I’m proud to be a part of this second one hour long special report done by KUSI-TV and veteran TV meteorologist John Coleman. John is, in my opinion, the “Walter Cronkite of television weather”. His demeanor, humor, and delivery is reminiscent of that extraordinary television journalist.
I traveled to San Diego last week to tape my segment, and while I was there, I asked a few people I met at the TV station and at a restaurant what they thought about the first special last month. I was surprised to learn that the positive supporting comments far outnumbered the negative ones.
I also learned that the first special in January gave the station its highest rating ever for a one hour news report, so it is no surprise that they’d want to repeat that success. On a personal note, my entire taped presentation is not included here, and was edited for time. The end part where I refute NCDC didn’t make the final cut, perhaps the producer thought it too technical due to the graph of TOBS, FILNET, and RAW data that I used to show that NCDC’s claims about a cooling trend in poorly sited station doesn’t hold up. However, KUSI will make all the taped interviews available in their entirety, and I’ll post links to them when they are available for all to see. I should note that I don’t agree with the broad statement made in the video that “CO2 has no effect”. It does, but the magnitude of the direct effect and the feedback effects is disputed.
*The first KUSI program from January, “Global Warming: The Other Side”, can be viewed at:
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/81583352.html
Additional footage and unedited full length interviews from that program are available here:
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner
Here is all of the latest program, which aired Thursday Feb 18th, at 9PM PST:
Part one:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
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Bravo!
Coleman needs help. He pours scorn on the IPCC for a couple of minor mistakes in three volumes, then makes numerous mistakes in one short programme>>
What mistakes? A decimal point was slipped on CO2 concentrations that, if corrected, makes the point even stronger. Yes the CO2/water vapor thing was way over simplified, but the point was that over simplified or not, the data doesn’t support the theory. This was a video report for the public, not a lecture for a 4th year engineering class.
And I have yet to see a proper explanation of CO2 as a GHG that didn’t devolve into a rat hole nest with arguments about absorption spectrum or conductance vs radiance, or stefan’s law, or toa vs near surface or so on. Keep it as accurate as possible within a simple framework… and then show if it fits the data. I’m good with that.
Daniel (08:27:51) :
That is great post, the Finns don’t hold back at all do they?
John Coleman (09:43:38) :
I oversimplified. Critical comments are taken to heart. I will keep trying to do better.
With that attitude I know you will. Way to go. You are a good communicator and your efforts are invaluable. If only the IPCC had the same humility.
Now it is my turn to be humble, here is another greenhouse effect link, this is over my head to judge. Is he on to something here?
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:A81VTnHUPkEJ:www.tech-know.eu/NISubmission/pdf/Politics_and_the_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf+adiabatic+lapse+rate+greenhouse+effect&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiwZvv2w8O-I2jVLvl_jNAyMMK0oFFvnwWm3qZAom59wDIjAF9Q5k-_voIQCmn1hoWtEBgjtFGGZ22LU9giDVTnMmCmdQ7GIUpCrHNeNm6G4nKLg14djiR6c7SgRbj7b3uck3hb&sig=AHIEtbTG1haSI1yNANL1FwkTLacvcOBU0w
R. Gates (22:05:02) :
Re the UAH data, I know Dr. Spencer is a very respected scientist on the Site, but the fact that the Satellite data goes completely against what the Northern Hemisphere has experienced over the last 2 months, I have to wonder if it is not just a bit tainted with the NASA syndrom.
I have read & reread his description of how the data is analysed and there is so much room for problems it could be just as bad as Land Temperatures.
I am especially suspicious of how it copes with all the Cloud Cover that there has been in the NH recently.
The bigest problem for IPCC and CRU is that not Finnish nor Swedeish (which I am from ) nor Russian data shows any GW!!! And they don’t have any answer why. Karlén Wibjörn who is Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography at Uppsala says:
“I tried for years to obtain the data that the IPCC was based on a claim that the climate in the Nordic region has become warmer, “says Karlén Wibjörn who is Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography at Uppsala. This did not with my own calculations show that the Nordic countries have not undergone any unusual warming, but both Philip Jones and Kevin Trenberth simply refuses to hand over the data.” (Google translation)
dkkraft (10:35:58) :
Good find.
Richard Telford (07:40:50) :
UAH reporting is in trouble if all it can add to the sum knowledge of climate is the “Warmest Jan. on Record” when a wide majority of N. Hemisphere suffered through a record snowy winter.
People do not want to hear that the oven caused ice to form all over the kitchen, or that the wall heater froze the bathroom solid. In this age of connectivity, they know what went on this winter all over the place, from people just like them, on the ground where the winter pedal meet the metal.
AGW (Magic Pixie Dust Theory) is not cutting the mustard.
All Leanord Nimoy has to do, at this point, is to roll out a retread of “In Search of the Coming Ice Age” and that’s a wrap for the discussion.
A complaint – Anthony Watts has inventoried 87% of the 1,221 U.S. stations which he has said is one subset of about 3,000 stations used for world-wide land temperature records. Coleman and guests talk about a reduction in stations from 6000 down to 1500 stations for the land temperature record. So I would think the 1500 stations referenced as being left from an original 6,000 stations are those covering the rest of the world. This doesn’t mean that Coleman’s critique isn’t valid. It’s just not leaving an accurate picture of the world-wide land-based temperature record infrastructure.
Coleman did a decent job of presenting the overall skeptic case, but he didn’t address at least one issue correctly, IMHO:
Anthony Watts’ investigation is of the 1,223 stations in the U.S. of about 3,000 stations used world-wide for the world land-based temperature monitoring. So I don’t understand where Coleman gets his “we went from 6000 stations to 1500 stations” statement, which some of his guests seem to accept as valid unless he’s talking about the out-of-U.S. station drop-out after 1989.
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Much better than the first documentary done by KUSI on this subject.
Unfortunately, a couple of seconds could have been devoted to the differences made by the changeover from standard formulation whitewash to semigloss latex paint upon National Weather Service surface stations’ Stevenson screens in 1979.
I find myself having to explain the impact of this simple and (to most folks) straightforward-seeming change in terms of warming bias, and it would have been good for the KUSI audience to have understood that something as un-obvious could have made a significant impact in skewing the surface station temperature record.
I strongly recommend Dr. Jefferey D. Kooistra’s “The Alternate View” column in the November 2009 edition of Analog magazine, “Lessons From the Lab” for a cogent and brief appreciation of Mr. Watts’ surface station paint study.
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Why does my computer pause the tapes every 10 seconds of play? It is very irritating. Why won’t it just download the entire tape segment and play it all the way through?
I think i understood it now.
While Gerlich and Tscheuschner as well as William C. Gilbert dismiss the natural (and anthropogenically enhanced) greenhouse effect altogether, arguing with the laws of Thermodynamics, there should still be a measurable effect due to the fact that water vapour and CO2 actually absorb LWIR radiation, causing increased radiation towards the surface. How can these two seemingly contradictory statements be united?
The solution lies in the word “equilibrium”. An equilibrium in a vast system like the earth’s atmosphere needs time to be achieved. Here, the statistical analysis by Beenstock and Reingewertz fits in perfectly; saying that the temperature anomaly may not be caused by the absolute level of CO2 but by the first derivative.
So an increase in CO2 leads to a temporary upswing in temperature that levels off again as the system readjusts (cools through increased convection). A decrease in CO2 leads accordingly to a temporary downswing in temperature.
This can also be interpreted as the negative feedback posited by Miskolczi’s theory.
As our CO2 emissions rise pretty much linearly ATM (not exponentially as assumed by the IPCC) this leads to a roughly constant positive anomaly for the time being.
A little more nit-picking:
– Coleman’s statement that the Himalyas covered one tenth of the world’s land area (as some posters here have picked up on) and Moore’s CO2 concentrations quotes should have been fact-checked prior to the show. Sloppy. The AGW’ers will be all over those faux pas to diss the show at the expense of the other valid points. I also think Coleman may have been using camera teleprompters with text that wasn’t reviewed prior to broadcasting. Even Obama’s having trouble getting away with that these days, and he’s paying a price for it. We can’t afford that in this battle for the hearts and minds of the electorate.
– Watts (and Coleman) lost a good opportunity to slam NASA. Yes, their new USCRN network of stations is excellent in positioning as Watts said in the interview and in his prior blog posts (check out the NASA website – excellent distribution nationally and good positioning locally IMHO). And it’s true those new stations have only been around for a couple (2-3 years) and they have produced results comparable to other neighboring old-school stations (though I don’t know if NASA was comparing the recent results from those stations to local rural stations or to highly urbanized stations). But Watts should have pointed out that a major issue is historic adjustments to the station record that may have depressed earlier temperature records to produce an artificial warming bias to the historical record.
– One interviewed AGW’er said that more modern stations actually reflected a warmer condition than from earlier system installations. Lame. If the older installations underestimated temperature, then they did it across the last decades and historical temperatures should be adjusted upwards throughout the historical record and then compared to the latest technological records. It’s the trend in temperatures that’s important here.
REPLY: As I pointed out, my presentation was edited. The full presentation will be online soon with points you raise. While I would have liked to review the entire program prior, I didn’t have that opportunity. -A
Richard Telford and fearofscience have both been critical of John Coleman’s program for doing a little bit of what the IPCC has been doing for nearly two decades. So what does John Coleman do? He apologizes and says he will try to do better.
What does the IPCC do? Circles the wagons and gives you more cherry-picking science, half truths and obfuscations. Every uncertainty is portrayed as a likely enhancing event, such as: We don’t really understand this. It could be bad, or it could be a lot worse than bad!” It could also be A good factor, but they NEVER include that one.
Compared to the IPCC, Coleman’s sins are minuscule. Why do some people feel compelled to hold a TV meteorologist to a much higher standard of scientific integrity than the IPCC. That seems really irrational and dangerous, as Coleman has much less ability to mess up our lives than IPCC!
Tucci (111:07:02)
Thank you for your post and web connection. I had initially followed Anthony on his Stevenson Screen investigation and then on his subsequent site investigations, but I didn’t realize that that he had experienced that “Road to Damascus” moment in Chico. Getting blown on by hot exhaust from an HVAC system at a temperature station must have freaked him out on the validity of the station and the whole temperature recording system, as it should anybody.
What a mental visual!
“Pamela Gray (11:20:45) : ”
First time you’re using Flash, Pamela? Just hit play, hit it again to pause it, go make yourself an espresso, come back and the buffer is fully loaded. It just needs a little while to fill it up.
Anthony,
Thanks for responding to my post. I realize that Coleman was trying to jam a lot of points into a set time frame and had to cut out some material. Shoulda been a two hour program! I look forward to your thread.
Hammiesink (08:01:37) :
In part 8 during his interview with Christy, Coleman says that NASA has reported 2000-2009 as the warmest decade on earth.
This is a strawman.
The news release says that this decade was the warmest since record keeping began in 1880.
———————
Since NASA and Michael Mann have been in cahoots, and NASA has implicitly, through Gavin et al. at RC, endorsed Mann’s hockey stick, which suppressed the Medieval Warm Period, NASA has essentially been going along with the whole fairytale that global warming is out of control due to human activity. That argument relies on past temperatures being no warmer than today, using various temperature proxies that have virtually eliminated the Medieval and Roman warm periods. These periods are not allowed by the warmists to have been any warmer than today (despite historical and archaeobotanical evidence to the contrary). Hence, this is the warmest decade ever — at least in human history. Given the general tone of AGW arguments, Coleman’s statement is not so much a straw man as it is a response to the tenor of the AGW scare.
Jerry from Boston (11:05:45) :
The 1223 sites may be used in the USHCN but only a sub-set in GHCN
DaveE.
Playlist, part 1 to 9: http://tinyurl.com/ylb8jj6
The atmosphere is socialist in nature
It is not a free market, the GHGs don’t get to keep the heat they have absorbed, they are immediately taxed back into heat poverty via collisions with the majority of the GHG unemployed atmosphere.
The atmosphere is not a simple absorb then re-emit IR proposition (# 1 in = 1 out)
What is absorbed is governed by the availability of incoming IR
What is emitted is governed by Temperature
Increased emissions can only be funded by increased temperature.
From all sources (Convection, IR, Solar).
Anthony, you’re a very good presenter. You were very clear and well spoken. Great job.
Response to: rbateman (03:45:14) :
Your question (with .039% atmospheric CO2 and 50% Relative humidity (R.H.), what is the CO2/H20 ratio?) is easy to answer, but first, one needs a temperature before relative humidity can be used to determine the air’s water vapor content, so I’ll assume 70 degrees for which the vapor pressure is 0.0363 psia. Oh yeah, we need atmospheric pressure too, so let’s assume sea level and 14.696 psia.
From this and the ideal gas law, we have Pv/Pt = Nv/Nt= .0247
Where P=pressure, N=moles, v=vapor, and t=total
Thus water vapor occupies 2.47 percent by volume of the atmosphere.
.039/2.47 = .0158
In other words there are about 63 molecules of water vapor for every molecule of CO2 at 70 degrees F, at sea level with 50 % R.H.
So let’s see, if my memory serves me correctly. Miskolczi is right, and we double CO2, which Blick/Segalstad (http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/co2_not_bad.pdf )
say we can’t, then we go from 63 moles water vapor to only 62 moles water vapor to account for 2 moles of CO2, so that extra CO2 might cause R.H. to drop from 50% to about 49.2%.
If there is an Ice Age in our future, is sure has a strange way of showing itself with all this tropospheric heat…
Nup, not strange at all. A temperature increase has been the precursor of every Ice Age Mama Gaia has experienced in the past umpty-hundred-thousand years…