The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) has responded to the excellent report
Watts, A. 2009: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? 28 pages, March 2009 The Heartland Institute [hard copies available from The Heartland Institute 19 South LaSalle Street #903 Chicago Illinois 60603]
which I weblogged on at “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” By Anthony Watts.
The NCDC “Talking Points” released on June 9, 2009 are available at
Talking Points related to: Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?
Unfortunately, the author of the NCDC Talking Points cavalierly and poorly responded to Anthony Watts report. They did not even have the courtesy to cite the report! {UPDATE 7/3/09: They have now cited Anthony’s report, but retained the original date of the Talking Points of June 9 2009).
Below, I comment on their response.
NCDC Talking Point #1
Q. Do many U.S. stations have poor siting by being placed inappropriately close to trees, buildings, parking lots, etc.?
A. Yes. The National Weather Service has station siting criteria, but they were not always followed. That is one reason why NOAA created the Climate Reference Network, with excellent siting and redundant sensors. It is a network designed specifically for assessing climate change. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/uscrn/. Additionally, an effort is underway to modernize the Historical Climatology Network, though funds are currently available only to modernize and maintain stations in the Southwest. Managers of both of these networks work diligently to put their stations in locations not only with excellent current siting, but also where the site characteristics are unlikely to change very much over the coming decades.
Climate Science Response
Their answer confirms what Anthony Watts and colleagues have carefully documented. An obvious question is why did not NCDC elevate this as a priority sooner? Moreover, if the current sites can be “adjusted” to be regionally representative, why does NOAA even need the new Climate Reference Network? The answer to that is that they have recognized for years that there is a problem with the siting of the surface stations, but deliberately attempted to bury this issue until Anthony Watts and colleagues confronted NCDC with the issue.
NCDC Talking Point #2
Q. How has the poor siting biased local temperatures trends?
A. At the present time (June 2009), to the best of our knowledge, there has only been one published peer-reviewed study that specifically quantified the potential bias in trends caused by poor station siting: Peterson, Thomas C., 2006: Examination of Potential Biases in Air Temperature Caused by Poor Station Locations. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 87, 1073-1080. Written by a NOAA National Climatic Data Center scientist, it examined only a small subset of stations – all that had their siting checked at that time – and found no bias in long-term trends. The linear trend in adjusted temperature series over the period examined was nearly identical between the stations with good siting and the stations with poor siting, with the stations having poor siting showing slightly less warming. The following questions address implications from that paper.
Climate Science Response
This is blatantly untrue and the author of these talking points know that. Tom Peterson, for example, was even a reviewer of the Pielke 2007a and 2007b papers, and was aware of the Pielke et al 2002 paper.
Pielke Sr., R.A., T. Stohlgren, L. Schell, W. Parton, N. Doesken, K. Redmond, J. Moeny, T. McKee, and T.G.F. Kittel, 2002: Problems in evaluating regional and local trends in temperature: An example from eastern Colorado, USA. Int. J. Climatol., 22, 421-434.
Pielke Sr., R.A. J. Nielsen-Gammon, C. Davey, J. Angel, O. Bliss, N. Doesken, M. Cai., S. Fall, D. Niyogi, K. Gallo, R. Hale, K.G. Hubbard, X. Lin, H. Li, and S. Raman, 2007a: Documentation of uncertainties and biases associated with surface temperature measurement sites for climate change assessment. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 88:6, 913-928.
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007b: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.
In the second paper, we wrote
“Peterson’s approach and conclusions, therefore, provide a false sense of confidence with these data for temperature change studies by seeming to indicate that the errors can be corrected.”
The decision of the NCDC Talking Points to ignore these papers illustrates the state that NCDC is in with respect to Climate Science. NCDC, as led by Tom Karl, is not interested in an inclusive assessment of climate science issues (in this case the multi-decadal surface temperature trends), but are only interested in promoting their particular agenda and in protecting their particular data set.
NCDC Talking Point #3
Q. Does a station with poor siting read warmer than a station with good siting?
Not necessarily. A station too close to a parking lot would be expected to read warmer than a station situated over grass far from any human influence other natural obstructions. But a station too close to a large tree to the west, so that the station was shaded in the afternoon, would be expected to make the afternoon maximum temperature read a bit cooler than a station in full sunlight. Many local factors influence the observed temperature: whether a station is in a valley with cold air drainage, whether the station is a liquid-in-glass thermometer in a standard wooden shelter or an electronic thermometer in the new smaller and more open plastic shelters, whether the station reads and resets its maximum and minimum thermometers in the coolest time of the day in early morning or in the warmest time of the day in the afternoon, etc. But for detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature – whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station over grass – but how that temperature changes over time.
Climate Science Response
The answer correctly reports on the variety of issues that affect surface temperatures. However, where we disagree is that the multi-decadal surface temperature trends and anomalies also depend on the details of the observing sites and how these details change over time.
This can be illustrated from our 2007 BAMS paper, where the set of relatively closely spaced stations shown in Figure 10 (reproduced belw) have significantly different long term trends, as summarized in Table 5 (reproduced below) from that paper. Despite being relatively close together, the variations in both the local enviroment and the station exposure result in distinctly different trends [Using the categories in the Watts, 2009 report, the stations had the following Trinidad (3); Cheyenne Wells (1); Las Animas (5); Eads (4) and Lamar (4)]. 
Even sites that are locally in a category 1 class, such as Cheyenne Wells, however, also have issues with the landscape in their local surroundings, as we documented for locations in northeastern Colorado in Figures 5, 7, 9, 10 and 12 of
Hanamean, J.R. Jr., R.A. Pielke Sr., C.L. Castro, D.S. Ojima, B.C. Reed, and Z. Gao, 2003: Vegetation impacts on maximum and minimum temperatures in northeast Colorado. Meteorological Applications, 10, 203-215.
Depending on wind direction, the air that reaches the observing site can have a different temperature. Changes in the wind directions over time can result in temperature trends that are due to this effect alone.
This local landscape variation as a function of azimith can be seen in the photographs for the Cheyenne Wells site in
Davey, C.A., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2005: Microclimate exposures of surface-based weather stations – implications for the assessment of long-term temperature trends. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., Vol. 86, No. 4, 497–504,
where depending on the wind direction and time of year, the air that the temperature sensor monitors may transit a dirt road, crops, or other land surface varations, each with a different surface heat budget., before reaching the temperature observing site.
The NCDC Talking Points ignore informing us why all of these local landscape effects on multi-decadal surface temperature trends would be random and average out.
NCDC Talking Point #4
Q. So a station moving from a location with good siting to a location with poor siting could cause a bias in the temperature record. Can that bias be adjusted out of the record?
A. A great dealof work has gone into efforts to account for a wide variety of biases in the climate record, both in NOAA and at sister agencies around the world. Since the 1980s, scientists at NOAA’s NationalClimatic Data Center are at the forefront of this effort developing techniques to detect and quantify biases in station time series. When a bias associated with any change is detected, it is removed so that the time series is homogeneous with respect to its current instrumentation and siting. The latest peer-reviewed paper which provides an overview the sources of bias and their removal (Menne et al., 2009 in press), including urbanization and nonstandard siting. At the time that paper was written, station site evaluations were too incomplete to conduct a thorough investigation (that analysis is forthcoming). However, they could evaluate urban bias and found that once the data were fully adjusted the 30% most urban stations had about the same trend as the remaining more rural stations.
Climate Science Response
The failure of NCDC to correct for all of the recognized biases has been documented in
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229;
a paper NCDC has chosen to ignore [another surface temperature analysis group has been open to scientific debate, however; see].
NCDC has also ignored
Lin, X., R.A. Pielke Sr., K.G. Hubbard, K.C. Crawford, M. A. Shafer, and T. Matsui, 2007: An examination of 1997-2007 surface layer temperature trends at two heights in Oklahoma. Geophys. Res. Letts., 34, L24705, doi:10.1029/2007GL031652,
where we document a bias in the use of a single level surface temperature (the minimum temperature, in particular) to monitor multi-decadal surface temperature trends.
The NCDC talking points also mention the Menne et al (2009) paper, which, unfortunately, perpetuates the NCDC failure to adequately consider all of the biases and uncertainties in the surface temperature record. The Menne et al paper was weblogged in
Finally, we have several other papers in the review process, and look forward to communicating them to you when accepted for publication.
NCDC Talking Point #5
Q. What can we say about poor siting’s impact on national temperature trends?
A. We are limited in what we can say due to limited information about station siting. Surfacestations.org has examined about 70% of the 1221 stations in NOAA’s Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). According to their web site of early June 2009, they classified 70 USHCN version 2 stations as good or best (class 1 or 2). The criteria used to make that classification is based on NOAA’s Climate Reference Network Site Handbook so the criteria are clear. But, as many different individuals participated in the site evaluations, with varying levels of expertise, the degree of standardization and reproducibility of this process is unknown.
However, at the present time this is the only large scale site evaluation information available so we conducted a preliminary analysis.
Two national time series were made using the same gridding and area averaging technique. One analysis was for the full data set. The other used only the 70 stations that surfacestations.org classified as good or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70 stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yetthe two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar. Clearly there is no indication for this analysis that poor current siting is imparting a bias in the U.S. temperature trends.
Climate Science Response
This is a cavalier response. In order to show that there is little effect on surface temperature anomalies due to station siting, they need to assess the anomalies over time in the same region for each category of station siting. A national average which includes includes large regional variations (e.g. see Figure 20a in Pielke et al 2007a ) tells us little about the quality of the data.
Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?
A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier
in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in mountainous areas, upward as well.
Menne, Matthew J., Claude N. Williams, Jr. and Russell S. Vose, 2009: The United States Historical Climatology Network Monthly Temperature Data – Version 2. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, in press.
Peterson, Thomas C., 2006: Examination of Potential Biases in Air Temperature Caused by Poor Station Locations. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 87, 1073-1080. It is available from http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/87/8/pdf/i1520-0477-87-8-1073.pdf.
Climate Science Response
Their claim that temperatures have been “rising rapidly” over the past 50 years is based on the surface temperature record in which there are reported warm biases; e.g. see
Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.
NCDC also is misinformed with respect to the other climate metrics. For example, they write
“Plants are blooming earlier in the spring.”
However, a new paper in press (see)
White, M.A., K.M. de Beurs, K. Didan, D.W. Inouye, A.D. Richardson, O.P. Jensen, J. O’Keefe, G. Zhang, R.R. Nemani, W.J.D. van Leeuwen, J.F. Brown, A. de Wit, M. Schaepman, X. Lin, M. Dettinger, A. Bailey, J. Kimball, M.D. Schwartz, D.D. Baldocchi, J.T. Lee, W.K. Lauenroth. Intercomparison, interpretation, and assessment of spring phenology in North America estimated from remote sensing for 1982 to 2006. Global Change Biology (in press),
writes
“Trend estimates from the SOS [Start of Spring] methods as well as measured and modeled plant phenologystrongly suggest either no or very geographically limited trends towards earlier spring arrival, although we caution that, for an event such as SOS with high interannual variability, a 25-year SOS record is short for detecting robust trends.”
IN CONCLUSION
NCDC would be a much more valuable resource in the climate community if they worked to be inclusive in presenting all peer reviewed perspectives in climate science. Currently, they are only reporting on information that supports their agenda and not communicating real world observational data that conflicts with that agenda. The fault for this failure in leadership is with Tom Karl who is Director of NCDC.
Dr Reese (14:17:05) :
And perhaps even more disturbingly our main pollinator the honey bees are dying. Without the bees there’s no chance that our civilization will prosper.
Dr Reese
It’s important to remember that the honey bee is not native to the Americas. They were brought here by the first settlers from Europe. There have been some four thousand species of native solitary bees (no colonies) and thousands of other insects (butterflies, flies, beetles, etc.) that pollinate our plants very well. And before there were flowers to attract insects, plants were pollinated by the wind. While the decline in the honey bee population is unfortunate they are not “our main pollinator” or a natural species in the Americas and their population is subject to natural variation of climate.
Dr Reese says: “You do not have to be a climatologist nor a physicist to see what’s coming down the road.”
Let me guess, doc… you’re neither. Right?
Since you’re new here, you probably missed the discussions about how very little the thin scattering of humanity over the globe is able to affect the planet. The answer: very little.
In fact, too little to even measure — unless the humans are packed together into an urban environment, with their A/C units blowing hot air over asphalt and onto surface station thermometers.
Want to understand how little humanity there actually is, compared with the Earth’s surface? I think I can reconstruct the analogy from memory, from the previous discussions here on this topic:
Currently there are about 6.7 billion people on Earth. So let’s be generous, and allow each person 6ft x 2ft x 1.5ft [women & children tend to be smaller].
This is 18 cubic feet per human. Multiplying 18 cubic feet by 6.5 billion people gives us 117 billion cubic feet of humanity. Sounds like a lot — to a relatively uneducated person. Right… doc?
Now let’s take one cubic mile, or 5280′ cubed. This is 5,280 x 5,280 x 5,280 feet = 147.2 billion cubic feet.
Therefore, all of humanity occupies significantly less than one cubic mile. [Actually, all of the people on Earth could fit into a sphere of about 940 meters in diameter.]
Since the surface area of the Earth is 197,000,000 square miles, that leaves over 196,999,999 square miles of human-free space. Looking at it that way puts the silly Club of Rome arm-waving about “6.7 billion people” in its place; it’s not a scary number when looked at in its true perspective. [I just realized that I’ve just mixed squares and cubes. So the total area occupied by humanity would be a few square miles. The point is that humanity isn’t a significant factor.]
Also, before the Europeans arrived it is estimated that between 40 million and 100 million huge bison thundered across the Great Plains every year, farting methane all the way and fertilizing the prairie with millions of tons of CO2 emitting meadow muffins. It is also estimated that there were over 50 million Native Americans then. There’s not much left of the bison or the Indians. So you see, even though people have multiplied, there are other factors to consider.
For instance, ants and termites are estimated to occupy around ten cubic miles; that’s more than ten times the volume of all humanity. And termites emit a lot of methane. But the alarmist grant-seekers can’t make their loot off of termite farts, so they get the clueless all worked up over a blob of protoplasm that would fit into a 940 meter sphere on a 197 million square mile surface.
Isn’t WUWT a great site, doc? You just learned something!
[BTW, since you mentioned that mysterious “tipping” point, I have to ask you, like I ask every warmer who mentions it: where is that tipping point? Enquiring minds want to know. Please show us. Also, nice touch about the honey bees. Is global warming gonna get them, too? I’d like to see your citations on AGW=dead honeybees. We can add it to the list.]
@ur momisugly bill (02:29:54) :
C’mon Bill, are you being serious? Please put the thermocouple 2m above the top of the radiator and repeat your experiment. The MMTSs you referred to were 2m above the heat sources, albeit 50cm away horizontally.
Mike McMillan (12:03:25) :
Meanwhile, I’d reeeely like to find out whether they compared homo’d or raw CRN 1&2 stations with the rest of the country. Are we looking at that ourselves?
REPLY: Why not ask Thomas Petersen? I’ve sent him two emails and have gotten no reply…
So I enquired of Dr Peterson, Anthony, sir, and he informed me that they used the fully homogeneity adjusted USHCN version 2 data.
Seems to me that investigations on the honey bees turned up a few suspect causes, but AGW was NOT one of them. Some were saying new GMO stuff, new pesticides, new microbes, etc.
It’s screaming hot out here on hot summer days, when we get them, and it doesn’t seem to bother the bees.
If AGW were real, the African Killer bees would have overrun the US by now. They love the heat. So, why are they not all over the place? Has it something to do with falling temsp of late?
Phil (16:44:56) : C’mon Bill, are you being serious? Please put the thermocouple 2m above the top of the radiator and repeat your experiment.
I assume you mean approx. 1.5m?
Some stuff of interest:
http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/pdfs/Pielke-etal_BAMS_Jun07.pdf
The Effectiveness of the ASOS, MMTS, Gill, and CRS Air Temperature Radiation Shields
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0426/18/6/pdf/i1520-0426-18-6-851.pdf
A Study on the USCRN Air Temperature Performance
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/69979.pdf
Lucy Skywalker (13:40:23) :
Mike D. IMHO it would be useful if you could quote some typical animal studies that are (a) BS (bad science) or (b) relevant to a time which was warming, but not happening right now that we’ve got cooling again.
You mean besides the expanding polar bear population?
Lucy, I spend my time seeking good science, not bad. If I was to analyze every piece of bad science I come across, I would never get anything else done. That being said, I recently critiqued a forestry paper that claimed global warming is responsible for increasing forest fire acreage in the Western U.S. here:
http://westinstenv.org/sosf/2009/06/30/is-there-a-forest-fire-climate-connection/
The problem with all the studies that purport to find a connection between climate and the environment are that they lack good data on both.
Another factor to consider is that, assuming there is some connection between poorly measured animal “ranges” and non-existent global warming, warmer is better for plants and animals. If ranges are changing due to climate (a baseless claim), it would be a GOOD thing. Warmer means more bio-productivity and biodiversity. So does increased CO2 concentration.
If Bill’s Italian lake warmed a whopping 2 degrees C, I guarantee it meant more life in the lake. Was that the only factor at play? Of course not. Can one isolate the effect of alleged warming from all the other factors that affected Italian lakes over the last 30 years? I strongly doubt it.
But bottom line, warmer means more biology. Do Italians want more biology in their lakes? I don’t know. People freak out at the slightest perturbations in their lives. If the world is not frozen in time, then hysteria rules. Italians are not exceptions to that rule. But more Life is a good thing, if you value Life, and I do.
Mike:
In our particular study of the Italian lake, we show that a change in thermal stratification regime of the lake provided a refuge from fish predation from a voracious invertebrate predator called Bythotrephes. A 10-fold increase in Bythotrephes resulted in a 95% decrease in Daphnia, the main phytoplankton grazer in the lake. You may have read about Bythotrephes because it invaded the North American Great Lakes in the 1980s and is changing the food chains of many northern lakes as it extends its range in North America. Our study is not about range change, but about a 10-fold increase in a key predator that is a native but has increased dramatically in abundance during a period of strong warming.
The large subalpine lakes of Europe, including lakes Geneva (France/Switzerland), Constance (Germany/Switzerland), Zurich (Switzerland) and Maggiore (Italy/Switzerland) have especially good long term data on ecology/fish and temperature. I am currently spending my time on lab experiments, but will soon be analyzing the long term data from all of these lakes to further study effects of warming on Bythotrephes/fish interactions. The best temperature data set is for Lake Zurich, starting just after World War II. If you are interested in reading about long term warming in Lake Zurich, search in Google Scholar under David Livingstone (author) and Lake Zurich. In my analysis, the effects of warmer temperature on physiology are neglible, but the effects of warming on the mixing and stratification regimes are very important.
@ur momisugly bill (20:13:50) :
Your point about the sensors being at different heights is good and Anthony has documented this on several occasions, IIRC.
bill (02:29:54) :The data as it stands is all the evidence you have.
Yes, we go to war with the army we have, not the army we would like to have. This is the same rationalizing that led to the invasion of Iraq. Tell me, how did that work out?
Just a side note. Mike D assumed that he knew what my Lake Maggiore study was about without reading the study or even hearing a description of it. If you read what he says he assumes the study shows and my description, you will note that he has completely missed the point. This goes to emphasize my point that you cannot critisize a study without reading and understanding it. You should not assume that just because a study is peer-reviewed and appears in a respected scientific journal, that it is “junk science.”
Bill,
One common defect in wildlife/habitat studies is the lack of appreciation for predator/prey relationships. I’m not familiar with your study and don’t mean to imply anything about it, but it is a general rule that wildlife population dynamics are governed by predator/prey interactions, not “habitat” per se.
Habitat is the field on which the predator/prey game is played. In many cases, both predators and prey can survive and even thrive across a range of habitat conditions. That is, the habitat does not govern population dynamics — the carrying capacity is never strained — because predators eat the prey down to a fraction of the carrying capacity. As prey populations fall, so do predator populations. A non-linear dynamic results.
I don’t know much about Bythotrephes or Daphnia, except that they both occur in lakes and waterways across a wide range of latitutdes and longitudes. That is, in a variety of aqueous temperature regimes. I infer that a narrow water temperature condition is not a limiting factor for either genus. And I further hypothesize that predator/prey dynamics are the fundamental driver of population change in both.
“Habitat” set asides almost never affect wildlife populations, whereas manipulations of predator/prey relationships almost always do. Wildlife Population Dynamics 101.
Could it be that the recent introduction of Bythotrephes into waters formerly free of that predator is driving the population changes, rather than minor water temp changes? And is there any reason to believe that thermal stratification has been constant throughout Holocene lake history? Do you see how habitat alone might not explain anything, whereas predator/prey relationships explain almost everything?
Mike:
The invasion of Bythotrephes into lakes in the northern US and Canada is unrelated to climate change, but is closely tied to the presence of a deep water, low light relative warm refuge from predatory fish. Bythotrephes requires relatively warm water, but is very vulnerable to being eaten by visually feeding fish. Thus, it only survives in deep lakes where warmer water is found at great enough depths such that it’s difficult for visually feeding fish to see the Bythotrephes (due to low light). There are many cases in ecology where habitat is important in providing refuges from predators.
Bythotrephes has been present in Lake Maggiore at least since the 1940s and perhaps for thousands of year. However, until the period of warming in the late 1980s, it was a minor player in the lake food chain. Warming, especially during strong El Nino years in the late 80s and early 90s resulted in earlier thermal statification and a thicker and longer lasting (during the warmer seasons) layer in which Bythotrephes could “hide” from fish and still find its own prey. This resulted in an “explosion” of its population density. The running head for our paper is “indirect effects of climate warming,” because the key seems to be the change in habitat structure (due to warming) that has altered predator-prey relationships.
This can be described as a “regime shift” or a “tipping point.” Nearly all of the increase in Bythotrephes occurred during a 3 year period and the species remained abundant after that time. It was during this time that the duration of the thermal/light refuge dramatically increased. In the early 80s the refuge first appeared in August or September, but by the early 90s, the refuge appeared in May or June. Thus, Bythotrephes, which has a generation time on the order of 10 days, had a much greater time when it was safe from fish predation.
Since I teach a graduate level class in population ecology, I know that predator/prey and competitive interactions are often important in detemining a species success. Several effects of climate change on habitat have been hypothesized to affect predator prey interactions in mammals, although I am not sure how well they have been documented. Snow cover, for example, is supposed to increase moose vulnerability to wolves but to decrease snowshoe hare vulnerability to lynx. The most famous case, of course, is the polar bear and near shore ice. I don’t want to argue about whether sea ice is likely to increase or decrease. However, it seems clear, based on scientific studies, that polar bear hunting success for their main prey, seals, depends on near shore ice. I would say that these studies, including the Bythotrephes study all point to the influence of habitat on predator prey interactions. Thus, habitat and predation interact and both are important.
Dr Reese
And perhaps even more disturbingly our main pollinator the honey bees are dying. Without the bees there’s no chance that our civilization will prosper.
==
You also and uncritically wonder at the “impact” man “must have” on the environment, then demand (through the economically deadly climate change legislation!) that we spend 1.6 trillion dollars to prevent that damage.
Couple of points:
(1) All that 1.6 trillion dollars will do NOTHING to reduce global warming.
(2) It will only HURT everyone – except socialist international politicians and the corrupt local and overseas governments and criminals who take the money.
(3) The supposed global warming you claim has such disastrous impact was – real world now, not exaggerated political propaganda – 1/2 of ONE degree change in temperature in 1998, and is right now, real world, actual numbers remember 0.0 degrees change over the past 30 years.
Please explain exactly how a 0.0 degree measured change in temperatures is supposed to be catastrophic. Please explain exactly how a 1/2 of one degree change accounts for the wildlife changes you claim have occurred due to global warming.
You CANNOT “invent” results if the “source”: is not present. Well, the AGW propagandists actually do that all the time, but I hope – as a “doctor” you don’t try to treat your patients that way.
We have measured the real source of ALL supposed AGW symptoms: it is a now 0.0 degree change over 30 years in global temperatures.
Bill D (05:08:26):
I’ve been reading your comments with interest. It’s pretty clear that you’re working toward getting the answer you want, whether it’s right or wrong. And of course, you will get it.
I’m sure you have a ready answer to Robert A Cook’s comment to the “Dr Reese”, immediately below yours:
People without a personal, emotional investment like yours will look at the plain facts you state and understand that your conclusions are off base. The problem comes from trying to tie your ecology study in with AGW [you were careful to not mention the A in AGW, but c’mon. You certainly know where you’re posting, and it isn’t RC].
The planet’s temperature goes through constant, small fraction-of-a-degree fluctuations above and below the long term trend line of natural global warming. The climate never remains static. Concluding that a temporary, fraction of a degree variation in global temperature is the cause of what you’re observing is ridiculous. And I don’t have to read your unpublished paper to know it’s ridiculous.
Before putting it out for climate peer review, keep in mind that the referees and journals will pet you if you blame it on global warming. But I suspect you already knew that. Good luck with the grant.
Smokey:
Interestingly, the reviewers, were very critical of the idea that climate change was behind the increase in Bythotrephes in Lake Maggiore and an earlier version of the paper which I was not involved in was rejected.. I became involved in study because I had ideas for a more rigorous statistical analysis. I am very excited that I now have access tolong term data from four other lakes with Bythotrephes with over 140 years of data. This should provide a strong basis for rejecting or confirming our interpretation of the Lake Maggiore analysis. Once a scientist is convinced of the validity of an hypothesis, he or should naturally presents the data as clearly and convincingly as possible. However, it’s also good idea and a good strategy to consider the weaknesses and alternative explanations in the discussion section of a scientific paper. If the author brings up the weakness, this blunts criticism by reviewers. In many cases, reviewers are quite ruthless. If the overall accessment is positive, it is good to have a few pages of highly critical comments that help to improve the clarity and strength of the paper.
I’ve been an editor or peer reveiwer for over 650 scientific articles for at least 33 scientific journals. Climate change is not my area of research–I’ve probably only reviewed about 10 papers dealing with long term effects of temperature change and I have only been involved as an author in one such paper. I will say that I look to the quality of the science and not whether the conclusions conform with some expectation when reviewing and serving as an editor. Some journals have very high rejection rates (say 80%). I think that it is important for people who are interested in science to have a better understanding of the peer review process and this is why I am writing this note. The notion that peer review is biased is not supported by my experience, although scientists can be more critical if a paper goes against well accepted earlier studies and their expectations. I have often supported publication of papers that were not really convincing if I did not find any defects in the experimental design or data analysis. On the other hand, papers that support a concensus position are often rejected because they have “nothing new.”
Bill D,
I’m not a biologist, but I can think of a number of alternate explanations for your observations, and a temporary change of a fraction of a degree isn’t one of them. Even local/regional climate changes generally have a bigger effect. And other factors completely unrelated to the climate could more credibly account for the observed changes. But I understand how rent seeking works, and I don’t blame any one individual for jumping on the AGW bandwagon. The problem goes deeper than that; it is systemic. As the article states: “NCDC would be a much more valuable resource in the climate community if they worked to be inclusive in presenting all peer reviewed perspectives in climate science. Currently, they are only reporting on information that supports their agenda and not communicating real world observational data that conflicts with that agenda.”
No doubt you’ve seen Bishop Hill’s report on the shenanigans in climate peer review, but in case you haven’t, here’s the link: click
I would be interested in your thoughts about the Amman/Mann/IPCC situation. Do you think the climate peer review system is working properly?
As the Wegman Report to Congress makes very clear, climate peer review is tightly controlled by a relatively small clique of insiders.
Professor Wegman is an internationally esteemed statistician with impeccable credentials. Do you find his report credible? If so, you must then admit that the climate peer review system has been gamed for the benefit of those promoting the [repeatedly falsified] AGW hypothesis. If not, please explain why Prof. Wegman, et al. are wrong in their analysis.
Being so involved with the peer review process, maybe you can’t see the forest for the trees. But those of us on the outside, looking at the gross irregularities, see that the system has been gamed for the benefit of a few.
I am not saying that everyone involved is trying to game the system. Most scientists are honest. But those few insiders controlling the system by waving through papers that have an agenda they agree with, and blocking papers that do not buy into the CO2=AGW conjecture, are making all scientists appear to be less than honest.
There is money — big money involved in promoting AGW. Not every scientist has the necessary ethics to do the right thing. So the system has been gamed, which explains why those on the AGW side have filled the moat with crocodiles and pulled up the drawbridge. They will not answer straightforward questions, and they will not debate. They dishonestly claim that the data and methodologies used are their own personal property, even though that work product was paid for by the taxpayers.
You stated that ‘the notion that peer review is biased is not supported by my experience.’ You really don’t see the problem?
Smokey:
I really can’t speculate on peer review outside my own experience, which is mainly in aquatic ecology. One of the strengths of our study on Maggiore is that we have good data that eliminates the alternative explanations that concerned reviewers. I don’t really see how you can suggest alternative explanations when you have not seeen the data nor have you read about the alternatives that we have alread shown to be false. If you have some ideas that could be tested with my 140 years of data on lake temperature and the abundance of Bythotrephes or if you think that we need some specific missing data, I would be happy to hear your ideas.
One apparent misconception is that scientists try to prove each other right. In fact, the best way to get a good publication is to present data that show that other publications are inaccurate or have overlooked important mechanisms. Over the short term, peer review may lead to the rejection of some good work, or the acceptance of weak or inaccurate studies. However, over longer periods, maybe a few years the best data and the best analysis win out.
“Over the short term, peer review may lead to the rejection of some good work”
Then I’d say peer review doesn’t work “in the short term”
How long does peer review take for it to work? Will we know in 30 years?
Andrew
Bill D,
You first, please. Why? Because I asked first, and I’d like to hear your views on the Amman/Mann/IPCC shenanigans documented by Bishop Hill, McIntyre & McKitrick and others. You seem to have skirted that issue completely.
My final sentence in my last post was a question for you. I provided plenty of backup information in the links, which go to the heart of the climate peer review issues. I have more links if you wish. I’d also like to read your response to the quote in the first paragraph, which was taken from the topic article.
You also say there is an apparent misconception that scientists try to prove each other right. That may be true elsewhere, but not on this “Best Science” site, where we are constantly reminded of the Scientific Method — which requires that others must try their best to falsify any new hypothesis. [Note that the CO2=AGW hypothesis has been falsified; climate changes are the result of natural fluctuations, and that erstwhile hypothesis has never been falsified.]
So check out the links I provided, then tell us if you think the climate peer review process is being done fairly and honestly… or not.