It seems no matter where you look, “hockey stick” shapes pop out of data related to climate. Today, the most extraordinary day in climate science seen in quite some time, was no exception.

And, the day is not over. But honestly I’m too tired to continue. Thus I’m going to present the dataset gleaned today in raw form, but without the final endpoint. There’s no smoothing nor splicing of dissimilar datasets, but granted it is not a complete dataset. I’ll have complete data tomorrow.

Readers will recognize that even though the endpoint has not been established, the conclusion from the graph is clear. We are living in times of extraordinary data, never before seen. It’s accelerating, and worse than we thought.

WUWT daily stats - 11/20/2009 - click to enlarge

Sometimes, there is irony.

In other news, WUWT’s post on the CRU data hack was the number one post on WordPress today, beating out CNN, People magazine, and other well known media outlet posts.

Click for a larger image

I wish to offer my sincerest thanks to the WUWT moderation team. Thanks also to readers who spread the word and participated in the largest ever thread.

This is a mirrored post from ClimateAudit.org which is terribly overloaded.

Mike’s Nature trick

So far one of the most circulated e-mails from the CRU hack is the following from Phil Jones to the original hockey stick authors – Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

The e-mail is about WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999 -report, or more specifically, about its cover image.

click to enlarge

Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about “the divergence” in Myth vs. Fact Regarding the “Hockey Stick” -thread of RealClimate.org.

Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least.

mike’s response speaks for itself.

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.

But there is an interesting twist here: grafting the thermometer onto a reconstruction is not actually the original “Mike’s Nature trick”! Mann did not fully graft the thermometer on a reconstruction, but he stopped the smoothed series in their end years. The trick is more sophisticated, and was uncovered by UC over here. (Note: Try not to click this link now, CA is overloaded. Can’t even get to it myself to mirror it. -A)

When smoothing these time series, the Team had a problem: actual reconstructions “diverge” from the instrumental series in the last part of 20th century. For instance, in the original hockey stick (ending 1980) the last 30-40 years of data points slightly downwards. In order to smooth those time series one needs to “pad” the series beyond the end time, and no matter what method one uses, this leads to a smoothed graph pointing downwards in the end whereas the smoothed instrumental series is pointing upwards — a divergence. So Mann’s solution was to use the instrumental record for padding, which changes the smoothed series to point upwards as clearly seen in UC’s figure (violet original, green without “Mike’s Nature trick”).

TGIF-magazine has already asked Jones about the e-mail, and he denied misleading anyone but did remember grafting.

“No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”
Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”.
“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”

Maybe it helps Dr. Jones’s recollection of the exact context, if he inspects UC’s figure carefully. We here at CA are more than pleased to be able to help such nice persons in these matters.

Stagnating Temperatures

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

By Gerald Traufetter

 

ddp

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

UPDATE: Response from CRU in interview with another website, see end of this post.

The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown.

UPDATED: Original image was for Met Office – corrected This image source: www.cru.uea.ac.uk

I’m currently traveling and writing this from an airport, but here is what I know so far:

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to
be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents

The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files.

It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people.

I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur- it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.

Here is some of the emails just posted at Climate Audit on this thread:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7801#comments

I’ve redacted email addresses and direct phone numbers for the moment. The emails all have US public universities in the email addresses, making them public/FOIA actionable I believe.

From: Timo H‰meranta
To:
Subject: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal

Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.

Cheers
Phil

“It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John
Daly.Condolences may be sent to John’s email account (daly@john-daly.com)
“
Reported with great sadness

Timo H‰meranta
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Timo H‰meranta, LL.M.
Moderator, Climatesceptics
Martinlaaksontie 42 B 9
01620 Vantaa
Finland, Member State of the European Union

Moderator: timohame@yxxxxx.xxx
Private: timo.hameranta@xxxxx.xx

Home page: [1]personal.inet.fi/koti/hameranta/climate.htm

Moderator of the discussion group “Sceptical Climate Science”
[2]groups.yahoo.com/group/climatesceptics

“To dwell only on horror scenarios of the future
shows only a lack of imagination”. (Kari Enqvist)

“If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion.
What do you do, Sir” (John Maynard Keynes)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0)xxxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxx.xx.xx
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-

References

1. http://personal.inet.fi/koti/hameranta/climate.htm
2. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/climatesceptics

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

—————————————————————————-

Hi all – I’m not too comfortable with this, and would rather not sign – at least not
without some real time to think it through and debate the issue. It is unprecedented and
political, and that worries me.

My vote would be that we don’t do this without a careful discussion first.

I think it would be more appropriate for the AGU or some other scientific org to do this -
e.g., in reaffirmation of the AGU statement (or whatever it’s called) on global climate
change.

Think about the next step – someone sends another letter to the Senators, then we respond,
then…

I’m not sure we want to go down this path. It would be much better for the AGU etc to do
it.

What are the precedents and outcomes of similar actions? I can imagine a special-interest
org or group doing this like all sorts of other political actions, but is it something for
scientists to do as individuals?

Just seems strange, and for that reason I’d advise against doing anything with out real
thought, and certainly a strong majority of co-authors in support.

Cheers, Peck

Dear fellow Eos co-authors,
Given the continued assault on the science of climate change by some on Capitol Hill,
Michael and I thought it would be worthwhile to send this letter to various members of
the U.S. Senate, accompanied by a copy of our Eos article.
Can we ask you to consider signing on with Michael and me (providing your preferred
title and affiliation). We would like to get this out ASAP.
Thanks in advance,
Michael M and Michael O

______________________________________________________________
Professor Michael E. Mann
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@xxxxxx.xxx Phone: (434) 924-7770 FAX: (434) xxx-xxxxx
http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml

Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:EOS.senate letter-final.doc (WDBN/MSWD) (00055FCF)

–

Jonathan T. Overpeck
Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
Professor, Department of Geosciences
Mail and Fedex Address:
Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
715 N. Park Ave. 2nd Floor
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
direct tel: +xxxx
fax: +1 520 792-8795
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/Faculty_Pages/Overpeck.J.html http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/

Developing story – more later

UPDATE1: Steve McIntyre posted this on Climate Audit, I used a screen cap rtaher than direct link becuase CA is overloaded and slow at the moment.

UPDATE2: Response from CRU h/t to WUWT reader “Nev”

http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/hadleycru-says-leaked-data-is-real.html

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.

In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

“Have you alerted police”

“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken.”

Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.

“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.”

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

UPDATE3: McIntyre has posted an article by Jean S at climateaudit.org which is terribly overloaded. We have mirrored it.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/mikes-nature-trick/

Bill Illis and Bob Tisdale will likely make use of this. h/t to WUWT reader Chris D.

NOAA Releases Expanded World Ocean Database

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

The 2009 database, updated from the 2005 edition, is significantly larger providing approximately 9.1 million temperature profiles and 3.5 million salinity reports.  The 2009 database also captures 29 categories of scientific information from the oceans, including oxygen levels and chemical tracers, plus information on gases and isotopes that can be used to trace the movement of ocean currents.

“There is now more data about the global oceans than ever before,” said Sydney Levitus, director of the World Data Center for Oceanography, which is part of NOAA’s National Oceanographic Data Center. “Previous databases have shown the world ocean has warmed during the last 53 years, and it’s crucial we have reliable, accurate monitoring of our oceans into the future.”

Climate scientists use the World Ocean Database to track changing conditions which adds to the international science community’s understanding of global climate change. Forecast centers, such as NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center, also use the information for quality control of real-time oceanographic information.

The database is a crucial part of the Integrated Ocean Observing System and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS, as a reliable source of oceanic information. The information was compiled by scientists at the Ocean Climate Laboratory, part of the NOAA Satellite and Information Service.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment—from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun—and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

This is likely to cause a bit of a stir. Michael  from the Climate Skeptics Party in Australia writes in Tips and Notes:

The TCS ad campaign hit the airwaves last night in Australia. I thought you might be interested and post them on your website.

Here are the other TV advertisements:

Kind Regards

Michael

The Climate Sceptics

Policy and Media Unit

Townsville Qld

email: climatesceptics.policy.media@gmail.com

website: http://www.climatesceptics.com.au

Al Gore’s new book had a problem – no big hurricanes since Katrina to put in the book to look “threatening” to the USA. Any imagined link between hurricanes and global warming has evaporated.

Solution: the artists airbrush.

Ryan Maue, hurricane expert from Florida State University writes:

Anthony,

Not a lot of hurricanes here

The cover opens and closes half and half — so you only see one hurricane…as in the press release photo or the one on  Amazon.

But this is the real picture sequence from the book which I looked at Borders today and took cell-phone pictures, original (before the retouching by some “artist”) Note all of the Arctic ice and the size of the Florida Peninsula…

and the final product:

Now with 4 scary hurricanes - hey where's the ice?

WUWT?

A midget Southern Hemisphere cyclone is off the coast of Florida, another hurricane is sitting on the equator off the coast of Peru — and the Arctic Ice is gone (perhaps it is summer) and the Florida Peninsula is half gone

There are other differences I am sure you can find — but the hurricanes are just nonsense…

Ryan

Here’s the book cover:

Nonsense? No more like scaremongering, especially when it has been shown time and again that there is no hurricane to global warming linkage, and we are at a 30 year low.

Mr. Gore, you are a charlatan.

While this article makes a strong case, looking at SST and CO2 can also be revealing:

A review of this WUWT post might also be instructive: A look at human CO2 emissions -vs- ocean absorption

From Columbia University: Oceans’ Uptake of Manmade Carbon May be Slowing

First Year-by-Year Study, 1765-2008, Shows Proportion Declining

(Click on image to view larger version)
Carbon released by fossil fuel burning (black) continues to accumulate in the air (red), oceans (blue), and land (green). The oceans take up roughly a quarter of manmade CO2, but evidence suggests they are now taking up a smaller proportion.
Credit: Samar Khatiwala, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The oceans play a key role in regulating climate, absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air. Now, the first year-by-year accounting of this mechanism during the industrial era suggests the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions—a finding with potentially wide implications for future climate. The study appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, and is expanded upon in a separate website.

The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion tons of CO₂ produced from burning of fossil fuels. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%.

Some climate models have already predicted such a slowdown in the oceans’ ability to soak up excess carbon from the atmosphere, but this is the first time scientists have actually measured it. Models attribute the change to depletion of ozone in the stratosphere and global warming-induced shifts in winds and ocean circulation. But the new study suggests the slowdown is due to natural chemical and physical limits on the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon—an idea that is now the subject of widespread research by other scientists.

“The more carbon dioxide you put in, the more acidic the ocean becomes, reducing its ability to hold CO₂” said the study’s lead author, Samar Khatiwala, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Because of this chemical effect, over time, the ocean is expected to become a less efficient sink of manmade carbon. The surprise is that we may already be seeing evidence for this, perhaps compounded by the ocean’s slow circulation in the face of accelerating emissions.”

The study reconstructs the accumulation of industrial carbon in the oceans year by year, from 1765 to 2008. Khatiwala and his colleagues found that uptake rose sharply in the 1950s, as the oceans tried to keep pace with the growth of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Emissions continued to grow, and by 2000, reached such a pitch that the oceans have since absorbed a declining overall percentage, even though they absorb more each year in absolute tonnage. Today, the oceans hold about 150 billion tons of industrial carbon, the researchers estimate–a third more than in the mid-1990s.

For decades, scientists have tried to estimate the amount of manmade carbon absorbed by the ocean by teasing out the small amount of industrial carbon—less than 1 percent—from the enormous background levels of natural carbon. Because of the difficulties of this approach, only one attempt has been made to come up with a global estimate of how much industrial carbon the oceans held—for a single year, 1994.

Khatiwala and his colleagues came up with another method.  Using some of the same data as their predecessors— seawater temperatures, salinity, manmade chlorofluorocarbons  and other measures—they developed a mathematical technique to work backward from the measurements to infer the concentration of industrial carbon in surface waters, and its transport to deep water through ocean circulation. This allowed them to reconstruct the uptake and distribution of industrial carbon in the oceans over time.

Their estimate of industrial carbon in the oceans in 1994—114 billion tons—nearly matched the earlier 118 billion-ton estimate, made by Chris Sabine, a marine chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization in a 2004 paper in the journal Science.

Sabine, who was not involved in the new study, said he saw some limitations. For one, he said, the study assumes circulation has remained steady, along with the amount of organic matter in the oceans.  “That being said, I still think this is the best estimate of the time variance of anthropogenic CO₂ in the ocean available,” said Sabine. “Our previous attempts to quantify anthropogenic CO₂ using ocean data have only been able to provide single snapshots in time.”

About 40 percent of the carbon entered the oceans through the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, because carbon dioxide dissolves more readily in cold, dense seawater than in warmer waters. From there, currents transport the carbon north. “We’ve suspected for some time that the Southern Ocean plays a critical role in soaking up fossil fuel CO₂,” said Khatiwala. “But our study is the first to quantify the importance of this region with actual data.

The researchers also estimated carbon uptake on land, by taking the known amount of fossil-fuel emissions and subtracting the oceans’ uptake and the carbon left in the air. They were surprised to learn that the land may now be absorbing more than it is giving off.

They say that until the 1940s, the landscape produced excess carbon dioxide, possibly due to logging and the clearing and burning of forests for farming. Deforestation and other land-use changes continue at a rapid pace today—but now, each year the land appears to be absorbing 1.1 billion tons more carbon than it is giving off.

One possible reason for the reversal, say the researchers, is that now, some of the extra atmospheric carbon—raw material for photosynthesis–may be feeding back into living plants and making them grow faster. “The extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be providing a fertilizing effect,” said study coauthor Timothy Hall, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Many other scientists are now working to determine the possible effects of increased carbon dioxide on plant growth, and incorporate these into models of past and future climates.

Khatiwala says there are still large uncertainties, but in any case, natural mechanisms cannot be depended upon to mitigate increasing human-produced emissions. “What our ocean study and other recent land studies suggest is that we cannot count on these sinks operating in the future as they have in the past, and keep on subsidizing our ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels,” he said.

In a related paper in Nature, Khatiwala describes how the research was done.

Revenge of the Climate Laymen

 

Global warming’s most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science.

Julian the Apostate presiding at a conference of sectarian - by Edward Armitage - image from Wikimedia

By ANNE JOLIS

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang’s Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described “auditing” a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa’s much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists’ posters. Like other so-called “hockey stick” temperature graphs, it’s an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We’re burning ourselves up!

“It was the belle of the ball,” Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. “Its dance card was full.”

At least until Mr. McIntyre reported that the modern portion of that graph, which shows temperatures appearing to skyrocket in the last 100 years, relies on just 12 tree cores in Russia’s Yamal region. When Mr. McIntyre presented a second graph, adding data from 34 tree cores from a nearby site, the temperature spike disappears.

Mr. Briffa denounces Mr. McIntyre’s work as “demonstrably biased” because it uses “a narrower area and range of sample sites.” He says he and his colleagues have now built a new chronology using still more data. Here, as in similar graphs by other researchers, the spike soars once again. Mr. McIntyre’s “work has little implication for our published work or any other work that uses it,” Mr. Briffa concludes.

He and his colleagues may well ignore Mr. McIntyre, but the rest of us shouldn’t. While Mr. McIntyre’s image may use data from fewer sites, it still has nearly three times as many tree cores representing the modern era as Mr. Briffa’s original.

Yet Mr. McIntyre is first to admit his work is no bullet aimed at the heart of the theory of man-made climate change. Rather, his work—chronicled in papers co-written with environmental economist Ross McKitrick and more than 7,000 posts on his Climateaudit.org Weblog—does something much more important: It illustrates the uncertainty of a science presented as so infallible as to justify huge new taxes on rich countries along with bribes to poor ones in order to halt their fossil-fueled climbs to prosperity. Mr. McIntyre offers what many in the field do not: rigor.

It all started in 2002 when—as many might given the time and Mr. McIntyre’s mathematics background—he decided to verify for himself the case for action on climate change.

“It was like a big crossword puzzle,” he told me. “Business was a bit slow at the time, so I started reading up.”

Prior to the Briffa graph revelation, he had also caught a statistical error that undercut another exalted “hockey stick” graph prominently featured by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, this one by Michael Mann, head of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center. Alerts about review boards’ seemingly lax standards litter his blog, highlighting in particular the IPCC, which has used both the Mann and Briffa graphs in its reports. In 2007, Mr. McIntyre found a technical gaffe that forced NASA to correct itself and admit that 1934, not 1998, was the warmest year recorded in the continental U.S.

“At the beginning I innocently assumed there would be due diligence for all this stuff. … So often my mouth would drop, when I realized no one had really looked into it.”

Even more innocently, he assumed the billion-dollar climate change industry would welcome his untrained but painstaking work. Instead, Mr. McIntyre is subjected to every kind of venom—that he must be funded by Big Oil, by Big Business, by Some Texan Somewhere. For the record, the 62-year-old declares himself “past my best-by date, operating on my own nickel.”

Read the entire article here: Revenge of the Climate Laymen

Here’s technology doing something useful. Who wouldn’t like tires with better mileage? It comes from a new chemical additive, shown below. I chuckled when I saw the chemical structure, which itself looks like a tire tread:

Of course, before rushing out to buy new BF Greenrich radials, just making sure your tires are properly inflated will net you a similar mileage improvement.

From Eurekalert and ACS: Developing ‘green’ tires that boost mileage and cut carbon dioxide emissions

Lanxess

 

PERFORMANCE Chemical makers are developing additives to make tires more fuel efficient, safer, and longer lasting.

A new generation of “green” automobile tires that can boost fuel efficiency without sacrificing safety and durability is rolling their way through the research pipeline. The new tires could help add an extra mile or two per gallon to a car’s fuel economy. That’s the topic of the cover story of the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, (C&EN) ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

C&EN Senior Editor Alexander Tullo explains that rolling resistance — the friction that tires encounter when rolling — are a major factor in a vehicle’s fuel economy. It can determine up to 20 percent of fuel economy. Overcoming it accounts for 4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. For years, tire makers and their raw material suppliers have been eyeing lower rolling resistance as a way to boost fuel economy and promote a cleaner environment. But they have been thwarted by a principle in the tire world called the “magic triangle of tire technology.” It holds that an improvement to rolling resistance has to come at the expense of wet-road grip and durability.

That barrier is now falling, thanks to the development of new materials, including new forms of silica and nanomaterials. These new materials include a nanogel that improves abrasion resistance, grip and rolling resistance of tires as well as a newly-developed resin that helps tires retain air longer. But there’s a catch: Motorists still will have to keep tires properly inflated to take full advantage of the new technology, the article notes.

People email me stuff. Sometimes its just too bizarre to ignore. We have another person on an “expedition” with a camera and artistic license to foist upon the world:

click for the video

From Francesca Galeazzi of the disko.bay expedition, whatever the hell that is:

This morning I walked across the fresh snow with a gas cylinder in my arms, containing 6kg of CO2. I took it across the unspoiled snow field of the Jakobshavn Fjord until I found what, to my eyes, was a wonderful place.

From a little hill I could see massive icebergs impassably floating by, some of them breaking up from time to time with a loud bang. The sea below was deep grey, which made the icebergs stand up in all their beauty and fragility. The sky was a merge of pale grey and cerulean with a yellow glow just behind the skyline. Lichen and small berry plants could be felt under the powdery snow as I walked by. I thought this is perfect!

I walked to the top of the small hill, I put the cylinder down, got on my knees and opened the valve. The CO2 came out violently, freezing the air around the nozzle and producing an unpleasant whistle. When I lowered the cylinder towards the ground, the snow blow off all around me under the pressure of the air jet, almost to signify the melting of the Arctic ice shelf because of the Carbon emissions generated somewhere else.

Photo: Nathan Gallagher.

Reading this you might think I am an evil horrible woman. I would like to reassure you, I am not! I haven’t done anything bad. because I have offset the carbon emissions generated by the CO2 cylinder, through an online Gold Standard Carbon Offsetting scheme! Cool no? This is great stuff. one can go about consciously polluting the world, wasting energy, producing tonnes of waste and abusing natural resources without feeling guilty at all!! One can simply pay somebody to compensate for his/her ‘bad’ actions somewhere else, and become Carbon Neutral!

Don’t you think this is great?

Read the rest here

No, and I think you are beyond art, you’ve launched yourself into the great realm of anti-art with a megadose of idiocy.

What next? posing propane cyclinders  with polar bears? Yes the propane and propane accessories signifies the struggle against heat the polar bears must face every day.

Hey it’s art. I have a license.

Here’s the latest global temperature plot from UAH:

From Dr. Roy Spencer - click to enlarge

From Eurekalert: Human emissions rise 2 percent despite global financial crisis

		IMAGE: Human emissions rise 2 percent despite the global financial crisis. Click here for more information.

Despite the economic effects of the global financial crisis (GFC), carbon dioxide emissions from human activities rose 2 per cent in 2008 to an all-time high of 1.3 tonnes of carbon per capita per year, according to a paper published today in Nature Geoscience.

The paper – by scientists from the internationally respected climate research group, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) – says rising emissions from fossil fuels last year were caused mainly by increased use of coal but there were minor decreases in emissions from oil and deforestation.

“The current growth in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is closely linked to growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” said one of the paper’s lead authors, CSIRO’s Dr Mike Raupach.

“CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion are estimated to have increased 41 per cent above 1990 levels with emissions continuing to track close to the worst-case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“There will be a small downturn in emissions because of the GFC, but anthropogenic emissions growth will resume when the economy recovers unless the global effort to reduce emissions from human activity is accelerated.”

The GCP estimates that the growth in emissions from developing countries increased in part due to the production of manufactured goods consumed in developed countries. In China alone, 50 per cent of the growth in emissions from 2002 to 2005 was attributed to the country’s export industries.

According to the GCP’s findings, atmospheric CO₂ growth was about four billion metric tonnes of carbon in 2008 and global atmospheric CO₂ concentrations reached 385 parts per million – 38 per cent above pre-industrial levels.

According to co-author and GCP Executive Director, CSIRO’s Dr Pep Canadell, the findings also indicate that natural carbon sinks, which play an important role in buffering the impact of rising emissions from human activity, have not been able to keep pace with rising CO₂ levels.

“On average only 45 per cent of each year’s emissions remain in the atmosphere,” Dr Canadell said.

“The remaining 55 per cent is absorbed by land and ocean sinks.

“However, CO₂ sinks have not kept pace with rapidly increasing emissions, as the fraction of emissions remaining in the atmosphere has increased over the past 50 years. This is of concern as it indicates the vulnerability of the sinks to increasing emissions and climate change, making natural sinks less efficient ‘cleaners’ of human carbon pollution.”

More than 30 experts from major international climate research institutions contributed to the GCP’s annual Global Carbon Budget report – now considered a primary reference on the human effects on atmospheric CO₂ for governments and policy-makers around the world.

Media Note:

Dr Raupach will be available to speak to the media at a briefing at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney at 10.30am today.

For details go to: www.aussmc.org or contact Imogen Jubb on 0417 258 020.

Image available at: http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/mediarelease/mr09-206.html

Further Information:
Dr Michael Raupach, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research
Ph: +61 2 6246 5573
E: Michael.Raupach@csiro.au
Ph: +61 408 020 952

Dr Pep Canadell, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research
E: Pep.Canadell@csiro.au

Further information available at: www.globalcarbonproject.org

From Alabamawx.com by Bill Murray

A survey of weathercasters’ feelings on global warming was published in this month’s edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It had some interesting findings. There were 121 respondents. 94% of the respondents had at least one of the three major seals.

Television meteorologists are the official scientists for most television stations. The overwhelming majority felt comfortable in that role for their stations. The majority agreed that the role of discussing climate change did fall to them.

The eyebrow raising responses:

“Respond to this IPCC conclusion: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” Only 35% agreed or strongly agreed. 34% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

“Most of the warming since 1950 is likely human induced.” A full 50% disagreed or strongly disagreed. 25% were neutral on this question. Only 8% strongly agreed.

“Global climate models are reliable in their predictions for a warming of the planet.” Only 3% strongly agreed and another 16% agreed. A full 62% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

“Respond to one TV weathercaster’s Quote saying “Global warming is a scam.” Responses were mixed. The largest percentage was neutral, at 26%. A total of 45% disagreed (23%) or strongly disagreed (22%). 19% of the respondents agreed with this statement and 10% strongly agreed.

The amount of uncertainty found in this survey tells that even the most educated and motivated communicators are still uncertain about the truth on this issue. Interesting article.

The entire text can be found at: http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/90/10/pdf/i1520-0477-90-10-1457.pdf

Guest post by Willis Eschenbach
There is a lot of misinformation floating around the web about the greenhouse effect works. It is variously described as a “blanket” that keeps the Earth warm, or a “mirror” that reflects part of the heat back to Earth, or “a pane of glass” that somehow keeps energy from escaping. It is none of these things.

A planetary “greenhouse” is a curiosity, a trick of nature. It works solely because although a sphere only has one side, a shell has two sides. The trick has nothing to do with greenhouse gases. It does not require an atmosphere. In fact, a greenhouse can be built entirely of steel. A thought experiment shows how a steel greenhouse would work.

Before we start, however, a digression regarding temperature. The radiation emitted by a blackbody varies with the fourth power of the temperature. As a result, for a blackbody, we can measure the temperature in units of radiation, which are watts per square metre (W/m2). For objects with a temperatures found on the the Earth, this radiation is in the range called “longwave” or “infrared” radiation. See the Appendix for the formula which relates temperature to radiation.

This means that we can denote the temperature of a blackbody using W/m2 as well as the traditional measures (Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin). The advantage is that while temperature (degrees) is not conserved, energy (W/m2) is conserved. So we can check to see if energy lost is equal to energy gained, since energy is neither being created nor destroyed by the climate.

For our thought experiment, imagine a planet the size of the Earth, a perfect blackbody, heated from the interior at 235 watts per square metre of surface area. How is it heated from the interior? Doesn’t matter, we’ll say “radioactive elements”, that sounds scientific.

The planet is in interstellar space, with no atmosphere and no nearby stars. The equilibrium surface temperature of this planet is, of course, 235 W/m2. To maintain the equilibrium temperature, it constantly radiates this amount of energy out to space. Coincidentally, this is the amount of solar radiation that makes it past the clouds to warm the Earth. If we convert 235 W/m2 to one of our normal temperature scales, it is -19 Celsius (C), or -3° Fahrenheit (F), or 254 Kelvins (K). It’s the temperature that the Earth would have if there were no greenhouse effect. That is to say … cold.

Now imagine that the planet gets completely surrounded by a thin black steel shell, located a few thousand metres above the surface, as shown in a cutaway view in the picture above, and in Figure 1 below. What happens to the surface temperature of the planet?

In order to maintain its thermal equilibrium, the whole system must still radiate 235 W/m2 out to space. To do this, the steel shell must warm until it is radiating at 235 watts per square metre. Of course, since a shell has an inside and an outside, it will also radiate 235 watts inward to the planet. The planet is now being heated by 235 W/m2 of energy from the interior, and 235 W/m2 from the shell. This will warm the planetary surface until it reaches a temperature of 470 watts per square metre. In vacuum conditions as described, this would be a perfect greenhouse, with no losses of any kind. Figure 1 shows how it works.

Figure 1. Building a steel greenhouse. (A) Planet without greenhouse. Surface temperature is 235 W/m2 heated from the interior. (B) Planet surrounded by steel greenhouse shell. Shell radiates the same amount to space as the planet without the shell, 235 W/m2. It radiates the same inward, which warms the planet to 470 W/m2 (29 C, 83°F, 302 K).

The trick can be repeated again, by surrounding the planet and the shell with a second outer shell. In this two shell case, the planetary surface temperature (in W/m2) will be three times the initial surface temperature.

In nature, planets have atmospheric shells, of course, rather than steel shells. The trick works the same way, however. Rather than being warmed from the inside, the Earth receives 235 W/m2 from the sun. Solar radiation passes through the atmosphere. Outgoing longwave radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, just as it is absorbed by the steel shell shown in Fig. 1.

So that’s the trick of the greenhouse. It has nothing to do with blankets, or mirrors, or greenhouse gases. It works even when it is built out of steel. It depends on the fact that a shell radiates in two directions, inwards and outwards. This radiation keeps the planet warmer than it would be without the shell.

Now, it is tempting to think that we could model the Earth in this manner, as a sphere surrounded by a single shell. This is called a “two-layer” model, with the two layers being the surface and the atmospheric shell. And in fact, a number of simplified climate models have been built in this way. Un-noticed by their programmers, however, it that is not physically possible to model the Earth as a two-layer system. Figure 2 shows why. Note that in all cases, the system has to remain in thermal equilibrium. This means that the surface must radiate as much as it absorbs, and the shell must also radiate as much as it absorbs. In addition, radiation from the shell to space (upwelling longwave radiation or ULR) must equal radiation from the shell to the Earth (downwelling longwave radiation, or DLR)

Figure 2. Single-shell (“two-layer”) greenhouse system, including various losses. S is the sun, E is the Earth, and G is the atmospheric greenhouse shell around the Earth. The height of the shell is greatly exaggerated; in reality the shell is so close to the Earth that they have about the same area, and thus the small difference in area can be neglected. Fig. 2(a) shows a perfect greenhouse. W is the total watts/m2 available to the greenhouse system after albedo.  Fig. 2(b) is the same as Fig. 2(a) plus radiation losses Lr which pass through the atmosphere.  Fig. 2(c) is the same as Fig. 2(b), plus the effect of absorption losses La.  Fig. 2(d) is the same as Fig. 2(c), plus the effect of thermal losses Lt.

Figure 2(a) shows the same situation as Figure 1(B), which is a perfect planetary greenhouse. In this case, however, it is heated by an amount of energy “W”, which is coming from the sun. The planet receives solar radiation in the amount of “W” from the sun, and longwave radiation “W” from the atmospheric shell. The surface temperature is thus 2W. All energy flows are in Watts/square metre (W/m2).

Figure 2(b) adds two losses. The first is the reflection from the Earth’s albedo (Wo – W). This is energy which never enters the system and is reflected back into space. We are still getting the same energy entering the system (W). The second loss Lr is from radiation which goes from the surface to space through the “atmospheric window”. Because of the second loss, the surface of the Earth does not get as warm as in a perfect system. In a perfect system, the temperature of the surface is 2W. But including the radiation loss Lr, the surface temperature drops to 2W – 2Lr.

Figure 2(c) adds another loss La, which is the solar radiation which is absorbed by the shell. This cuts the radiation hitting the surface down to W – La. Including this loss, the surface temperature is 2W – 2Lr – La.

Figure 2(d) adds the final loss. This is Lt, the thermal loss. It is the sensible energy (heat) and latent energy (evaporation) which is transported from the surface to the shell by convection. Including all of these losses, the surface temperature of the Earth is 2W – 2Lr – La – Lt.

Now, why can’t the Earth be modeled in this manner? A look at the size of the various losses shows why. Here is the canonical global energy budget, called the “Kiehl/Trenberth” budget, or the K/T budget.

Figure 3. The Kiehl/Trenberth Global Energy Budget. This is a “two layer” representation, with the surface and the atmosphere being the two layers. Lr, the radiation loss, is the 40 W/m2 labeled “Atmospheric Window”. La, the absorption loss, is the 67 W/m2 labelled “Absorbed by Atmosphere”. Lt, the thermal loss, is 102 W/m2. This is the sum of the 24 W/m2 labelled “Thermals” and the 78 W/m2 labelled “Evapo-transpiration”. W, the energy from the sun, is the incoming solar radiation of 342 W/m2 less the 107 W/m2 that is reflected by the surface and the clouds. This means that W is 235 W/m2. SOURCE: http://atoc.colorado.edu/~dcn/ATOC7500/members/Reading/KiehlTrenberth.pdf

What’s wrong with this picture? Note that the temperature of the Earth is 390 W/m2, labelled as “Surface Radiation”. This is 15 C, or 59°F. But from Fig. 2(d), we know that the surface temperature of a greenhouse system with a single shell, as shown in the drawing, is 2W (470) – 2Lr (80) – La (67) – Lt (102) = 221 W/m2. This is far below the known surface temperature of the Earth. In other words, a single shell greenhouse system simply isn’t efficient enough to give a surface temperature which is warm enough to allow for the known losses.

So where is the problem with the K/T budget diagram? The hidden fault is that the upward radiation from the atmospheric layer does not equal the downward radiation. There is 195 W/m2 going to space from the atmospheric shell, and 324 W/m2 going down to the surface.

In order to get enough energy to allow for the known losses, the simplest model requires two atmospheric shells. A perfect greenhouse with two shells would give a surface temperature of 3W, or 705 W/m2. This is enough to allow for the known losses, and still give a surface temperature which matches that of the Earth. Figure 4 shows one such possible system.

Figure 4. Simplest greenhouse global energy budget capable of representing the Earth. Note that all major flows in the K/T energy budget have been maintained. There are two shells, which must be physically separate. These are the lower troposphere, and the lowest stratosphere. They are separated by the tropopause.

This budget fulfils all of the requirements for thermal equilibrium. The same amount is radiated upwards and downwards by each layer. The amount absorbed by each part of the system equals the amount radiated. Further verification of this energy budget is the 147 W/m2 emission from just above the tropopause. This converts to a Celsius temperature of about -50 C, which is a typical temperature for the lowest part of the stratosphere.

I have written a simplified Excel radiation/evaporation/convection model which encapsulates the above system. It is available at http://homepage.mac.com/williseschenbach/.Public/global_energy_budget.xls

I invite people to play with the model. It is what I term a “Tinkertoy” model, which is what I call the simplest possible model that can represent a particular reality. One of the interesting results from the model is that there can be very little thermal loss between the inner and the outer atmospheric layers. If there is more than a trivial amount of leakage, the surface cools significantly. Among the other insights yielded by the model is that a change equivalent to a doubling of CO2 (an increase of 3.7 W/m2 downwelling radiation at the top of the atmosphere) can be cancelled by a 1% increase in the upper and lower cloud reflections.

Experiment with the values, it is an interesting insight into the energy flows in the simplest possible climate model that can represent the Earth’s greenhouse system.

APPENDIX

The formula that relates the temperature to radiation is called the “Stefan-Bolzmann” equation:

R = sigma * epsilon * T^4

where r = radiation (W/m2)

sigma = the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, 5.67 * 10^-8

epsilon = the emissivity of the body, which for a blackbody = 1

T^4 = absolute temperature in Kelvins (which is Celsius plus 273.15) raised to the fourth power

This is mind blowing ignorance on the part of Al Gore. Gore in an 11/12/09 interview on NBC’s tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, speaking on geothermal energy, champion of slide show science, can’t even get the temperature of earth’s mantle right, claiming “several million degrees” at “2 kilometers or so down”.  Oh, and the “crust of the earth is hot” too.

Screencap of Gore on The Tonight Show 11/12/09

Temperature of the sun’s corona: 1–2 million kelvin

Temperature of the sun’s photosphere:  6,000 kelvin

Temperature of the Earths mantle, more than “2 kilometers or so down”: between 500 °C to 900 °C (773 to 1173 kelvin)

Watching Gore make a complete scientific idiot of himself on national TV: priceless

Don’t believe me? Watch the video from NBC below:

Click for video - Gore's statement on temperature is about 40 seconds in

For a faster presentation, without a pre-viewing commercial, here is the same video on YouTube

Oh…and here is a graph of the vertical temperature profile with drilling depth:

Source Geohil AG (captions added)

And here is the temperature profile of the Earth’s crust, mantle, and core:

Source:  Electropaedia (Mpower UK) page on geothermal energy

]]> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/16/gore-has-no-clue-a-few-million-degrees-here-and-there-and-pretty-soon-were-talking-about-real-temperature/feed/ 314 wattsupwiththat gore_on_tonightshow_111209 Gore_tonight_show2 Earth's Crust Temperature Profile Geothermal Gradient http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/16/monckton-climate-change-video-goes-viral/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/16/monckton-climate-change-video-goes-viral/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:15:23 +0000 wattsupwiththat http://wattsupwiththat.com/?p=12871 ]]>

Video of Lord Monckton Warning of Copenhagen Climate Treaty Exceeds 3.5 Million Views in a Single Month

Lord Monckton giving a presentation – photo by Derek Warnecke

 

Minneapolis – A video of Lord Christopher Monckton warning of the impending Copenhagen climate treaty has received over 3.5 million views in 30 days, according to Minnesota Majority, the organization responsible for posting the original 4-minute excerpt of Monckton’s speech.  The organization says that its original clip, together with the 100+ cloned versions that now exist on YouTube, in total exceeded 3.5 million views as of November 15, 2009.  The video clip made Minnesota Majority the #1 most viewed Non-Profit & Activism channel in the month of October on YouTube.

[ Note: Also I have a link to the draft Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty here Monckton’s Powerpoint presentation used at that speech is available in PDF format here (warning large download 17.5 MB) - Anthony]

See the video below.

The video clip is an excerpt from a 95-minute speech given by Lord Christopher Monckton at an event sponsored by the Minnesota Free Markets Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota on October 14.  Monckton, former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher and a noted climate change expert, presented evidence dispelling the theory of man-made global warming.  He also warned that America’s sovereignty may be at risk if the United States signs the treaty scheduled to be negotiated at a United Nations climate change summit beginning on December 7 in Copenhagen.  Monckton says that the Copenhagen treaty will cede U.S. sovereignty, mandate a massive wealth transfer from the United States to pay reparations for ‘climate debt’ to third world countries and create a new ‘world government’ to enforce the treaty’s provisions.

Full video speech of  Lord Monckton’s speech. It is one hour and 35 minutes long.

The Monckton speech has spurred a national debate on the issues of man-made global warming and the Copenhagen Treaty.  His comments have been featured on Fox Business, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, The Wilkow Majority, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin and Breitbart TV.  An hour-long segment featuring Lord Monckton and Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton was aired on the October 30^th edition of the Glenn Beck Show.

The Monkton video also helped to launch a national petition drive opposing the Copenhagen Treaty as well as domestic cap-and-trade legislation.  The petition, which is hosted at www.NoCapAndTrade.com, has generated over 135,000 messages to Congress.

“The more people learn about the supposed issue of ‘climate change’ and how green extremists intend to control our lives, the more skeptical they become,” said Jeff Davis, president of Minnesota Majority.

Monckton’s message appears to be having an impact.  Last week, key US Senate Democrats said it is unlikely there will be any additional action on climate-change legislation this year.  The Obama administration had hoped to seal a deal on domestic cap-and-trade legislation prior to attending the Copenhagen conference in December.  Earlier this month, The Times reported that all hope is lost for a deal in Copenhagen and that a world treaty on climate change will likely be delayed by up to a year.

Davis warns now is not the time for treaty opponents to rest on their laurels.  “We may have bought ourselves some time,” said Davis.  “But green extremists will be back in-force trying to advance both domestic cap-and-trade legislation and an international climate treaty that will rob us of our liberties and grant government more control over our lives.”

CONTACT

Jeff Davis, Minnesota Majority

jeff.davis [ -at -] mnmajority.org

612-605-3303 ext 702

A Critique of the October 2009 NCAR Study Regarding Record Maximum to Minimum Ratios

Guest post by Bruce Hall, Hall of Record

This is a critique of the October 2009 NCAR publication regarding increasing ratio of new daily maximum temperatures to new daily minimum temperatures.

The NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research] study titled “The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.” was published October 19, 2009.

“Abstract

The current observed value of the ratio of daily record high maximum temperatures to record low minimum temperatures averaged across the U.S. is about two to one. This is because records that were declining uniformly earlier in the 20th century following a decay proportional to 1/n (n being the number of years since the beginning of record keeping) have been declining less slowly for record highs than record lows since the late 1970s. Model simulations of U.S. 20th century climate show a greater ratio of about four to one due to more uniform warming across the U.S. than in observations. Following an A1B emission scenario for the 21st century, the U.S. ratio of record high maximum to record low minimum temperatures is projected to continue to increase, with ratios of about 20 to 1 by mid-century, and roughly 50 to 1 by the end of the century.”

The following is a graphic representation of the study from the UCAR website:

“This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue)for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.”

While this study does use sound methodology regarding the data it has included, it falls short of being both statistically and scientifically complete. Hence, the conclusions from this study are prone to significant bias and any projections from this study are likely incorrect.

Study’s Methodology

“We use a subset of quality controlled NCDC US COOP network station observations of daily maximum and minimum temperatures, retaining only those stations with less than 10% missing data (in fact the median number of missing records over all stations is 2.6%, the mean number is 1.2%) . All stations record span the same period, from 1950 to 2006, to avoid any effect that would be introduced by a mix of shorter and longer records. The missing data are filled in by simple averages from neighboring days with reported values when there are no more than two consecutive days missing, or otherwise by interpolating values at the closest surrounding stations. Thus we do not expect extreme values to be introduced by this essentially smoothing procedure. In addition our results are always presented as totals over the entire continental U.S. region or its East and West portions, with hundreds of stations summed up. It is likely that record low minima for some stations are somewhat skewed to a cool bias (e.g. more record lows than should have occurred) due to changes of observing time (see discussion in Easterling, 2002, and discussion in auxiliary material), though this effect is considered to be minor and should not qualitatively change the results. Additionally, at some stations two types of thermometers were used to record maximum and minimum temperatures. The switch to the Max/Min Temperature System (MMTS) in the 1980s at about half the stations means that thermistor measurements are made for maximum and minimum. This has been documented by Quayle et al. (1991), and the effect is also considered to be small. To address this issue, an analysis of records within temperature minima and within temperature maxima shows that the record minimum temperatures are providing most of the signal of the increasing ratio of record highs to record lows (see further discussion in auxiliary material).” [lines 82-102 NCAR publication]

Comments

The NCAR Study contains at least two biases:

1. The selection of 1950 through 2006 significantly biases the outcome of this study because the U.S. was entering a cooling period in the 1960s and 1970s which creates the illusion of unusual subsequent warming from 1980 through 2006.
2. During the last decade, a large reduction of rural reporting stations in the U.S. has biased records toward urbanized and urbanizing areas. Land use changes as well as deterioration of urban siting versus NOAA standards [http://www.surfacestations.org/] have resulted in a bias toward over-reporting/erroneous reporting of high temperature records and an under-reporting of low temperature records.

The charts below show the results of nearly 4/5ths of the U.S. weather stations and demonstrate a significant bias toward errors greater than +2°C or about three times the total trend reported for global warming. This instrumentation issue as well as the bias toward urbanization contribute to significant doubt about the conclusions that can be reached concerning temperature trends in the second half of the 20th century.

Reference for site ratings: NOAA’s Climate Reference Network Site Handbook Section 2.2.1

Reality Check

As stated earlier, this critique does not question the statistical methodology applied for that data used in the study. Rather it challenges the underlying selection of the data and the quality of the data.

The most obvious deficiency to anyone familiar with tracking U.S. temperature records is the omission of data from the 1880s through the 1940s. By selecting a period of cooling as the starting point, the NCAR study “stacks the deck” in favor of a warming trend. This is the same problem with the 1880s as a starting point for the longer term trend, but due to shorter cyclical variations within the 130 years longer trend data are somewhat tempered. There is no full climate cycle in the NCAR study.

To demonstrate this point, we will compare the record of statewide monthly temperature records for the longer period with the approximately 60-years of data used in the NCAR study. Obviously, comparing monthly statewide records to daily single point records can be argued a case of apple seeds and watermelons, but from an analytical perspective it is reasonable, as shall be shown.

The real difference is that we are comparing area climates with micro climates. Area climate monthly data maximum and minimum records will rarely be affected by spurious readings whereas micro climate daily data is wholly dependent upon very specific proper siting and quality control, including avoidance of external heat sources, issues that have been raised at the Surface Stations website.

In February 2007, I published an analysis titled, “Extreme Temperatures – Where’s The Global Warming” and a subsequent data update in January 2009 titled “Where Is The Global Warming… Extreme Temperature Records Update January 2009.” Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. provided suggestions and a review in his weblog, “Climate Science.” In February 2009, these data were summarized graphically with this animation and data table in a posted titled, “Decadal Occurrences Of Statewide Maximum Temperature Records”:

Each state can have only 12 statewide, monthly records for the 13 decades tracked here… hence, they are “all-time” records for a state for a month.

Range goes from 0 [white] to 8 [dark red]. Indiana had the highest frequency of records in one decade with 8 still standing from the 1930s. See the table below for the actual count by decade. Old records are replaced if tied or surpassed by subsequent readings.

The 1930s experienced the highest number of maximum extreme temperatures for which records have not been tied or surpassed subsequently. While the late 1990s did have a very brief hot period associated with El Nino, the 1990s were a rather ordinary period for extreme temperatures in the contiguous 48 states.

I have excluded Alaska and Hawaii from this animation because they are distinct and separate climate zones. For the record, however, Alaska’s decade of most frequent high temperature records was the 1970s with 4. Hawaii’s decade of most records was the 1910s. Those data are included in the table below.

The 1990s were only particularly hot, as reflected in these records, in New England and Idaho. These selective areas were far more restricted than the geographically widespread heat of the 1930s.

This animation goes to the heart of my arguments regarding global warming as it is reflected in U.S. temperature data.

• The trendline used by those claiming a long term warming begins in a very cool climate period. Consequently, any trend from that point will be upward.
• The late 1990s were an aberration and not indicative of the general climate oscillations presented in these records.

Each state can have only 12 maximum or minimum all-time monthly records. The methodology requires that any instance where a previous record is tied or exceeded, the old record in replaced by the newer record. Therefore, this approach has a slight bias toward more recent records due to the “tie goes to the later” rule.

Comparison of Statewide Monthly Temperature Records with the NCAR Study

Going back to the NCAR graphic we can see a trend which may correspond to their conclusion:

For later in the 21st century, the model indicates that as warming continues (following the A1B scenario), the ratio of record highs to record lows will continue to increase, with values of about 20 to 1 by mid-century, and roughly 50 to 1 by late century.

Two factors contribute to this increase as noted by Portman et al (2009a): 1) increases in temperature variance in a future warmer climate (as noted in the model by Meehl and Tebaldi, 2004), and 2) a future increasing trend of temperatures over the U.S. (model projections shown in Meehl et al., 2006). Since the A1B mid-range scenario is used, a lower forcing scenario (e.g. B1) produces reduced values of the ratio in the 21st century, and a higher forcing scenario (e.g. A2) produces greater values. The model cannot represent all aspects of unforced variability that may have influenced the observed changes of record temperatures to date, and the model over-estimates warming over the U.S. in the 20th century. The future projections may also reflect this tendency and somewhat over-estimate the future increase in the ratio. Under any future scenario that involves increases of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and corresponding increases in temperature, the ratio of record high maximum to record low minimum temperatures will continue to increase above the current value.

Before the direct comparison to the statewide monthly records, let us look at their extrapolation [FROM THE NCAR STUDY - "is projected to continue to increase, with ratios of about 20 to 1 by mid-century, and roughly 50 to 1 by the end of the century."] [my graphic]:

Before we can judge the extrapolation of maximum to minimum ratios in this study, we should understand how the data used by NCAR fits into the “big picture.”

Let us look at the statewide monthly maximum and minimum records by decade beginning in 1880. Those records are used to calculate a ratio of maximum and minimum records by decade and then compared with the NCAR study ratios.

[click above table image for larger view]

There are two aspects of this comparison that jump out to the reader:

1. The 1930s were, by far, the hottest period for the time frame. The ratio of maximum to minimum temperatures is greater in the 2000s, but the absolute number of monthly statewide extreme records is far less significant making the ratio far less significant.
2. The general pattern of ratios for the monthly records follows reasonably closely to the pattern of the daily individual location records, on a decadal basis.

Now let us take the two data sets and plot the ratios and see what conclusions we might draw remembering that in absolute terms, the 1930 had a much higher frequency of maximum temperature extremes than the 1990s or 2000s or the combination of the last two decades.

If you were to only look at the ratios of maximum to minimum monthly temperature records, it would be understandable to draw the conclusion that, while there was a cyclical pattern to the ratios, the ratios were increasing exponentially toward a much hotter environment.

It is only when you compare the absolute number of all-time records that you appreciate that ratios as a measure of global warming may be quite deficient. You should also note a significant divergence in the numerical trend of record high monthly versus daily records.

Keep in mind that there are significant biases toward recording daily warmer temperatures due to the closure of thousands of rural stations and expansion of urban areas into previously rural or suburban areas, creating enormous “heat sinks,” that prevent night time temperatures from dropping to the extent that they would in a nearby rural setting. Hence more stations reporting greater frequencies of maximum temperatures and fewer minimums.

Conclusion

The oscillating or cyclical nature of our climate is completely overlooked when one takes a small time frame such as the 1950s through 2006 and extrapolates a full century beyond. Even 130 years of data, starting from a relatively cold period, gives a very brief look at climate history for the U.S. and certainly one that is not sufficient to extrapolate a general warming trend, much less an accelerating one.

In the face of the recent decline in new all-time monthly statewide maximum records, it is more probable that we may be facing a cyclical decline in our overall temperature and that something similar to the 1960s and 1970s may be a far more realistic projection. Our most recent winters have been particularly colder than long-term averages and minimal sunspot activity may be another harbinger of this normal cyclical variation in our relatively stable climate.

For more information about this and related topics, please check out the following blogs:

• Climate Science
• Icecap
• Watts Up With That?

The authors have contributed ideas and advice for this post.

One wonders why the story of a new paper covered on WUWT:  NCAR: Number of record highs beat record lows – if you believe the quality of data from the weather stations did not include the 1930’s and 1940’s and earlier, conspicuously missing from the NCAR graphic below:

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Source NCAR

From: “The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.”Authors: Gerald A. Meehl, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling, and Larry McDaniel Publication: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)

The answer: those decades are inconvenient to the conclusion Meehl makes from a cherrypicked portion of the US data. There were many many temperature records during this period. For example, Richard Alan Keen writes in email:

My book, Skywatch West, covers the weather and climate of the 11 western states, plus Alaska, plus 6 western Canadian provincs and territories.

The chapter on temperature extremes includes a chart of the occurrences (by decade) of the all-time extreme temperatures for each of the 18 states, provinces, and territories (a total of 36 records in all).

Some fun statistics from this are:

• Of the all-time record maximum temperatures, 10 occurred before 1940 (the first six decades), and 8 after (the second six decades).
• For record minimum temperatures, the reverse is true: 8 records before 1940, 10 afterwards.
• Half of the records – 8 maximum and 10 minimum, a total of 18 – occurred during the middle three decades of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s, and of these nearly a third of the total (10) were during the 1930’s alone.
• No records occurred in the 2000’s up to the publication date of the book (2004).  Since then Arizona’s record maximum was tied, but not broken, in 2007.

cheers, Rich

Here is his graphic:

Granted this is not the entire USA dataset, only western states, and one could say that I’m engaging in the same sort of cherrypicking that Meehl et al engages in by  illustrating it here. But there’s more.

Let’s look at all the US data then. Last year in this thread on Climate audit David Smith writes:

U.S. Record Temperatures—A Closer Look

A new paper that is soon to appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that across the U.S. daily record high temperatures are being set at about twice the frequency of daily record low temperatures and that this ratio—number of record highs to the number of record lows, has been growing larger over the past 50 years.

The popular press seems to be particularly taken with this finding, although headline proclamations fail to disclose important details of the actual findings reported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Gerald Meehl and colleagues.

Although you can hardly blame the press, because the NCAR press release did much to lead them down this muddy path.

Meehl et al. find that the reason more daily maximum temperature records are being set than daily minimum temperatures records is because there are fewer than expected daily lows records being set, not because there are more daily high records than expected.

In other words, our days are not becoming extremely hotter, but our nights are becoming less extremely cold. This fact is buried in the press release and consequently in most of the coverage—likely, because this finding has pretty benign, if not beneficial, implications.

Instead of highlighting this, the NCAR press release not only tries to confuse it with all sorts of graphs and numbers (presented without a proper reference frame of the expectations), but by also suggesting that this observation—nights warming more than days—is what is expected because of a rising greenhouse effect, and they have a model to prove it.

While it is true that an enhanced greenhouse effect should warm nights more than days, so too does the processes of urbanization—something which has not been accounted for in the results of Meehl et al. (because it is virtually impossible to do so at a daily level), but something that is widely known to be occurring.

A report just published earlier this week estimates that urbanization and other land use changes are responsible for half of the observed temperature rise in recent decades in the U.S. This is similar to what Ross McKitrick and WCR editor Pat Michaels found for global land-based temperatures in a paper published two years ago.

Further, despite the contention that climate models show the nights-warming-more-than-days expectation from an enhancing greenhouse effect, the model results depicted in Meehl et al.’s paper don’t show this at all. In fact, the model in the paper—the NCAR climate model—shows that it expects daily high records should be being increasing (above expectations of no climate change) at about the same frequency that daily minimum temperature records should be decreasing. This model expectation is shown by observations to be wrong.

This model error can be seen by comparing Figures 1 and 2 below. They show the expected progression of the number of record daily temperatures with time (black curves) (note the number of expected daily records in any given year decreases with time). The red dots on Figures 1 and 2 represent the number of daily maximum temperature records set each year and the blue dots represent the number of daily minimum records. Figure 1 shows the observations, and Figure 2 shows the expectations from the NCAR climate model.

First let’s focus on the top graph in Figure 1 and see what the observations say is going on.

• with the exception of the 1960s and 1970s when fewer daily high temperature records were set than expected (the red dots fall below the black curve), for the most part, the number of daily high temperatures set each year falls off as the theory (which assumes no climate change) predicts it should (i.e. the red dots are pretty evenly distributed about the black curve).

• the observed data show that the number of daily minimum records being set (blue dots) is progressively falling further below the theoretical expectations. This confirms what we said earlier—that it is the decrease in minimum temperature records that is dominating the increase in the maximum/minimum temperature ratio.

Figure 1. Observed number of daily maximum (red dots) and daily minimum (blue dots) temperature records set each year across the United States, compared to expectations of assuming no temperature change (black curve). (Source: Meehl et al., 2009).

Now let’s have a look at what the NCAR model thinks should have been going on over the same time period. Notice in Figure 2 that the number of daily high temperatures progressively decrease less than expected under the assumption of no temperature change (red dots getting progressively higher than the black curve), while the number of expected minimum records decrease more than expected (blue dots progressively fall further below the black curve).

Figure 2. Projected number of daily maximum (red dots) and daily minimum (blue dots) temperature records set each year by the NCAR climate model, compared to expectations of assuming no temperature change (black curve). (Source: Meehl et al., 2009).

So while the observations suggest that our nights are warming faster than our days, this is not so in the NCAR climate model which suggests that the days and nights are warming up at the same rate. Such a model error leads to the model grossly overestimating the frequency and intensity of future heat waves.

Hopefully the powers-that-be in the EPA take note of this, because the specter of expanding heat waves in the future is something that the EPA highlights as it tries to justify regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Maybe they should go back and rethink that section as the climate models—or at least the NCAR climate model—fail to capture the behavior of the observations in this regard.

Repeat after us—if the models can’t replicate reality (for the right reasons) they can’t reliably predict the future.

So, the bottom line here is this—climate change in the U.S. during the past 50 years has resulted in fewer extreme nighttime low temperatures, while the daily extreme high temperatures have been little affected. And, at least one leading climate model fails to correctly capture this behavior.

Ask yourself this, is this the impression that you got from the coverage of this in the popular press?

References:

McKitrick, R. R., and P. J. Michaels, 2007. Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data. Journal of Geophysical Research, 112, D24S09, doi:10.1029/2007JD008465.

Meehl, G. A., et al., 2009. The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S., Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2009GL040736, in press.

Guest post by Larry Fields

The last Ice Age razed all of the coniferous forests in Finland. After the ice sheet retreated, trees from elsewhere–like the Scots Pine–gradually colonized the vacant niches. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened in many high mountains of the Earth’s temperate regions, including the Sierra Nevada Range of California. We can learn a thing or two about climate history from Alpine dendrology.

Round Top Lake, at 9340 feet elevation in the Northern Sierra near Carson Pass, is my favorite place for informal climate history research. Whitebark Pine trees grow in tight clumps around the North half of the lake.

Other high altitude conifers–like Lodgepole Pine, Mountain Hemlock, and Red Fir–also grow in the Carson Pass area. But Whitebark Pines can grow at slightly high elevations than these other trees.

At Round Top Lake, the Whitebark Pines in any given group are nearly identical genetically, since they reproduce asexually. New tree trunks grow outward from an existing root system. This is called suckering. The seeds that do sprout can’t endure the harsh Winters at that altitude. Walking 100  yards downhill from the lake on the main trail, one can see Whitebark Pines that have grown in a more normal way.

Naturalist Jeffrey P. Schaffer mentioned Round Top Lake in the 1989 edition of his book, The Tahoe Sierra: A Natural History Guide to the 106 Hikes in the Northern Sierra. Here’s a link to a review of a more recent book by Schaffer.
http://www.amazon.com/Tahoe-Sierra-Natural-History-Northern/dp/0899972209

Question: After the last Ice Age, how did the Whitebark Pines reach the lake in the first place?
My answer: At some time after the last Ice Age, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than it is these days. The Whitebark Pines sprouted from seeds at that time, with a little avian assistance.

The Clark nutcracker helps to spread seeds from the conifers in the Carson Pass area. The bird caches seeds that it gathers in anticipation of the Winter food shortage, but often stores more than it needs. Some of the forgotten seeds sprout a fair distance–and even uphill–from the parent trees.

Several years ago, I was surprised to see a knee-high Whitebark Pine seedling outside the half-circle of clone clusters hugging Round Top Lake. However it did not survive.

If the Northern Sierra climate heats up in a big way, I’d expect individual seed-sprouted Whitebark Pines at Round Top Lake to eventually supplant the clumps of small trees. Over the last 1000 or more years, the clones have been gradually accumulating random mutations, which should put them at a slight competitive disadvantage with any future surviving seed-sprouted progeny. When I see a lot of isolated Whitebark Pine seedlings that grow to 6 feet in height at Round Top Lake, then I’ll believe that the Northern Sierra climate is the warmest that it’s been since before the last Ice Age.

Jennifer Marohasy kindly allowed me to guest-post a guest article about this preliminary investigation on her blog.  That report is similar to this one, but with less detail. On 29 August 2009, co-investigator James Mayeau and I visited Round Top Lake for more detailed study. Here’s a link to James’ account of our exploits on that day, in a second guest-posting at Jennifer’s blog.
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/white-bark-pine-trees-part-2-a-note-from-james-mayeau/
This blog post includes a link to more of James’ photos from Round Top Lake.

Although the overwhelming majority of Whitebark Pines at Round Top Lake were clones growing in clumps, we did manage to find a few medium-sized individual trees near the sunnier West end.  I’m guessing that their growth rates were pretty slow, given the marginal nature of the habitat. They probably predate the latest global warming that started in the late 1970s. If any of the West-end trees date from the 1930s, that would be additional evidence that the last round of’ global warming in the 80s and 90s was not a big deal, even by 20th Century standards.

A good follow-up project would be to count the growth rings in these few West-end trees, in order to determine their ages. Alas, my academic background is in analytical chemistry; I’m not qualified to drill for core samples in living trees.

Studies that emphasize tree ring analysis tell parts of several different stories that Nature has woven together into the fabric of climate history. These stories are about precipitation (in the case of Bristlecone Pines in the semi-arid Basin and Range Region of the Western US), insolation, wind, and yes temperature. Modern dendroclimatology often requires sophisticated  techniques to tease out the temperature parts of tree-ring stories. One lesson from the recent Keith Briffa controversy: In modern-dendroclimatology-based climate history studies, the methodological uncertainties stemming from sampling error, inter alia, are huge.

On the other hand, Seat-of-the-Pants Dendroclimatology (SPDC) emphasizes straightforward early 20th Century technology: shoeleather, cameras, maps, field guides, and optional hand-operated tree-boring devices. The key insight of SPDC: For a given topography, temperature is the single unambiguous control variable that governs tree reproduction mode just below Alpine timberline. When clumps of clone trees dominate the landscape there, one can be certain that the climate was appreciably warmer at some time in the past.

Side note. At timberline in the Northern Sierra, it is difficult to find Whitebark Pines in the form of trees; instead they typically grow as Alpine shrubs–known as krummholz. This is the subject of ongoing climate-related investigation by other researchers.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/programs/snrc/climate_landscape/high_elevation_sub1/genetic_variability.shtml

Summary. In the Northern Sierra, Seat-of-the-Pants Dendroclimatology can give a more accurate indication of pivotal warming events in Earth’s geologically recent climate history than can modern dendroclimatology. In terms of the debate surrounding the ‘unprecedented’ global warming of the late 20th Century, Round Top Lake is ‘the elephant in the room’.

Cluster of Whitebark Pines at Round Top L. Photo by James Mayeau.