UPDATE: Roger Pielke Jr. alerts us to this:
Last summer the San Francisco Chronicle carried a story about research on fog and climate with a different conclusion:
The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.
That’s the conclusion of several state researchers, whose soon-to-be-published study predicts that even with average temperatures on the rise, the mercury won’t be soaring everywhere.
“There’ll be winners and losers,” says Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University. “Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast.”
The study, which will appear in the journal Climate, is the latest to argue that colder summers are indeed in store for parts of the Bay Area.
More fog is consistent with predictions of climate change. Less fog is consistent with predictions of climate change. I wonder if the same amount of fog is also “consistent with” such predictions? I bet so.
From the University of California – Berkeley via Eurekalert:
Fog has declined in past century along California’s redwood coast
Analysis of hourly airport cloud cover reports leads to surprising finding
California’s coastal fog has decreased significantly over the past 100 years, potentially endangering coast redwood trees dependent on cool, humid summers, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
It is unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle of the result of human activity, but the change could affect not only the redwoods, but the entire redwood ecosystem, the scientists say.
“Since 1901, the average number of hours of fog along the coast in summer has dropped from 56 percent to 42 percent, which is a loss of about three hours per day,” said study leader James A. Johnstone, who recently received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Department of Geography before becoming a postdoctoral scholar in the campus’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM). “A cool coast and warm interior is one of the defining characteristics of California’s coastal climate, but the temperature difference between the coast and interior has declined substantially in the last century, in step with the decline in summer fog.”
The loss of fog and increased temperature mean that “coast redwood and other ecosystems along the U.S. West Coast may be increasingly drought-stressed, with a summer climate of reduced fog frequency and greater evaporative demand,” said coauthor Todd E. Dawson, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and of ESPM. “Fog prevents water loss from redwoods in summer, and is really important for both the tree and the forest. If the fog is gone, we might not have the redwood forests we do now.”
The scientists’ report will be posted online during the week of Feb. 15 in advance of publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The surprising result came from analysis of new records recently made available by the National Climate Data Center. The U.S. Surface Airways data come from airports around the country, which have recorded for more than 60 years hourly information such as cloud cover (cloud ceiling height), visibility, wind and temperature.
Johnstone evaluated the data from airports along the northern California coast and found two airports – Arcata and Monterey – that had consistent fog records going back to 1951. With these data, he was able to show that frequent coastal fog is almost always associated with a large temperature difference between the coast and inland areas.
Using a network of 114 temperature stations along the Pacific Coast, Johnstone and Dawson demonstrated that the coast-inland contrast has decreased substantially, not just in Northern California, but along the entire U.S. coastline from Seattle to San Diego. This change is particularly noticeable in the difference between Ukiah, a warm Coast Range site in Northern California, and Berkeley on San Francisco Bay. At the beginning of the 20th century, the daytime temperature difference between the two sites was 17 degrees Fahrenheit; today, it is just 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
The relationship between temperature gradient and fog frequency implies a 33 percent drop in fog along the coast during this time.
Greater fog frequency is connected to cooler than normal ocean waters from Alaska to Mexico and warm water from the central North Pacific to Japan. This temperature flip-flop is a well-known phenomenon called Pacific Decadal Oscillation – an El Niño-like pattern of the north Pacific that affects salmon populations along the US West Coast. The new results show that this pattern may also have substantial effects on the coastal forest landscape.
In addition, the data show that the coast gets foggier when winds blow from the north along the coast, which fits with observations that northerly winds push surface waters offshore and allow the upwelling of deep, cold, nutrient-rich water.
“This is the first data actually illustrating that upwelling along the Pacific coast and fog over the land are linked,” Johnstone said.
By pulling in data on temperature variation with elevation, Johnstone and Dawson also related their fog data with a temperature inversion that each summer traps the fog between the coast and the coastal mountains. The inversion is caused by a warm, dry, high-pressure cell that sits over Northern California in late summer, bringing hot temperatures to inland areas, including the Central Valley. If the inversion is strong, its lower boundary at about 1,200 feet keeps a lid on the cool marine layer and prevents fog from penetrating over the Coast Ranges. When it is weak, the ocean air and clouds move upward and inland, resulting in a cooler interior and a warmer, drier coast.
“The data support the idea that Northern California coastal fog has decreased in connection with a decline in the coast-inland temperature gradient and weakening of the summer temperature inversion,” Johnstone said.
“As fog decreases, the mature redwoods along the coast are not likely to die outright, but there may be less recruitment of new trees; they will look elsewhere for water, high humidity and cooler temperatures,” Dawson said. “What does that mean for the current redwood range and that of the plants and animals with them?”
Eventually, Dawson and Johnstone hope to correlate fog frequency with redwood tree ring data in order to estimate climate trends going back hundreds of years.
“While people have used tree ring data from White Mountain bristlecone pines and stumps in Mono Lake to infer climate change in California, redwoods have always been thought problematic,” Dawson said, mainly because it’s hard to determine whether the width of a tree ring reflects winter rain, summer fog, temperature, nutrient supply or other factors. “Stable isotope analyses of wood cellulose allows you to pull this data out of the tree ring.”
Dawson has established that the isotopes of oxygen in a tree reflect whether the water comes in via the leaves from fog, or via the roots from rainwater. “Redwoods live for more than 2,000 years, so they could be a very important indicator of climate patterns and change along the coast,” he said.
The new fog data will allow Dawson and Johnstone to calibrate their tree ring isotope data with actual coastal fog conditions in the past century, and then extrapolate back for 1,000 years or more to estimate climate conditions.
The work was supported by the Save the Redwoods League and the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.
================================================
Further reading: Fog in California from UCSB
Yes, comparing current satellite photos with those taken a hundred years ago confirms just how dramatic the loss in fog coverage is.
I reckon all that missing fog has just migrated on up to Sacramento and infused the minds of the state legislators.
Advocacy science. Bah.
==============
Hmmm… Is fog cooling or warming?
We have had recently been in a 30 year “warm” cycle of the PDO that results in, as I understand it, less rainfall in our area. We have had several dry periods over the past 20 years (remember the 6-year drought that ended in the early 1990’s?). Wind patterns that often have Easterlies flowing offshore would prevent the fog coming inland.
I have noticed this winter in the Bay Area that we have had more cloudy days than I can remember in recent years but I have no hard data to support that. It is simply something I have noticed in my daily travels outdoors.
As I type this at about noon in San Jose, the morning “marine layer” has not yet completely burned off and we still have high thin clouds.
It would not seem unreasonable to expect the amount of fog to vary with long term climate cycles. What I might be curious to see is how the PDO cycle looks compared to amounts of fog seen along the Pacific coast. I am skeptical, however, of tree rings being used as a proxy for humidity. They should make up their minds … are trees thermometers or are they hygrometers?
Hmm. If there are redwoods more than 2,000 years old, then that suggests that at least some of the trees are quite resistant to natural variations in climate, including the RWP, MWP, LIA, and probably MMGW (Mann-made Gorebal warming).
Under a warming scenario, shouldn’t inland areas warm-up more than the moist coastal areas and increase the gradient, producing more fog?
Should it be any surprise that, “This change is particularly noticeable in the difference between Ukiah, a warm Coast Range site in Northern California, and Berkeley on San Francisco Bay,” considering the UHI of Frisco?
When has this happened before?
How old are these trees?
Is there a problem?
Richard North at EuReferendum has already debunked this story:
Hot on the trail of the Golden-Gate scam, a readers draws my attention to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle for 6 July 2009.
The title of the piece somewhat gives the game away, as it declares: “Get ready for even foggier summers”. The opening lines of the text tell us that the Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. “And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.”
This makes an interesting counterpoint to the article in The Daily Telegraph today, proclaiming: “Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change”.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/02/you-will-love-this.html
PS. Sorry if this appears twice, I submitted it a few minutes ago but it doesn’t seem to have registered!
Every time I have been to the beach in Monterey or Carmel, fog shortage has not been a problem. Staying warm in the fog is a problem.
Aside from all the fog having gone to Vancouver, I’d be interested in the wind records from those stations.
From EU Referendum today:
“Hot on the trail of the Golden-Gate scam, a readers draws my attention to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle for 6 July 2009.
The title of the piece somewhat gives the game away, as it declares: “Get ready for even foggier summers”. The opening lines of the text tell us that the Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. “And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.””
Good grief! Polar bears dying, snow disappearing, the sky is not foggy. What else can these doom and gloomers come up with. Berkely immediately raised my suspicion. Good story for more study and grant money I suspect. Kali-fornia is bust. The USA is bust. Who is going to pay for this? Not me I hope.To heck with it, I’m going hillwalking.
AGW is the source of yet more danger. Sort of. From down under http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/garretts-roofing-fire-admission/story-e6frg6n6-1225829880090
The 3rd to last paragraph is the key as to why tree rings are not a good proxy for temperature. Most ring width differences are due to water availability of that year, though other factors may have an effect.
So higher temps mean less fog, less fog means lower tree growth, less growth means smaller ring thickness. So going back and using ring thickness as a proxy for temp does not work in this area, no doubt there are other variations to this theme eg frosts,cloud cover, weed growth, moss cover etc etc all over the world which also give the same odd results.
Does that mean we can have a Global Medieval Warm Period back ?
What did they say?
All I heard was … blah blah blah … cause by man’s activity … blah blah blah
Yeah .. whatever…
Well, I suggest they cut them all down now before it’s too late!
Well I think that it all must have come up here. Normaly we get 2-4 days of fog per year. This winter we have had 20+ days. It is kind of crazy. I have never seen it like this.
This is a direct result of the Green Movement. The factories that used to pump out particulate matter that the fog stuck to aren’t doing it any more. The air is free of fine particulates and the fog has nothing to stick to. Same thing happened with London, England. You don’t see the pea-soup thick fog anymore because they cleaned the air.
So start up those factories and begin pumping C02 back into the air. Then the fog will stay and as an added bonus California’s economy will improve.
Or maybe not. I don’t know.
The article is flawed: It fails to mention that these trees are huge carbon sinks. No funding for you.
Just noticed that Michael Mann is a Keynote speaker for one of the sponsor’s of this paper. Redwoods League and the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.
Not to put too fine a point on it but it looks as though this paper is intended to alarm the good people of San Francisco just a tad.
Redwoods League and the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.
You are invited to participate in the Eighth Atmospheric Science Symposium sponsored by the UC Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center (BASC). Please use the web form to register and submit your poster title.
This symposium will be a one day event including keynote seminars, poster sessions, and discussion.
Friday, February 26:
Slusser Auditorium
International House, UC Berkeley
9:00am Michael Mann (Penn State) Learning About Climate Dynamics Using Paleoclimate Information From Past Centuries
Heavens! It’s worse than we thought!
the air is getting cleaner
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n2/abs/ngeo414.html
” kim (12:10:49) :
Advocacy science. Bah.”
Seriously? You do realize that half the papers on this site are either out-and-out funded by the energy lobby, written by non-specialists sticking their oar into climate science specifically for the political purpose of trying to discredit AGW, or both? And you want to talk about “advocacy science”? Ballsy.
OK, I’ll bite. What is it about this study of ocean currents, fog, and redwood trees that makes it “advocacy science”?
The article states that the difference between inland and coastal summer temps have decreased, but it didn’t specify if that was cooling interior or warming coast or both. I also would suggest that other factors could be in play. I grew up in No. Cal, as did my father who would be in his eighties if still alive, and we both noticed a change over our lifetimes in the climate due to increased humidity from irrigation. I no longer live there, but my friends who do say they’re starting to get afternoon thunderstorm clouds that never existed just 15 years ago.
Obviously, to save the redwoods, all of California will have to be evacuated.
I thought that CO2 increase was supposed to drive an increase in water vapour, which was the real danger since water is a more effective “green house gas”. Shouldn’t that INCREASE the amount of fog?
Still confused…
Among the factors they will need to investigate the effects of irrigation and farming changes in the central valley over the last 150 years. These have had a impact on the valleys’ heating due to evaporation and ground cover changes. 150 years ago the central valley was ether swamp or desert, often in the same year 😉
Well since I drove to SF and back this morning, I can attest to the fact that the fog is alive and well in Northern California.
Funny thing is it was nice and goggy yesterday too, so that makes it more like climate than weather.
Who has the 1910 Satellite photos of all that megafog ?
OMG, the weather changes all the time which creates havoc with our scientific studies. I mean, I’m a 30 year old PhD student and I haven’t seen anything like it before. These trees which have been around for hundreds, even thousands, of years don’t know what’s going to hit them!
What fog shortage? What are they talking about?
The work was supported by the Save the Redwoods League and the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.
Oh, I see.
Maybe in the Bay Area, there is a shortage of fog, but it ain’t so in the NorthState. As the Sun sank into i’ts Deep Solar Minimum the fog ran inland.
So far, it’s just gotten worse. The Fog used to form in the Winter after dark.
Now it forms in the afternoon in Winter and into late Spring after dark.
So, in other words, the Fog has found a new home.
Using a network of 114 temperature stations along the Pacific Coast, Johnstone and Dawson demonstrated that the coast-inland contrast has decreased substantially, not just in Northern California, but along the entire U.S. coastline from Seattle to San Diego. This change is particularly noticeable in the difference between Ukiah, a warm Coast Range site in Northern California, and Berkeley on San Francisco Bay.
Cherry pick, cherry pick.
The loss of fog and increased temperature mean that “coast redwood and other ecosystems along the U.S. West Coast may be increasingly drought-stressed, with a summer climate of reduced fog frequency and greater evaporative demand,” said coauthor Todd E. Dawson, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and of ESPM. “Fog prevents water loss from redwoods in summer, and is really important for both the tree and the forest. If the fog is gone, we might not have the redwood forests we do now.”
OMG, it’s got to be global warming. What else can it be?
It is unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle of the result of human activity, but the change could affect not only the redwoods, but the entire redwood ecosystem, the scientists say.
Try the Younger Dryas, where this place turned into a semiarid desert for 1,000 years.
Oh, bother.
No problem at all. As long as the CO2 continues to increase, the trees water collection efficiency increases…
http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/1/179
More of the same garbage.
Just follow the money. If advocacy organizations like this can’t come up with a science “cause of the day” you can be scared in, they won’t get much in donations.
If this is really true, I have an idea. We can float 1000’s of ships just offshore to spray water into the air, thus helping the creation of fog. And we can power the pumps using giant floating solar arrays that span the Pacific all the way to Hawaii. /sarc off
Is fog just caused by mechanisms they attest?
fog days in UK have almost disappeared from the begining of the 20th century to now, this is all due to human influence, we now have clean air! the same maritime climate but not the geography, so who knows
wouldn’t fog make the land cooler ? it used to make my childhood winter fog days very chilly. perhaps thats why the record now shows its a bit warmer in the UK winter (pet theory)
so they conclude the decrease in fog is maybe connected to climate change or maybe not, I could have concluded that! looks a bit of a waste of time, a good use of taxpayers money?
If they calibrate the way paleo does to a trend we will see another hockey stick.
Feb 16, 2009 / San Francisco Chronicle front page headline stating:
“Less fog puts redwoods at risk, scientists say –
A gradual decrease in summer fog along the California coast over the past century may be endangering the region’s giant redwoods and affecting the ecology of the area surrounding the trees, according to a study by UC Berkeley scientists”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/16/MN3G1C05BD.DTL&type=green
July 06, 2009 / SF Chronicle headline stating the opposite:
“Get ready for even foggier summers”
The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years.
And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.
That’s the conclusion of several state researchers, whose soon-to-be-published study predicts that even with average temperatures on the rise, the mercury won’t be soaring everywhere.
“There’ll be winners and losers,” says Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University. “Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast.”
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-07-06/entertainment/17218478_1_warming-fog-vapor-cloud
The Bornstein’s study referenced may be this one that was published later that year:
“Observed 1970-2005 cooling of summer daytime temperatures in coastal California . Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory”
http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/7c05q7cv
My point is that the conversation goes like this:
Question “Does this mean that this loss of fog is due to CAGW?”
Answer “You might say this but I couldn’t possibly comment”
Doug
Should read : Feb 16, 2010/ San Francisco Chronicle
Thanks moderator
but but but I thought we just learned that warming INCREASED moisture in the air……….
There is more to the story at EU referendum – Richard North:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/02/golden-gate-gate.html and
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/02/you-will-love-this.html
It’s all YOUR fault!
OT:
but worthy of a mention.
“Science blogger finds errors in Met Office climate change records”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7028362.ece
This was doing the rounds on Bishop Hill but now seems to have found itself into the MSM
(Gate de l’Heur)
“Save the Redwoods League, along with Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences, funded the study. ”
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0215-hance_redwood.html
Doesn’t necessarily mean nuthin’
One thing is certain we can blame Climate Change for decreasing fog levels
Maybe deforestation has to do with the difference of temperature and humidity on the coast and its role in the fog.
I wonder whether it has anything to do with the salt content of the local aerosol? I have been studying the NADP data on the chemistry of rain, and have found a three-fold drop in the Na and Cl flux between 1984 and 2006, all the way along the west coast from California to Washington. At present the best hypothesis I have for the phenomenon is a rise in detergent-containing effluents affecting the generation of sea-salt droplets that carry the salt into the air in the first place.
It is best not to “slam” any and every presentation of data whether accompanied by speculation or not. This is how the debate is developed and new questions are formulated.
An open mind leads to more productive studies in the long run. It was just the closed-minded approach of the AGW proponents that caused a lot of the issues that are presently coming to light.
Mitigation or instigation? If we are causing something then it should be provable above the “noise” of the climate record and we can then devise potential approaches to further damage…er correct.. the situation.
As long as there is no statistically significant effect regarding our input into the system, how can we even contemplate any kind of action, one way or the other?
Climategate has a post that references studies that aruge less/more fog is due to warming.
I’m very confused.
http://www.climategate.com/climate-change-causes-an-increase-and-a-decrease-in-san-francisco-fog
So it will be front page news today.
Will the 1,000 year extrapolation be front page news if it shows that this is normal?
I guess the “Save the Redwoods League” would rather release an incomplete report and an ominous news release now rather than wait for the anything that might put the report in context.
“..are not likely to die outright,”
How ‘not likely’?
Is it maybe 100% ‘not likely’, or just not significantly likely?
“It is unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle of the result of human activity”
Translation: We have no idea why this happens but the “Save the Redwoods League” insisted that we include a possible human connection.
“Using a network of 114 temperature stations along the Pacific Coast…”, Hmmm.
“While people have used tree ring data…”, Hmmm.
This all sounds familiar.
Where is the data?
But another study predicts INCREASING fog!
‘Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University. “Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast”. The study, which will appear in the journal Climate, is the latest to argue that colder summers are indeed in store for parts of the Bay Area’ (July 2009).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/06/DDJT187GK9.DTL
Oh, this fog of uncertainty…
Hat tip: http://www.climategate.com
hat tip: http://www.climategate.com
Read Richard North’s thread.. Follow the money!
Save the redwoods, agenda, what agenda.
Open science is the only real science.
Ya, but it was rotten fog….
actually southern alberta has had lots of fog the last couple of weeks, perhaps we can export all of it back to the coast…
Is fog a feedback?
Yikes.
New headline:
Eco-freaks fake foreceast for fogbank feedback in Fresno’s forests, finding it a forcing function and favoring fevered fines for fightened folks in Fords.
Richard North has dug up an old article from 2009 that says the fog is increasing – and that this is being caused by global warming. So global warming makes more fog and less fog if you believe some people.
O, the humidity!
I suspect the number of deaths from car accidents will decline with the decline in fog.
I forget. Human life is not that important.
Heh heh …
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/02/you-will-love-this.html
Dueling papers?
Has the Valley been cooling? Maybe so in the past decade? Last summer we had record fog due to the cooler PDO.
According to that Christy study, there has been central valley warming due to agriculture and irrigation but the summers are slightly cooler. It is the summer heat that draws the fog.
Also, how do smoke particles effect fog? The California air has gotten cleaner during the past 100 years.
First, Correlation is not causation.
Second, they state that
“At the beginning of the 20th century, the daytime temperature difference between the two sites was 17 degrees Fahrenheit; today, it is just 11 degrees Fahrenheit.”
True, but all the change happened over a very short period of time in the 1920’s, so if the Redwoods have been fine for the last 90 years there is no indication of imminent catastrophe.
This is the GISTemp record for Berkley: http://tinyurl.com/ybm7k9v
This for Ukhia: http://tinyurl.com/ybopgj5
as you see nothing dramatic has happened.
Any links to the original paper? It would be interesting to check the methodology.
With the PDO back in a cooling phase, we’ll see if the fog increases.
Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century: “cool” PDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while “warm” PDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990’s.
Time for some enterprising researcher to plot fog vs PDO index.
“It is unclear whether this is part of a natural cycle of the result of human activity. . . ”
Typo: Second ‘of’ should be ‘or’.
/Mr Lynn
Some things are not simple enough for idiots.
The fog “readings” are at airports. And the redwoods are at airports? Would it be a tad more scientific if “fog” was measured in the redwood forrest?
Like we read on this board. The pavement and heat sink effect also plays out at airports.
Over at EU Referendum:
“Hot on the trail of the Golden-Gate scam, a readers draws my attention to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle for 6 July 2009.
The title of the piece somewhat gives the game away, as it declares: “Get ready for even foggier summers”. The opening lines of the text tell us that the Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. “And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.”
This makes an interesting counterpoint to the article in The Daily Telegraph today, proclaiming: “Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change”.”
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/02/you-will-love-this.html
“The work was supported by the Save the Redwoods League and the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.”
Quelle suprise!!!!!
It should’ve been a no-brainer that fog relates to SST – if there’s some “first” here quantitatively, it’s no more exciting than a statistical analysis intended to *dazzle* the public with the “revelation” that days are warmer than nights.
As for the fears about redwood recruitment:
We’re talking about a perennial species with a VERY LONG lifespan – a PDO cycle is a BLINK of an eye. By the logic being shoveled upon the masses, we should acutely fear the collapse of civilization due to a warm summer or cold winter.
Let’s try to be serious about this: it’s very worrying. And what makes it even more worrying is last year’s warning by Robert Bornstein (meteorology professor at San Jose State University) that “Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast.” This global warming is really, really bad – causing both less and more fog. Something must be done.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/06/DDJT187GK9.DTL#ixzz0fjpVxezg
crosspatch (12:12:50) “They should make up their minds … are trees thermometers or are they hygrometers?”
Don’t dare them to politically oversimplify it into false black-&-white.
Was the statistical analysis corrected for particulates in the air? London used to have its famous pea soup fog before the particulates were reduced.
“While people have used tree ring data from White Mountain bristlecone pines and stumps in Mono Lake to infer climate change in California, redwoods have always been thought problematic,” Dawson said, mainly because it’s hard to determine whether the width of a tree ring reflects winter rain, summer fog, temperature, nutrient supply or other factors. “Stable isotope analyses of wood cellulose allows you to pull this data out of the tree ring.”
Bristlecone pines are reliable now?
I also wonder about Canada’s east coast. Sable Island, a 25 mile sand bar 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, shows a negative Tmin trend (-0.10C/century) and a positive Tmax trend (+1.00C/century) for the period 1900-2007.
Are foggy nights warmer than clear nights? Could this mean that the fog is trending downwards? Sable Island is one of the foggiest places on earth, with the fog being generated by the temp difference between the warm Gulf Stream and the cool Labrador Current.
It only has a population of 5 people, but there are some structures around the weather station. Maybe their heating systems have become more energy efficient over the years?
Here are some pics:
http://www.greenhorsesociety.com/Station_Met/meteorology.htm
A follow-up over at EU Referendum…
For the warmists global warming causes both more and less fog!
“Hot on the trail of the Golden-Gate scam, a readers draws my attention to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle for 6 July 2009.
The title of the piece somewhat gives the game away, as it declares: “Get ready for even foggier summers”. The opening lines of the text tell us that the Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. “And thanks to global warming, it’s about to get even foggier.”
This makes an interesting counterpoint to the article in The Daily Telegraph today, proclaiming: “Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change”.”
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/02/you-will-love-this.html
NickB. (14:03:12) :
Bristlecone pines are reliable now?
Of course they are!!! Scientists use them in studies all the time!!!(well, at least one I know of) Who are you going to believe? You or a SCIENTIST? (sarc)
This is probably because they need another cause and quick!!!! Money for the alarmist crowd just got a little thinner!!!
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/16/major-firms-pull-climate-change-alliance/
Well, they still have Dutch Shell.
Sorry, bit off topic, posted Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G60JKJd7gNo
My next video will be on precipitation data, but that will be a while yet.
Should I be laughing or crying – or both?
jorgekafkazar (13:22:08) :
Excellent.
The lifting of the fog is a good thing for it shows us the predetermined propaganda driven agenda of men such as Rajendra Pachauri.
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2010/02/16/the-fog-of-the-predetermined-agenda-begins-to-fade-revealing-unpleasant-facts-and-conflicts-of-interest
Those poor Redwoods. Such a delicate species with no resiliency at all. Just a slight change in the climatic regime (which has been stable for thousands of years-ha!) and poof, they die! Amazing they actually made it as a species in the first place.
Robert (12:41:02) :
“You do realize that half the papers on this site are either out-and-out funded by the energy lobby , written by non-specialists sticking their oar into climate science specifically for the political purpose…”
At the bottom of this page:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history
From the Climate Research Units own web site you will find a partial list of companies that fund the CRU.
It includes:
British Petroleum, ‘Oil, LNG’
Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, ‘Food to Ethanol’
The United States Department of Energy, ‘Nuclear’
Irish Electricity Supply Board. ‘LNG, Nuclear’
UK Nirex Ltd. ‘Nuclear’
Sultanate of Oman, ‘LNG’
Shell Oil, ‘Oil, LNG’
Tate and Lyle. ‘Food to Ethanol’
Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, ‘Nuclear’
KFA Germany, ‘Nuclear’
World Wildlife Fund, ‘Political Advocates’
Greenpeace International, ‘Political Advocates’
Robert, you have a point.
We should not trust ANY study funded by an Energy Lobby or by Political Advocates.
Today in Brookings Oregon, it was beautiful and Sunny with out a trace of fog. In Gold Beach its sunny to the south and Foggy just north of the bridge. Its seriously foggy and dark grey in Naseki Beach.
Its just weather…
Excellent videos Richard Wakefield. Keep up the great work.
I’ve used them here: http://pathstoknowledge.net/2010/02/16/for-the-sake-of-scientific-integrity-we-must-abandon-filling-in-missing-data-with-fictitious-invented-data
Rob from BC (14:41:53) :
“Such a delicate species with no resiliency at all”
Rob, it’s not like you can cut a hole through one big enough to drive a car through and have it live.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2043
Never mind…
From the UC Berkeley press release:
So in fact, they have not measured the amount of fog along the coast. Instead, they have looked at two airports (Arcata and Monterrey), and related their two fog records to the “temperature difference between the coast and inland areas” …
Then, from this large sample (N=2), they have extrapolated the amount of fog from the difference between 114 coastal stations and an unknown number of inland stations.
For example, they say that the difference between Ukiah daytime temperatures and Berkeley daytime temperatures has decreased. Maybe so, maybe no. My questions would be:
1. What is the quality of the Ukiah and Berkeley stations?
2. What changes have occurred in the location of the two temperature stations in the last 100 years?
3. What changes in population have occurred around the two stations in the last 100 years?
4. What “adjustments” have been made to the temperature data?
Finally, claiming a decrease in fog based on extrapolation from two stations seems … well … kinda optimistic at best.
The Ukiah site is directly in the middle of the city, as is the Berkeley station. My guess is that Ukiah’s population has gone up much more than Berkeley’s during that time.
Not wanting to screw with this too much, I didn’t go get the maximum temperature data. I have an advantage in that I live near the coast between Berkeley and Ukiah. So I know that the fog (as the press release states) occurs in the summer month when the temperature difference is largest. If their claim is true, there should have been a large increase in the difference between Ukiah and Berkeley in the summer months (June, July, August, September). Here’s that graph …
Since the summer data (when Berkeley gets fog) is more negative than winter, I’d say I have the time periods right. I see no great change over that time, the graph is nearly flat. I see no significant difference between what happened in summer versus winter. Note that there is a three year gap with no data for Berkeley, 1991-1993, and when it comes back the data is different … not a good sign.
So, I fear that until I can see their data, I’ll say that the data I find makes their claim that there was a 6 degree change in daytime temperatures sound bogus.
However, this is all from the press release. I despise science by press release, it is Ravetz’s “post normal science” at its best … Does anyone have a link to the actual study?
w.
Robin Guenier (13:56:26) “Let’s try to be serious about this: it’s very worrying.”
Indeed, natural processes have serious consequences, but fairy tale explanations, such as those based on fortune cookies & AGW computer fantasies, are a counterproductively disrespectful perversion of nature.
I don’t worry about the fog or the trees, it’s all natural variability and nice clean air.
So, fog off.
Evidence of Climate Fraud grows, Media Coverage doesn’t
by Marc sheppard
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/02/evidence_of_climate_fraud_grow.html
Wow, its kinda mad that we are running out of fog… As laughable as it is, the winter months would be horrible without no fog to make you feel alone on them long drives.. dont you think?
“Analysis of hourly AIRPORT cloud cover reports leads to surprising finding”
Now what have we learned about weather stations at airports? Surfacestations.com ring any bells?
This study has supposedly been conducted over the past century. What was a California airport like a century ago when the study started? Has there been any change in the traffic or the types of planes in that 100 year period? What was the UHI effect over those California cities in 1910? What method of measuring fog intervals is still in effect today (and accurate to +/-1% over 100yr interval)?
I blame it all on fluoride in the drinking water.
The airports went from a grass stip to asphalt, more infrastructure, more buildings more and bigger planes, the expansion of poplations, farming and irigation as well as the natural varation in ocean temperatures, this all has to be taken into account.
Let’s do some more measurement for the next thirty years to see what’s really going on.
The fact (if we can trust their findings) that there is less fog does not mean there is no morning dew which has a similar effect to fog.
The report does not make any reference to dew.
With this said I think the report is incomplete and therefore REJECTED.
Richard North’s blog def has the scoop on this one
Make sure you look at the “Denier” petition there too. We are up to over 1000 now so maybe Gordon Brown, UK PM, might take notice.
There’s a great pub in SF called “Mad Dog in the Fog”, run by a brit. Full of Aston Villa pictures I seem to remember. Plenty of Mad Dogs around these days.
I have spent a lot of time recently walking in the redwoods in the coastal range south of San Francisco and they look pretty healthy to me. Lots of young trees as well and a lot of the range has recovered from intensive logging 100 years ago which would have completely screwed up any of these “calibration” efforts.
Woah Nellie, Johnstone uses a 114 temp stations to model California, while real climatologists like Jones uses 1521 to model the whole world; and hourly data points too! Now that’s some raw data, somebody could have a lot of fun doing some comparisons between those two data sets.
Here’s an interesting observation (perhaps this runoff is affecting coral too (in other locations)?):
What about the arrival of the Jet Engine -I gave an example of that the other day on another thread.Also what about the cleaning up of particulates-no nucleus-no fog.
London England is a prime example….
Here in Vancouver we’re having a serious problem providing snow for the Winter Olympics. Our solution, expensive though it be, is to bring in truckloads of snow from a couple of hundred miles away.
Once the Olympics are over, perhaps we could rent you the trucks (at a very attractive rate, of course) to transport the requisite amount of fog to your coast.
Whenever I see the word “study” my first thought is to be skeptical. I am usually correct in being skeptical.
“Since 1901, the average number of hours of fog along the coast in summer has dropped from 56 percent to 42 percent, which is a loss of about three hours per day,” said study leader James A. Johnstone
Now why am I on auto-skeptic?
Please help me.
I’m torn between wanting to say gosh that’s really troubling or saying this is just more BS.
IMO there’s probably some not so reliable methods invoved here.
If they used the Lubchecno Ocean dead zone approach it’s complete BS.
The real margin of error, or accidental adjustament, is probably
4 or 5 %.
With it in error 4 or 5% high on the historical side and 4 or 5% low on the current side.
It’s just too easy to make these unsubstabtaited claims with accuracy and reliablity. And way to easy to adapt them to reveal something interesting, useful and worthy of attention.
But then I am just a naysaying saying things.
I think many comments miss the point of what Dawson and Johnstone propose to do. It is not tree ring widths that they will look at. It is the oxygen isotope ratios in the tree rings. Because water from fog and water from rain have different isotopic ratios, they hope to see whether they can determine when fog was a major water input and when it was rain. From that they presumably will try to infer something about the climate in the various periods.
It is important to remember that fog is not just an impairment to visibility. It is in fact an important water input, particularly in arid regions. I run a charity, FogQuest, that uses the collection of fog droplets as a water source for villages in arid parts of the developing world. In California, it is not just the redwoods that benefit from the fog water. It is many other coastal species. In part what may happen if the temperatures warm or cool over long periods of time is that the bases of the marine cloud decks, which produce the fog on the hills, will rise or lower accordingly and the altitude band where the fog appears will also rise or fall. Plant species can adapt to these changes but only if they persist for extensive time periods.
“A cool coast and warm interior is one of the defining characteristics of California’s coastal climate, but the temperature difference between the coast and interior has declined substantially in the last century, in step with the decline in summer fog.”
With the ocean temperature being very stable in comparison to the inland temperatures. This would indicate that the inland areas have cooled. Hence, less fog intrusion inland.
Does this mean then that there has been no global warming for the period of study? Hmmm.
So who is fogging up the climate debate now?
Johnstone’s claim of “first data actually illustrating” the connection between summer fog and upwelling off N. California is way off. I first read (an UC Bulletin, if memory serves) about that connection a few decades ago. And, like Willis, I’m very skeptical about the integrity of the Ukiah data. But I’m confident that, as long as there are climate scientists, there will be plenty of fog!
one more thing to yawn about
Sorry another one off topic, but may be of interest.
FOI request for emails related to production of faulty Australian ABC Climate Timeline denied. Is this another Climategate in the making?
http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com/2010/02/foi-request-for-climate-time-line.html
Mike (14:33:09) :
Should I be laughing or crying – or both?
How about laughing so hard that you cry?
Did I read that correctly that the whole notion is based on climate modeling and not on observation?
What we don’t read in the Media.
Mongolia, for the second time in three years, has been hit by a Dzud.
After the drought of last summer, the people have run out of food stocks in the middle of this extreme winter. Death and hunger have hit hard.
It’s cold that’s our enemy, not warmth.
The Red Cross estimates that by the end of this winter the life stocks will have been decimated by 20 million animals.
Watch this movie “Frozen Cattle Crises in brutal Mongolia, but I warn you, some of the shots are pretty disturbing.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20100208/video/vwl-frozen-cattle-crisis-in-brutal-mongo-89eb865.html
Quick, burn some coal and get those particulates nucleating fog.
Get those clunkers back on the road Arnie!
@ Willis Eschenbach (15:01:57):
So in fact, they have not measured the amount of fog along the coast. Instead, they have looked at two airports (Arcata and Monterrey), and related their two fog records to the “temperature difference between the coast and inland areas”
As usual you hit the nail on the head. I thought I had read that in passing but never got around to a 2nd more thorough read to confirm/deny. I guess such is the state of modern climate science that allegations of decreasing fog can be extrapolated by unverified empirical theory.
Observation is, after all, an antiquated scientific method right? 😛
Unbelievable … its front page news …. not Haiti … not the economy …. the fact that its less foggy in California than it was 100 years ago …. allegedly.
Bla bla bla ….. on the one hand they state that it is uncertain whether man has had any influence …… then they state that the fogginess is driven by the PDO …..
These people are beginning to $#@% me off.
I think we have learned from this blog, that pettifoggery is not defined by the clouds edge.
I’m sure the redwoods will survive just fine, considering how old some of them are. A much bigger concern for us humans is the loss of some great California wines due to the sensitive grapes altering their flavor off in sunnier fields.
DOE’s accelerator lab Fermilab just posted the video for Richard Lindzen’s colloquium talk “The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming,” delivered on April 10, 2010. Please visit this link for the video:
http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/100210Lindzen/index.htm
It was a great presentation to a rather rambunctious group of physicists! Enjoy!
paul jackson (15:47:40) :
The 114 stations in California would be great if it weren’t for the drive-by on the data.
Maybe some folks in each of those places could spend some time verifying the ‘official data’ with what is in the newsprint of the times.
You might not be so fond of it after you see the difference between the two datasets.
I’m not.
Robert:
Since you find it appropriate to pounce on other people like Kim who merely spoke her feelings I have something say about you Robert.
What, do you have to be a specialist in your private world before other people can open their mouth and speak. You are either a control-freak or a government employee, can’t quite tell yet.
For me I’m not employed, love the physical sciences, do mostly know what I am speaking of when I do, do make mistakes, will discredit AGW because every important fact points counter what is said of it and will stick my oar into climate science whenever I want to, specifically for anti-political involvement in AGW political causes.
Who are you? Or are you so dishonest you won’t open your mouth to let the people here really know you, not your mantra, you? Until then, until I can sense some real honesty and humility, you are nothing to me, just a rude man.
Do not expect me to reply until then. If you want more of me, don’t ask me, ask the people here. You are known by you words and actions, but by letting myself be a little peering as fictional Troy, I can read through your words and your motives are crystal clear.
SFO and OAK don’t have fog records back to 1951?
Can someone really claim less fog in Berkeley based on records from Arcata and Monterey while ignoring San Francisco and Oakland airports?
I wonder where Tom P and Nick S are? Why aren’t they here telling us what a poor study this is? I guess they must be out cashing their checks from Big Green.
Robert, I just got got my $10,000 check from big oil for my posts this week. The $5,000 I got from big coal was also nice. Don’t know where I will spend all the money.
Not to mention all that is left is “rotten fog”.
(Hey you knew someone was going to say it…….)
This fog alarmism is utter BS. As someone who grew up in Sonoma County I was surprised to read that the authors focused their study on redwood trees when local vineyards are much more sensitive to seasonal fog changes. The fog is crucial for the proper growth and health of Chardonay, Pinot Noir, and Sauvignon Blanc grape varieties because it moderates the temperature during the hot dry summer months by cooling and re-hydrating the grapes. Too little fog and the grapes dry and shrivel into raisins; too much fog/moisture and you get all kinds of nasty fungi which leads to “bunch rot”.
Fortunately, the unique micro-climates of the Northern California wine country have remained remarkably stable over the years and the wine industry has expanded substantially. That’s how I know this study is flawed. There are new vineyards popping up everywhere! The area around Mount Taylor where I grew up used to be cattle and sheep country but now it’s covered with vineyards and fancy Mediterranean style chateaus. None of it would have been possible without the stable and consistent fog cover that blankets the region.
Anyway, these Berkeley professors should drive up north on 101 for a change and interview some real life viticulturists instead of inferring conclusions based on computer models and questionable airport records. These data are obviously tainted by land use changes and, at the very least, the Ukiah records were probably influenced by logging and clear cutting activities. Lumber was a HUGE industry in Mendocino County from the 1940s up until the mid-80s when the spotted owl thing became an issue. Now their main industry seems to be related to the growing medicinal marijuana market. That’s a land-use transition that Berkeley residents are intimately familiar with.
I get a stomach cramp whenever climate geeks opine about forests, something they know NOTHING about. But then I rise above it, because that’s what my mother taught me to do. “Rise above it, Mike,” she would say.
For an interesting paper on historical human influences in the redwoods (people have been living there for 10,000+ years), see Norman, Steven P. 2007. A 500-year record of fire from a humid coast redwood forest. A report to Save the Redwoods League, here:
http://westinstenv.org/histwl/2009/09/08/a-500-year-record-of-fire-from-a-humid-coast-redwood-forest/
Wow! Obama making courageous deceisions and promoting nuclear – even reported in The West Australian newspaper, which is normally a month behind on most stories:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/world/6815463/obama-ups-nuclear-investment-for-climate-fight/
I presume this is old news?
paul jackson (15:47:40) :
Yeah, and it’s rather telling since GISS is only uses something like three or four stations for all of California. I had a gut feeling there were more stations but were merely dropped from global temperature calculations. Really adds to your confidence in that data, doesn’t it.
Since there are no graphs to show the distribution of the temp and fog change by year, they could have simply found that positive PDO equals less fog and warmer coastal temps.
Let’s wait for the full paper before going nuts.
Billyquiz (12:18:32) :
It’s a little like the east coast snows – if it doesnt snow, it’s global warming; if it does snow, it’s global warming or in this case, if its foggy, its global warming or if its not foggy, it global warming
That is not what we would call solid science
“Greater fog frequency is connected to cooler than normal ocean waters from Alaska to Mexico.” So the warmer the ocean waters from Alaska to Mexico, the less frequent the fog.
Clearly, Man is responsible for the warmer ocean temperatures along the coast. Too many West Coast swimmers peeing in the ocean (actually, percentage-wise isn’t it about equivalent to the amount of CO2 we pump into the air?).
Sorry, read the above as, “So the warmer the ocean waters from Alaska to Mexico, the MORE frequent the fog.:
ROF Neo
“Obviously, to save the redwoods, all of California will have to be evacuated.”
Hmmmm………we’ve had a few too many clear/sunny days here this month.
I think that something is wrong with the climate.
I suppose it’s time to mail another check to the government to straighten this situation out.
This is great news.
Less fog = less traffic accidents.
Less traffic accidents = less injuries and car repairs.
Less injuries and car repairs = cheaper insurance.
Cheaper insurance = lower insurance company profits.
Lower profits = insurance co’s raise rates to compensate…..
Crap. Never mind.
I live in Monterey. I am 46 years old.
It is just as foggy here as ever. In fact, between Monterey and Castroville the fog has become so thick after 10pm that driving has become an adventure. I grew up in Carmel, which is on the other side of the Monterey Peninsula, and I can tell you that Carmel gets more fog than Monterey. So even if the Monterey Airport logged a day as “Sunny” that doesn’t mean that Carmel wasn’t socked in with fog. So I doubt that using data from Monterey Airport would be of much use.
Fog moves, and it seems to have a mind of it’s own.
Also, we have Redwoods that extend far east of the fog line. There are Redwoods in Carmel Valley that see 50% less fog than their counterparts in Big Sur, Santa Cruz and Eureka. Those trees are fat and happy.
What if CO2 increases ‘just’ change things?… What if a trace gas doesn’t affect temperature? What if CO2 increases just makes things a little different?
“In his 80s, Freeman has seen the Samoan controversy settled decisively in his favour. At a meeting of the American Association of Anthropologists in December 1998, his new book was on display. Its significance will take time to digest. It concludes with a call for anthropologists to abandon pre-scientific, anti-evolutionary ideologies, and recognise the rapidly accumulating evidence of evolutionary biology. This shows that “all humans, belonging as they do to the same species, have the same phylogenetically given human nature, with their differing cultures having come into being during quite recent times, through the varying exercise of choice. Our biologically given capacity for choice is then of enormous human significance.” Nature and nurture interact, but we should never disregard our biological heritage, which is becoming more and more fully understood.”
http://www.newsweekly.com.au/books/0813336937.html
Since I am not an anthropologist, I ask… Why do the people pushing the anti-human AGW agenda believe humans are static? I know they think the Climate should be static… That’s a whole other mind boggler….
This is important because changes ‘force’ adaptation… Are AGW proponents just nihilists at heart?
How did we allow ourselves to become so pessimistic?
If AGW acolytes believe humans can’t adapt, surely the whole world is a static DNA strand that will wither and die at the slightest whisper of a hush of warm wind…
More fog on the California coast = global warming
Less fog on the California coast = global warming
Covered in many places, but IMHO best coverage so far is here:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/02/consistent-with-being-in-deep-fog.html
the big problem with this “foggy” story is it’s already all over the MSM (u can easily find the links if u want them):
Fog decline threatens US redwoods
BBC News – Doreen Walton
Giant Redwoods May Dry Out; Warming to Blame?
National Geographic – Rachel Kaufman
Climate change threatens fog and redwoods -study
Reuters
Around the Redwoods, the Fog Is Dissipating
New York Times – Henry Fountain
Fog decrease harming California redwoods
USA Today – Doyle Rice
California redwoods dread sunny, fogless summers
Nature.com
Decrease in fog threatens California’s sequoias: study
AFP
California’s Fog Is Clearing, and That’s Bad News for Redwoods
Discover Magazine
Fog decline threat to redwoods
Herald de Paris – Doreen Walton
Fog loss affects California’s s sequoias
Channel Nine, Australia
it’s even in russia’s pravda:
Giant Redwoods of California May Soon Fade Out as Fog (sic)
http://english.pravda.ru/news/science/earth/16-02-2010/112241-giant_redwoods_california_fog-0
by the end of the day, it will have no doubt circled the MSM globe….and that is the problem we face.
Let’s panic about the fog. Immediately.
Bulldust (17:24:10) :
The Nuclear lobby has been funding the Climate Research Unit tune for a long time. It’s just payback.
Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund must be very pleased that the president has fully endorsed the zero CO2 solution, after all they helped write the IPCC report that was used to support the decision.
—
February 16, 2010 1:45 p.m. EST:
President Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees Tuesday for two nuclear reactors to be built in Burke County, Georgia.
Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget triples loan guarantees for nuclear power plants to over $54 billion, the White House noted.
—
In a while we should all expect some announcement about off-shore LNG facilities on the East and West coasts of the US. That would complete the rollout of Food-to-Ethanol, Nuclear Power and Liquefied Natural Gas.
As California’s northern coastal fog dissipates by a third to become mere haze, redwood dryads will adjust their charges’ metabolisms accordingly. Meantime, one does not “extrapolate” backwards, but interpolates between previous and current periods. Of course, since Earth’s atmosphere is a complex dynamic system exhibiting sensitive dependence on initial conditions (Lorenz, 1964), linear extrapolations forward are mathematically impossible.
The real danger lies in the fact that, as solar irradiation increases 33%, lightly clad trekkers may find themselves prey to local Fanggen, archaic tree-spirits who have been waiting over millennia for perambulating short-shorts to burn away. Beware– these entities are very old and very powerful, and they bulge with sap.
I would be curious how the researchers will account for, among other things:
a. Changes in vegetated areas around the airports, esp. houses, roads, longer runways. De-forestation has been a big issue in that area, I believe. Monterey, if I have the correct airport, is in a dry area, so I question the appropriateness.
b. Changes in the way cloud cover is measured. The method of measurement, and the way of reporting, has changed over the years, from human eyeball to several types of instrumentation. Now, clouds over 12K ft. are not reported at all (and visibility over 10 mi. is reported as 10 miles). The instrument that measures cloud cover looks at one spot and takes a time weighted average. My experience has been that it is not very true to real conditions. It could be looking at the only hole, or the only cloud.
This may be another case of information being collected for one purpose and misused for another. What a pilot needs to fly has little to do with water droplet formation on tall trees. Any results they get should be questioned.
The trees are amazing. We were there late last year. It was wet, and cold. No signs of drying out yet.
By 2035 the redwoods will be gone.
There’s fog recovery in the works, but it’s “baby fog.”
Daniel H (17:19:22) :
Thank you for some real facts in a real world!
Have only visited CA four or five times in the past but seems the coast line environment would have even lower plant forms, as moss on rocky surfaces, that would be more telling. Seems if fog conditions were getting to some critical point, they would disappear first, not being able to draw moisture from the soil as trees or vines. Do you know the local environment well enough to shed some light there? Seen any moss lately?
Missing Californian fog pops up in Britain….
“I am Geoffrey Boulton – Professor of Geology at Edinburgh University. My research has been in glaciology and in climate change in the geological past . In essence that means that I understand a lot of the underlying science that relates to more recent and current climate change and I think that’s probably my principal contribution. I should stress that I am not involved in recent and the issues of recent and current climate nor am I part of that community.”
Global warming is the most mercurial force in nature. Last year it was blamed for too much fog in N.Calif.
John Blake (18:18:47) :
I caught that too. Thought they were just a little foggy after ‘extrapolating’ on some of that Califoria wine and just couldn’t remember the last 1000 years. Quality science! Wish I had a job like that!
Would this be the paper?
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/2/189
Yeah, that Fog Monster problem is so bad:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/16/major-firms-pull-climate-change-alliance/
Three Major Firms Pull Out of Climate Change Alliance
FOXNews.com
ConocoPhillips, BP America and Caterpillar pulled out of a leading alliance of businesses and environmental groups pushing for climate change legislation on Tuesday, citing complaints that the bills under consideration are unfair to American industry.
Oh for the love of Pete!!!!!!
Great Posts All!
The researchers has not figured out anything about fog and redwoods, rather … he has figured out that airports are larger and hotter than they were 100 years ago. I wonder if he got his PhD for this and if a small part of our Chinese and Saudi funded government paid for it.
Bobcat (18:43:27) :
Global warming is the most mercurial force in nature. Last year it was blamed for too much fog in N.Calif.
That bad ol’ puddy-tat.
25-30 years of ‘expert’ Climatology….
What a joke…
For climatologists, human scripture is irrelevant.
If only we as ‘modern’ humans could understand the imperative to influence future human development…
Oh Wait…
Being based on static human DNA and intellectual rigidity… Humans are at the end, stuck in a morass of filth and misery…. The only way to move forward is to eliminate the flotsam and jetsam while the cream rises to the top….
How does the LibLeft figure the best way to eliminate the waste humans?
Unless that press release contains a typo, who would have been keeping fog data back in 1901?
Democrat Walter Russell Mead – must read all:
15 Feb: DC Post Runs With Climategate; NY Times Still in Tank
The New York Times turned down the Watergate story, giving the Washington Post ownership of the story of the decade. Now the Washington Post is going for a repeat, scooping the somnolent Times on the Climategate story. The Post story by Juliet Eilperin and David A. Farenholdt is no skeptic’s dream, but Post readers now know something that Times readers are still in the dark about: the climate change movement has taken a serious hit in recent weeks as allegations of misconduct and high profile errors undermine the credibility of the key institutions and figures in the movement…
I am not sure how long the reputation of a great newspaper can withstand the consequences of this kind of news judgment; the steady (and to me, painful and unwelcome) erosion of the Times‘ influence and prestige is unlikely to end until its pages regain the reputation as the first, best place to learn about the vital events of the day. At some point, the Times will simply have to break down and let its readers in on the Climategate story…
Personally, I’m still clinging to the rebuttable presumption that global warming is real and it is serious, but I have to admit I wouldn’t be as surprised now as I would have been three months ago to discover that the truth turns out to be somewhat less dramatic, less categorical and less immediately actionable than what we’ve been led to expect.
But the story the Times cannot bring itself to print is not about belief. It is a political story that the Times is failing to report. ..
I gather from friends better connected than I that many top environmentalists in the US are still in denial, still hoping that somehow this will all go away.
News flash: it won’t…
Here’s a thought for the truly twisted conspiracy theorists to chew on: could the New York Times be working for a Republican victory this fall? Probably not, but the paper of record couldn’t be doing more to help the GOP on this issue if it tried.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/02/15/nyt-still-mia-on-climategate-big-boost-for-gop/
Well, I visit the redwoods often, and I have not seen ANY signs of stress. And I have a forestry degree. These guys are just seeking headlines, IMHO.
Robert (12:37:35) :
‘Heavens! It’s worse than we thought!’
Robert babycakes, Its actually precisely as we thought. As Kim indicates, advocacy science.
Doug
““While people have used tree ring data from White Mountain bristlecone pines and stumps in Mono Lake to infer climate change in California, redwoods have always been thought problematic,” Dawson said, mainly because it’s hard to determine whether the width of a tree ring reflects winter rain, summer fog, temperature, nutrient supply or other factors. “Stable isotope analyses of wood cellulose allows you to pull this data out of the tree ring.”
Dawson has established that the isotopes of oxygen in a tree reflect whether the water comes in via the leaves from fog, or via the roots from rainwater. “Redwoods live for more than 2,000 years, so they could be a very important indicator of climate patterns and change along the coast,” he said.
The new fog data will allow Dawson and Johnstone to calibrate their tree ring isotope data with actual coastal fog conditions in the past century, and then extrapolate back for 1,000 years or more to estimate climate conditions.”
I guess it’s time for my quarterly reminder of this post from June ’08
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/13/surprise-leaves-maintain-temperature-new-findings-may-put-dendroclimatology-as-metric-of-past-temperature-into-question/#comments
which references this paper
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/pdf/nature07031.pdf
The central premise on which the notion that oxygen isotopes in tree rings are reliable recorders of climate phenomena rests is that tree foliage is normally at ambient temperature. The Helliker and Richter paper presents rather compelling evidence that this not the case. That through a combination of biological processes tree foilage maintains itself within a much narrower range of temperature than the ambient. In a rational world this finding would have been more than sufficient to put a stake through the heart of the paleoclimate tree ring proxy vampires. Obviously, that has not been the case.
Although the authors are not scientists of great repute, the language of the paper makes it pretty clear that the results they achieved came as a big surprise to them, which makes me grant them more credence than most of bilge that I’ve waded through in trying to come to grips with this whole CAGCC morass. Indeed, from what I’ve been able to discover their thesis has not been refuted or contradicted in the time since it was published.
The history of this little paper is revealing. If you do a Google search, you find a flurry of references about the time of the PR announcing its publication, including Anthony’s post. Then it pretty much disappears down the memory hole, with a few science journal cites, but mostly blog references in the interim. When trying to understand this seemingly illogical neglect, my more conspiratorial side tends to focus on the fact that the authors are employed at UPenn, which places them in proximity to a certain tree ring aficionado we are all familiar with. But I’m sure that is purely coincidental.
Is this another worry that I shouldn’t worry about?
Is Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones too tall?
@wayne:
“Have only visited CA four or five times in the past but seems the coast line environment would have even lower plant forms, as moss on rocky surfaces, that would be more telling. Seems if fog conditions were getting to some critical point, they would disappear first, not being able to draw moisture from the soil as trees or vines. Do you know the local environment well enough to shed some light there? Seen any moss lately?”
Yes I have seen moss, lots of it! I’m an avid runner and I run through the hills around here nearly everyday. The streams are full of water from all the rain and there is green moss everywhere. It’s sticking to the rocks, the branches, you name it. It’s a beautiful sight to behold.
Robert (12:41:02)
Half the papers funded by the “energy lobby”. I’d like to see the data to back up that particular piece of bullshit.
I’d also like to a study that shows that the specialists (Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Briffa, and the rest of the unindicted co-conspirators) do a better job at the science than the non-specialists (McIntyre, McKittrick, Anthony Watts, chiefio, Jeff Id, myself, and others).
Yes, some of the papers here have been found to have errors. But given the Hockeystick and the hockeystickalikes and the Jesus Paper and the rest of the peer reviewed crap we’ve seen, that’s no surprise. It’s how science works. Put the ideas out there, and let people try to tear them down.
You don’t like the science? Fine, you can be the one to find faults with it. You don’t like the CVs of the authors? Fine, you can piss off and post where people think that it makes a difference who wrote a paper or where it was published … here, we care about the truth, not the pedigree.
Read my submission above at Willis Eschenbach (15:01:57). You see, while you are raving about who wrote what, some of us actually look at the data to see if the paper is science or advocacy …
“I’d also like to a study that shows that the specialists (Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Briffa, and the rest of the unindicted co-conspirators) do a better job at the science than the non-specialists (McIntyre, McKittrick, Anthony Watts, chiefio, Jeff Id, myself, and others).”
That would be all of them. Mann has done more and better science than your entire batting line-up.
Hi folks – you can find the article here – it is open-access, so you can read it and make your own judgments on the paper itself, rather than the press clippings.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/recent
(scroll down just a bit)
I’ll make one point here – the airport cloud data are relatively immune to local surface changes. The airports are recording cloud ~400 m above the ground just ~1 km from the ocean near sea level. The fog deck typically forms over the ocean at elevation and moves into the coastal hills as a layer.
[snip] Calling Mr Eschenbach a “liar” is only acceptable if there is a reason. You have given no reasons.
Second warning. ~dbstealey, moderator
David Corcoran (18:05:01) :
Let’s panic about the fog. Immediately.
===================================================
Don’t bother me. I’m too busy panicking about that Antarctic ice shelf.
Willis Eschenbach:
“I’d also like to a study that shows that the specialists (Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Briffa, and the rest of the unindicted co-conspirators) do a better job at the science than the non-specialists (McIntyre, McKittrick, Anthony Watts, chiefio, Jeff Id, myself, and others).”
Robert (19:48:31) replied:
Thus showing conclusively that Robert is simply a troll.
Willis,
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this asked before.
Great shot.
Willis Eschenbach (19:44:53) :
“I’d also like to a study that shows that the specialists (Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Briffa, and the rest of the unindicted co-conspirators) do a better job at the science than the non-specialists (McIntyre, McKittrick, Anthony Watts, chiefio, Jeff Id, myself, and others).”
Problem solved….Next!
Robert (19:48:31) said:
Proof by assertion. QED.
This is so simple, all the experimental data I’ve seen indicates that more CO2 makes plants more drought resistant so….build a coal fired power plant there.
Robert (19:48:31)
This is no problem with the Mann Hockey Stick graph?
Robert (19:48:31)
Do you know of ‘Mike’s Nature trick’?
I worked at Humboldt Redwoods State Park in the summer of ’72. I remember very little fog. We often had daytime temps in the 90’s. Part of my job involved taking bank deposits to the bank at Garberville late at night. Fog was not a problem for the driving and I usually drove at regular highway speeds.
My wife stayed in Eureka while I worked away from home in the summer during my time studying forestry at Arcata. Eureka had fog almost every afternoon. But 10 miles inland up a little valley at the community of Blue Lake, it was a lot drier and we still have redwoods. Our day care lady was there and I remember going to pick up my boy. It would be drizzly in Arcata and I would get to the day care place and the sun was shining and Mike would be running around with no shirt on.
Maybe fog is important if the soil is coarse or shallow, but I doubt it is important where soils are deep.
Check this out. I just searched the Google news archives using the terms “Northern California” and “foggier” and this story came up from July 6, 1992:
SCIENCE UPDATE The Dallas Morning News
“New evidence supports a theory that global warming could bring foggier weather to Northern California, according to an article published last week in Nature…”
—
Unfortunately, it costs $2.95 to read the full article and I didn’t feel like paying. So instead I searched the Nature web site for any articles containing the term “fog” between June and August of 1992 but no relevant hits came up. That’s strange. Anyway, here is the Google search result that contains the Dallas Morning News story if anyone else wants to explore this further:
http://tinyurl.com/yc6mpgj
If someone finds the Nature article mentioned in the story please post a link here!
“Proof by assertion. QED.”
Equally as valid as Willis’ assertion that his list is better than Mann and his colleagues. That was the initial assertion. Given that Mann has 80 peer-reviewed papers and Mr. Eschenbach is known mostly for having falsified scientific data, I would say the burden of proof is on him to demonstrate his superiority.
[Reply: impugning Willis Eschenbach’s integrity one more time will have consequences. ~dbs, mod.]
One more thing. These scientists are from Berkley, maybe 200 plus miles from Arcata and probably 50 miles from any redwoods. They need to get out of the lab and see the real world.
OT – I’m a regular visitor to this site and was thrilled to hear Mr. Watts on my favorite talk radio KFI in SoCal this afternoon. Please do more interviews in CA. Thank you so much, Mr. Watts.
Why are we hearing about this now?
Posted: February 10, 2010 09:43 PM
“California: The Next Climate Battleground”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hunter-cutting/california—the-next-cli_b_457777.html
—
Why are we hearing it from the Save the Redwood League?
The Save the Redwood League is part of an alliance that sells carbon credits.
(January 16, 2008, Humboldt County, California)
http://www.savetheredwoods.org/newsroom/pr/pr_alliance.pdf
“Today an innovative alliance of private capital investors and conservation interests have joined forces … The Nature Conservancy, Save-the-Redwoods League and the Community Forestry Team — a coalition of Humboldt County-based forestry, conservation and environmental advocates — are working with investment and forestry partners Atlas Holdings, Bank of America, Conservation Forestry LLC and the Redwood Forest Foundation Inc.”
“The Redwood Forest Foundation, Inc. (RFFI) is a private non-profit, Section 501(c)3 organization. Its mission is to acquire, protect, restore and manage forestlands for the long-term public benefit of the region’s citizens….. In 2007 RFFI completed the purchase of the 50,000 acre Usal Redwood Forest outside of Ft. Bragg, California.”
—
(July 2009)
http://www.rffi.org/Usal-management-faq.html
“RFFI is pleased to sell approximately 918 acres to the Save the Redwood League at the same time the conservation easement is sold on the remainder of the property.”
“The 2.9% inventory cap recognizes both substantive and community related goals. Substantively, a “percent-of-inventory” or “POI” cap will help recruit larger trees and higher inventories across the ownership regardless of market forces which may come into play.”
“RFFI is currently working to certify the carbon that will be sequestered through implementation of its conservation strategy. This carbon will be certified with the Climate Acton Registry. Once the carbon is certified, RFFI will seek to sell its certified carbon credits to help pay back its loans so long as it makes economic sense to do so.”
—
Where there is climate scientology, there is money, you just need to know how to find it.
Robert (19:48:31) :
That would be all of them. Mann has done more and better science than your entire batting line-up.
Robert babycakes. Your comments are like those of some infantile football fans e.g – ‘my team is better than yours – na de na de na na’
What is happening here is a discussion on the merits and value of this paper in the context of the scientific, economical, social and political arenas. The participants here are trying to UNDERSTAND what is happening. Every strand of this is part of the wider debate. It is really quite serious.
Doug
“Calling Mr Eschenbach a “liar” is not acceptable.”
Your board, your rules. That’s perfectly fine. But please help me understand those rules. Are we not allowed to talk about people falsifying their data sets? That’s news to me. It seems like a frequent topic of discussion on WUWT. Why should it be acceptable to call Mann a liar (that is, to say he has been suspected of falsifying data), but not Mr Eschenbach, especially given that he invited the comparison?
Not arguing the point; asking for clarification to avoid future trouble.
[Reply: Willis Eschenbach is an esteemed writer and commenter here. Michael Mann is not. And that is the end of this discussion. ~dbs, mod.]
Wayne R (15:53:06) :
“Here in Vancouver we’re having a serious problem providing snow for the Winter Olympics.”
Wayne do you know that to be true or are you just regurgitating warmist lies?
None of the stats available online show any shortage of snow in BC.
Both Cypress and Whistler seem to have about 3 metres of snow.
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-ski-525351-british_columbia_ski_resorts-i
http://cypressmountain.com/
“Andrew30 (14:43:48) :
Robert (12:41:02) :
“You do realize that half the papers on this site are either out-and-out funded by the energy lobby , written by non-specialists sticking their oar into climate science specifically for the political purpose…”
At the bottom of this page:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history
From the Climate Research Units own web site you will find a partial list of companies that fund the CRU.
It includes:
British Petroleum, ‘Oil, LNG’
Broom’s Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, ‘Food to Ethanol’
The United States Department of Energy, ‘Nuclear’
Irish Electricity Supply Board. ‘LNG, Nuclear’
UK Nirex Ltd. ‘Nuclear’
Sultanate of Oman, ‘LNG’
Shell Oil, ‘Oil, LNG’
Tate and Lyle. ‘Food to Ethanol’
Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, ‘Nuclear’
KFA Germany, ‘Nuclear’
World Wildlife Fund, ‘Political Advocates’
Greenpeace International, ‘Political Advocates’
Robert, you have a point.
We should not trust ANY study funded by an Energy Lobby or by Political Advocates.”
I believe “Robert” wears special fact filters on the glasses worn when reading certain web based material. Articles paid for by the energy lobby here at WUWT. Oh the irony!
Just a slight deviation, NOAA predicted 2009-10 winter to be warm in the US.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20091015_winteroutlook.html
The irony is sweet, they should have listened to Matt Rogers from the Commidity Weather Group.
So, Water Vapor is stronger than CO2.
More damage control over at RealClimate by Gavin. Those guys truly make me sick.
So we lose the redwoods — big deal. Replace ’em with palms.
I am just so gosh darn tired of every advocacy group demanding that their cause be acted upon with untempered vigor. My ability to become aroused about trees can be summed up in one word: impotence.
Tree people, bye-bye. Please.
One other thing. the The Redwood Forest Foundation looks like a shell compant with less than $100,000 in assets.
The Save the Redwood League on the other hand;
As of March 31, 2009
Commercial paper and cash $ 6,866,332
U.S. Government and agency obligations $54,107,505
Exchange traded funds and stocks $ 6,578,130
as part of a total asstet holdings of $ 81,355,672
This is typical of the levels of cash I see in other ‘charities’ that fund climate scientology; although this is less than Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.
One point and a question —
. The Federal Government must evacuate and relocate everyone in California to new reservations East of the Mississippi River. Everyone else in the country must be relocated and resettled to reservations East of the Hudson River. We MUST save the environment. The only way to accomplish this historic move and save gasoline and the precious environment is to force everyone to walk. Re-locatees will be permitted to bring only what they can carry. Anyone not complying with this order should be tried in Federal Court and hung at sunrise following their conviction. Anyone who falls out along the way will be shot. Anyone caught crying will be shot.
Q Have the British ever found out where the Irish hid all that wonderful, beautiful, life sustaining, miserable fog?
Lordy, the next thing you know, they’ll be saying global warming or climate change or whatever the hell they call it now is causing the universe to collapse into itself. Is there anything at all left that’s happenning or has happenned or will happen that isn’t or wasn’t or will be caused by it? Could the itch on the bottom of my foot be a result of global climate change? I’m starting to wonder……..
Robert (20:05:42)
“
Obviously in response to my statement:
Robert, here’s a protip for you. If you want to attack something, first you should probably learn to read. Once you’ve done that, actually read what the person said. Otherwise, people will just continue to point and laugh.
I live in Sacramento where there are redwoods planted in many private yards and business complex’s. Not only is there zero summer fog it’s 30 – 40 degrees hotter then the coastal areas on a typical summer day. It would appear that redwoods are fairly adaptable.
O/T but we are all hoaxers and cranks apparently, according to my big mate Gav at RC:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/
I am trying to figure out if he is a terminal blogging death spiral and lashing out randomly or whether this is just his normal state. It is quite disturbing to see such unbalanced behaviour IMO.
Historical note: The Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1903.
Implication: Not so many “airports” in the early 20th century.
Until after The Great War most “airfields” were exactly
what the term indicated… dirt or grassy fields where
airplanes took off and landed.
The study is a documentation of the temperature island
changes at airport facilities as they evolved from airfields and
airstrips to concrete then black-topped runways, with most
maturing into complexes with parking lots, transport
depots and modern highways.
There seems to be more than a few biases that would be in
play in any temperature/humidity study of West Coast
airports over time.
Robert (20:18:29)
Robert, Tim Lambert over at the Deltoid blog calls me a liar all the time. In some ways I find that incredibly infantile and puerile, since he never bothers to back up his claim with any facts, it’s just “he’s a liar waa waa waa”.
In some ways I find it a measure of how much I am actually accomplishing. He wouldn’t attack me without evidence in such a virulent and unpleasant way unless I was getting through to him. And I would say the same for you, you wouldn’t falsely accuse me of lying with no evidence at all unless my arguments make you uneasy …
Now, I may well be wrong, I’ve been wrong many times. Heck, I may well be wrong in some of the things I’ve said on this thread. And I have no problem with people pointing out where I’m wrong, I don’t like it, but hey, that’s science. If you find where I’m wrong, tell me.
But I’m an honest man.
Calling someone a liar is something that you shouldn’t do without solid evidence. I’ve called both Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann liars, and I showed exactly where they lied, chapter and verse. Here’s an example, where I list exactly what other people said, and then Gavin’s claims, at Willis Eschenbach (22:54:43).
That’s the difference between an accusation and evidence. For you to claim that I’m a liar based on some random Deltoid bullshit, sorry, that doesn’t work. Just makes you look credulous.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
The faster we can educate other people how to “read between the lines” the faster this charade can be put to an end. Here’s a little example. You can do it with most articles blaming man for his many sins.
See this portion from the article? Notice the “particularly noticeable”? Translate that to be “this is the most difference between any of the airports we were able to find”. They then base the article on that.
Then notice “beginning of the 20th century” and “it was 17 degrees Fahrenheit”. That was when the maximum difference occurred. If the maximum difference would have been in the 1950’s, that would have used that for maximum impact. These are not blind studies as in proper science and statistics!
Would love to get to the actual data and prove my statements above false.
But that will be a rarity. One, takes far too long with no funds to investigate properly. Two, many times the data is not available even if you had the resources. Three, the people behind the stories will never come to you with the data to make it transparent themselves, and if the above statements are true, I don’t blame them, who would turn themselves in. But after seeing this type of data picking and warping, chances are very high this is just another example of the same bending of the truth.
The more you see it, the easier it is to see. Congratulations on becoming a “skeptic”.
As Dr. Richard Feynman said:
Scientists are trained to employ logic to examine and test claims.
( more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-feynman-tufte-princip )
In other words, to be skeptical of untested and unproved claims until you are sure it is true.
To test a claim has become almost impossible but you can still examine the claims and use your logic. It’s the lack of this that is destroying all of science, not just climate science.
“…redwoods have always been thought problematic,” Dawson said, mainly because it’s hard to determine whether the width of a tree ring reflects winter rain, summer fog, temperature, nutrient supply or other factors. “Stable isotope analyses of wood cellulose allows you to pull this data out of the tree ring.”
“Dawson has established that the isotopes of oxygen in a tree reflect whether the water comes in via the leaves from fog, or via the roots from rainwater.”
I would like to have Mr. Dawson explain something for me. Redwood forests are mist forests for much of the year. Their leaf structure is a very effective condensation drip generator, as anyone who has spent any amount of time walking in a foggy redwood grove would know. When the fog blows in they produce their own precipitation, “rain” for the forest floor where, as luck would have it, their roots are located. How, Mr Dawson, can you possibly tell the difference between foliar absorption and root absorption during the same weather event by looking at isotopic oxygen?
Just asking.
Redwoods do rather well in NZ too. Some have been here for well over 100 years doncha know. They seem to do quite well without the fog too. In fact I’m sure we could adopt them all if they are really threatened in California. You know – ‘support our American cousins an’ all that !
“Calling someone a liar is something that you shouldn’t do without solid evidence.”
That is a discussion that the moderators have rather firmly ruled out of bounds. I would be happy to discuss it with you further, but the rules of the forum do not allow it.
aMINO aCIDS iN mETEORITES (19:42:17) :
“Is this another worry that I shouldn’t worry about?
Is Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones too tall?”
Ed ‘Too Tall’ Jones, Medal of Honor Winning pilot, was too tall to qualify to be a pilot. He passed away last year in Boise, Id. A true hero. God bless em all.
California’s coastal fog has decreased significantly over the past 100 years, potentially endangering coast redwood trees dependent on cool, humid summers, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
Uh huh….and since there is a LONGER cycle of the PDO (that goes for many, many decades)…it is reasonable to conclude that this cycle may have something to do with this.
Back when Arnold was decrying “global warming” as causing the horrific fires in Cali a couple of years ago….we were all saying….”No it wasn’t, stupid.”
It is the cold PDO that is causing the subsidence and drier conditions.
Also….perhaps….less fog.
Besides….100 years is a blip in time really….especially, in light of Earth’s actual age.
Get over your concerns. Mother Nature will always find an ingenious way to balance herself out.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Willis Eschenbach (21:31:44) :
Willis I respect your tenacity and your quest for the truth. Bravo….and carry on!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
There are a fair number of sequoias in Scotland that were planted around 160 years ago and have grown well. (Indeed some suggest that as they still have another 800 years ahead of them they will grow taller than their Californian parents). We don’t have any fog to speak of in the summer months.
So let me get this straight.
If there is more fog, it is the fault of global warming.
And if there is less fog, it is the fault of global warming.
I don’t get it.
Gateway Pundit picks up on the hypocrisy:
2009 – Global Warming Causes Foggy Days in San Francisco…
2010 – Global Warming Causes Fog-less Days in San Francisco
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/02/2009-global-warming-causing-more-foggy-days-in-san-francisco-2010-global-warming-causing-fog-less-days-in-san-francisco/
Can I just be mesmorized by the arial photo and not read or get into the substance? I flew into that airport at Arcata. I almost had a job processing redwood chips at the last Pulp Mill in California … probably the last Pulp Mill in the West with a pipe out into the ocean as an ‘effluent system’. Man (or is that ‘Dude’ now), I just missed being bulldozed by ARM’s and precipitously falling real estate values.
There are two kinds of redwoods–the coastal redwoods and the sequoias, which are inland trees in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The inland species lives in a drier, warmer habitat. Just for clarification, it is the coastal redwoods they are talking about. I suspect, but don’t know, it was coastal redwoods planted in Scotland.
I found the fog. Someone parked it outside my window during the night.
Robert (21:54:04) : edit
Dang, I guess we’ll just be forced to discuss the science, hate it when that happens … so what do you think of the claim that we can predict fog on the California coast from:
a) Taking 2 fifty year fog records, one each from Arcata and Monterrey airports, and comparing coastal versus inland temperatures and hours of fog, and
b) Using those two results (N=2), plus other coastal and inland temperature records, to estimate the change in coastal fog over 100 years.
Let’s start with a softball question … if using this procedure we estimate a change in fog of three hours per day as per the study, what would you guess the 95% confidence interval on that would be?
Me, I’d say the 95% CI would be at least ± three hours, but what would I know, I’m a “non-specialist” … what’s your guess?
Bonus question 1 – we haven’t seen the study yet. What are the odds that it won’t contain error estimates on the “three hours per day” at all? I’d say damn high, but again, I’m a n-s …
Doug in Dunedin (21:40:48) :
…In fact I’m sure we could adopt them all if they are really threatened in California. You know – ’support our American cousins an’ all that!
Doug,
We accept your kind offer and will send them straight away,
along with their minders.
Paul Vaughan (15:07:26) – yes, I’m well aware of that. My point was to point out the absurdity of having one claim that global warming causes more fog and another that it causes less. Perhaps you don’t get irony.
I see airport records were used to identify these long term trends in fog. We know that airport traffic has increased dramatically and can continue operating in worse conditions than in the 50’s. Could the warming effect from all those aircraft have had a localized effect.
@ Willis Eschenbach
I’ll be interested to see the paper when it comes out. I feel no need to defend its findings, given I look at the science as a tool to improve our understanding, and not as a contest where the objective is to discredit the other side.
The use of two stations does not have anything to due with the confidence interval, and you wouldn’t calculate your p value using n=2. The number of stations speaks to whether the results of the study are generalizable or not, which has nothing to due with the confidence interval.
Here’s a protip for you: if you want to pass yourself off as scientifically literate, learn to use the terminology correctly.
crosspatch (22:58:37) :
If you were around in the 70’s, it seemed like every year someone would pipe off with ‘Something’ is bad for you. So everyone ate something else, until someone said ‘oh no, that’s not bad for you, this is’. So everyone ate what they were eating before.
Salt is bad for you, eat Sea Salt.
Oh, no, Sea Salt is bad for you, eat Salt.
Eggs are full of cholesterol and will kill you. Don’t eat eggs.
Oh, no, eggs have the good cholesterol, meat has the bad stuff. Eat eggs.
Global warming melting is bad for Earth.
Oh, no, Global warming snowing is bad for Earth.
Global warming no-fog is bad for Earth.
Oh, no, global warming fog is bad for Earth.
See the game?
.
Its the Clean Air Act wot dunnit 😉
Seriously, fogs are also driven by condensation nuclei (pollution, to you and me), and without them it is much harder to produce a good fog. The London pea-soupers (2-yard fogs) are thankfully a thing of the past, but this must affect climate/weather to some extent.
Another reduction was caused by the banning of field burning in the autumn, which used to produce some spectacular fogs underneath high pressure systems. Again, all of this has gone – allowing more warming of the ground, and more evaporation of the ground.
How this Wiki report on pan evaporation rates fits into this, I don’t know. But I can assure you that NW Europe used to have much worse anticyclonic fogs than it does now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_evaporation
.
>>Could the warming effect from all those aircraft have
>>had a localized effect.
Yes indeed – depending on the type of fog involved. A well known way of clearing the fog is to run the aircraft down the runway, and presto, a clear gap for a few minutes. But this probably won’t work with advection fog.
Conversely, on a still and humid night, you can create a fog simply by turning on the runway lights. A little thermic mixing, and away she goes.
.
Robert (00:17:39)
Quick description of science. It is not a tool, it is a method. You know, the “scientific method”. That method works like this:
1. Somebody makes a scientific claim, and publishes it with the data, methods, math, and logic that supports it.
2. Other people try to find fault with the data, methods, math, or logic.
3. If nobody can find fault with the claim or the things that support it, the claim is (provisionally) accepted as scientifically valid. If not, if someone can find fault with it, it is not accepted.
Science is about falsification, what you incorrectly describe as “discrediting the other side”. You don’t want to defend the paper, you just want to credulously believe what it says.
On the other hand, those of us who are scientists want to test it, to check it, to make sure it solid, that the math is correct, that the logic is valid. Only then can we use it to further our understanding. That’s the scientific method.
Your claim that there is no reason to try to test or falsify or discredit or defend papers like this is why we are up to our ears in IPCC-approved pseudoscience and bogus claims … because as long as the claims agree with your preconceptions, folks like you aren’t interested in testing them to see if they are true.
I don’t follow you here. Are you saying that if they determined the relationship between fog and coastal/inland temperatures by studying 100 fifty-year coastal fog records, that the 95% CI on the final result would be the same as in this study, where they only used two fifty-year records? Really? Is that your final answer, or would you like to use one of your lifelines and phone a friend?
PS – As you have brought up the issue of terminology, it is “nothing to do”, not “nothing to due” …
Ralph (02:44:30)
While this is true in some parts of the planet, here on the Left Coast of the US we are looking at sea fogs. For these, the typical condensation nuclei are tiny crystals of NaCl, good old sea salt. Makes for a very corrosive fog, of course, but there’s generally no shortage of condensation nucleii around here …
>>Willis Eschenbach (15:01:57) :
>>From the UC Berkeley press release:
>> he was able to show that frequent coastal fog is almost
>>always associated with a large temperature difference
>>between the coast and inland areas.
Yes, but also associated with a high humidity. The Freemantle Doctor (a sea breeze) comes streaming in at mid-morning in W Australia and can produce a 15oc temperature difference, let alone a paltry 17of difference – but you won’t see any fog.
Why? Because the hot air over the land that is cooled is too dry. I might suggest that a change of land use may also reduce fogs in the situation given here. A coastline full of forests will be a lot more humid than a coastline full of condos and parking lots.
Except for Al Gore’s new condo, of course, that is probably permanently covered in snow.
.
Good point by Daniel H that nearby chardonnay vines are more sensitive than Redwoods to fog reduction. Somebody needs to point out to those Berkely professors that they should get on their bikes and visit their local viticulturist for some realworld information.
Beth Cooper (05:00:50) :
Good point by Daniel H that nearby chardonnay vines are more sensitive than Redwoods to fog reduction. Somebody needs to point out to those Berkely professors that they should get on their bikes and visit their local viticulturist for some realworld information.
Beth, they are not being paid by the viticulturists!!!
Quote: “Using a network of 114 temperature stations along the Pacific Coast, Johnstone and Dawson demonstrated that the coast-inland contrast has decreased substantially …”
Isn’t this just another example of the Urban Heat Island Effect? Couple this with the fact that the temp in the interior of the state could be falling due to the current cooling phase.
As the resident observational expert on fog because I’m a Newfoundlander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog, home of some of the foggiest places in the world, I suggest that when you get warm wet air coming off warm water meeting cold land or land based cold arctic currents you get fog.
Several points. This line of thinking is begging for a PDO graph to try to find a relationship and then maybe a graph of water versus land temperature graph. The current situation is an absolute great experiment because cold arctic air traveled over land while the water was extra hot. Did we have a recent spike in fog? Also, the urban heat island effect could reduce fog. Fog requires the land to cool and make water vapor condense. Heat islands seem to have the larger effect at night retaining heat meaning less fog? Less variation in temperatures between day and night could also mean less fog.
Wasn’t there also a drop or in water vapor over the last century. A tough topic for those that belief CO2 and water vapor create a strong feedback loop.
D. King (19:56:57) :
Problem solved….Next!
D. That is one tres sexy fog machine….. ooohhhh yyyeahhhhh baaayyybbby…….
I wonder, will the good folks at GHCN adjust the temps of the four California stations down to adjust for the increase in warmth caused by less fog, which would of create an anomalous increase in the heat signal?
“I don’t follow you here. Are you saying that if they determined the relationship between fog and coastal/inland temperatures by studying 100 fifty-year coastal fog records, that the 95% CI on the final result would be the same as in this study, where they only used two fifty-year records? Really? Is that your final answer, or would you like to use one of your lifelines and phone a friend?”
Yep, exactly. You’re going to determine the CI according the the number of data points you have for fog/no fog as compared with the temperatures. This will give you a p value for the relationship between fog and delta T AT THE AIRPORTS. Whether the conditions at the airport are representative of conditions elsewhere is a problem of generalization.Perfectly valid issue, but you are not going to address it by calculating a 95% CI, which tells you only about the relationship of your data points to the likely chance distribution.
CI specifically address the problem of random fluctuations in the data that may look like patterns. Using one to try and address a problem of the generalizability of your results makes as much sense as trying to fix a broken windscreen by pouring gasoline on it.
I kinda skimmed the rest of your stuff about “science is.” You really don’t seem like an authority on what “science is.” So why don’t we follow your excellent suggestion and confine our discussion to the paper itself?
Sort of ironic that this morning in the SF bay area is extremely foggy. There was a crash this morning of a twin engine Cessna taking off from Palo Alto airport in the fog. It apparently struck some major power lines about a minute after takeoff.
“Quote: “Using a network of 114 temperature stations along the Pacific Coast, Johnstone and Dawson demonstrated that the coast-inland contrast has decreased substantially …”
Isn’t this just another example of the Urban Heat Island Effect? Couple this with the fact that the temp in the interior of the state could be falling due to the current cooling phase.”
Leaving aside the fact that there is no measurable UHI effect (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/population/article2abstract.pdf), if there were, wouldn’t it tend to increase the coast-inland contrast, not decrease it?
Robert (09:57:48)
Here’s how I see it, Robert. Please explain where you think I’m wrong.
The authors are using two sites (Monterrey and Arcata) to say that fog is related to coastal/inland temperature difference at those two sites by some function “f”, like:
FogHours = f(TempDiff)
However, we know that for those two sites this has an associated confidence interval (CI), so the function is actually
FogHours = f(TempDiff) ± 95%CI
As you say above, this measures the relationship of your data points to the likely chance distribution.
The size of that CI depends on the size of their dataset, which in their case is two fifty year records. If they had more data, of course, the 95%CI would be smaller.
Then they take that formula, and apply it to some other TempDiff data from a new location. However, the CI doesn’t magically disappear. The new formula is
FogHours2 = f(TempDiff2) ± 95%CI
There is, of course, the additional problem that you point out. We don’t know if the function “f” is generalizable to the new TempDiff2 dataset from the new location. The meteorological conditions in the new location may be totally different.
But all that does is to increase the 95%CI of the final result. We now have two sources of error. First, the original formula may not be accurate. Second, the original formula may not be generalizable. Both of these increase the CI of the result (typically in quadrature).
Consider the theoretical case where the result is 100% generalizable, the case where the meteorological conditions are the same in all of the location. Would that make the CI of the final result equal to ± zero?
Of course not, because the final result is only as good as the underlying formula, and it has an inherent 95%CI. Thus, as I started this out by saying, the fact that they only have two fifty-year sites does affect the final CI. It is not the only source of error as you point out, but it is assuredly one source of error.
What am I missing here?
In other words, you couldn’t find anything substantive to say about my ideas, so you make an ad hominem attack by saying that I’m not “an authority” … which perfectly encapsulates the point I’m making in my discussion of what “science is”.
It doesn’t matter if I’m an authority or not. It only matters if I’m right or not. If you think my description is wrong, tell us where, that’s science at work.
But don’t bother us with your speculations about who is “an authority” and who is not, that’s a meaningless attempt to avoid the issues.
Finally, my “excellent suggestion” you referred to above was:
So using that as an excuse to avoid discussing the science doesn’t work.
Fortunately the rising CO2 levels may be providing additional nutrient to the fog-deprived redwoods, helping them to survive the stress.
KW
2009- Global Warming Causes Foggy Days in San Francisco… 2010- Global Warming Causes Fog-less Days in San Francisco
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/02/2009-global-warming-causing-more-foggy-days-in-san-francisco-2010-global-warming-causing-fog-less-days-in-san-francisco/
D. King (23:51:16) :
Doug,
We accept your kind offer and will send them straight away,
along with their minders.
No problem about the trees but the minders are declined – we’ve got more than enough of those here thank you very much.
Doug
For those who would like to see a real study of fog in California, there’s a 105 page study here.
From the “Conclusions”, page 75 …
They also say (ibid):
With fog coming in two climatological regimes and three possible scenarios, my opinion is that this makes it extremely unlikely that we can generalize from two stations to the entire coast … but hey, I’m not “an authority”, what do I know.
Finally, as evidence that this is an honest scientific endeavour, they include the following graphic at the end of the report that shows the uncertainty in their results …
Over to you, Robert …
“With fog coming in two climatological regimes and three possible scenarios, my opinion is that this makes it extremely unlikely that we can generalize from two stations to the entire coast”
Which may very well be true, but it is nothing you can calculate a CI from; that’s an entirely separate problem. As I said above:
“Whether the conditions at the airport are representative of conditions elsewhere is a problem of generalization.Perfectly valid issue, but you are not going to address it by calculating a 95% CI, which tells you only about the relationship of your data points to the likely chance distribution.”
Willis continues:
“Here’s how I see it, Robert. Please explain where you think I’m wrong.”
Happy to. You continue:
“The size of that CI depends on the size of their dataset, which in their case is two fifty year records. If they had more data, of course, the 95%CI would be smaller.”
As long as they have fifty years of records, taken however often they were taken, the CI remains the same. What is being measured in the correlation between fog and delta T. Each point in time where you compare those things affects your confidence interval. More stations will probably add to your knowledge of the distribution of the fog, but at the end of the day, you still have to define a condition of “foggy” or “not foggy,” or “medium foggy” or what have you, and while more stations may allow you to make that distinction more accurately, it’s not going to affect your confidence interval.
You see, the stations are collecting data in parallel, not in series. If you had 200 years of data it would decrease your CI; but 50 years of data from 8 stations instead of 2 does not. Which is not to say 8 stations are not better than two, but it has nothing to do with your chi-square test.
You could treat the stations as if they were independent of one another, which would obliterate the distinction between parallel and series. But that would be a terrible mishandling of the data. It would also have a very small impact on the CI: assuming fog conditions were assessed every six hours, fifty years of records would give you 4 x 365 x 50 data points. I make that 73,000 data points (somebody check my math, please). Your CI is going to be very, very small (which, to reiterate one more time, tells you nothing about other sources of error).
Well, the Save the Redwoods League has long been in the pay of Big Oil: since 1926, in fact, when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., otherwise known as Mr. Standard Oil, gave them $2 million.
Back then the dollar was backed by gold and an ounce of gold was worth $25; today an ounce of gold is about $1000. So, major funding by the original Big Oil.
Hmmm…
Philemon (16:28:15),
Apparently it worked, for my tree was saved! I have a giant Redwood in my back yard, nearly 200 feet tall. And we rarely get any fog in our valley.
It’s the only Redwood tree within several blocks, so it is its own eco system. It’s amazing that it can survive in the middle of a large city. It’s probably healthy due to the extra beneficial CO2 from the nearby freeway. Wait ’till its cousins in the Santa Cruz mountains find out. They’re gonna be jealous, even though they get plenty of fog.
Contrary to Michael Mann’s belief system, the climate changes constantly. So do CO2 levels, and temperature. And natural climate change has been going on forever; it caused the LIA and the MWP.
I don’t recommend planting a Redwood tree to anyone, though. Nothing grows under those suckers, and they rain down little pinecones and debris 24/7/365/2000+.
Smokey, I’m glad your redwood is doing well, even with debris, but, given the Rockefeller M.O., there might well be lots and lots of light sweet crude under the Redwood National Park. Maybe not. Maybe Laurance thought it would be a nice money-making resort.
As a general rule, the more land locked up, the better, as far as the Rockefeller trusts are concerned.
And, along comes the MSM with one more scary story:
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-cyber-attack17-2010feb17,0,803757,full.story
Robert (14:39:11), thanks for your reply:
First, you say:
Absolutely not. They are comparing degrees of temperature difference inland/coastal with HOURS of fog. They are not defining any condition such as “medium foggy”, thats a total misconception.
Instead, they are collecting pairs of individual data points, of the form
Coastal/Inland Difference, Fog Hours
7°C, 11 hours
9°C, 21 hours
4°C, 3 hours
17°C, 24 hours
and the like. Note that it doesn’t matter if these are in temporal order or not. The are just pairs of data points, not ordered pairs. Because these are individual pairs, each one adds information.
Now, what they are trying to do is estimate the function that relates those two variables FOR THE ENTIRE WEST COAST. Not just for one site, not for two sites, but for the whole coast.
To get a function that more closely matches the actual reality FOR THE ENTIRE WEST COAST, there’s two things that they can do:
1. Use longer records from each station, to include data from different temporal climate regimes.
2. Use more stations, to include data from different spatial climate regimes.
Both of these will make the final function more closely represent reality.
If your claim were true, that additional records don’t change the CI, then they could just use one station record to represent the entire coast, and the confidence interval for that record would be the CI no matter which station was chosen … which makes no sense at all.
“If your claim were true, that additional records don’t change the CI, then they could just use one station record to represent the entire coast,”
No. Not every problem with a study shows up in the CI: all the CI tells you is the impact of random variation on the data set. If you had one station, you could have an extremely narrow CI. BUT the results, just as you say, would be impossible to generalize to the whole coast. But the generalizablity of a study is a different issue from the CI. A study can have a p value of 10^-900 and be total crap.
I hope that’s clear.
Thanks, Robert. I think we might be talking about different things. From Eric Weiss’s “Mathworld”, a definition of the confidence interval:
Note that anything that makes the result more uncertain widens the confidence interval. You keep talking about “generalizability”. But if the study is not generalizable, when it is applied to a general situation the results will have a larger error … or in other words, it will have a wider confidence interval.
This study is a good example. There is a confidence interval for the results of a single station. This is how well the function is able to characterise the hours of fog compared to the temperature difference between the coast and the inland for that station.
However, there is another, separate confidence interval for the application of the function to the entire coast. This is a combination of how well the function applies to a single station, and how representative that station is of the coast as a whole.
You call this something like “generalizability”. But it is a confidence interval, just like the one for an individual station, except perforce it is wider. At the end of the day, they say that their method claims a 3 hour/day decrease in fog. But it might really be 2 hours/day, or 4 hours/day. For it to be honest science, we need to be able to say “There is a 95% chance that the true change is between 1 and 4 hours/day decrease”, or something along those lines. That’s the CI of the study as a whole, and that’s the number I’m interested in.
I’m still waiting for this study to come out, not just the press release, so we can see how they’ve handled this question. I doubt very much that you can accurately model the entire coast with any accuracy using a function developed from just two stations …
“You call this something like “generalizability”. But it is a confidence interval, just like the one for an individual station, except perforce it is wider.”
No. Nothing in the characteristics of the standard distribution will tell you whether or not the results at x sites are representative of the whole coast. Imagine if there were. You put a hundred stations within ten miles of the northern border. All done, problem solved? Of course not. Generalizability and being able to reject the null hypothesis are two different things.
Generalizability, of course, is not a concept I made up just now. It’s a basic element in evaluating all scientific research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_validity.
I like to return to a claim you made above:
“3. If nobody can find fault with the claim or the things that support it, the claim is (provisionally) accepted as scientifically valid. If not, if someone can find fault with it, it is not accepted.”
That’s not an accurate description of how science works, because people are always going to find fault. People will find fault by saying the claim is contrary to the Bible, or what the voices tell them, or because the universe is made of green cheese. Invalid objections, according to your model, would bring the process of scientific discovery to a halt.
So we have to have a test for objections, as well as for claims. A good objection, like a good claim, is based in evidence, logically consistent, accurately reflects the original claim, and so on. If a claim is addressed in a responsible fashion with good evidence, repeating that objection is not a valid objection. That, essentially, is the scientific consensus: not necessarily a body of beliefs, but a body of objections raised and answered, such that if you want to go over them again, you need something new.
“Science is about falsification, what you incorrectly describe as “discrediting the other side”. You don’t want to defend the paper, you just want to credulously believe what it says.”
Science is also about reserving judgment until you have all the facts. Nowhere did I say I believed everything (or anything) in the paper. You attribute such a belief purely because you identify both the paper and myself with a pro-AGW “team” and conceive of my role and protecting and advocating for that team. But that’s not science. Science, a wise man said, is not about proving yourself right, it’s a way to become right.
So there’s no reason I should defend this paper. Why don’t you defend it, and I’ll question it? It would be a good exercise for our skeptical faculties. The test of skepticism is questioning things you want to believe are true, not attacking those that you don’t.
This sums up the whole AGW mentality:
1. Climate is not supposed to change. Ever. (Didn’t the Hockey Stick prove that?)
2. Any change is due to human CO2 emissions. *
3. Any increase is bad.
4. Any decrease is bad.
5. The sky is falling. The sky is falling.
6. The planet is going to die.
7. When it dies, we have no one to blame for it but ourselves.
8. The planet would be better off without human activity.
9. Mea culpa, mea culpa… It is all our fault.
10. Humans are evil.
11. If humans are to be allowed to remain, we need to go back to an agrarian society; pre-agrarian would be best.
I adhere to The Tugster, Tug McGraw’s, philosophy:
[Note: He didn’t really say, “So, let’s go have a beer.” I added that to make it sound more homey. But it WAS in keeping with his attitude. The Tugster would have approved the addition.]
* Isn’t it odd that the really negative human activity – land use – is given a pass, and only CO2 is targeted as evil?
Fog is back with a vengeance today. Of course, summer fog is of greater interest; supposedly that’s what keeps the sapling growing during the rain-free months, generally April through October.
Smokey , I have a redwood growing in a very large pot. It’s about 4 years old and about the size of a christmas tree now. I originally found it growing on the edge of the driveway , when it was about 5 inches high. I love walking through redwood forest, but there is concern about whether we really want one of those monsters growing in the yard. So I’ll keep it the pot until it gets too big, then not sure what I’ll do . . .
Robert (08:50:49), I think we are at least approaching agreement.
I return to the definition of a confidence interval:
Note that there is nothing in there about the “characteristics of a standard distribution”. Sometimes we estimate the confidence interval from the math of a standard distribution. But we can just as well estimate it by comparing our results to reality. All it is is an estimate of how accurate our results are. In this case, as you point out, it depends on a variety of things like where our test stations are located. If the hundred stations are within ten miles of the border, our results will be less accurate.
But that does not mean that we cannot estimate the range within which we are say 95% confident that our results are accurate. This can be done by a variety of mathematical methods.
I agree. However, that is a separate issue, one which does not make it impossible to calculate a CI for a study such as the fog study. For example, the citation I gave above shows that we have a host of shorter than fifty year fog records along the coast. It would be trivially easy to compare the results of their whiz-bang formula to those records to determine just how accurate their method is.
Care to guess whether they did that or not? My guess is not, we’ll see when the paper is published.
I assumed the part about the objections being valid and verifiable.
However, you invalidly extend this to the idea of “scientific consensus”, and define that consensus in a way which is not how it is commonly used. In climate science, the claimed “consensus” is like the “consensus” of those who do not believe in evolution … that is to say, a group of people who all refuse to look at the data and the results.
You know, the ‘fog blanket’ needs rising warm air inland to ‘pull it in’ from the ocean. We get some of the best fogs when it’s warmer inland…
So maybe “less fog” is just saying “less inland warmth”.
It also forms over the ocean from a water / air temperature difference, so unless you have the ocean currents thing really well worked out, you don’t know it there is a net heat change, or just a rearrangement.
*******
Smokey (17:07:29) :
Philemon (16:28:15),
Apparently it worked, for my tree was saved! I have a giant Redwood in my back yard, nearly 200 feet tall. And we rarely get any fog in our valley.
*******
A pic of such a giant would be nice. There was a coastal redwood (not an inland sequoia) in one of the wine-country establishments north of San Fran when I was there. Seemed well inland of the natural groves & out of the fog belt. It was open grown — very wide branch-spread w/a huge trunk prb’ly 12′ in dia but just under 200′.