From the “temperature bias only goes one way department” and the University of Montana:
Mountain system artificially inflates temperature increases at higher elevations
MISSOULA – In a recent study, University of Montana and Montana Climate Office researcher Jared Oyler found that while the western U.S. has warmed, recently observed warming in the mountains of the western U.S. likely is not as large as previously supposed.
His results, published Jan. 9 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, show that sensor changes have significantly biased temperature observations from the Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL) station network.
More than 700 SNOTEL sites monitor temperature and snowpack across the mountainous western U.S. SNOTEL provides critical data for water supply forecasts. Researchers often use SNOTEL data to study mountain climate trends and impacts to mountain hydrology and ecology.
Oyler and his co-authors applied statistical techniques to account for biases introduced when equipment was switched at SNOTEL sites in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s.
His revised datasets reduced the biases to reveal that high-elevation minimum temperatures were warming only slightly more than minimum temperatures at lower elevations.
“Observations from other station networks clearly show that the western U.S. has experienced regional warming,” Oyler said, “but to assess current and future climate change impacts to snowpack and important mountain ecosystem processes, we need accurate observations from the high elevation areas only covered by the SNOTEL network. The SNOTEL bias has likely compromised our ability to understand the unique drivers and impacts of climate change in western U.S. mountains.”
###
Co-authors on the paper “Artificial Amplification of Warming Trends Across the Mountains of the Western United States” include UM researchers Solomon Dobrowski, Ashley Ballantyne, Anna Klene and Steve Running. It is available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/2014GL062803/.
Awesome!
Reblogged this on Catholic Glasses and commented:
Lying in Weather Reporting is common place and shamelessly just like the Global Financiers want it. Pure Evil.
You sound insane.
On the contrary.
no more insane than you do claiming CO2 controls the weather/climate… actually less so in fact …
I have never said a single word regarding how “CO2 controls the weather/climate”.
It is curious how much paranoia one finds around here… just about as much as one finds among the warmist cults. Granted the paranoia here is nowhere near as violent as with that bunch of nuts.
In any case, the comment was meant to be friendly. You two sound crazy. Tone it down for your own good.
@Brute, you sound sanctimonious
Hey Brute “It is curious how much paranoia one finds around here… just about as much as one finds among the warmist cults. Granted the paranoia here is nowhere near as violent as with that bunch of nuts.”
Yes, I agree with that. Some people here in WUWT are sounding more and more like warmist cultists but on the opposite pole.
Maybe they should pull back a little.
When biases kicks in, for or against anything, it’s the truth that suffers.
CG … you have it right … those others are uninformed or misinformed. Which means Liberal.
Thanks
Hopefully Ted Cruz will put some science back into science in the US.
Damn your political ads.
No ad, he’s just been appointed.
Ted Cruz – a soccer player; a stand-up comic; a venerable librarian; or – what?
Auto,
from East of the Pond (And not up with the latest meteoritic presumed-politicos on the west of said Pond. Sorry. Ish.)
Ted Cruz is a senator from Texas just named chair of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, where he will oversee NASA and science programs. He’s an outspoken climate skeptic. In your terms it would be out with the Greens and in with reality.
Actual numbers mysteriously missing from this press release. Here they are from the abstract:
With artifacts removed, the network’s 1991–2012 minimum temperature trend decreases from +1.16 °C decade−1 to +0.106 °C decade−1 and is statistically indistinguishable from lower elevation trends. Moreover, longer-term widely used gridded climate products propagate the spurious temperature trend, thereby amplifying 1981–2012 western US elevation-dependent warming by +217 to +562%.
Wow! In other words, 91% of the previously reported trend was spurious.
What’s an order of magnitude between friends? 1.16 to 0.106??? Holy cow Batman!
Nice to see some audits being done. As is obvious from the above corrections a lot more audits are needed.
Hopefully new Congressional oversight from both houses will get NASA. NOAA and NWS off of their current political scaremongering and back to doing unbiased science. Now that a skeptic (who likes proof) is running Senate oversight maybe we’ll turn that corner. I have a dream of uncorrupted data being produced from my tax dollars…
Holy Bat! Cow-Man!
If I may . . . .
Auto
Total house cleaning at NASA is necessary. Goodby Gavin. Anything else is insanity
Only missed it by one order of magnitude, Chief!
Maxwell Smart
Now that means you either are as old as me or you’ve been watching very old TV. Missed it by that much 🙂
Would you believe….
[Snip. Fake email. ~mod.]
If this guy keeps it up, he’ll be a WINO (Warmunist In Name Only).
Post-modern climate science in action. This does not end well for anyone. USGS administrators should be ashamed.
Correction: Not a USGS run network. Apologies to USGS.
It is a USDA/NRCS network.
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snow/
Picture of a Montana SNOWTEL site in summer 2014.
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/photo_contest/images/t7_full.jpg
Looks like they had a forest fire through there. I hope they took note of that.
Hey George, what do you bet they left all the readings taken during the fires in the data set.
Better scenery than we have inside London’s M25 Orbital.
But, maybe, some of the wildlife is a little less welcoming?
Auto, happily ensconced in a warm house in light rain!
How very thoughtful of the USDA to protect their instrumentation in a wind-proof, light-proof tin-hat greenhouse! The Weather Service could learn a few tricks from them on siting instruments to induce bias.
USGS administrators should be FIRED.
Fixed it.
There needs to be consequences.
We need a few press releases stating that so-and-so, who’s research has been proven to be fraudulent, has been fired, is under investigation for misuse of public funds, and has been deemed unfit for scientific research at any future point in time, and is banned from holding any government funded position.
jimmaine commented on
I help businesses deploy design and design data management systems. It usually involves getting the crusty veterans to use new computer things that sometimes they just don’t see the need for.
As part of the discussions on options for a successful deployment, I suggest that sometimes proper motivations are required, and that your typical design guy is a smart fellow, and learns quick enough.
I use to suggest taking the biggest complainer out in the parking lot in front of all the windows and shooting him, you usually only have to shoot one of two for everyone to get the idea. But I have mellowed with age, so I now suggest tazing them, seeing them flopping around wetting themselves should be plenty of positive motivation.
“applied statistical techniques to account for biases ”
WHAT???? No models??? Then the study has to be fubared.
[Snip. Fake email. ~mod.]
In a way it’s kinda fun watching others discover what we’ve known for years… that claims of accuracy, precision, and confidence are laughable.
Warming? What warming?
It is man-made warming! Cut the CO2!
Buy more bird-choppers and solar panels!
[Snip. Fake email. ~mod.]
One site. /sarc
Does anyone else wonder if this same bias is also in all the other high altitude station data?
Yep. Wondering also why the AGW temperature anomalies seem to be inversely proportional to the population density.
Well Pierre found someone else wondering, over at http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/12/university-of-augsburg-44-year-veteran-meteorologist-calls-climate-protection-ridiculous-a-deception/
Interviewed was meteorologist Klaus Hager. He was active in meteorology for 44 years and now has been a lecturer at the University of Augsburg almost 10 years. He is considered an expert in weather instrumentation and measurement.
One reason for the perceived warming, Hager says, is traced back to a change in measurement instrumentation. He says glass thermometers were was replaced by much more sensitive electronic instruments in 1995. Hager tells the SZ
” For eight years I conducted parallel measurements at Lechfeld. The result was that compared to the glass thermometers, the electronic thermometers showed on average a temperature that was 0.9°C warmer. Thus we are comparing – even though we are measuring the temperature here – apples and oranges. No one is told that.” Hager confirms to the AZ that the higher temperatures are indeed an artifact of the new instruments.
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.Dm2Z36NY.dpuf
Not only compromised our ability to understand the climate in western US, but in the entire world. That is the problem of not being honest with empirical data. Now we don’t know at what extent temperatures have changed, then we cannot reach any conclusion about what drives the climate.
I can .. it’s snowing and about 20 F… It is January after all, and not the balmy, sultry tropics. Outside of calling it the warmest year on record, last July was cold, it snowed on May 11, 18 F and it has been the coldest winter already that anyone can remember. When records won’t do, crops will. No tomatoes last year. That tells you a lot about night time lows.
rish,
Your comment could be improved with some sort of geographic tag. I live just east of the crest of the WA Cascade Mountains (SNOTEL sites up the valley a few miles) and had great crops of tomatoes and summer squash – freshly melted snow helped.
You do realise what lower crop yields due to the cold in the warmest year ever will be spun into?
Will it be the same as global warming causes it to snow more? Or maybe it causes a polar vortex? Once upon a time I knew where the growing line for tetra quarto kali was.
Ah, not so. You just need to look at the actual rate of change at the actual station.
These are day to day derivative averaged for a full year, for min and max daily temp for the area listed.
Poles N/S >66Lat
http://www.science20.com/files/images/n-s_poles.png
N/S 23>66 Lat
http://www.science20.com/files/images/northern_continents.png
http://www.science20.com/files/images/southern_continents.png
Africa
http://www.science20.com/files/images/af_0.png
Australia
http://www.science20.com/files/images/au.png
Eurasia
http://www.science20.com/files/images/ea.png
South America
http://www.science20.com/files/images/sa.png
Continental US
http://www.science20.com/files/images/us.png
Global
http://www.science20.com/files/images/global_1.png
Then this is the single day derivative averaged by day for an area, then the slope of this daily change is measured from the ~day of max warming to max cooling, and max cooling to max warming (spanning April to Oct to the following April). This is global stations
http://www.science20.com/sites/all/modules/author_gallery/uploads/543663916-global.png
When you start to dive in, you can link the changes in the minimum temp annual derivative(you can see some of that in these charts), to an unusual change in Seasonal temps at the regional station level, not a global change. There might be a small trend in the background of these regional changes, but the magnitude will be limited by the regional changes being responsible for most of the change in GAT.
You might want to write this up a bit more thoroughly. Y axis is °F/day ? And the description of the last graph.
I have written about the basic process in a number of blogs here http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds
Yes, Y axis is the annual average of the daily value in °F/day. This value is then averaged with the other stations in a particular area. Again think of this as the temp change at the station, not a field. All we actually know is what the station measures. If you want to get an idea what surface stations actually recorded, I think I’m the only one giving you that. Everyone else is using the measurements as input into a temperature model of the surface. Now cue Steven jumping in with
Yes Steven you are right, everything is a model, but models do have differing levels of abstraction, I wanted to see what the stations measured, I wanted to understand why the temp drops so fast at dusk. So I got the data and went to work. I offer that work to anyone who might be interested in those same questions. And I do think the way I’ve looked at the surface data has something new and important to add to this discussion.
The concept that evolved into the last graph is discussed here
http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds/analysis_night_time_cooling_based_ncdc_station_record_data-115410
But instead of doing it all by hand I created code to do it on whatever area I want.
All of the aggregated data used to create all of these charts, and the code that I use to process surface data is at source forge, the url in my name above.
Thanks Mi Cro. I wanted to do something similar but I lack the programming skills to deal with such a large amount of data.
My approach was to be something slightly different. The rate for each station would be estimated from the difference in days of consecutive years and smoothed over 12 months.
I would have also found the median for each date rather than the average. You’re only assuming that the the spread is random enough that the middle sites are the ones where the local effects are at a minimum, not that they cancel each other out.
And put up a sum (or integrated) plot.
While not all the same, I have a lot of data in csv files on the earth sliced, cubed and chunked into various pieces by day, and annual average of daily change, plus averages for each station and other goodies.
Url in my name.
Hmm.. One of Germany’s leading meteorologists has discovered something very similar :
“Warming an artifact of new instrumentation
One reason for the perceived warming, Hager says, is traced back to a change in measurement instrumentation. He says glass thermometers were was replaced by much more sensitive electronic instruments in 1995. Hager tells the SZ (my emphasis):
For eight years I conducted parallel measurements at Lechfeld. The result was that compared to the glass thermometers, the electronic thermometers showed on average a temperature that was 0.9°C warmer. Thus we are comparing – even though we are measuring the temperature here – apples and oranges. No one is told that.”
Hager confirms to the AZ that the higher temperatures are indeed an artifact of the new instruments.”
– See more at: http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.jD1tQycP.dpuf
I have noticed a difference between electronic sensors and mercury-in-glass maximum thermometers. The electronic probes consistently read 0.2-0.5C higher, tending towards the larger difference in summer. Used to think the probes were more sensitive, now I wonder. It would certainly lead one to think that older temperatures should be warmed, not cooled, if any “adjustments” are to be made to the long-term record.
Another factor that Anthony documented in his surface stations work was that many of the new electronic sensors were sited much closer to buildings than the old stations they replaced. This was done to reduce the amount of cable and trenching required, but it also introduced warming bias. The new sensors were now closer to buildings, asphalt, and concrete. How ironic if the new stations were used as justification for even more upward adjustment of temperatures.
The new MMTS electronic instruments are supposed to introduce a “cooling” bias and therefore the previous temperatures have been adjusted down to compensate. MMTS produces a cooling bias in the maximum temperature of about 0.4C and a warming bias in the minimum of about 0.3C, so the net impact is to introduce a cooling bias of 0.1C or more. This is adjusted out by the NCDC through the pairwise homogenization adjustment.
It is actually the opposite then?
BINGO. Deliberately so, too.
This is why temperature data is now nearly useless.
[Snip. Fake email. ~ mod.]
This confirms my long held opinion that anyone who tries to do a study based on temperature data is looking at data that has error bars of at least 0.5°C. In other words, disregard all conclusions based on a fraction of a degree.
The sensors are different. Actually one reason for suspecting bias in these sensors is that the trends in SNOTEL and USHCN differ (higher in SNOTEL).
Do you think adjustmens are warranted her Illis?
rooter commented
I think if you look at how the temp at a station changes from one day to the next, since it’s referencing it self, you don’t change it.
Now maybe to do a better job of maintaining calibration of your thermometers to a calibration standard would be a good idea, like any commercial lab would do.
mpainter:
Why 0.5? Why not 2 degrees? Or 3?
Mi Cro would not adjust for sensor change. Even if the sensors are different and give breakpoint changes.
The reason? Then station refers to itself.
???
Indeed.
rooter commented on
Boy, you sure are a deep thinker rooter, what should I do now, you seem to have me pinned into a corner I can’t get out of!
There feel better?
A sensor change on a day to day basis looks just like a weather event at a station, and since in larger areas weather becomes a local event, a sensor change is nothing but a single blip that gets averaged out by all of the other sensors in that area that did not get changed. And then the very next day, the new sensor goes about recording min and max temps.
Day to day processing is also more tolerant of UHI, imagine a sensor in a field, and then over a few days that field gets turned into a parking lot. Over this week, there will be a large change in absolute temps, so there will be a disturbance in the temp data at that week, but in the US there’s a couple thousands stations, again it looks like weather to that single station. After the parking lot is there, there will be a step, and then a new range of min and max, max will be higher, min will be higher, and that station will settle into a new min max range.
Plus lots of station changes appear to come with new station numbers, so in that case it will be a whole new series.
On the other hand I could assume I 50 years later knows why a station changed it’s daily temps, and decide that I know more than the people who were monitoring that station, and just add my own correction to it, that’ll make it better!
rooter, did you know that when you look at the global average temperature trend, that much of the changes in the trend since the 70’s is from large regional changes in min temp only? No large changes in max temp, just changes in min temp, did you know that? And did you know that these regional changes at the continent level happens in different years! Also when you average the day to day change in min temp, since 1940 the average daily change to min temp is -0.097F, and for max temps it’s 0.001F, average temp -0.00035F. That’s the change in temps as measured by 95 million surface station readings. I bet you didn’t know that.
Want to check my work (follow the url in my name)? rooter, you seem like a smart up and comer, someone destine to make a name for yourself (though I might have picked a better name to go down in history with), why don’t you get my code and show me how it ought to be done!
Country Towns in Australia show a similar trend in the maximums. eg.
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=080023&p_nccObsCode=36&p_month=13
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=076031&p_nccObsCode=36&p_month=13
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=075031&p_nccObsCode=36&p_month=13
More from Notrickszone :
http://notrickszone.com/2015/01/13/weather-instrumentation-debacle-analysis-shows-0-9c-of-germanys-warming-may-be-due-to-transition-to-electronic-measurement/#sthash.YkbfbTwN.dpbs
And yet more :
http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.2vPqSlyz.dpbs
All the biases tend to be to the warm side. Just once I’d like to see an error that led to us reading cold. It would be bad news for the climate but such very good news for the integrity of the climate scientists.
It’s just not funny.
But SNOTEL is.
MCourtney,
ROFL! Um. So, the scientists found: In a recent study, University of Montana and Montana Climate Office researcher Jared Oyler found that while the western U.S. has warmed, recently observed warming in the mountains of the western U.S. likely is not as large as previously supposed.
Translation: the instruments are biased hot, reality is cooler. I think that speaks well of the “integrity of the climate scientists,” don’t you?
So we are reading hot. Reality is cooler. Agreed.
Funny how we never read cold and find out it actually has been worse than we thought.
The biases in the instruments exist only because they are allowed to exist “undetected”. Why?
Because of the biases of the scientists.
Were the instruments biased (randomly) to confirm “Sceptic Beliefs” they would be checked and the error detected – corrected. That happens, it seems.
But the bias warm of the instruments (random) is never doubted by the unsceptical scientists.
I think we are speaking at cross-purposes.
And SNOTEL still makes me laugh.
Brandon,
It speaks well of the co-authors of this paper from University of Montana. It does not speak (well or other wise) for the ‘integrity of the climate scientists’ in any sense beyond the 4 co-authors of this paper.
MCourtney,
Well … so what’s the fuss?
Er … well if we read cold, that would mean that the proper adjustment would be in the up direction. Surely you don’t mean we read cold and “worse than we thought” is colder?
lol. Ok, here we have an instance of climate researchers based out of Missoula, MT — which is like the Berkeley of the Rockies — identifying an instrument bias which has previously made it appear that MORE warming has happend in the Western US than previously thought. And still here you are complaining about researcher bias causing them to look the other way.
Mac the Knife,
Yeah, that line reasoning of works real well when the topic is U. of E. Anglia, doesn’t it.
@Brandon
If you are complaining about generalization, you are correct. In fact, I’ll go further and say that most climate scientists are on the correct side of the “debate” (ie, away from any form of propaganda, warmist or otherwise). They don’t often speak up, true, but it is easy to demand they stand up. The fact is that their jobs and livelihoods are on the line. It is them, the majority of climate scientists, who are the true and ultimate target of the politically-motivated intimidation campaigns that ask for “deniers” to be killed, imprisoned, silenced, etc. Or, in even simpler words, the 97% consensus is an artifact meant to gag the field and not the tourists around here.
Brandon,
ROLF! I was thinking more of ‘nature tricks’ and the little ” I’ll Of Mann “…. But what the heck? If you’ve seen one pal reviewed example of ‘climate science’ that speaks (well?…. um, no.) fell of climatologists, you’ve seen Yamal!
Brute,
I agree with you, but let’s make no mistake: it is a trust thing on my part. I don’t actually know anything about anyone’s motivations or true thoughts. On an issue this potentially important, I can’t let my trust be a matter of faith. So I read the science. Crunch my own numbers. The arguments and data make more sense than the critiques and arguments against. That’s pretty much my position in a nutshell. It’s not real comfy, I tell ya’.
Right there is one of those arguments which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me once I dig into it. I’m no dummy, I took org. behavior in school and did quite well — fascinating class — but the kind of powerful groupthink conspiracy you propose would just not be so … inept … in my view. Models would “agree” with “actuals” more often than not.
There is a rich history of keeping garbage science out of major journals. That system has a track record of working more often than not. Look around you. What do you see? Stuff that works more often than not. Things our fairly recent ancestors would have called magic, even sorcery.
Our success as a species is not an accident. Fortuitous in many ways, but still we have done it. Science, math, religion, the arts, all those things working together. I have a lot of trouble believing that the wheels suddenly fell off the wagon when Al Gore made a movie. I don’t have trouble believing that film pissed a lot of people off.
[Snip. Fake email. ~ mod.]
Mac the Knife,
Well yeah, that was one of the emails illegally obtained from CRU, so we’re pretty much thinking the same thing.
Brandon, homogenisation has been going on for a while while something like this has only come to light recently.
They detect a break point and adjust data by a tenth of degree C with no documented change to the site and using neighbouring stations 100 km away, but they missed a false trend of a degree of magnitude off for 10 years, and there was a historical reason for it! Or better still, something that should have been checked 10 years ago.
Mac the Knife, Honest are the authors, I would somewhat expect that from people that live in so called fly over country but it make me wonder if the authors thought out what such a paper might do to their careers, in the past the warmest come down hard on those whom point out the emperor has no clothes.
@Brandon
I speak about peer pressure in academic circles from my own experience. No need to research it. I know where some of the bodies are buried. Careers have been made and careers have been destroyed many, many times since I can remember on absolutely no scientific or academic grounds whatsoever.
Climate science is not my field so I don’t speak here out of personal experience. Rather, I speak from what colleagues tell me. And what they say I have experienced myself, that is, blocking of funding/grants, dismissal of manuscripts, barring from promotion, etc, etc. It not only sounds familiar. It is an exact repeat of what has happened quite a few times before… and will continue happen in other fields. Just as I am confident that climate hysteria will pass, I am also confident that cyclical trends of intolerance will continue to hit the academic world. It’s a human thing… and the vanity of the intellect only adds fuel to it.
Granted, and in any case, climate science is not the only field that _today_ is tightly governed by this sort of out-of-control zealotry. However, it is rightly the most notorious because some of its members have pushed their way into politics and are causing a hugely disproportional great deal of harm that is still to be concretely justified. Promises, yes, predictions, yes, realities, not a single one. Not one. Consider this. Not one prediction has come to pass. Not-a-single-one.
Robert B,
What is “this”. The E. Anglia email breach?
Where does this “should” come from? The reason we do science is because we are not omniscient. I do think it is silly that someone thought to install a/c outlets next to the thermometer in the parking lot. Credit where credit is due to Anthony for leading that charge. But jeez. It just piles and piles on … what thread is this … yup, this is the correct thread:
Here we have an instance of consensus climatologists figuring out something which was wrong, the adjustment needs to be made to the cool side of things rather than the warm, and you guys cannot get off the narrative.
Knowing when to give it a rest looks reasonable to people. Bellyaching about everything, especially when it’s something that goes the way you think it should, is not exactly credible behavior.
Seriously, why are we even talking about Jones, Briffa and Mann right now? Why the referendum on the homogenization process? Why were those subjects introduced into this discussion when the topic of this post was climatologists doing what you would otherwise demand they do if you’d caught the mistake first, not them?
Don’t you get it what tossing out red herrings indicates?
Brandon, this is not funny any more. The ‘this’ refers to the topic of the post. Don’t answer, just think about it, why are you questioning me insisting that scientists should check their work?
Brute,
I must answer because I am not insisting that scientists should check their work. Do you have an argument which is not some form of non sequitur?
Brandon Gates
So, you ARE claiming that scientists do NOT need to check their work? For the writers AND the anonymous few who review their work TO BE HELD be accountable in public for their errors – whether deliberate or accidental when THEIR publications ARE being used to decide the health and lives and well-being of billions worldwide?
RACookPE1978,
Why would I go say a stupid thing like that? In fact, where exactly is it that I said such a preposterously idiotic thing?
These researchers at U of M in Missoula did exactly the proper thing: identified a warm bias in the SNOTEL network and against the alleged conspiracy to make everything warm and toasty as possible, published the results of their work showing that warming trends at higher altitudes in the Western US have probably been overstated.
Which is what honest scientists are supposed to do. Don’t you agree? I certainly do. So what’s the major source of confusion here?
RACookPE1978,
Well scratch my previous response, I found my error: I must answer because I am not insisting that scientists should check their work.
Should have been “should NOT check their work”. Dratted double-negatives …. [wanders away blushing]
There’s more going on than that! The question is whether the main climate honchos incorporate this into their theory, and whether it tempers the doomsayers. It probably won’t.
Brute,
Did you keep any of the shovels?
Well guess what, we’re not going to become robots any time soon. I see you touch on that below.
I don’t share your confidence about climate hysteria. Hysteria does not pass, it will not go away. I am confident the planet is warming and that we’re doing most of it. The physics and math I understand make sense.
All else about the academic peer-pressure I get. I believe you, I’ve done my time in and around labs (been a while, too long maybe), I know the egos and the pressures involved and it isn’t pretty. And yet year after year in all sciences, good work gets done. I don’t see climate science any differently, I see very little compelling reason to do so — but I do watch it more closely than others because the stakes, and therefore pressures, are obviously quite high.
Flat out not true in my view. You’re not looking in the right places, or your standard of prediction is so high that the success has not been achieved. I can’t help you there, only you can make those decisions for yourself.
Please provide a list of the predictions that have come to pass if you can find any. There was a time when many predictions were made in very specific terms (e.g. there will be food riots in London before the end of the 20th century, the Arctic will be ice-free during the summer, etc, etc, etc). Details are important, please don’t miss any of those.
Please provide also a list of the predictions that have not come to pass and explain in detail why they didn’t. Surely, if the science is there (as you “believe”), explanations will be available to you.
I never had “any of the shovels”. I know where the bodies are buried because they belong to fallen colleagues. There is no humor whatsoever in your remark.
Brute,
I’ll start with the most important one:
http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
Arrhenius estimated 5-6°C/2xCO2 averaged across all zones of latitude. AR5 puts the ECS estimate at 1.5°C to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling, same range as FAR, so the 1896 estimate has held up rather well.
Observed CO2 levels have risen, and per prediction so have temperatures, since 1896. Given that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and knowing that other variables exist in the system, at this point all I have demonstrated is that Arrhenius’ predictions were not inconsistent with subsequent observation.
There is much to discuss in this one topic alone; 100 posts such as this wouldn’t cover it. I’m happy to take it further in stepwise fashion by way of responding to specific questions.
The Arctic Ocean is not ice free in summer. Hurricane frequency and intensity has not increased appreciably. ENSO, PDO, AMO and other quasi-periodic internal variabilites continue to defy prediction in terms of changeover timing and duration.
These predictions and many others like them “fail” because simulating an entire planet is not as easy as AOGCM critics would have us believe. It doesn’t help that folks have widely differing expectations, therefore dissimilar standards of acceptable performance.
It was a crass remark, I apologize.
Anthony,
A little help here, should I file this under “Logic Fails” or “From the Department of Unintentional Humor”? Perhaps both ….
Brandon Gates says:
Yeah…I was sort of wondering the same thing. Perhaps the real issue is that the interpretation only goes one way around here: When scientists discover a way in which the temperatures are biased warm and they have to do a cooling correction, this confirms what people here always knew to be the case. On the other hand, when scientists discover a way in which the temperatures are biased cool and they have to do a warming correction, that just shows how the scientists manipulate the data to get the result they want and that such corrections can’t be trusted.
joeldshore,
Roughly I agree with you, but it’s even more tangled than that. First off I’m not entirely sure everyone here is on the same page as to which direction the correction needs to be made (down). I’ve seen that kind of thing happen before:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/21/surprise-sea-water-salinity-matters-to-sea-level-on-long-time-scales/
Hard as I tried, I could not get folk to see that the paper’s conclusions were not based on models, but observations, and that the point of the study was to compare how models do against reality.
Next, it matters when the temperatures are adjusted. Making the late 19th and early 20th century temperatures cool = bad. Making today’s temperatures cool = good. Making the MWP temperatures cool = bad.
A common theme is: we don’t know what climatologists are actually saying here, but it must be wrong. This article reads a lot like that.
So when will these data sets be officially corrected? If at all?
Please show us such a “cooling correction” that has been performed, Joeldshore.
But you can’t , can you?
not shame on nrcs, we have known this for years and have tried to communicate it to the climate world. mr oyler is the first to publish it in a formal journal and he solicted data and information from us which we freely gave. for further documentation look at the utah snow surveyweb page under historical data and the caveats listed there.
Thanks. Checking it now. I suspect NRCS is living through the Dark Ages of the Inquisition, with the current political appointees running the uSDA.
Surely it was at least 97% of the previously reported trend that was spurious.
Couldn’t they have given it a better name then SNOTEL? I know this is going to sound petty, immature, and representative of an individual with arrested development (all three of which are probably true), but the first thought it brings to my mind is the viscous fluid that drips out of someone’s nose.
Yeah, I know the foregoing comment adds absolutely, positively nothing useful to the discussion, but every once in a while everybody should practice being utterly useless for at least brief portions of their lives. Think about it: how much better off we’d all be if certain individuals (yours truly included) endeavored, not to try and better the world, but instead to be useless. And leave well enough alone.
No climate change. No useless (oops) studies. No war. No grotesque taxation. No coercion. No idol worship. All erased by brief periods of idle uselessness.
” but every once in a while everybody should practice being utterly useless for at least brief portions of their lives. ”
Climate Science much?
You got it!
>Couldn’t they have given it a better name? Sno-way, man!
There’s snotelling what they’ll do next!
I believe they are called SNOTELs because there primary function is measuring snow pack in the mountains so that spring runoffs can be accurately forecast.
They replaced the old “snow courses” where somebody would periodically ski along a defined track and measure the depth of the accumulated snow at defined points along the course to reach an average depth.
Not to be picky but SNOTEL does sound like something that would elicit snickers from the 5th graders learning post normal science. It is the same type of confusion created by the word ‘manual’ which comes from ‘hand’ not ‘male’. The first group of letters looks as if it is telling us something important, but it’s not.
Forgot to include the link:
http://wn.com/If_My_Nose_Was_Running_Money_By_Aaron_Wilburn
Some do, Its called SPORT!
I wonder if these authors will get the plum jobs now that they have committed the sin of pointing out confirmed bias in previous reporting ?
Sad.
Senior Vice-President for Peas (Frozen) at the local hyper-market is a pretty plum job [outside the seasonal fruit aisle].
Auto.
I have come up with a new concept. If there is heat island effect, why can’t there be cold island effect? We had a 6 degree temperature differential last summer 3 blocks apart. On Saturday, in rural Montana, we had a 6 degree temperature differential in the middle of winter. One site is surrounded by black top and cement, the second site is soil and gravel.
prjindigo I had the same result at a camera club, everyone brought in their thermometer and low and behold none read the same, when a fellow member ask me which one was correct she did not like my answer, it was they all were. I then tried to explain that when you use a thermometer in the process the fact it is there is always the error range and when you develop film you must adjust the process for the variables that are in the process, temperature is only one of the many. Your testing should allow you to control the variable as long as you work to minimize them. Unfortunately most of the member could not understand that, obliviously they had no idea what Ansel Adams, zone system was all about, basically it testing you equipment and process so you can get consistent, repeatable and predictable results and and understanding of the variables so you can manipulate them to achieve a final result that produces the optimum photographic print for the subject you are photographing. Either climate scientist understand this and they are manipulating the results to get what they want or they don’t and are just to stupid or dishonest to care as long as the results are on the warm side.
When my mother makes toffee and other hard candies the first thing she does is boil water with the candy thermometer to determine where boiling is this year on her sealed high precision candy thermometer. You know the ones in the glass tubes that clip to the side of the pot.
So back in 1992 I bought her a new one because the old one had drifted way off and I found that the same company was still making them. So she used the new one with the original recipie’s temperature and the sugar burned. So she calibrated the thermometer using boiling water then tried again and the sugar didn’t melt right. Boiling was 210.5°F at 140’ASL. Ok, little error on the thermometer is fine but why was it then still not accurate?
Well, because it wasn’t made accurately enough by the company that has been making thermometers for close on to “forever”. There are only two points where we can accurately prove the accuracy of a thermometer. Freezing and boiling as sea level. (tidally wrong but for the most part accurate)
So when my mother took her thirty year old thermometer and the new thermometer and put them both in the pan and stood with it slowly raising the temperature, the old one worked at the same temp as the previous year and now she knew the accurate temp on the new one. She still makes the toffee each Christmass and the the thermometer is always wrong and a little off from year to year.
When you make half a thousand thermometers, expecially bulb types, you have two choices on calibrating them in the box. You can calibrate them separately one at a time or you can calibrate every fifth one and use those settings on the rest of them.
That’s fine. But when you’re gonna use them for science for an on-going project, shouldn’t you also calibrate them against the equipment you’re replacing with them? Hmm?
My mom knows that by one burnt pot of sugar. Apparently it isn’t something they teach people when they take your $150,000.00 for a Doctorate degree.
Every thermometer in existence is wrong to some extent. Up until the mid 80s they were read by people and were only accurate to 3/4 of a degree F. Yet “science” is claiming it has found a 1°C change in average temperature using equipment that errors over its lifespan by up to 7°C.
Received a BS in Chemistry in 1986. In Organic lab, the very first time we met our activity was the calibration of our thermometer, 24 lab stations, 24 students finding the flaws at certain points along the graduated scale. 24 students discovering that each has a unique measuring device. For any physical scientist this is common knowledge. These climate scientists have often behaved as if the rest of us are a bunch of morons, it’s truly insulting.
[Snip. Fake email. ~ mod.]
I believe that, statistically, it is “assumed” that the error drift is even both up and down so improved accuracy is supposedly obtained over many thermometers. However, I have never seen where this is shown to be true for these devices, since during or after manufacture, the drift could tend to be in one direction depending on the design or other parameters including external ones. But as long as it is in the “right” direction (warmer) no one is going to check or care.
@BFL “I believe that, statistically, it is “assumed” that the error drift is even both up and down so improved accuracy is supposedly obtained over many thermometers. However, I have never seen where this is shown to be true for these devices,”
[reply trimmed. duplicate id’s. .mod]
yes and god knows all the mark one eyeballs are reading the temp correctly and the exact right time to catch the high and the low.
[Snip. Fake email. ~ mod.]
Usually this blog complains when temperatures are adjusted upwards. It’s good to see, in fairness, that complaints are also made when temperatures are adjusted downwards.
Have the temperatures been ajusted downwards yet?
These findings may disappear into an academic obliette
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines.
Barry January 12, 2015 at 1:58 pm
“Usually this blog complains when temperatures are adjusted upwards. It’s good to see, in fairness, that complaints are also made when temperatures are adjusted downwards.”
Funny that you see auditing and parsing as “complaints”. i see WUWT as hundreds of professors marking 1 students paper at a time.
🙂
Nice word, obliette. I didn’t know it so looked it up. Closest was oubliette. From Wikipedia: ” An oubliette (from the French oubliette, literally “forgotten place”) was a form of dungeon which was accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling.”
MCourtney
January 12, 2015 at 12:34 pm
‘…
It’s just not funny.
But SNOTEL is.’
Damn, you beat me to it. I didn’t think there was anybody so warped, so twisted, so bizarre, so weird, so strange, so vile, so out of it, and so maladjusted that they would actually find a serious scientific acronym, SNOTEL, as funny as I did.
I salute you, sir! Best wishes in the New Year. And I was kidding before…sort of.
To be honest, I’m shocked no-one else sniggered before us.
I’m always amused when people caught up in the details of their project don’t stand back and look at the big picture. SNOTEL is funny. But the best one ever was when Canada’s two right of centre parties, the Conservatives and the Reform, merged, they proudly announced the results of their merger as the Conservative Reform Alliance Party. News anchors were turning themselves in knots trying to report it without breaking into hysterics.
The CRA Party!
Mi Cro January 12, 2015 at 3:20 pm
The CRA Party!
Well, I managed to mess it up. They were the Conservative Reform Alliance Party of Canada.
So yes, they were the CRAP of Canada.
In Victoria, Australia, they renamed their rail service. Metropolitan Rail became Metrail, They didn’t rename Country Rail.
I was laughing too hard to type! This still took me minutes. I can’t help but chuckle every time I see it.
Why am I not surprised?
1C per decade is 10C per 100 years. Commonsense should have required a recalculation. 0.1C per decade makes a little more sense.
But if you truly believe, you will (mis-)remember your youth – perhaps fifteen years earlier [Not mine, but for some] as a degree or two cooler, even in that – short-ish – time; belief, I guess, conquers all.
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