Re: OT: Global warming strikes again.

The propblem is that they all burnt out, long ago. Like cheap Chinese CFLs.

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For the last time:  I am not a mad scientist, I'm just a very ticked off
scientist!!!

Stupidity provides a necessary and sufficinet explanation.

Somebody less stupid might have carried over the relevant information that *global* warming could cause *local* cooling, but Rich's life- long enthusiasm for recreational chemicals hasn't left him enough functioning brain cells to grasp such subtle distinctions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Anthropogenic global warming people have indeed been predicting drought for the West Coast for some time now, but not for a few decades yet.

ought

John presumably doesn't read Scientific American - I've given up on it myself - and is relying on careless second hand reports by denialist reporters in the right-wing media that he does seem to read.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

How convenient. After a couple of hundred years of CO2 rise, the effects are still a few decades in the future.

I gave up SciAm a long time ago, when they gave up hard science for preachy semipolitical trash.

The cool thing about snow depth is that it's been measured in the same places in pretty much the same ways since the early 1900s. No heat island effects, no moving weather stations, no data culling. And the measurements are NOT tracking AGW predictions so far. So good skiing and long, hot showers are still in my plans.

We have maybe a dozen reporting weather stations close by here, plus my private RTD thing. It's not unusual for there to be a 10C spread at any instant. The most extreme temps are at the "official" weather station at the airport. -8F Friday morning, when it was +8 here. The station at the airport is a fairly recent installation.

At this instant, reported temps in F are 9 (official, airport), 13,

14, 15, 16, 17, 17.1 (me), 19, and 21 in a pretty small region.

So what IS the temperature in Truckee?

John

Easy. All of the above.

Unfortunately the ground based temperature indices are useless.

The Met Office is aboutto upwardly correct sea surface temperatures for the last 10 years. IT is strange how all current corrections are upwards and historic corrections are downwards. It is almost as if they are trying to make the data proove AGW.

Note the last sentence in the quotes below. Which year was warmest depends on "temperatures in parts of the world where there are no monitoring stations. "

/quote

?It?s currently the second-warmest year on record,? Pope said, noting that 1998 had a ?strong? El Nino phenomenon, a cyclical warming of the Pacific Ocean that typically raises the global average temperature.

/end quote

/quote

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration publish two other widely used global average temperature series. They have 2005 as the warmest year due to differences in the way they account for temperatures in parts of the world where there are no monitoring stations.

/end quote

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The CO2 levels didn't rise much in the first few hundred years

The pre-industrial CO2 levels seem to have been around 280ppm, and started creeping up around 1750.

In the 210 years between then and the beginning of the Mauna Loa observations in 1958 the level went up to 315 ppm, 12.5%. Since then it has gone up to 37.5% above the pre-industrial level. The rate of increase is increasing, and the projections for 2100 lie between 541 and 970 ppm.

Your observation is comparable with that of the guy who jumped of the top of the Empire State Building, and announced that everything was fine as he passed the 50th floor ...

Whose AGW predictions? Snow depth isn't so much a reflection of colder winters as wetter autumns.

But fully automated. The weather service went to the trouble of automating all the airport weather stations around 2004, and put in a few extra automated stations in useful locations - apparently there is one in Central Park. The other reporting weather stations are maintained more out of historical interest than for the instrinsic value of the data they record.

A weighed average, with the airport getting most of the weight.

Anthropogenic global warming refers to a weighed average of temperatures spread right around the entire globe - 71% of which is covered with water.

Anthony Watts gets excited because the Stevenson screens around the non-automated thermomenters aren't being painted with the right kind of white paint. The whole area of the USA is 9,629.091 square km, 6.5% of the land area of the earth, and about 1.9% of the whole area of the globe, so the measurements that he is getting excited about don't represent a significant proportion of the data used to compute whether global warming is going on at the moment. That doesn't stop the denialist press from giving his quixotic opinions loads of column inches.

A recent issue of the journal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute - of which I'm still a member - included nearly a page of his rubbish which some denialist propagandist had managed to sneak in after flying the nitwit out to Australia to sell some more doubt about anthropogenic global warming.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not strictly true. They have to be used with care. Not a concept that Ravinghorde has the wit - let alone the motivation - to appreciate.

There are other hypotheses, but Ravinghorde isn't going to entertain any of them.

Though Ravinghorde hasn't yet heard about it, there are now satellites in orbit that can measure surface temperature in places where there aren't any monitoring stations.

Their measurements of the surface of the ocean do monitor the actual surface, where water is evaporating and cooling the top fraction of a millimetre. None of the contact measurement techniques are influenced by this effect.

No doubt he will remain ignorant as long as his ignorance leaves him free to accuse the NASA and the British Met Office of cooking their books.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Cool, we'll give most of the weight to the obvious (official!) outlier. Located in a place that is an absolute anomoly around here, a bare airport runway in a rare meadow flat, surrounded by mountain forests.

Why don't you get out and examine some of your local reporting weather stations, and see how they are sited?

Most of the surface area of the planet had zero weather stations until recent years, and some huge area still have none. And modern weather stations can't be usefully compared to historical measurements. The only "fair" data is satellite measurement, which is too recent to discern longterm trends.

John

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So what. Has it ever struck you the global warming is averaged over the entire globe, not just the various micro-environments around your holiday home. Professional meteorologists - as opposed to Anthony Watts who was a weather announcer on TV who may have gone to Purdue but never graduated - did look into the heat island question, and worked out that there weren't enough of them to make any significant difference to the global average.

The nearest weather stations to Nijmegen for which once can find tabulated data on the web are in Twente and Eindhoven. Both are about an hour's drive away. What exactly is my examining them going to do for me?

But ships logs have been recording weather data on the oceans since the 16th century. The data recorded was one of the first things standardised by the International Meteorological Organization when it was set up in 1873. That's 71% of the planet's surface.

Callender in the late 1930's was able to put together enough data to show that world was in fact warming - though, as it turned out - not due to the small rise in CO2 level that had taken place since the start of the industrial revolution.

I'm sure that the world's meteorologists will be glad that you have your opinion on the subject. It doesn't seem to be one that they share, and since they did the undergraduate courses that you seem to have skipped, and went on to graduate school to learn a little more, their opinions do carry a little more weight.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Averaging bad data makes it good data? Graphing trends acquired over

100 years, by different instruments in different places, is good enough to overturn the world's economy? I'm sure glad you don't design electronics.

Help you think?

John

You're a prize package!

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Says Jamie, whose performance in various threads over the past few days has been rather less than stellar, not that he's likely to be able to remember the finer points of his several pratfalls.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Two points - the first that the data isn't bad data, merely local data, and second that the evidence from that kind of temperature measurement isn't the whole case for anthropogenic global warming, or anything like it. You have fallen the "merchants of doubt" tactic of casting doubt on a small portion (urban areas) of a minor part (the land area of the United States) of a minor line of evidence (the global historical records of weather observations), and allowed them to fool you into neglecting the bulk of the scientific evidence.

The problem with your head-in-the-sand scepticism is that anthropogenic global warming will - if allowed to proceed unchecked, overturn the world economy in a century or so. The "overturning" of the economy required to slow down CO2 emissions would be a planned and gradual process, and is unlikely to to be accompanied by any population crashes. The consequences of continueing global warming are less predictable - we don't know which particular bit of shit is going to hit the fan first - and won't be under anybody's control. There's an increasing amount of geological evidence (from the end of the last ice age) that suggests that ice caps tend break up suddenly, rather than sedately melting in situ, and some rather older evidence that that methane hydrates deposits - when provoked - tend to release a lot of methane in geologically brief periods - less than a thousand years.

None of this is an obvious smoking gun, but it's more than enough to suggest that we shouldn't fool around with a system that we don't understand well enough to let us make precise predictions.

Not a subject where your advice is all that persuasive.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

SNIP

Exactly.

A common mistake I see in new engineers is using a DC meter and noticing a small error. They puzzle over the circuit until they give up unable to find the cause. I then put a scope on the signal and show them the oscillation. The meter's average reading had too little information to see what was going on.

It seems to me a lot of the AGW case is based on using a DC meter to examine the climate. Trying to reduce the globe to a single annual measurement is absurd.

What alarmists miss is that good engineers know how to measure things. In the end it doesn't matter if it is volts and amps, or feet and inches or temeprature and humidity.

SNIP

If you are worried about global temperature changes you are committed to averaging individual temperature measurements right around the globe.

The detailed modelling of of the heat transfer from the sun to the surface of the earth and then back again to outer space is more sophisticated, and does allow for non-linearities - and worse. Clouds colder than zero Celcius can either consist of droplets of super- cooled water - if there aren't many dust particles around to act as nuclei for ice crystals - or ice particles, and these two different sorts of clouds absorb and retransmit infra-red radiation in subtly different ways. The models can now handle this - we do know which bits of the atmosphere are dusty, and whch aren't.

Because the earth has a rather extensive surface, the individual cells in the models are still quite a lot bigger than individual clouds, so the cloud behaviour in each cell is modelled as a mix of cloud and clear sky, which isn't ideal, but engineers are working on a special purpose super-computer that can handle a lot more cells.

The data about the vertical temperature distribution within the oceans, and the heat trasnfer by ocean currents at various depths within the oceans is still coming in from the Argo project, so the models are getting progressively betters they interate this - relatively new - data.

If you actually knew anyhting about what you are talking about, you wouldn't make the implicit claim that meteorologist can't handle non- linear processes.

It seems to me - not for the first time - that you haven't got a clue about the details of the case for anthropogenic global warming. Reducing the temperature of the earth to a single annual measurment is indeed an over-simplification, but it does make the point that anthropogenic global warming is a global phenomena. Any detailed discussion of the subject will point out that global warming is currently affecting the arctic regions much more dramatically than the rest of the globe - one of the well-known positive feedbacks that amplifiy the relatively small direct greenhouse warming we get from rising CO2 levels is the decrease in the albedo of previously snow- and ice-covered regions as the snow and ice melt.

The albedo of the Arctic Ocean only matters in summer, when there is some sun falling on it, and in summer the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice falls to a new low every year or so nowadays.

Non-ice-covered ocean absorbs about 94% of the incoming solar radiation. Sea ice absorbs about 40% and snow-covered sea ice can absorb as little as 10%

One of the more worrying potential positive feedbacks is methane release from methane hydrates as the local temperature around methane hydrate deposits builds up. There's a lot of methane tied up in hydrates in the Siberian permafrost around the Arctic Circle, and as that area warms up, some of that methane is already being released.

Oddly enough, the meteorologists interested in global warming do know how to measure meteorological data. It isn't particularly surprising that certain elderly electronic engineers don't know much about what they measure and how they measure it, but it is a bit surprising that you are silly enough to think that because you don't know what they are doing, they don't either.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Jesus Bill you're full of it.

Here's an example of what Watts is highlighting....

Note from here...

..that only 10% of the stations surveyed have an error rating of < 1 Deg C according to the guidlines for siting stations. 61% have an error rating of >= 2 Deg C.

BTW, Watts frequently publishes posts from warmists, have you ever actually visited the site?

No, but if this is the quality of the records from the USA, which you would probably expect to be some of the highest quality in the world, what does it imply about other sources?

What's your motivation in this un-swerving support of the warmist agenda?

Nial

SNIP

And which areas of the planet are estimated not measured either on the ground or by satellite?

1. The Arctic?

1. The tropics?

Ring BILL SLOWMAN, calls will cost $1 per minute

SNIP

The satellites doing the measurements seem to be in polar orbits, and survey the entire planet.

You could have found that out for yourself, rather than going to the trouble of reminding the rest of us that you really don't know what you are talking about.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The surface area of the United States is some nine million square kilometres. You presumably pulled out the worst example of a n urban weather station that you could find. How many square kilometres worth of the temperature record is it contaminating?

When Anthony Watts is estinating the errors.

ly

Not recently. It is a typical "merchants of doubt" web site, strong on horrible examples, and weak on their (neglible) quantitative significance.

Why would you expect US weather records - from the manual stations that Anthony Watts concentrates his attention on - to be of particularly high quality? The US doesn't have a public service tradition, and one would expect the traditional weather stations to be serviced by people who were cheap rather than good.

The US Meteorlogical Service got into bed with commercial aviation very early in the history of commercial aviation, and the airport weather monitoring stations delivered more frequent, more up-to-date, and more detailed data than the traditional observation stations from very early on. The airport observatories were eventually automated in

2004, and I would expect those records be as good as anything you could get from ground observers

An appreciation, based on a fairly thorough education in the relevant physics, that the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is comprehensive and convincing, and that the denialist propaganda against it is misleading and superficial.

Anthony Watt s is a depressing example of the sort of pseudo-authority used by the denialist propaganda machine to sow fear, doubt and uncertainy about the remarkably solid scientific envidence for anthropogenic global warming.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen