Watts Up With That?

Our local weekly has a few words to say in the column Green Man

Too funny!

UPDATE: It appears “Green Man” doesn’t write his own material. See this. Either that or it was “borrowed” later, or “Green Man” is also “blueness”. Either way, with the additional feature of “Green Man’s” ability to publish attacks on people in a weekly newspaper anonymously, it’s “journalism” at it’s very very finest.

UPDATE 2: Surfacestations.org volunteer Gary Boden took the Chico Beat Green Man’s concept and turned it into an emblem patch. Enjoy.

Note that Green Man’s “screeching mercury monkeys” concept isnt far off the Chico Beat’s original angry monkey logo, seen below, which they don’t use anymore because it apparently scared away advertisers. Imagine that.

There is an interesting fight brewing over surface meteorological stations in China being led by Doug Keenan of the UK. This is a case where the station metadata used to track station moves and other changes doesn’t seem to be available, and that lack of availability is in contrast with a paper written by some top climate scientists.

This report concerns two research papers co-authored by Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York. The two papers are as follows.
Jones P.D., Groisman P.Y., Coughlan M., Plummer N., Wang W.-C., Karl T.R. (1990),
“Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land”, Nature, 347: 169–172.

Wang W.-C., Zeng Z., Karl T.R. (1990),
“Urban heat islands in China”, Geophysical Research Letters, 17: 2377–2380.

Each paper compares temperature data from some meteorological stations in China, over the years 1954–1983. (The first paper also considers data from stations in the USSR and Australia; Wang was only involved in Chinese data, and so the other stations are irrelevant here.) The first paper is quite important: it is cited for resolving a major issue in the most recent assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC, 2007].

See the description of the issue and specific complaints here: http://www.informath.org/WCWF07a.pdf