The point seems quite clear. It is important for the actual data to show a real warming trend and that may not exist. The surface record is very suspect. If one looks at the actual measurements it becomes clear that there has not been any noticeable warming since the 1930s, which were the warmest decade in the US over the past 100 years. While the satellite data shows warming it begins after the PDO went into a negative phase and the atmospheric warming seems to have reversed when the PDO reversed into a cooling phase.

It may well be that the warming that we have all agreed on (the argument is about the role of CO2, not about the warming) was the result of inadequate measurements. If that is the case, most of these papers, which assume that the warming is real and that CO2 has an effect, are just narratives that have no scientific merit. Pielke knows that and as such has written his disclaimers to that effect.

I read the paper looking for elaboration on this statement, but I didn’t find anything. The paper makes a clear case for possible sources of the discrepancy between terrestrial and satellite data but I don’t see what the point of the above statement is.

Is there any data that plots the average high temperature over the years, and another that does the same with the low temperatures, then maybe even the same by latitude, like tropical, midway, and arctic? ”

That would be interesting,it might reveal a pattern that shows minima rising to meet a more or less static maxima,instead of an average rise. A rising minima would clearly implicate the UHI effect.

My question (00:40:40),just to clarify, concerns whether or not data exists on a temp/height profile that goes from ground level to say 20 metres above ground.

Sorry for the confusion.

And FWIW frogs don’t understand commands anyway.

We are talking climate not last night’s weather.

So you say “at night couds always cause warming”; simply not true. When the sun goes down; clouds or no, the temperature always goes down; not up; and we are excluding the obvious situation where some warm air mass moves in from some other location; the temperature at night will also go up if you set fire to your house; but that is not an effect of clouds.

The very presence of those clouds is BECAUSE it was warm; they are not the cause of the warmth, but the result of it; and the warmer it is, the higher the moist air has to rise, before its temperature drops to the dew point so clouds can form, so the warmer it is, the higher those clouds form, and if the amount of moisture in the air (humidity) is lower, the air mass has to go even higher to get down to the dew point and form clouds.

Meteorologists have spouted that thesis for years on the evening news; it’s cloudy so it will be warm tonight. NO !!! It is warm, and moist so it will be cloudy tonight; but absent the inflow of a santa ana air mass, it WILL cool down tonight clouds notwithstanding. And tomorrowe because of those clouds; they will block sunlight and it will get less warm.

Over climate time scales more clouds always means more cooling; never more warming. They have it exactly backwards just like the temperature/CO2 argument.

It’s just plain silly to argue that a moist air mass that eventually condenses into cloud; and cloud that is of lower density and water content, the higher the altitude at which it forms; so therefore the less total long wave or solar radiation it can absorb; but yet it will warm the surface, and even moreso the more evanescent and high the cloud is.

No I don’t dispute that clouds at night can still absorb surface emitted LWIR, and slow its escape, but it still will escape and it still will cool down; it won’t warm up after the sun goes down; unless by mass transport of a different body of warmer air. And of course a forest fire down the street will likely warm things up too.

Why is it so hard for people to discriminate cause from effect when they have two phenomena occur together.

When you cut all four legs off bull frogs, and tell them to jump; they will not jump; no matter how loud you yell at them. That does not mean that cutting all four legs off a bull frog makes it stone deaf !

George

bill (13:24:15) :

from the document p7

if, for instance, there is a long-term positive trend in greenhouse gas concentrations or cloudiness over the observing site, it may introduce an upward bias in the observational record

Local CO2 raises temperature!!

Or more accurately

Local co2 or cloudiness may raise temperature. “”"

So what is the mechanism where local cloudiness (climatically speaking) raises temperatures; given that when a cloud passes in front of the sun, it ALWAYS gets cooler in the shadow zone (for very elementary optical reasons) as a result of blocked sunlight not reaching the surface.

And why would one take the air temperature at a height of two metres as being the same as the surface temperature. Try telling that to a head of lettuce growing on the ground. What would caue the air temperature (climatically speaking) to be higher than the actual surface temperature ?

So please tell me, where would I find a continuous and current record of actual atmospheric methane concentrations that I as a public tax paying individual can see for myself whether or not we are dying in a tundra-melting sea of methane?

You could try here: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/methane.html

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/methane.html

One thing you will note is that lack of change in Methane concentration recently is a pretty robust and “mainstream” conclusion which puzzles and confounds everyone.

The same objections go for animals (and by the way, people love warming weather, so in point of fact, even if the world wasn’t warming, at least in the US the average temperatures people EXPERIENCE would still be rising considerably, because people are CHOOSING to live where it is warmer!) and plants (which are loving that CO2 by the way) BUT EVEN SO!:

White, M.A., K.M. de Beurs, K. Didan, D.W. Inouye, A.D. Richardson, O.P. Jensen, J. O’Keefe, G. Zhang, R.R. Nemani, W.J.D. van Leeuwen, J.F. Brown, A. de Wit, M. Schaepman, X. Lin, M. Dettinger, A. Bailey, J. Kimball, M.D. Schwartz, D.D. Baldocchi, J.T. Lee, W.K. Lauenroth. Intercomparison, interpretation, and assessment of spring phenology in North America estimated from remote sensing for 1982 to 2006. Global Change Biology (in press),

“Trend estimates from the SOS [Start of Spring] methods as well as measured and modeled plant phenologystrongly suggest either no or very geographically limited trends towards earlier spring arrival, although we caution that, for an event such as SOS with high interannual variability, a 25-year SOS record is short for detecting robust trends.”

Even I find that spring is not arriving sooner a little puzzling since I agree there has been SOME warming.

So quit this amateurish CRAP about a very serious paper. I mean COME ON!