1. The areas were the temperature anomaly are greatest are the Arctic, Siberia, and Antarctica. There aren’t too many sidewalks, air conditioning vents, or tarmacs in those areas.

2. The US only covers 2% of the Earth’s land mass, so even if there were errors in that data, it wouldn’t affect the data in the rest of the 98% of the Earth’s surface.

3. As has been said many times, the errors you site can only cause a constant higher temperature, and those errors would not be useful to a global warming case, since they would have to be increasing. Your only rebuttal point seems to be that you object to the common procedures to normalize the data and adjust for these errors.

4. We don’t even need to look at temperature data, when we can observe the patterns of nature changing before our eyes in response to what would be expected if the Earth was warming as a whole.

~snip~ [~dbstealey, moderator]

Via realclimate (the link to the German scientists’ letter to the chancellor), I found an article on Dan Satterfield, a TV meteorologist (WHNT Huntsville, AL) …

I used to live in Huntsville. The standing joke was that Dan is a great meteorologist, he’s predicted 37 of the last 2 blizzards. 8^)

Via realclimate (the link to the German scientists’ letter to the chancellor), I found an article on Dan Satterfield, a TV meteorologist (WHNT Huntsville, AL) being very loudmouthed in denouncing any criticism of AGW as pseudoscience. He’s got (linked from WHNT) a website with a host of Hansen, Schmidt, Mann et al regurgitations, and, what’s worse, a special children’s misinformation site.

So I’m looking around his sites to find a comment function, thinking about a basic find-yourself-on-the- wrong-side-of-history-pretty-soon sort of post, with an added question how he ever came to unquestioningly retell vague propaganda while calling detailed rebuttals pseudo-science – and perhaps to point out that after something is “peer reviewed” (the most common words in his sites), if the review indicates a paper is crap, it is not a mark of excellence. (As a terrible example, he cites Mann’s fantasy data on the Antartic in his slide presentation on why your friend who disbelieves AGW is wrong.)

And what do I find?
Go here:
http://wildwildweather.com/forecastblog/
and scroll down to the currently second item, “August 2009- Science Fights Back” where he writes about a book on lack of science knowledge in the US general public, writes how important that problem is to him, and suddenly, how questioning AGW is unscientific.

*** Then he links to his own post about the Surfacestations pamphlet, where he regurgitates the talking-point memo including crap pre-homogenized graph, enveloping simple untruths (“mis-sited stations cancel each other out”) and irrelevant strawmen (“it’s the delta-T, not the absolute numbers”) in his condescending this-is-not-science, he-doesn’t even-understand style.

Then: “The Scientists at NOAA had had enough, and responded to it.” And:

***Then he goes on to laud the stupid video that is the topic of this thread “Peter Sinclair made a well produced video called The Climate Denial Crock of The Week. It took apart Watt’s silly pamphlet, bit by bit, and showed without a doubt, why NOAA was right.”

and finally, he accuses Anthony of censorship and naturally, “He apparently understands even less about “Fair Use” under copyright law, than he does about climate physics”.

I wished I had the time to respond to him (I’d have a hard time to not stopp to the ad hom. style of the video and call him Mortimer Snurd, as that’s all I’ve seen in this clown until now), but I don’t.

He’s local to me, you see. Anybody else here from Huntsville? Particularly a mouthpiece from this area should have it pointed out to him how local UAH is the source of much of the data that will be his undoing.

(a) Whether or not the ‘good’ stations show the same trends as the overall network I think it is important to keep as much capability to analyze the data from the poor stations as possible. The bureaucratic impulse would be to close down the ‘bad’ stations or fix the problems that Anthony points to. Unfortunately, doing that would make it much more difficult to salvage any value from data from the stations involved. Hopefully the NOAA can figure out some way to salvage data from at least some of the stations. Running properly sited station in parallel (and nearby) to some of the more important ‘bad’ stations for a year or two might allow them to quantify how the poor siting affected the results. We don’t have a time machine, so if this data can be salvaged it should be. In some cases (siting under an air conditioner hot air exhaust) there probably isn’t much point in trying to salvage anything. In other cases there may be a signal extractable from the noise.

b) It’s important not to demonize the poor saps who have been trying to keep these records and make sense of them over the years or to turn them into enemies. If someone at an agency proves themselves to be a political hack rather than a scientist that’s one thing. If some poor smo is just trying to do an impossible job as well as they can that’s another. Don’t make enemies when you don’t have to.

Anthony and the volunteers are doing a job that the agency probably doesn’t have the resources to do themselves. If both sides spin it right this could lead to more resources going to doing the job right, which is in everybody’s interests.

c) The surface stations project was a good idea, but it may start looking at the process too late. Remember, the stations that are being looked at, both good and bad, are a subset of the total stations. I don’t remember the exact figures but I think that around 10-15% of the stations were chosen. How were those specific stations chosen? If any part of the process involved judgment calls, then it’s almost inevitable that biases of some kind got introduced. An obvious one: if you’re expecting warming, you’re more likely to think that stations showing it are good quality stations. Problems like that are why the FDA requires double-blind studies when they decide whether or not to approve drugs.

A closely related problem: sensor replacement. If you’re expecting warming you’re probably going to be more likely to check for faulty sensors when the sensor is running colder than you expected rather than hotter than you expected. When you’re talking tenths of a degree per decade it doesn’t take much subconscious bias to produce a trend whether or not there is one.

d) It would be interesting to see if you could pick out any impact from irrigation on rural temperatures. If water vapor is a greenhouse gas it seems logical that putting a lot of it in a field would increase local humidity and thus local temperatures. Well-watered soil would also probably hold heat better than very dry soil too. How large of an impact would this have? I don’t know. Do temperatures appear to go up more in irrigated areas than in areas with a lot of natural rainfall?

Local humidity might actually be an issue to look for in checking out the siting of sensors. If a sensor in an arid region is in the middle of irrigated field or even a well-watered lawn is it representative of the area in terms of local humidity?

Trenberth, K.E.; Stepaniak, D.P.; & Caron, J.M. (2002), Interannual variations in the atmospheric heat budget, Journal of Geophysical Research 107(D8), AAC 4-1, 4066. doi:10.1029/2000JD000297.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/jgr2001a/jgr_interann.html

I have never complained about the way that Anthony is doing a site survey. It’s a lot of work and I think the results are potentially useful for real science. My statement about studiously avoiding a quantitative analysis is based on his many rejections of offers to quantify the data and write it up as a blog post.

—
Anthony,

I just went back to the original comment thread at CA where I did my first analysis. You are right that my first analysis came before Steve McIntyre’s first analysis (my memory of events was incorrect):

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2048

You ask why I didn’t send you an email first. I guess it was just because I was writing a simple comment in a large online community using data that you had just publicized. Your initial reaction was quite positive:

—
“Hello John V.

Thanks so much for doing this analysis, your detailed effort is appreciated.

I had planned on doing something similar, and I know Steve McIntyre is also working on something along these lines.

Before I comment further, I’m wondering if you’d be able to run the same analysis method on max temps only, then min temps only, discarding calculating any mean or average of max and min.”

(technical details that only make sense in the context of the thread)
—

Looking back, the early comments were very civil and cooperative. We both became more hostile as I came under attack from some CA regulars and you came under attack from outsiders. At some point you decided I was targeting you.

But Anthony, you have to realize that when you spend your days promoting Surface Stations and the idea that the surface temperature record is badly broken, somebody is going to quantify your assumptions. You can’t have it both ways — you can’t promote and publicize your data and assumptions while simultaneously hoarding it and complaining when others do a reality check.

You say that Anthony is “studiously avoiding any analysis of [his] data that would quantify the effect of station problems on the temperature record.” How would you know that?

Do you seriously believe, after the enormous amount of time and effort that has gone into the Surface Stations project, that Anthony is avoiding any analysis of the data? That sounds like a preemptive hit piece, in case the results aren’t what you want to see.

There is nothing stopping you from doing your own site survey, instead of complaining about the way Anthony chooses to do it. But that would take a lot more effort than sitting back and taking pot shots at the guy who’s actually doing the work, wouldn’t it?

Without taxpayer subsidies, alternative energy sources are much, much more expensive than coal, oil or nuclear power.

And they only produce a tiny, single-digit percentage [1%, IIRC] of power produced — for a really massive waste of tax money.

It’s like hooking up generators to bicycles, subsidizing the peddlers, and claiming you have a new alternative source of power.

Take away the subsidies. Then we’ll see what an inefficient waste of resources “green” power really is.

I was hanging out on Climate Audit when Mr. McIntyre did his initial analysis using your data. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to take his preliminary work and your station ratings and improve on it. I was not “targeting” your work — I thought your work was useful and was curious about the temperature record. I spent a couplef of evenings writing a little program (OpenTemp) to analyze the stations with proper geographic weighting. I then posted the results on Climate Audit.

That led to many re-analyses. My work was appearing on other web sites that I knew nothing about. I addressed every problem that you and others found in my work. I looked into including stations with CRN ratings of 3 or higher. I excluded urban stations. I excluded airports. I and others worked on regional analysis within USA48. We looked at the differences between the best and worst stations. The basic conclusion was always the same — the station problems had little if any qualitative effect on the USA48 temperature record.

I also made many offers to work with you and Mr McIntyre to write an open-source program and to analyze the data together. You were not interested, and that’s fine.

I published the source code online. I invited collaboration but there were no takers. I do not have the time or inclination to run an open-source project, but the code is still available if anybody wants it.

I do not “snark” about Surface Stations taking two years to complete. I snark about you studiously avoiding any analysis of your data that would quantify the effect of station problems on the temperature record. You spend a lot of time publishing the poor quality of some stations but are unwilling to quantify the problem. As I said, you could be finished this afternoon using OpenTemp.

REPLY: You still haven’t answered the question about why you embarked on the project and published initial results using the data gathered without so much as an initial email to me. Your offers of collaboration came later, BTW. But that’s OK I don’t need an answer.

About my timeline: They key has always been to find the “best” stations, as there are very very few of them. That is the goal. The “best” stations establish the baseline. Publishing analysis on early CRN1/2 data that is clumped and missing wide swaths of the USA while comparing it to a larger more evenly and spatially distributed set is fine, but in my opinion and that of others, was not enough. And that analysis has been completed at one stage for one paper, and we are writing that paper. Your analysis didn’t have a critical mass of CRN1/2 stations so to say that it coame out the same way each time only really speaks to the data.

I will say that your work showed us something of value though, and I’m making use of it. We could go round and round for hours. The right time for doing that is after my papers have been published. All I’ve ever asked of anyone (beyond the volunteer help) is to let me finish, yet I’m being criticized for that even.

Wait for our analysis, then criticize all your wish, write rebuttals. That is the accepted way science does it. – Anthony

Your arguments sounds very convincing, but you were very happy to promote and go along with Steve McIntyre’s analysis of the same data. His analysis was much simpler than mine and did not even make an attempt at geographic weighting. His analysis also supported your statements and opinion that the “official” temperature histories had major problems.

It was only when I did an improved analysis that showed the official temperature histories were ok that you complained about premature conclusions.

As for using “your” data, all that I have ever used was your station ratings which you regularly publish online (which is a good thing). Nobody has usurped your right to use the data first for your own benefit.

If you would like to do your own analysis with your quality-controlled data, my OpenTemp software is still available. You could finish your analysis this afternoon using any subset of stations that you like. The results would certainly be more complete than empty predictions about the quality of NOAA and NASA results.

REPLY: John, you may recall that McIntyre’s analysis was prompted by you. Other than noting the initial rebuttal here I haven’t been using it. Your analysis OTOH, was being cited as proof of falsification repeatedly on many online discussions, without so much a mention of the weaknesses in that early data. Your analysis of early, incomplete, and non QC’d data prompted a summary rush to judgment by many.

As far as I can tell, you haven’t lifted a finger in any of those cases to point out any of those weaknesses. If you have, please email me a list.

Let me ask you. If I had not been open in my process, and published some early data, would you have even embarked on OpenTemp?

I think not. You saw an angle and went for it. If the OpenTemp project was truly to be used as anything other than a tool to target my work, it would have blossomed (as Open Source projects tend to do) and we’d be seeing regular updates on it. Right? You snark about my taking two years to complete a nationwide project with volunteers. yet your own project has not been significantly updated, and you have only yourself to manage.

You don’t even have it published up on Sourceforge yet.
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=OpenTemp

- Anthony

I didn’t have time to read all of this, but I noticed a couple of statements about me. Let me clear those up.

First, there is a John Van Vliet who makes movies. He’s not me. He was also involved in Weird Science — I was pretty excited as a kid to see my name scroll by in the credits.

Second, what’s with your statement that I used “incomplete data”. If you think just a little bit harder, you’ll remember that I analyzed the best stations (as chosen by you) with proper geographic weighting and without homogeneity adjustments. You’ll remember that the USA48 trend from the best stations matched the trend from all stations.

You may also remember that you continuously ask me to hide the results. Supposedly you’re going to do your own analysis at some point. It’s been a couple of years — how’s that analysis coming?

REPLY: Ah John, the data was in fact incomplete as the data you used was not spatially representative of the USA, there were serious clumping and lack of coverage issues for CRN1/2 stations. The data had also not been quality controlled yet when you used it. We fixed several errors where volunteers had surveyed the wrong station, since many communities contain multiple COOP sites, this is easy to do.

I did not ask you to “hide the results”. That is your statement, not mine. What I did ask you to do is WAIT until I had a complete enough data set and had a chance to publish my own results first. I also asked you to stop citing your results pending publication of mine. This is common practice in science, not to usurp another person’s work by taking their shared data and publishing some conclusion on it prior to the primary investigator being able to do so. Both you and NCDC didin’t pay any attention to that, preferring the rush to judgment approach without so much as asking me initially (you may recall I made suggestions after your surprise analysis. This is what my being open and publishing data early on got me.

The current analysis is going swimmingly, thank you. And two papers are being prepared. I was also invited to participate in a paper from NCDC which I am considering, but they too want to “rush”. When my papers publish, all data and methods will be available online for replication. Until they publish, I ask for the same courtesy extended to any other primary investigator and collector of data. – Anthony