You are most welcome. I do suggest going barefoot in the summer a bit more… it certainly brought back some of these memories to me ;-)

Even the ones of “bull head stickers” that I didn’t want 8-(

Then there was the “flat flip flop”… When we got enough money to have those cheap plastic ‘flip flops’ and toward the end of summer the strap between the toes would break… And you had to learn how to walk with a flip flop flopping on a foot, or do the the “flip flop hop” where the good flip flop foot would stay on the ground a long time and bare foot would do a quick hop step…

Just think of what grand experiences we are denying to our children today!
8-)

One year, in desperation from too many leaks in a bike tire full of bull head stickers and no money for a 3rd tire / tube that year, and being a somewhat bright 8 year old: I ran the hose over the hand air pump while filling my tire and filled it with water (figuring the greater viscosity would keep the water in longer). After one day or two cycle (that got most of the residual air bubble out) I had a tire that held pressure for many days… Used it that way for the rest of the summer / fall.

It really would coast a long ways, but the turns at speed were “interesting”… (It was the front tire ;-)

If only I’d have taken it a bit further I could have been the inventor of tire “Slime”. Oh well, it was a pretty good effort for an 8 year old and I got what really mattered to me at the time…

BTW, the fishing in the Feather River near Marysville can be very good… and they have a nice “off road park” (hope it is still there!) in the river overflow area next to the river between the two cities.

A decent “cruise” cycle was to enter town (Yuba City) from the north on (what was then 99E back when what is now I5 was 99W) highway 99, turn left on the first main drag (hwy 20?) and cruise the new part of town, over the bridge to The Other City (Marysville) and just after downtown, near the theatre, turn right on “bridge street” to take the old bridge back to Y.C. eventually cycling back around to your entry point. Repeat until low on gas, then stop at the Dairy Queen on the way north on the OLD 99E for burger, fries, and frozen dairy which was near the Very Cheap noname gas station (it only pinged if you floored it, so don’t floor it!). If we had lots of money, we would add a movie at the drive in theatre that was toward the river…

Now we watch TV and play nintendo games with the climate…

BTW, at the hottest part of the day it is ALMOST 70 F on my patio and it is very overcast. This is running on several weeks (month?) now. It ought to be sweltering hot and family complaining at me about it. My “45 day” tomatoes that are typically set out as gallon sized in April / May ought to be giving plenty of fruit and the beans ought to be more than we can eat “where did I store the canner and jars last year?” plentiful. I’ve got kale and onions and a few grapefruit sized green tomatoes…

Sunday we were at a graduation (she got Summa Cum Laude) at San Louis Obispo. Outdoors most all day. Absolutely beautiful day. But I noticed that it was not horridly hot… Briefly, about 10 to 11 am, the sun was “too hot” which ought to be “normal” and one expects a swelter into the afternoon.

Instead, that “high haze” started… About 12 noon a couple of jet contrails didn’t go away (instead starting a slow expansion into broad cloud bands) and some cumulus puffy bits filled in. Just enough to make it perfectly comfortable and only “too hot” if you were stuck in a patch of direct sun.

It was predicted that the weekend would be warmer, and it was, for about 24 hours. Now we’re back to “Will it sprinkle soon?” (Don’t know how better to describe it. Not rain imminent, and not cold winter… that odd spring / fall state with thick overcast and a feeling like charged air before a storm a bit – and cool, but well, just, like it’s going to sprinkle just a little Real Soon Now.)

Maybe I’ll change my handle to “Eternally Waiting For Summer”…

What is the “nominal” degrees C per 100 meter elevation increase” compared to “degrees C per degree latitude increase”?

It is sometimes claimed that animals and plants are extending their ranges to higher elevations than they occupied in the 19th century. (I recently saw a snippet of a TV interview describing a comprehensive 19th century survey of plants and animals and their locales in California in which this claim was made.) This is taken as supportive of a global warming trend–and no doubt there is one. But what may be overlooked is that these plants and animals had been driven down to lower elevations during the LIA, and that what has been seen since is a lagging rebound effect. (Part of the lag would be due to the length of time it would take for new trees to establish themselves, a few feet per year, at higher elevations before animals that rely on their presence would move up there.) IOW, the rate at which the animals are reestablishing themselves is not dependent on the more recent, manmade, temperature changes, but on mostly natural increases going back centuries.

I hope someone can develop this possibility as a partial rebuttal to one of the warmists’ strongest arguments.

Actually, there are some dramatic examples of step change. But mostly it’s as you say.

Thanks for the stoll down memory lane. I especially liked the barefoot parking lot part. I remember doing that at Jones Beech, Long Island, NY. I only started wearing shoes outside when I didn’t have to about 5 years ago (I’m 52). Maybe I’ll stop.

That is because you have a false assumption. A facility does not just one day turn from peach orchards into asphalt jungle. It evolves over time. A barn gets put up. Then a dirt road and a few cars park over a patch of dirt (that dies and browns). Later some gravel is added. The gravel grows to a larger lot. A new building is put up and 1/4 the parking area gets asphalt. Couple of years later, a second building, so they asphalt another chunk. Then more buildings, and some concrete sidewalks are added and a larger parking area to deal with the new shed equipment cover at the far side of the facility. I’ve watched this happen a large number of times.

The tendency to take 20 acres and do a mega-development “greenfield” is a new thing. It was fairly rare a few decades back (and then largely done in major urban areas like Chicago or in major industrial areas like Huston).

So you just can’t “eyeball” the temperature graph and expect to see a bright line transition from Mayberry RFD to Downtown Dallas…

The question is why is it only .5C changing from grass to tarmac?

Because it isn’t only 0.5 C and it didn’t happen in one moment when the entire city got asphalt on that day… I went barefoot most summers for pretty much the whole summer. Kids got REALLY good at dashing from white paint stripe to patch of weeds and HATED when it was all black asphalt. You could burn your feet on the black stretches if you took too long (not blister-burn, but Ouch Ouch burn) where the grass and white paint stripes were comfortable (even on 110 F in the shade and there ain’t no shade – which was most of July and August…)

Stand in the sun on asphalt, you would be sweating in no time. Move to the grass under a shade tree and have a picknick for comfortable (slow) hours. (THE thing to do when I was about 4-10 yrs old was the picknick at the park. Folks came from all over for a big pot luck every so often. Then we got TV sets and the world started to change… we had one of the first sets in the town and folks came over to marvel at it. Early 1950s, B&W, RCA, $800 IIRC – 3 channels to choose from. Sacramento, ch. 3 barely, and Chico was channel 12? and I think 7 was Redding?) But the bottom line is that you can FEEL the very large difference between open asphalt and park setting; and it is measured in the several degrees, not the fractional degrees. (The community pool was opposite the picknick park, you had to cross asphalt parking to get to it. EVERY kid dreaded the run over the “fire hot asphalt” from cool enough park to delicious cold water… coming back you were dripping cold water so it wasn’t too bad. Heck, I was just reminded of how we would squeegee the water out of our cutoffs to make a puddle if someone stopped you to talk in the parking lot ;-) Ah, the joys of growing up in a Very Hot Place ! Now maybe that 5 F (or more!) got averaged with the cool patch on the way to the thermometer… or maybe not: And that is why siting standards matter. So you know what you’ve got.

BTW, my home town has almost exactly the same population today as it had then. The pool is now 3 miles away at a new location and is heated now. Folks drive between the park and pool. Most every house has an AC (many window mounted – some central) where they had none when I was a kid.

Picknick pot luck in the park has been replaced by 300w to 500w of color TV at home and the dinky fridge is now a monster fridge; and “cruising” (at least they still cruised in about 1990 last I was there on a Saturday Night…) blossomed through the ’50s with ever larger engines. At least in the 60s folks parked as much as they cruised to save on gas. Later is was more cruise and less parking… Oh, and all the cars now have AC. I didn’t have AC in my car until after graduating college… Car AC is about 5 tons (ice equiv.) IIRC. It’s a significant added heat load to the UHI.

Now none of these changes happened over night. They will not give you a bright line on the temp graph. They all DO put more heat in the UHI. Heck, when I was a kid it was a big deal to run the heater and keep the whole house warm. Now folks complain if it drops a degree below 74 F. I didn’t have a heater outlet in my room until I was about 14. I would often get down to “foggy breath” cold and occasionally freezing cold in winter. No complaints, I had my own room. That was a bit of a luxury then… And most of the time the heated part of the house had the heat turned off at night anyway. After all, you were under a big comforter…

Which brings up another point: The standard 100 years ago was 2 to 4 kids to a bedroom. Today it’s one. Think the added rooms, all kept at perfect temperatures 24 hours a day year round, might add a bit of waste heat to the environment? Even with a stable population? We had one car when I was a kid (and even THAT was a bit “rich”) for a family of 6 (rising to 3 cars over 20 years). Now I’ve got a family of 4 and we have 6 cars, with 4 of them being used at any one time when everyone heads out. Again, think that makes a bit of heat difference? Then, going 15 miles to “the big city of Marysville” was a big deal, reserved for one trip on the weekend. Now 15 miles is “a short daily commute”… and I’ve seen folks do 30 miles to visit 2 different malls in one day just looking for some trinket.

And when I get home, we now have 4 TVs (large color ones at about 500 w each; but only 2 with satellite feeds) with 4 VCRs and usually 2 or 3 laptops running (one TV for each person; after all, everyone wants to watch something different…) As a kid, we had one BW TV that was run for about 3 hours (after dinner to bed time: at 10 p.m. for Dad, 9 for kids on school nights.) at about 300 W I’d guess (trying to remember the power rating of a 5u4 power rectifier tube!)

Each room of the house had exactly ONE light bulb. 60 W in small rooms, 100 W in the 3 big rooms. Don’t need much when you rise with the sun. About 1970 I put a chandelier in the dining room that took 6 bulbs. As many as the whole house had prior. About the same time that the whole house got heat with a new heater. (It got window AC in 1965). We also put double bulb ceiling fixtures in the living room and kitchen. And yard lights.

So just why do you expect to see some kind of “step function”?

Look again. It is right next to a PARKING SPACE. The temperature will bounce around with each arrival and departure of a vehicle. Now me, I’m fond of parking with my windshield away from the sun (which if I read my shadows right puts the car backed into the space, exhaust pipe blowing on the sensor).

I grew up near Marysville. During the hot part of the summer, folks often leave the engine running to keep the car cool while they wait for someone. In winter, they do the same to keep warm. If the car was left parked and frosted overnight, they will run the engine to warm it up enough to melt the frost so they can see enough to drive off. The opportunities for sporadic heating are very large. Not a one time only “shift”.

Those buildings look to me like about 1980’s vintage. That means that the site has had construction and change of features. Also, in that climate, the color of the paint will change the radiative heat you get off the buildings. (Hey, hottest I personally remember was about 117 F one day sometime about the early ’60s. At those temperatures in direct sun, the color makes a BIG difference. Black cars run 15 F hotter than white cars…)

Now maybe you have the magic eye that can spot a 2 hour lift in the temperature from a hot black car running the A/C while waiting for a lunch date… but I don’t think so.

One other point: In that area it is dramatically cooler over a nice green watered lawn than over black asphalt. (As a kid once, we did cook an egg on the pavement in August…) Which is right? I couldn’t say. Are they different? Heck yes! Does the spec say “no asphalt, yes grass”? Then you must do what the spec says. Was that place grass in 1897? I’ll bet beer to dollars it was. (I get the beer ;-)

What I can say with certainty, is that your assertion of a simple ‘SHIFT’ is just broken, and very much so. In winter the asphalt will be quite cold (nightime radiator) while in summer it will be quite hot. If no car parks there at night it will give a wrong low. If “auto heated” it will be too high. During the summer it will be “way high”. When the field trip is over and someone tips the ice chest out on the dirt under the sensor? (And yes, folks do that there. I’ve dumped more ice chests of water on scraps of dirt near facilities after the “offsite” than I care to think about. It is considered polite to water the plants). And after the ah, Chu obligatory whit paint on the buildings it will be off again.

You just can’t get an accurate stable temperature in a parking lot near air conditioned structures.

Oh, and per the ’stable population’: So what? During the time I lived there, the dominant form of cooling shifted from very little, to swamp coolers, to small window AC units, to the large industrial units seen in these pictures. (Or did you think they had industrial AC in 1897?) Cars changed from “Old Gluepot” the horse, to Model Ts to Hummers since 1897. Any heat difference?… Size of population is a poor proxy for rate of thermal energy production change. (Or more precisely: energy production rises BOTH with increased population AND with economic advance.)

And a LOT more asphalt got laid down… Many a dirt road and grass / dirt parking area got asphalted over the last half century (and unfortunately, I remember that half century having been born near there and lived there for a few decades and visited regularly for a few more after that… we used to “cruise” Marysville as the “Big City” – farm kids! 8-) And a fairly large number of new buildings were built. (Sadly, one replaced an old open air farmers fruit stand / store where you could get farm fresh produce and fruits right from the lug boxes on tables in an “open air with tin roof” shed. Still have fond memories of the rich fruit smells. Sigh. Refrigeration just kills that kind of thing.) And did I mention the TWO freeways built through the area? Yuba City / Marysville make a bit of a metroplex that mushes together with a river between them. HWY 99 on one side, HWY 70 on the other. Watched them go from 2 lanes at about 35 – 45 MPH and light traffic to 4 lanes 70 MPH with a LOT more traffic. Those cars passing by don’t count as “population” either. Nor all the folks who drive in to the shopping malls that got built near the freeways… like the folks from my home town.

So basically, your idea that it’s OK, nothing changed over time is just wrong.

It was actually a possessive apostrophe – the ‘off’ belonged to the ‘hat’.

.

The only answer will have to be the insertion of a ‘fiddle factor’ into the data to correct for this – and if we apply the fiddle factor to all stations, we can even engineer a global temperature RISE.

.

Wonder what key words kicked it off… (And still waiting for an article titled “Halle Berry Hot Images of Antarctica”… though googling the phrase brings up the “Steig et.al. Falsified” page from when I last made the suggestion; so you might just get an ad to yourself! )

FWIW, I’m not sorry to see the Asphalt Jungle thermometer put on the bench… but as I understand GIStemp, it will now “fill in” the missing data going forward based on a “nearby” station. Hope they are cooler.

I noticed that, but assumed it was a subconscious typo; having read your posts, I know you know better.

Would we get a more meaningful “average global surface temperature” by treating measurements from urban areas like people with fevers and leaving them out of account altogether?

Maybe. But I wonder if NOAA or GISS are properly determining what is in fact “urban”. 9% of the USHCN is rated as urban, 17% suburban, 74% suburban.

What USHCN1 did was to rate stations as urban, suburban, and rural. Then note the trend differences between urban and non-urban, divide by the number of stations and subtract the difference.

This is good enough to be going along with, but it falls down if the u-s-r classifications are incorrect (and they may well be).

It is the ongoing battle for the swing vote that will determine where policy is going to wind up. Right now, what with the staggering price tag, many are willing to take a second look. The brutal winters and snow-in-June thing are taking their toll as well.

I remember seeing the photographs of this station before and thinking how absurd it is to include its records in any assessment of average temperatures in California, let alone on a wider scale. If one or both of the A/C vents were removed what difference would it make? No one can tell. If the big tower were removed what difference would it make? No one can tell. How have individual vehicles parked nearby affected readings over the years? No one can tell. There probably is some learning on the effect of the asphalt ground surface but even that would need to be tweaked to take into effect the nice hedge (box hedging by the look of it, and very neat it is too). When there are so many “ifs” and “buts” I cannot see how any adjustment can result in figures within a meaningful margin for error.

And then how do you “adjust” measurements from other urban locations to provide data that can be of any use statistically? Quite simply, you can’t. And the reason you can’t is because they don’t all have two A/C vents, a big mobile phone tower, an asphalt ground surface, hedges and vehicles parked close by. No single formula can get anywhere near making an accurate adjustment for the particular circumstances of each urban measuring facility. All that can be done it to assume an enhancement value for UHI and apply a discount universally. The result is an average of an average based on an assumption of an average. It can, I think, only be as accurate as the multiple of the averaging factors.

I wonder whether it is fair to compare “average global surface temperature” to “average human body temperature”. When measuring the latter we are concerned with the mode average not the mean average (I last studied statistics back in the days before colour television, so just ignore me if this is twaddle). Average body temperature seeks to assess what body temperature is once you leave out of account any ailments, agues, conditions or treatments that affect particular individuals but do not affect the population as a whole. You simply don’t include those very few people whose temperature is temporarily lower than par through illness or excessive ice-cream consumption nor the more prevalent number whose temperature is temporarily higher than par through illness or recent ingestion of a tasty chicken vindaloo.

Insofar as urban areas produce more heat than quaint villages with thatched cottages, they undoubtedly add to overall surface temperatures for a few miles around, but one only needs to look at a map to see how very few cities and large towns there are compared to the whole surface area of the planet.

Would we get a more meaningful “average global surface temperature” by treating measurements from urban areas like people with fevers and leaving them out of account altogether?

I ask, I don’t advocate.

We know that the current USHCN numbers are worthless. What we don’t know is what they were like 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago. Personally I think they should all be thrown out. But if we throw them out we have no history. Life sucks.

We’ve only got accurate data going back to 1979. That includes both satellite and ice data. I read somewhere (here?) that Roy Spencer isn’t even sure that his data is accurate enough and I don’t doubt that his data is the best in the world.

WE JUST DON’T KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is nothing wrong with not knowing. I’ve spent most of my life not knowing about the things that are important in my life. The important thing is to try to learn so that you (we) will learn.

The Alarmists “know” what is happening. They “know” it because it fits what they expected to see. Anything that questions that is discarded as irrelevant.

http://www.surfacestations.org/ is one of those problems and it needs to be ignored.

“A few years ago I read about a study that indicated rural California was cooling. The stations not affected by UHI showed cooling. I’d like to know if you have enough data to do a similar analysis and if you plan to publish it soon.”

I would second that question. In 1994 I started logging temperatures in my vineyard. So, I had to ask the question of where my logger should be located, how high, what type of enclosure, whether it should be insulated at the base and so on. I worked with multiple loggers starting with soil temperature through to 1.5 metre elevation over grass north of some trees (Southern Hemisphere).

As I accumulated data over the years I realized that the place was cooling. I am in the extreme south west of Australia with the ocean in a 270° arc around me. The thermal regime is very moderate with a low thermal range. But, on two to three days in the height of summer the wind blows from the continent from the north east and temperature goes through the roof. For hundreds of miles in that direction the soil is strongly exposed because the land has been cleared, there is the summer drought and the stubble is short.

So, I recommend a survey of the temperature records of very small islands, well away from major continents, preferably uninhabited!

REPLY: Chatham Island – Anthony