I pulled into the office. High only around 80 the next several days. Rain, rain and more rain on the horizon. I’ll be in St. Louis (actually, somewhere off the Meramec river) this weekend, so I’ll miss the break in the heat.
Not far southwest of CS, there's a nice stretch of road that runs along side the Arkansas River for some miles. Pretty.Extremely. My two favorite areas are up near Estes Park (Rocky Mountain National Park, north of Boulder) and Thirtymile campground (Rio Grande resevoir, near Creede). Both are within a 4-5 hour drive. Closer is 11-mile canyon and even up Rampart Range road behind Woodland Park (entry in Garden of the Gods Park) which provides some stunning views of Pikes Peak, still with snow on it, btw.
Mark
Shh… Don’t tell them how nice it is in Colorado Springs. They’ll all want to move here, and we’ve got enough Californians already….
No kidding. I still haven’t completely figured out how there are so many $500,000+ homes in an area that’s considered “average” for income/cost of living. Of course, COS is considered an “alpine desert” with less than 16″ of annual precipitation (including melted snow), and sits at anywhere from 6000 to 7000 feet in altitude (I live at 6850). Those two facts alone are the area is not more populous than it is.
Hopefully Steve M. gets to see some of the sights in the area. Just the drive up 24 into Woodland Park through Ute Pass (uh, it is Ute, right?) is worth the trip. 7-Falls, the Royal Gorge, Garden of the Gods, etc., all are must see locations.
Mark
Oh, lest I forget a trip up Pike’s Peak via the cog railroad. It may not be passable via car yet (still a lot of snow up there), though one trip in the car was enough for me. Never, ever, ever again will I do that.
Mark
while the cat’s away, et. al.
First I apply the Mosher de-arking transform to turn myself into SteveM, then …
Have a great vacation Steve.
Mark W: One of MY favorite places is also Estes Park. I’ve climbed Long’s Peak many, many times via many, many routes. Almost died there a couple of times, in fact. Got lots of relatives in that area.
Ontario? on a lake.
Are you trolling for CA houseguests?
35 years ago my uncle took me up around sudbury, lake Panache I think, near espanola.
It was rock hound heaven. I recall it being a nickle rich area . And the fishing was great.
I wasnt the best kid to help on a portage since I was always looking for neat rocks.
MarkW.
Consider yourself ” de arked” and rotated as required.
I am working on my “anthony Watts” transform, so mind yourself.
That struck a note with me, since many years ago SWMBO planned an almost identical trip in July to your designations and to see friends. I had my doubts but it was one of the best trips I have ever experienced. My wife got us some deeply discounted airline tickets and when we were seated on the plane we were promptly upgraded to first class. I will not bore you with the details except to say that the trip got better from there. As I recall the temperature on our first day in Phoenix (which I spent mostly outside) was 110 degrees F. The dry heat of the Southwest bothers me a lot less than the high temperatures and humidity conditions we have experienced in the Midwest these past few days. When I took a respite from some heavy work in the garden today I told the wife I was not sure whether I was having a sun or a heat stroke.
I interrupt normal programming to announce that I have received answers to questions, generated in discussion at the ClimateAudit blog, directed to D.E. Parker concerning his study on the Urban Heat Island effect, and its effect (or lack thereof) on the perception of global warming through land-based temperature measurements.
You can find his responses at:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1718#comment-119294 ,
starting at entry #386.
#11 Mark T and the “must see locations”
I once had dinner in town and overnighted Woodland Park. Stayed in a small locally owned motel and had a picture-window view of Pike’s Peak. For a coastal Mississippi boy, it was all quiet a sight. From Woodland Park, we headed to Cripple Creek and Victor and the drive south on the Phantom Canyon Road. Then, went west on US 50 for that mentioned drive along the Arkansas River. I was envious of the half dozen or so fellows I saw along the way, wade-fishing the river in the late afternoon. I remember thinking these guys might have just gotten off work and are getting a little “fly time” in before heading home. Beautiful country. Vivid memories. Delightful trip.
RE19 Neil, I’ll create a separate post for these
Anthony
Off topic
But the following will be interesting to SM.
The “hockey-stick” gets a mention.
http://ncwatch.typepad.com/media/2007/07/the-confessions.html
Thanks, Neal.
Anthony is right it deserves its own Post with all of parker’s responses put in One post.
Neal. Kudos to you for sticking with this thing, and pass onto Parker kudos as well.
I know A lot of these discussion devolve into food fights, but the Parker discusion
was a joy. You and Milesworthy can take a measure of credit for that.
Most folks would not spend the effort to run the Gauntlet, so it speaks highly of
both of you chaps.
I skimmed the answers a couple hours back. I’ll try to make a short comment on each and then focus
on the one or two I find most critical.
Thanks
Anthony, the following deserves a thread of its own since it is bears directly on a claim frequently made at CA about the role of solar variability vis-a-vis CO2 in warming:
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/h844264320314105/
Also picked up by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6290228.stm
From the abstract, “Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.” It would be interesting to see what CA readers make of this.
RE24, While it does seem threadworthy, Since the Royal Society does not allow viewing anything other than the abstract and bibliography without paying for it, this makes it a bit “threadbare” Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to post it as a thread since it would only invite speculation. The BBC news article gives more detail, but not enough to really look at what science and techniques were used in the study.
If an open public link can be found to the paper, then I’ll post it.
Anthony, it’s linked from the page I gave (look at the right hand side).
A direct link is: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/h844264320314105/fulltext.pdf
Pete – I see you are in full “mice away” mode as well, since, while this topic may break out in comments from time to time, it most definitely isn’t a subject featured with SteveM’s blessing. Perhaps Lubos has already taken this bull (not a perjorative – yet) by the horns. I shall check.
Re26 no, sorry Pete, thats just a link to put it in a shopping cart if you don’t have an account with the Royal Society…no publicly viewable document there.
Also, SteveM entrusted me with this priviledge, and I don’t plan on abusing it by posting things willy-nilly. If you have something, throw it out here first, and we’ll see how it shakes out with opinions by regulars.
Anthony, when I click on the link I get a 14-page pdf file which is the complete paper. Try it again! Alternatively, click on the link where it says “pdf” to the right of the abstract.
Of course, it’s up to you whether you want to post a thread up about this or not. I only suggested it because it’s a fairly common claim from posters at CA that any rise in global temp is due to solar activity and not CO2. John A brings this one up quite often. It was also a claim made in the Great Global Warming Swindle. Steve himself posted up the thread about the Alexander paper which had solar/astronomical content.
That’s a pretty unrepresentative statement about the population here. Few, if any, think this is an absolute, or even a primary forcer. Nice try, however, but do try to keep the gross generalizations to a minimum.
Mark
re #8,
aurbo,
“… I see the GHCN Version 2 data is now available (free) from NCDC …”
GHCN V2 data have been available from NCDC for several years.
“Based on the annual means, their new ‘adjustment’âž for the NYC
CP raw data is now all positive ranging from +1.4⡂°F at the start of the
record to about +2.4⡂°F at the end.”
You might take another look. What I see are the same temperature numbers
for NYC CP in both raw and adjusted GHCN V2 files for the years since 19
since 1920.
Pete,
When I click on your link, I get the same shopping cart that Anthony does.
No link to a full PDF.
I’m guessing that there’s a cookie on your computer that indicates that you have already purchased the study. So when you go to the page, you get a different screen than Anthony or I do.
Pete – fair enough, Steve did put up the Alexander thread w/o comment. I apologise. However, I feel MarkW’s comment there applies perfectly well here (there it was a reference to Solanki).
Before you can declare that there is no correlation between solar activity and earth temperatures over the last 30 years, you must first remove the various contaminations of the temperature record. Starting with UHI. Which despite the claims of certain papers is significant, and growing.
Good to see that divergences are important to discuss after all, though.
Re 33
I get the full paper and I definitely have no such cookie on my machine
Re #35, ditto
I downloaded the paper ok from the link in #26. I had a quick read, and I disagree with the underlying premise on which the conclusions are based. The smoothed plot of sunspot activity shows 2 humps, the most recent being slightly less than the previous, and in another plot they show the Hadrcud temperature (no comment) anomalies. They show that while the solar activity dropped slightly, the temps have been going up. The unstated premise is that for solar forcing to be credible, the level of solar activity would have to rise with temperatures. But, the cosmic ray hypothesis is based on cloud formation that acts like an iris. So as long as the iris is open temps will continue to go up. It isn’t necessary for the iris to open more and more to cause higher temps. Obviously, there will be a point where equilibrium would occur and temps would stop climbing. We may be near that point now.
Be Patient with a question from a casual reader of your excellent technical site. I can follow a lot of the least squares fitting issues, but the basic physics issues are unclear to me, and this thread seems causal enough to not be annoying to
people that really follow this closely.
I observed that in the Al Gore movie, ice cores seem to have supplanted tree rings as GW evidence. Deriving a temperature proxy from tree rings seems to have come into disfavor because of the Mann cheery picking of sites, the inability to differentiate between a drought and a temperature signal, serious procedural/fitting-math issues, etc. So now I find, in the water cooler arena with respect to global warming, I am finding ice cores to be the refuge from the defects of Mann and his hockey team. So I looked up ice core in wikapedia, to understand All Gores argument that one can get not only co2 measurements from ice cores, which I understand as dissolved gas concentration as we go into the past record, but direct temperature data as well
Here is the best I could find:
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So I imagine that water vapor being made into snow will have different concentrations of heavy isotopes of oxygen if the prevailing atmosphere is hot than if its cold? Does water not still freeze at 32F, and what does the global temperature have to do with that? Can anybody tell me more about the proposed mechanism for extracting a universal atmospheric temperature signal from 32 degree water vapor as it is being converted to snow? I am sure there is some basic idea they have for this proxy. Can you tell me how it’s flawed? (like in tree rings, temperature/drought differentiation issues). There is always cherry picking issues, no matter what basic method is chosen, I understand that. Thanks patent reader.
L Hickey
38: I don’t know much about this, but perhaps that description of the method is not written correctly. There should be more heavy isotopes available for freezing after a WARM period, not a cold one. Thus, maybe there is a negative correlation.
38: Also, I presume you are aware that Gore forgot to mention that there is a lag of about 800 years between a rise in temperature and the rise in CO2, with the CO2 FOLLOWING the temperature rise. A little “inconvenient detail,” there.
#12, you’ll never go up in a car again? C’mon, it is not THAT bad. After all, today a lot of people raced up the mountain… in cars, motorcycles, even big-rig truck cabs.
You might enjoy watching this (award-winning) video clip of one racer… and then you’ll realize that normal mortals can easily go up the mountain at more ‘normal’ speeds ;)…
PS: Go here to download the full-size 66mb file; link #2 worked best for me.