Hansen has followed up his “Lights Out Upstairs” outburst with another outburst dismissing critics as “court jesters” with whom he will have no truck. (Lights Out is now cited on the NASA website.) His new jeremiad re-iterated the position of NASA spokesman Gavin Schmidt that U.S. errors “didn’t matter” because the U.S. was only 2% of the earth’s surface. Today I’ll take a look back at Hansen et al 1999 and, especially Hansen et al 2001, the latter entitled “A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change” and being entirely devoted to coaxing a few-tenths of temperature change out of the U.S. record, a matter now said to be unimportant. Hansen also linked interest in the NASA computer programming errors to somehow acquiescing in the “destruction of Creation”.
Continue reading →
NASA spokesmen Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen have observed that the US accounts for only 2% of the earth’s surface and conclude that problems in the US network don’t matter. There are only 6 Brazil stations in GHCN which have records extending through the 1930s and as late as 2004, which is an indication of the radical difference in coverage between two nations with large land areas. One of these stations is identified in the GHCN meta-data as “rural”. Can you identify which one?
Plot of 6 Brazil GHCN stations (unadjusted) with values through the 1930s and at least 2004 (in all cases 2007). All in deg C anomaly 1961-90.
I’ve shown GHCN unadjusted data, which, as far as I can tell, is the version used in the NOAA composite. I have no idea what version is used by CRU. I’ll look at GISS on another occasion. Recall that Jones et al and other studies cited by the IPCC have said that urbanization impact is under 0.1 deg C.
The NOAA website http://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry/search.cfm? has a Map tab linking to local maps and Google Earth. I don’t recall seeing it before. Maybe someone can comment on this and also check the accuracy of the maps for stations shown there.
I was looking to see if their equipment reporting included whether stations had aspirated or unaspirated housings. In the old CDIAC forms, the form of housing was recorded and perhaps it is here as well (if so, I’d appreciate info on how to find it if anyone knows.)
During the past 2 months, there has been an active discussion in the blogosphere about the quality of the Tucson U of Arizona weather station. While I have never claimed that the blogosphere is a substitute for academic journals, the thread of Tucson discussions seems to me to be a good example of internet discussion at work, doing something that couldn’t be done very well , if at all, in more formal venues. In this case, I’ll take partial credit for initiating this particular topic as, in a post on June 11, 2007, I observed that the Tucson – Univsersity of Arizona station ranked #1 out of all 1221 USHCN stations in the 20th century trend (using the time-of-observation adjusted version).
The identification of substantial non-compliance with WMO policies at the site with the largest trend in the USHCN network has prompted a small blizzard of commentary on the Tucson station. I’ll document some of these recent discussions here [Note with an update covering discussions since this post added on Sep 4, 2007]. Continue reading →
John A writes:
As Steve has already mentioned, I asked to stand down two weeks ago from the responsibilities involved in running this now notorious blog and return my life to some semblence of normality.
Continue reading →
The interview is here starting at 17:40 (just move the scrollbar to around 17:30, you don’t have to wait!). The interview is obviously edited, but Steve manages to make some clear points.
The new server hardware I built for Climate Audit was deployed in the co-location center today in California, I hand delivered it myself. This new server has much over the old one from a tech spec point of view, including faster CPU, dual core, error corrected memory, and hi speed SATA2 drives. It’s biggest advantage is that it’s not near a flood zone 😉 nor an earthquake zone for that matter. Multi-homed fiber to the backbone, DDOS attack filtering at two levels, instant UPS, automated backup, and remote administration by multiple methods will improve its uptime compared to the old server and location.
The DNS/domain name issues should now have been resolved worldwide, and http://www.climateaudit.org should now be reachable anywhere. The brief issue today with incomplete page loads had to do with the server temporary configuration at a fixed iP address for setup and testing and JohnA made the needed edits while I was on my way back from the COLO facility.
I think we are good to go. Onward.
Here’s an interesting article on the NASA “Y2K” error from Michael Fumento of Townhall.com that steers between the over-reaction of some commentators that this error somehow disproves global warming and the claims of NASA spokesmen, James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, that the error “doesn’t matter”. NASA spokesman Schmidt uses the realclimate.org website to advance the view that the error “doesn’t matter” without explicitly identifying himself in the article as a NASA spokesman.
The 6 pm promo for the 11pm CTV news (a Canadian national network) featured – guess who. You’ll recognize some graphics. The 11pm news is online here (only up to yesterday at present – I’m not sure whether they stream it at 11 pm or whether it’s just an archive.)
I’m on at the very end of the segment at about 28 minutes. A reader says that my segment is here
My Washington radio interview yesterday is online here.
Today Tomorrow (Thursday) sometime around 11am Pacific Standard Time, this server will go offline to be moved to its final home inside a colocation data center in California.
The IP address will change, so give Anthony and team a couple of hours to move the server and reconfigure. Steve will change the domain climateaudit.org to the new address, but this takes hours to propagate around the Internet and you may need to reboot or otherwise clear your DNS cache in order to get to the server again.
Thanks for your patience.
Update: Climate Audit may go down sooner because we’re currently eating into Anthony’s bandwidth, so if the blog does disappear it won’t be for any more nefarious reasons than that. Anthony’s business comes first.
Climate Audit 
Steve interviewed on BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme
The interview is here starting at 17:40 (just move the scrollbar to around 17:30, you don’t have to wait!). The interview is obviously edited, but Steve manages to make some clear points.