Climate Audit

TCO

[snip] no f-words allowed

Frank K.

“I’ve shown GHCN unadjusted data, which, as far as I can tell, is the version used in the NOAA composite.”

Just so I understand this correctly…NASA/NOAA uses UHI corrections for the US (presumably because there are usually rural stations close by the compare with) but not for the rest of the world??

And there are only ** six ** stations in Brazil with historical data dating back to the 30s?? What about 1880 – 1930? All of the global average temperature charts date back to 1880. Maybe Sounth America, like the US, isn’t important…

And these (uncorrected) six stations are somehow representative of the entire country of Brazil (which is a significant fraction of the South American continent)? Look at Sao Paulo! UHI run amok…

bernie

I have been to Sao Paolo and it is an amazing place with incredibly rapid growth. It is similar to LA in that the city grows everywhere with apparently minimal urban planning.
That Sao Paolo under any circumstances should represent a significant portion of the historical data for a country the size of Brazil is crazy.

bernie

I forgot to mention that Sao Paolo’s metro population is close to 20 millions!! And I have to tell you without air conditioning the place is kind of tough. A quick google search produced this set of data on Brazil’s urban growth and select city population and Brazil.

Doug F

Interesting. I don’t see anomolously high temperatures in the 30’s. The sample is small, but suggests that the temperatures in Brazil did not follow North American temperatures in the 30’s. Perhaps proxies are required because the number of sites is so tiny.

Paul S

Re Post # 9 by windansea

I read that post. Remarkable. Hansen is a politician, no doubt about it. And he gets in the Goreian shibboleth about Exxon too.

bernie

Windansea
Interesting statement but hardly revelatory. Citing Jefferson, the slave owner, on the Bill of Rights I think says it all.
The defense seems to be – OK, AGW appears to be minimal in the US but just look at the ROW. Brazil does not appear to be a great case example.

Steve Moore

RE #9:

Remarkable reading. From the Al Gore School of Climatology:

“…large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species…”
And,
“There is still time to avert the most dramatic climate effects, if we promptly begin to address both CO2 and non-CO2 climate forcings. But just barely.”

Remarkable.

Mike H.

sonicfrog, semicolon at the end of the number. ♫
Steve, the current post of the Patriot Post has a synopsis of the current discussion with Hansen. Would you care to have it forwarded?

Dave Dardinger

re: #9

Good Gravy! The man is insane. Quick, how old is he? Perhaps AGS is causing premature senility in scientists who work to close to it. I’m over 60 now. Perhaps I should stay away from here and take up a safer hobby.

SidViscous

Just for comparison. Brazil is similar in size as the U.S. (Lower 48).

Actually before we purchased Alaska (For a case of Vodka and a cartoon of Marlboro’s) Brazil was actually larger than the U.S.

Joel McDade

Hmmm… many of the GISS charts in Brazil go for years without data, then start again. How they can adjust – ah never mind.

I love Brazil. Anthony, I volunteer, but need a little funding.

Jim Edwards

Steve M:

Most of the ROW will likely have been too poor to give a *$#* about temperature readings before 1960. What about British Commonwealth countries. The Royal Society have been gathering science data in the empire for centuries. I’d guess you’d find more spatially dispersed ‘old’ sites for urban / rural comparison in Commonwealth countries.

Shawn

I’m confused how your wrote about the US only making up 2% of the earth surface, adding that it doesn’t matter, I didn’t understand where that was going, but this is what was I think.

If you think of the smoke stack capital of the world; it’s probably not far from you. However, in a scale of a month, our world atmosphere quickly flows from one place to the next, and it moves all around the globe, wouldn’t you agree? So isn’t it safe to assume that if North America were to immediately stop emitting GHGs that the effect would merely act as a hole which closes, but has already set in emotion GHGs that will float around the globe for centuries. I don’t think it all hangs in one place. Maybe over cities more because they are essentially GHG producing super producers (one collective smoke stack).

But I refuse to believe, I haven’t been breathing some of your city’s Carbon Dioxide output, and that our industrialized nations aren’t spreading a thickening blanket of millions of years of once absorbed CO2, over the oceans and lands which are greatly sensitive to their climate.

The climate is always in motion. The 1930s may have been a period as a result of sort of an anomaly that lasts only a few years , which climate forcings did not move much, or converged in such a way, that the US was very, very warm for a period then, not necessarily because of CO2 but say, because of the lack of Artic Air, who knows… But we all acknowledge that we are currently experiencing equally warm periods now, as the 30s, which we consider really warm, every year in fact. Surely, the entire decade of the 00s will prove to be warmer than the 90s, the 90s more than the 80s and so on. But now also, we are able to observe and understand the climate significantly better.

It’s not entirely far fetched to consider we are experiencing warmer temps in the US is because we’re out of control with C02 now, not only are we smothering in our own gasses but now more from the world around us, including even our past, all joining in the mix.

The cat is out of the bag. The WORLD’s warmest years on human and geological records dating back over 400,000 years have all occurred… recently (and I don’t have to go back as early as 1934 A.D.). What say you of that?

Brooks Hurd

Re: 9, Windsea,

Hansen’s temperature graphs which he uses to compare the US to the ROW are amazing. The y axis for the US is 3 C whereas the y axis for the ROW is 1 C. This is on the same page where he accuses others of misrepresenting data to prove their points.

Louis Hissink

Steve

Just occurred to me but if the argument is about climate and changes in climate, then should we not be using statistics of climate data rather than weather to determine if the climate is changing?

Climate is defined as weather averaged over 30 years, so this definition would produce a rather small number of data points (unless one uses a moving average and then the last data point would be 2007 – 15 = 1992) that might pose some difficulties in modelling. Much like trying to convince the folks that a trend discerned from two data points is important.

🙂

KevinUK

IMO James Hansen is a very dangerous man.

Why is he dangerous? Because since his 1988 alarmist AGW testimony to the Senate, he has caused billions of dollars to be diverted to the ‘AGW industry’ rather than for that same money to be spent on real global issues like poverty, disease, famine, poor education etc. A a consequence IMO many hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of people have died who otherwise might not have done.

He no doubt sincerely believes that he is almost single handedly saving the planet (to the benefit of the affluent western world) but at what expense. Answer? At the expense of the un-developed third world.

Paul

#9. How can anyone take Hansen seriously??

The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns.

There seems to be a dramatic rancour among people like Hansen resulting from the fact that general populous find the case so underwhelming that they aren’t selling their cars, ripping out central heating, cutting off their electricity.

Get over it mate.

Paul

#22 Just for comparison. Brazil is similar in size as the U.S. (Lower 48).

Yeah, but its only 2% of the world surface.

..and Australia? Well its only 2% of the world’s surface…

…And China? well its only…

For supposed smart guys with PhDs they sure are stoopid. It about the treatment of the data dumbies…..

dover_beach

Hansen’s agitprop is more disturbing then the recent amendments to GISS data. On topic, I simply cannot believe that UHI is still discounted considering the palpable difference in temperature trends between rural and urban locations as indicated above.

EW

#35

One of the things I did was to look for “Czech” on that page. The first “Czech” label you find is Arvavaralja. Doesn’t sound too Czech to me. It’s a Hungarian name for a Slovak village. The next one is Schossl and Tetschen, German names that could be outside Czechia. It’s interesting because there are many Czech cities around that are not labeled “Czech”.

Luboši, I worked on location of those on W. Hughes’ request. Both are Czech – Schossl is Střelná, seems to be a local small airport station and Tetschen is Děčín. Also there was a German-sounding place Neu-somewhat, attributed to Czechoslovakia, which we finally located in Poland, near Klodzko. IMO, in that list, the stations have their pre-WW II and maybe pre-WW I names!

John F. Pittman

I wonder if Hansen would appreciate the practical error in his posturing. As #34 KevinUK has pointed out, real world economies are not that simple. Quoting from the publication without peers, the IPCC WGII, we see

Even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further
impacts of climate change in the next few decades (Working
Group I Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III Fourth
Assessment Report), which makes adaptation unavoidable.
However, without mitigation, a magnitude of climate change is
likely to be reached that makes adaptation impossible for some
natural systems, while for most human systems it would involve
very high social and economic costs (see Chapter 4, Section
4.6.1 and Chapter 17, Section 17.4.2)

It is not yet possible to answer the question as to whether or
not investment in adaptation would buy time for mitigation
(high confidence).
Understanding the specific economic trade-offs between the
immediate localised benefits of adaptation and the longer-term
global benefits of mitigation requires information on the actions’
costs and benefits over time.

First, there are or have been effects. Secondly, the economic trade-offs are unknown in terms of buying time. Somewhere in the AR4 isthe acknowledgement that rich economies can more easily afford mitigation than poor economies. From IPCC the costs of carbon:

peer-reviewed estimates have a mean
value of US$43/tC

Lets see what a ton of carbon is. We will use methane as the basic carbon unit. Carbon is .75 by weight. So we will see what we get for 1.333 tons of methane. Let’s just use gasoline as our estimate. We get about 400 gallons to burn for that $43 dollars. The question is what starving 3rd world person would not want to pay 11 cents a gallon for gasoline to have food shelter and medical care? I wish I only had to pay 11 cents a gallon. I believe that the hypocricy of Hansen et al is properly thought as hubris. “Pride cometh before the fall” or more classically, Hansen, et al, believe they are on par with the gods (greek Tradegy).

Stan Palmer

Hansen thinks that he is insulting skeptics when he calls them “court jesters.” Court jesters were the people who were allowed and expected to make the king face the truth. They could force the king to reconsider his most cherished ideas.

The famous scene of King Lear on the moor with his jester is a good example of that point. Lear was railing against the force of a hurricane. The hurricane is a metaphor for the indifference of reality to Lear’s delusion about his own importance.

So if the skeptics are court jesters for forcing Hansen to admit his error; then they are court jesters in the finest tradition of that role.

King Lear could be a very apt play to represent this whole AGW debate. Jim Hansen as Lear

Luboš Motl

Dear EW #42, thanks for your info. “Strelna” was new for me. But is it OK to say that “Czech” was no good for “Orava” neither before the first war nor before the second war? 😉

bernie

#28 Paul
The link, I gave in #8 provides population estimates and projections for these cities from 1915 through 2015.
#30 Brooks
Steve provided these graphs rescaled to the same scale. When you do that you see that the 30s appears to be somewhat of an US anomaly. This, I believe, is why Steve is looking for Brazil data for this period.

Lubos:
As you probably know, Brazil is very much of a melting pot, with many German, Italian and Japanese immigrants. In fact Brazil has the largest ethnic Japanese population outside of Japan. Brazil also has some strange climates with a arid region in NE Brazil due to the cold current off the coast.

Gunnar

#28 >> If you think of the smoke stack capital of the world (US);

Shawn, you really need to look into this more. In reality, the communist (china) and the former communist areas of eastern europe/russia are far, far bigger producers of raw pollution. Since the free world is inherently cleaner, based on private property rights, people who want a clean world should be clamouring for freedom, not green communistic state control.

>> has already set in emotion GHGs that will float around the globe for centuries.

Freudian slip? That’s exactly what AGW is doing, setting GHGs into our emotions. For certainly, there is no data or scientific law that can support the idea that C02 increasing from .035% to .038% can have any deleterious effect. C02 cannot be pollution, since plants need it like we need oxygen. You’re not a plant bigot, are you? Even the AGWers have shifted their always slippery argument from “greenhouse warming” to C02 absorbing radiation, and re-radiating.

I’ll be the first one on the AGW bandwagon, as soon as someone comes up with a coherent scientific hypothesis (does not violate other known laws), and then repeatedly fails to falsify it with experiments.

In the meantime, I’ll let you in on a little secret. C02 is soluable, which you may have noticed when you drink a soda pop. This means that as C02 floats around, it is absorbed into the colder parts of the ocean. The average residence time for C02 in atmosphere is about 5 years. Therefore, based on AGW assumptions (man is the only C02 source & C02 causes temp rise), if we stopped all C02 output in 2090, all C02 would out of the atmosphere by 2100 and the temperature would plummet. No need for any action.

>> Maybe over cities more because they are essentially GHG producing super producers (one collective smoke stack).

Actually, a 2003-2005 study failed to find a C02 dome over a city. The average persons C02 output is negligible in his immediate environment. When you multiply this by the number of people on earth, it becomes even more negligible, since a lot of land in sparsely populated, and all the ocean is.

bernie

Gunnar:
The issue is one of what the cause of the 30s heatwave was. If it was local “weather” you are absolutely right. However, if it was a combination of sun and ocean driven forces then I would expect to see similar patterns elsewhere. The point of raising the question is that the temperature record in the 30s is partial for much of the world, which raises the question of how this record was actually constructed, i.e., much of the Asian land mass was in turmoil and much of Africa had little if any record. Until Steve helped reorder the “hottest” year data, I hadn’t even thought about the likely gaps in the 30s record but I had simply taken the record on faith. In addition, the temperature blip in the 30s appears to be a North American phenomenon not just the lower 48, which changes the weight from 2% to 6% of the surface or from 6% to 16% of the land record. So from a data point of view, if the ROW does not show the same peak, the greater the weight for area with a peak, the greater the need for a flat or downward trend in the ROW. All I tthat is being done is a double checking of the data given known likely sources of error or discontinuities.

Murray Duffin

Hansen should be ashamed of himself. To write a polemic about distortion, and support his position with a major distortion of the Y axis scale that most people won’t notice is hypocrisy squared.
Interestingly Sao Paolo has been growing like mad since the 1950s, while Curitiba is to a large degree a planned city that experienced major growth since the early ’70s. Clearly shows in the curves. Sao Paolo shows almost 3.5 degrees C of warming. Wow!! Murray

Ivan

Steve,
I know you requested from Jones CRU data and he refused, by saying that he will not give the data because you will try to find something wrong with them. Is it the end of story? IS there any other way to identify the stations?

Bob Meyer

Re 54

If the high temperatures of the 1930’s were a strictly US phenomenon then if follows that local effects can be as great, if not greater than global ones. This is in contradiction to the “CO2 uber alles” theory of GW.

Either:

A – the temperatures measured in the US are valid, which means that there is some unknown process of incredible power that raised the temperature of an entire continent seventy five years ago, or

B – the temperatures measured in the US are invalid which means that conclusions drawn from that data are useless.

Surely a local phenomenon that raised the temperature of North America as much as CO2 raised the temperature of the planet is worth investigating. A real scientist would chase down that effect, especially if it called his own theories into question. Hansen shows no interest in pursuing this, he is more interested in calling people jesters and clowns.

This North American temperature anomaly makes the station and data audits more important than ever.

Gunnar

>> 2% in the atmosphere (mainly as carbon dioxide).

Not sure what you mean, atmospheric C02 is .038%. Are you saying that 2% of the world’s carbon is in the atmosphere? Can’t be that.

>> Increasing CO2-levels in the atmosphere today is consistent with the medieval warm period

Yet, they seem lower now than in 1940.

bernie

Joel:
That is real helpful – can you add links? I was looking at the National Brazilian site mentioend above (I have zero Portuguese or Spanish but pretty good schoolboy Latin!) and came across this set of recent (2/2007)
conference presentations. I looked at 4 or 5 of them. A lot are reworking of IPCC reports – but what seemed to be missing is any detailed historical chart of temperatures for Brazil. I found that very surprising. There is one chart that showed trends for South America but in a scale that made it very difficult to read. What it showed was a very slight upward trend = much less that the supposed global trend.

Sudha Shenoy

We’ve been learning about the state of numerous American weather stations, & also about the problems with long-term records: eg, change in equipment but not noted in the records, etc. The US is the world’s richest country. What are these 6 Brazilian stations like? Can it be that they are better maintained? Do we have any info on procedures, who’s doing the measuring, maintenance, what sort of equipment, etc, etc? And what about the other LDCs?

Paul Linsay

#77, Ken

I love the 2% argument.

The Hockey Team: half a dozen trees in the Sierra Nevadas are sufficient to determine the global temperature for the entire twelfth century.

Hansen, Schmidt, and the Hockey Team: 1,200 weather stations covering the entire US are insufficient to determine the global temperature for the twentieth century.

Houston, we have a problem.

Gunnar

>> What percentage of the earth’s land area is the bristlecone proxy indicative of?

What percentage of the earth’s surface is Mauna Loa?

Wolfgang Flamme

Germany:

http://www.albwetter.de has some pictures of stations maintained by the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and other weather services.

bubba

I’ll play along. QUIXERAMOBIM?

steven mosher

Another two thing that bugs me.

1.hansen uses nighlights photos to measure brightness. How recent are these photos?

2. He uses 1980 census data. WTF?

bernie

Back to Brazil:
I pulled down all the Stations listed for South Americ and started looking at the rural stations. The first one seemed to be legitimately rural – though I can see some issues with the actual location of the station and changes ion land use. The second one I looked Coari is listed as rural. Here the population is 117, while here it is over 84,000! Now of course the actual station could be located outside of the city — but the articles also mention that Coari has grown rapidly in the last few years. Bottom-line the GISS data needs to be double-checked.

Joel McDade

hi bernie:

Google maps has Coari as a pretty decent sized town W of Manaus, Amazonas Province. 84K seems likely. GISS has data from 1961 to 1991. We can only hope, lol, that population growth is why they quit using it.

Lots of records with sparse data, too.

For your 1st language lesson, look up “Bunda” 🙂 It’s all you really need to know.

Magnus

Did my “research” with

and the bernie #51 url
http://esa.un.org/unup/index.asp?panel=2 ( bernie #51

😉

Dennis Wingo

Steve

Very nice work. In honor of your work I have published an article on Newsvine about “Cargo Cult” science that reprints Dr. Richard Feynman’s famous 1974 Caltech Commencement Speech.

http://wingod.newsvine.com/_news/2007/08/18/905075-anthropogenic-global-warming-and-cargo-cult-science?new&mode=edit

Ianric Ivarsson

First I must to apologise for carrying the CO2 thread along,
it doesn’t belong here.
Secondly I want to express my sorrow concerning the academic debate.
It should not be in media – neither the traditional, nor the Internet.
But after my long experience in the academia,
I find peer review is not sufficient.
There is so much bad science published.
I’m the co-author of one publication from witch
I demanded my name stricken out.
Thus I know how some of the “consensus 2500 scientists” feel.
From my own personally biased point of view,
the three most flawed fields of science today are:
1. Gender
2. Medicine
3. Climate
In that order.
But I may be wrong.
If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn’t be doing science.
The climatology orthodoxy scares me.
It makes me think of the Spanish inquisition.
Mr. McIntyre is a heretic.
He questions the dogma. I like that.
Keep up the good work Steve.

captdallas2

Ref 89, yup, I type lisdexic at times, Turku. This is a danged odd jump at 1990.

Magnus

STAFFAN LINDSTRÖM: “Sao Paolo is some 60 km from the Atlantic.”

You’re right of course, and I meant about 70 km (not 7 km). The same for Curatiba.
In comment #27 Paul Graham posted links to google maps with arrows pointing out weather stations…

doubleg

Don’t know if this comment is appropriate here, but a non-climate scientist is wondering about the latency involved with CO2 and actual atmospheric warming. Just a dumb observation- driving from coastal CA inland today just north of the Vaca fire (burning since July 4). There is a HUGE plume of smoke in the Kern County area (can be seen very well from satellite). About 5 minutes before I entered the smoke area the temp was 91. The further I went into the cloud, the cooler it got, down to 79 within 30 min. As I left the smoky area towards the town of Taft (on the outskirts of the smoke at the time) the temp had climbed back to 90 (about an hour start to finish). So, obviously the smoke cover has a very dramatic effect on cooling/blocking incoming heat. There must also be a tremendous amount of CO2 release from the fire as well. Does soot/ash have a much larger role in cooling than CO2 in warming? Shouldn’t there be warming in that area or somewhere nearby with that release of CO2? If the lower level soot/ash zone prevents any effect from CO2, wouldn’t clouds do the same? Finally, is the net effect of CO2 release into the atmosphere immediate or what is the time frame?

Green man

93:

If NASA had a calculated degree of confidence in their version of the global temperature record, then surely that confidence level should be changed now.

Good luck finding one, thats the thing that bugged me about Hansen’s 2001 paper concerning the US temp record, no clear description of the uncertainty/confidence. His graphs have a few oddly spaced error bars at various intervals and his greater than 0.1C line is in the text. Can’t he just say that he believes its +/- 0.2 95% or something like that? Maybe I missed it somewhere, but it is not as easy to find as I think it should be.

Magnus

The mathematical confidence level at 95 or 99 percent don’t refer to lack of relevance or potential problems in collecting data.

Papertiger

Steve McKitrick has the answer for you. It has to do with station culling, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Oops
That should be Ross McKitrick.

My bad.

hillrj

re 51, 61 >> the 30’s a US phenomenon..
If you look at the Australian data
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/timeseries.cgi
(select type: temperature, region: Australia)
you will see an interesting bump in the 1930’s
so, maybe it wasnt just a US phenomenon.
The Aussie data shows a much more pronounced anomaly than the US in recent decades. I didnt check if the temps are “corrected” or “raw”.

Puzzling is a century long regular decline in the max-min spread. Is that a UHI effect?

Brooks Hurd

Re: 102

Puzzling is a century long regular decline in the max-min spread. Is that a UHI effect?

I noticed this in Parker’s Tmin and Tmax plots which he sent me. Tmin is increasing faster in his data than is Tmax, leading to a reduction in diurnal temperature variation. I have not read a good explanation for this phenomenon.

As whether it is a UHI effect or not would require comparing Tmin and Tmax at stations which are truly rural with those effected by varying degrees of UHI. The issue which Watts and Steve have been raising is that many stations which we thought were rural are being effected by manmade heat sources.

bernie

The S. American issue seems to have been picked up elsewhere, in part prompted by this article
Alas I do not speak the language. Can someone paraphrase the main argument?
There is an ongoing discussion on this UK site.

Robert Wood

#9 I notice fig 1 has different y-axes scales for US and world, which helps reduce the “significane” of the US numbers.

Larry

109, others noticed that, too. Which raises the question, is it sloppiness, or is it a deliberate attempt to deceive? Neither one makes me feel warm and fuzzy about NASA, but it’s like some of the media errors that we’ve been witnessing over the past 10 years; there’s an odd tendency for their errors to always end up going one way. They never err in a way that undercuts AGW.

Larry

110, more specifically, they fit the scales on both to the mins and the maxes. That’s fine for a single graph, but it’s deceptive to do that and then put them side-by-side. I have a hard time believing that they don’t see the problem with that.

steven mosher

Here is a link I thught I put up .. has a little info on brazlian data

Click to access Garcia.pdf

steven mosher

The OTHER thing is that he is comparing a LAND OCEAN index.. to a LAND Record

So, the question is what does a land versus land comparision look like.

So US LAND record versus Global Land. The accuracy issue is the land record nt SST

aurbo

Re #104;

There are two reasons for the narrowing of the diurnal range. One has to do with the actual temperature, the other with the instrumentation.

Quayle, Karl et al in 1991 did a study of the differences between the liquid in glass readings from the Stepehenson Screen, (AKA cotton region shelter)and the electronic MMTS (Maximum Minimum Temperature Sensor) equipment which replaced the liquid in glass thermometry circa 1990. There study showed that the MMTS equipment tended to produce lower maxes (-0.4°C) and higher minima by about (+0.3°C). This change alone reduced the diurnal difference by a significant (0.7°C). But since the differences in maxima and minima nearly balance each other out in the daily means, the changes were considered acceptable.

The other more significant difference comes from the nature of rural vs urban temperature environments. Most properly located rural stations tend to be “good radiators” that is that the nature of their siting allows for efficient surface cooling under clear skies and calm or nearly calm conditions at night so that their minimum temperatures can be as much as 10°F or more cooler than their urban neighbors. This is partially a result of the effectiveness of radiational cooling at the ground surface under the instrumentation and the lack of advection of warmer temps either laterally from nearby warmer areas or vertically by convection since the cold air forming at the ground from radiationaal cooling and in the airmass immediately above by conduction is quite stable. Under typical radiating conditions there is a steep temperature gradient from the surface to about 10 meters so that the precise height of the temperature sensors is significant. The standard height for thermometers in Stephenson Screen shelters was 4.5 feet or about 1.5 meters. (Photos on Watts’ website of some MMTS sensors adjacent to innactive Stepehenson Screens shows height differences which could create significant differences in temperature under ideal radiational cooling conditions.)

The reason that maximum temperatures are less affected is that heating of the air in contact with the ground crerates a super-adiabatic lapse rate which creates auto-convective overturning of the unheated air above and the result is a well mixed areas where temperatures are essentially uniform up to the boundary layer. This means that a considerably greater volume of air is heated during the daytime hours than is cooled under nighttime radtiaonal conditions. Thus, maximum temperature observations reflect a greater volume of air than the compressed layers of cool air under nighttime radiational cooling. During windy conditions creating a well mixed deep layer of air near the surface, all bets are off.

BTW, air is a lousy conductor of heat and a poor recipient or emitter of thermal radiation. The temperature of of the lower atmosphere over land areas is controlled principally by conduction with the solid surfaces of the ground, and to a usually much lesser extent by solid particulates suspended in the airmass itself. The amount of temperature increase from solar or surface radiation passing through the air is neglibile. Things are slightly different over water as heat is transferred to the air not simply by conduction, but by the introduction of latent heat from water vapor evaporated from the water surface. At the same temperature and pressure, water vapor is much lighter, hence more bouyant, than air and has no problem rising through the lower atmosphere carrying its latent heat upward.

I think this answers the #104,s question. Perhaps when people think more deeply about the physics and the T-word ending in dynamics, one might wonder how much the radiative properties of CO2 has to do with climate.

Dano

Since we are a little off topic, there is an interesting post in John A, I Quit post about peer-review. I think it is #101.

DocMartyn

#19
“BTW, air is a lousy conductor of heat and a poor recipient or emitter of thermal radiation. The temperature of of the lower atmosphere over land areas is controlled principally by conduction with the solid surfaces of the ground, and to a usually much lesser extent by solid particulates suspended in the airmass itself. The amount of temperature increase from solar or surface radiation passing through the air is neglibile. Things are slightly different over water as heat is transferred to the air not simply by conduction, but by the introduction of latent heat from water vapor evaporated from the water surface. At the same temperature and pressure, water vapor is much lighter, hence more bouyant, than air and has no problem rising through the lower atmosphere carrying its latent heat upward.”

What would be the difference in the max/min temperature of a sensor in a proper shelter on
1) a dry lawn
2) a watered lawn.

Water usage has changed hugely in the last few decades. I am sure that we have more water present in our green spaces (like parks) than ever before. My guess is that Tmin would jump up and Tmax would decline a little. However, I don’t know what a sensor would read.

Jerry

Steve,

The Brazil data is mind-boggling. My sister-in-law was born there and she said the urban growth in her lifetime has been incredible and out of control. Same with a colleague who worked there in the 70’s.

Is it true that there are only 3,000 surface stations being used by the IPCC? If so, the U.S., with only 6% of the world land mass, accounts for 40% of the weather stations. This would give me a lot more confidence in the US records rather than records from the ROW. At the least, if we cull out the UHI-vulnerable sites, our data base will be on a superior position with the ROW, even assuming the others are purely rural. For the U.S., it would be a move towards quality of data. Maybe not so with the ROW.

U of Delaware website showing the evolution over time of the number of surface stations is a shocker. Question is – did the number of weather stations get reduced by the IPCC in attempt to enforce some quality control (i.e., culling out the urban stations)? I notice that Canada and Australia also showed a collapse in the number of surface stations around 1990, so I would believe that the culling factor might apply here. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union (geographically, economically and demographically), did the IPCC try to salvage a rapid dropoff in rural databases due to inattention by the monitors in Russia? It seems we’re going to be left with massive ROW data gaps in any grid system selected. Given the collapse in the internal geographic Russian (and Chinese) station distribution, I’m guessing the problem is local volunteers abandoning the interior rural stations and not quality control. Not good for the accuracy of the database.

As for the Chinese, we have an authoritarian political class trying to that diverts political discontent by riding a Wild West economic quasi-capitalist machine into earning a renmibi coupled with a rapacious destruction of the environment – both within China and transported internationally through its wind-driven “brown cloud” pollution. China is now the biggest CO2 emitter in the world. If the surface station monitors are government-paid, do you think that maybe, just maybe, there will be pressure on the monitors to down-play the temperature readings by, say, a tenth of a degree, especially in the urban centers? If Exxon was in this position of power, the Left would justifiably scream about a predatory conflict of interest and throw out any Exxon-tainted data. Just a thought.

On another thread, Steve previously connected us to the Australian station photo and data survey. I remember that A) the general designs appeared to be uniformly pretty decent, B) they did show an increase in temperature over time, and C) they appeared to be located near airports. Looking at the latest BOM data, using an 11 year moving average, an increase in temperature is apparent. But I think if a 5 year moving average was used, the trend line would have collapsed last year (though they seem to be having a high-temperature year in 2007).

Wolfgange Flamme,

Thank you for your connection to the German station photos. Scrolling through them shows what appear to be excellent “rural” station designs. But it also shows a lot of ridiculous roof-mounted and locally corrupted installations. Anyone know of which stations were used by the IPCC?

O2converter

“an important role in climate change”I’m thinkin’ that we need to change the name (again) to: “Climate Diversity”. That way we can celebrate and embrace it knowing that is makes us stronger.

John F. Pittman

Jerry #125

Why would the Chinese even care. Their impetusus is for economic growth. The IPCC has a section that if you run the numbers indicates, despite their Summary, that the best way to have a leg up on climate change is to be able to afford it. I posted this somewhere on CA, but can’t remember where. It had the numbers.

Jerry

[snip -offtopic]

bernie

Alan:
Nice site and useful summary of South American data. I have a feeling though that there are actually few if any real rural stations at least in Brazil. I am just compiling that lsit now. For example, Quixeramobin is in fact Urban assuming the NOAA classification scheme with a population > 50000. Rural is defined as

Magnus

#133 Erik: If a sampel consists of a number of “measurment points”/raw data these samples becomes more homogeneous, yes. And it also results in a more limited range for a confidence interval. But individual stations added on the same area will have about the same distribution as the original stations. That’s what I mean. The range “stationwise” will be approxemately the same.

Did you see the McKintrick document which shows a decrease in number of stations 1990? Does that make sence to the data you see (I guess you mean the graph on page 6). But more stations not necessarily reduce the interval that much. To get half the accuracy one often need …maybe a 5-10 times increase of data (depending on original size; I guess it was a large increase in the beginning of the 20th century). Similarly to reduce data by half mustn’t reduce quality that much. The UHI effect since 1950 may results in disparity in the data?!? I really don’t know… (…what these dots are either).

(The definition of avarage temperature is another interresting subject. If we cut the forrests in Scandinavia the changed albedo makes winters -30 degrees C instead of -20 degrees C, but to what extent will more extreme winters save anyone anywhere? 😛 )

Erik

Magnus,
The point is that the more samples act as a low pass filter. High frequencies (noise) stuff should not be able to appear on the chart. In statistics this would be more homogeneous. The underlying math is the same.

I do see that there is something funky going on with then number of stations around 1990. But the amount of noise on the chart I referenced from the IPPC is constant. Why do I not see changes in the amount of noise on the chart that correlate with the number of stations. There is no change around 1990.

The forest where I grew up (Minnesota) is about the same as yours in Scandinavia. It seems that swedes are drawn to these place. I am not sure why. It is really cold.

Sandy McIntyre

Why would any rational individual not adjust for changing temperature as land use changes? The Dunlop Observatory at University of Toronto was the primary source of temperature readings in Toronto up until the 1950s when it moved to Aurora in the suburbs of Toronto. When the observatory was bult in the early 20th century the location was undeveloped. By the 1950s this location was in a highly congested portion of the city and was relocated to farm land in a green belt north of the city. The current location is now in an area experiencing rapid increases in density. This issue was examined in a Scientific American article in the 1990s examining historical temperature readings as recording sites “migrated” into urban centers. The same article examined over 200 years of British Admiralty readings of sea temperatures.

Steve: Hi, Sandy. To others: in Canada right now, I’d be much more likely to be identified as Sandy’s older brother.

Frank Ewing

How many of you have begun to let your legislative representatives know that we know there are huge flaws in climate change research? The money for the vast majority of the climate change research is government funded i.e. YOU are paying for it out of your own pockets. Make the phone call; write the letter; send the email. Keep your elected representatives aware of what this site and others are bringing to light.

VG

What has happened to Satellite/UAH July 2007 data. None of the sites (even Nasa GISS) seem to have updated July 2007 data. Quite keen to see surface/troposphere data re cold temps Australia, South America, Tropics, Oceans etc. Does anybody know?

Derek Tipp

Below is an extract from the UK Met Office – any comments please?

“Isn’t the apparent warming due to urbanisation?
No. The below image shows the results of a recent analysis at the Hadley Centre of temperature trends over the last 50 years deduced separately from measurements on the most windy nights and the least windy nights, from the same stations. If urbanisation were causing the observed warming, one would expect calmer nights to have warmed more, as it is in these conditions that the heat island effect would act to warm the station compared to its rural surroundings. In fact, the results showed no difference between trends on windier and calmer nights, confirming that urbanisation is not to blame. “

Thomas Bolger

Re 145
I have measured temperatures under many conditions and have come to the conclusion that rural cooling is caused by the emission of water from plants.
I have measured temperatures on rainy days and found that the difference between “rural” and “urban” is minimised. However I have seen no such reduction of temperature range on windy days
Has anyone investigated the difference in warming for rainy conditions vs dry conditions?

Sean Houlihane

Back to Brazil… Is there anything useful that can be done with these data? The number of sites is small enough to make some additional measurement possible, but how is it possible to critisize any adjustments? Steve says we have one good station, they say they have 5 that agree. Is there any more good data hidden anywhere?

John F. Pittman

#147 Look at 134.

I think you are right. The rain would have to be quantified, as in small versus large in mm of rainfall. You would expect to see the rural drop with light, but the urban to only drop with heavy rains.

Mike Hollinshead

Thomas,

Might not the diminution of the temperature difference between rural and urban in rainy conditions be due to the rain cooling the hard infrastructure which is causing the UHI? Latent heat of evaporation would make the rain very efficient at cooling tarmac and buildings.

Consequently, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to compare temperatures in dry conditions and make an adjustment for plant transpiration in the rural setting?

You would have to be alert to micro conditions e.g. the urban forest versus the urban concrete jungle. For example, a sensor located in Central Park would be affected by transpiration just as much as a truly rural site.

Antero

In Finland there was really an heatwave in 1930’s and i found info that in Britain too. Even before 1970’s they estimated that UHI was playing some 1 C role in Helsinki, Kaisaniemi station. As i’ve written before Mariehamn has been warmer than Helsinki until 1950’s. Nowadays Helsinki is some 0.5 C warmer than Mariehamn or Jomala in island of Åland.

Ivan

143

There was a loss of data for 10 days in July at UAH. They are trying to reconstruct data now and will published it as soon as possible. In short, this is what John Christy answered me.

Brooks Hurd

#158,

Those are analyses of temperature change, not algorithms for adjusting temperature data.

windansea

I asked this question at RealClimate but no answer so far

US land mass is 2% of total earth surface, and 8% of total dry land on earth right?

How many temp stations are in the world used by GISS? What percentage are US stations of the total?

How many temp guages are in the oceans?

bernie

#161: Windansea
These are readily answered by downloading the lists from here
However, the more difficultquestion to answer is the number of high quality sites. The rural designation I think is very suspect.

windansea

Thanks for the answers, I think I saw a post or comment here in another thread stating that 40% of the stations used by GISS are US based, just wanted to check this.

PS In the latest thread at RealClimate I find Gavin’s repeated responses to questions about lack of transparency (of methods and formulas etc) Hansen’s modeling quite ludicrous.

“it’s all in his papers”

“do it yourself”

“it’s too complicated for you to understand”

Demesure

“I suspect the 1990 anomaly was a part of the extensive introduction of AWOS surface stations.”

#162, Dr Tim Ball (if you are you).
On the reverse, in France, all rural stations used by the GISS have their data ended in the 1990s, which is unexplicable (apart from the desire to reject no-warming trends) because high quality, long record rural stations like Mont Aigoual ou Pic du Midi are professionnaly manned by Meteo France and haven’t interrupted their records (I know them two for having visited them). Urban stations on the other side are mostly situated near airports, so if you want a “manmade” upward trend in temperatures, you can’t dream of better.

That’s the situation for France, with about less than 40 stations for the GISS, “un autre cadavre dans le placard” ? I don’t have the brain of Steve to check out the junk but it looks like a fish and smells like a fish.

PaulM

# 145 Derek Tipp. This has been discussed at great length already on other threads. Search for ‘Parker’ and ‘UHI’. Parker made a speculative assumption about wind that has no justification. The way to answer the question is simply to look at the data for urban and rural sites and compare them. The GW alarmists don’t do this, because they know it would give the ‘wrong’ answer. Just look at the graphs at the top that Steve has put up. Pretty spectacular. The extent of warming seems to be proportional to the size of the town / city! Has anyone checked this?

bernie

PaulM:
One type of correction for UHI is in fact primarily the size of the immediate population. However, there can be numerous confounding factors such as energy us. Sao Paulo for example stretches for miles and there are undoubtedly microclimates within this amazing city. What seems odd is that the approach to corrections appears to be extensive (lit vs unlit)rather than intensive (see the earlier cited papers in the recent Tuscon detective thread. It is a bit like understanding consumer behavior by simply tracking what they buy, without understanding why they buy what they buy.

Frank K.

Re: 170

There’s a word for this kind of data manipulation by NASA:

Adhoc

All the more reason to publish the source code…

Michael Jankowski

Re#174, that Seinfeld/GISS relationship has always been amusing to me. If I recall correctly, once you turn the corner down 112th, GISS is the first door you hit to (looks like there are the restaurant windows under the sign, then two more individual windows with a/c units, and then the entrance to GISS). FWIW, it was also the basis for the song “Tom’s Diner,” by Barnard (all-women’s school of Columbia) grad Suzanne Vega.

I actually took a class at GISS one semester…I wonder how many name past, current, and future, climate folks, RC and otherwise, I might have bumped into there without realizing.

windansea

well, found answer to questions about NASA software policy in the Townhall thread

Steve Moore

Is anyone sure that Terry Gilliam isn’t behind this?

BarryW

Re #180

I didn’t follow your answer. My question is the difference between Hadley’s land temperatures and sea temperaturesm not between US and ROW. Somewhere around 1990 the anomalies diverge. Before that they closely track each other. Unless there is a good explanation for the divergence I would say this makes the land record more than a little suspect. According to Steve this is when the number of sites was significantly reduced.

Alan Cheetham

Regarding Hadley vs GHCN, the following link compares the two sets of data for a rectangle approximating Brazil: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/brazil.htm

Mikel Mariñelarena

Similar to Brazil, the Rio de la Plata estuary in Argentina-Uruguay shows a remarkable example of UHI-contaminated data. Buenos Aires and Colonia share basically the same latitude, longitude and altitude. They’re just opposite each other across the estuary so there can’t be any long-term natural climatic trend affecting one but not the other.

However, BA has expanded tremendously in the last century to become one of the largest urban areas of the world. Its temperature history, unsurprisingly, shows a dramatic warming: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=301875850003&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Colonia, on the other hand, has remained a small town and shows, if anything, a cooling trend: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=313865600002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

In fairness to the GISS records, it must be said that eastern Argentina is one of the few regions in the world largely unaffected by GW during the past century, so their secret code must have somehow done the trick here, but a quick look at all the stations of the area shows that very few are rural and the only ones with a decent, uninterrupted temporal record are in urban areas: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/

UHI just 0.006°C per decade (IPCC)??

Alan Cheetham

Re: #185 – Often the GISS temperature graphs come from multiple close proximity stations. If you change the parameters you can get different views. For example, changing the data_set=1 to data_set=0 will display the multiple stations usng different line types. Also changing the num_neighbors to 2 can give you a comparative plot. In the Colonia example, this will plot the Colonia and Buenos Aires together: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=313865600002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=2

bernie

Mikel:
Do you speak Spanish and/or Portuguese? If so, it would be great if you could scan the Brazilian sites and check to what data they are focusing on. There are over 300 weather stations in Brazil, but only 47 made the GISS list.

Mikel Mariñelarena

Hi Bernie, I do understand Portuguese but I haven’t been able to follow the discussions very closely these last days. Where exactly could I find the list of Brazilian sites filtered by GISS? Also, did GISS provide any explanation for their site-filtering?

Mikel Mariñelarena

Nope. South American met offices will sell some of their data and processed products but I’ve never managed to get anything detailed for free, hard though I’ve tried.

In any case, here’s a map of all currently active (conventional) meteorological stations in Brazil: http://www.inmet.gov.br/html/rede_obs.php
Left pane, link titled “Superfície Convencional INMET”. Very nice flash, but not too friendly for the purpose at hand. It does however provide the WMO number and lat/long data for each station, thus allowing a comparison with GHCN.

A list of all currently active Argentinian stations is here: http://www.smn.gov.ar/?mod=biblioteca&id=98

I believe it should be possible to get the data and perhaps some metadata for these stations from this NOAA ftp site, but I haven’t downloaded the files to check: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/

PaulM

MC, the Lockwood and Frohlich paper has already been discussed at length on other threads here and other blogs for example Warwick Hughes. The paper is nonsense – there has been no decrease in the suns output. Google ‘richard willson lockwood’ to get an expert rebuttal.
Anyway that’s a bit off topic. The main point is as you say to look carefully at data and adjustments all over the world, now that it is clear that the US is no warmer than it was in the 1930s.
Would it not make sense to look first at the areas where, according to GISS and the IPCC, warming is greatest?
As I understand it, this is the arctic, right?
And does anyone know why the arctic is warming but the antarctic is not?

DeWitt Payne

Re: #195

And does anyone know why the arctic is warming but the antarctic is not?

Taking my cue from William Gray, IMHO it’s to a large if not primary extent a function of ocean currents (or thermo-haline circulation) which transfer heat from south to north. The AMO ramped up in 1995, not coincidentally the year the Arctic started it’s rapid warming trend. The Pacific equivalent has also been strong, but both should now be ramping down and I predict that Arctic temperatures have peaked and will soon be declining. See my post here. The same currents deliver chilled water to the Antarctic which helps to keep it cool.

bernie

Mikel:
The map is great and it clearly shows many more sites than the GHCN/GISS 47/57. While many may have shorter data records, it certainly would be interesting to find some more inequivocal rural sites for Brazil. One on the island in the mddle of the S. Atlantic seems a bit sparse!!

DeWitt Payne

PaddikJ August 25th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

Steve Sadlov seems to be the ice expert around here. Needless to say, I think you’re correct about needing heat from ocean currents to melt a lot of ice in a hurry, but this probably isn’t the right thread to discuss the details of your question. Try asking on the current Unthreaded #18 (at the moment). I need to construct some sort of chart to see if I can show some evidence of a change in trend without having to wait another five years.