By Steven Goddard
[Update: See message from Professor North Below]
Some well known Aggie Jokes:
Did you hear about the Aggie who won a gold medal at the Olympics? He liked it so much that he decided to get it bronzed.
Did you hear about the Houston Cougar that transferred to A&M? He raised the IQ of both schools!
How many Aggies does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, but he gets 3 hours credit.
How do you get a Texas A&M graduate off your front porch? You pay for the pizza.
And here is the most recent Aggie joke. Check out this piece of work from the Texas A&M school newspaper.
Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
It is not just Texas; it is global. The rising temperatures that have afflicted the state are only part of a larger problem. Earth’s temperatures are rising at an alarming rate, rates unseen for thousands of years. “The warming that has occurred in the last 100 years seems to be very unusual,” said Gerald North, professor of atmospheric sciences and oceanography. “We do not see warming changes like that for 10,000 years. The rate at which it is going up has not stopped.”Even though the global rise in temperature is small, 3 degrees Celsius over a period of 100 years, the implications of such warming are large. “3 degrees Celsius is about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and if you ask most people, they would say that it does not sound like very much,” said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences and oceanography. “If you look at the global average temperature, it really varies a small amount.”
Every fact and statistic quoted are suspect. According to NCDC, Texas has not warmed over the last 90 years, or the last 110 years.
Next up is their claim that global temperatures have risen by 3C in the last 100 years. Even Hansen’s bloated numbers only show 0.8C in the last 130 years.
NCDC shows the same thing, only less.
HadCrut shows less than one degree rise over the last 150 years.
The authors seem to be confusing IPCC estimates for the next hundred years, with measurements from the last hundred years – which is clearly the context of that paragraph.
Then they go on to claim that summer temperatures have increased in Texas.
Global climate changes are having equal effect on Texas‘ climate, which is part of the reason for the increased temperatures over the summers.
According to NCDC, Texas summer temperatures are dropping:
And finally :
“Texas temperatures are going up pretty much like the earth’s temperatures are,” North said. “Generally speaking, the global average temperature changes about the same as in Texas, so it is probably going to be warmer in Texas in the next 50 to 100 years. Last summer was a really hot summer, and while I say that is a fluctuation, it does probably indicate things that we might expect in the next 20 or 30 years. And what you can expect in the next 50 years is that the heat we experienced last summer is going to be the average summer temperature.”
Not one shred of evidence to support that statement. If NCDC trends continue, summers will be cooler in 50 years in Texas. Now, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are only thinking about their little part of Texas. The closest USHCN station to College Station is in Brenham.
According to USHCN, Brenham was warmer 100 years ago.
One might expect that professors of atmospheric science would have access to the Internet, and would be able to look these things up for themselves – before presenting information to their students. Looks like another bad Aggie joke.
[Update: Professor North responded to an email from one of our commenters, James Allison, and stated this:
“Please correct the false impression left on your website. The item in the Texas A&M student newspaper was based on short interviews by phone. While there was no error in fact, the impression left is false. In the interview with me, I was referring to the temperature changes of our planet over the last century (about 0.7 deg C). The author switched abruptly to an interview with Professor Andrew Dessler who was not talking about the temperature over the LAST century but instead the IPCC prediction for temperature over the NEXT century (averaging over models about 3 deg C). I would not have known about this error except that my email box has been unusually loaded with hate mail today.
Gerald North”]
He liked it so much that he decided to get it bronzed.
I am delighted to see Gerry North respond. On Real climate and other AGW blogs, the person being discussed is often blocked from posting.
I am glad to see some students respond that took classes at A&M. My niece has a PHD from A&M and turned out very well.
If you have a proff on your board for an oral defense of a thesis, I have reason to believe the graduate has a feel for the opinions of North.
I devoted a lot of time thinking about how men I selected for orals would give me questions.
Unless the writer directly misquoted Professor North, the statements below appear to differ from NCDC and USHCN data.
“While there was no error in fact, the impression left is false.”
Hmmm. So Dan Rather was false but accurate. These guys were accurate but false.
Nice twist.
Perhaps Dr North should consider not giving short interviews if he thinks he has been misquoted. Would he have fared better after a longer interview?
I’m still waiting to see the correction of the misinformation on the A&M web site. For starters:
1. Texas has not warmed over the last 100 years.
2. Texas summers have cooled over the last 100 years
3. Global temperature increases over the last century have been much smaller than the article indicated.
4. Global temperature increases so far this century have been negligible. The claims of 3C for the remainder of the century are based on computer models which have shown very little skill so far.
As I type this the offending article at Battalion online remains uncorrected while the posting here at WUWT has been updated to include Professor North’s response to James. I think that says it all. Perhaps Professor North’s email to the Battalion urging them to correct “false impressions” has been lost in cyberspace? I know what impression I’m getting.
“The state of Texas has revamped the hurricane evacuation plan for this year. Folks are now to leave the Houston/Galveston area based upon which college they went to. UT grads take I-10 West. LSU grads take I-10 East. SMU grads take I-45 North, and Aggies take Loop 610.”
Keep the Engineers close. They’re the ones who will know how to pick up the pieces.
They had a near riot of sports scholarship recipients at TAMU. A rumor was going around that in order to receive a letter in a sport they would have to identify which letter it was.
ctm yep send me your email.
There is much misinterpretation on the net and it spreads faster than an outback Aussie bushfire. The Prof didn’t take up my offer to join the discussion here (perhaps its sleep time up over where he lives) however appeared grateful that somebody would post his response.
Debate and critical questions by commentators attracts me to WUWT. Lets hope this place never becomes an echo chamber of complimentary comments.
My take on the global warming in Texas is at the link below. Not happening, for at least the past 125 years. Instead, there were a few cold winters in the late 1970’s. That’s one way to manufacture a warming trend: man-made global warming. I call this the Abilene Effect.
This is based on the HadCRU data for Abilene, Texas, a small town just west of Dallas.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/cold-winters-created-global-warming.html
Roger Sowell:
“… Abilene, Texas, a small town [population about 120,000] just west of Dallas [184 miles].”
Well, I guess given the size of Texas, 184 miles is “just” a little distance. I always thought a population of 120,000 meant a fair sized city. On the other hand, Marfa, Texas, /is/ a small town, of less than 1,900, “just west” of Abilene by 345 miles.
We report, you decide . . . .
😉
It would be interesting to know how Prof. North defines “hate mail.” It is hard to believe that WUWT readers would send anything vicious or genuinely hateful.
/Mr Lynn
Obama is not an Aggie, yet…..
“President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/gallon_gas_9GlF3o1xIcIBelOV3k0RsK
The article said the only temp measuring station was at Brenham. Hmmm.
I remember things there getting unusually warm at times back in the 1950s.
I’m all too familiar with the “Abilene Effect”, as I lived there from birth until college. A few years before I left for school, 2000, there was a drought in Abilene. There were incredibly warm summers (close to 110°F) followed by incredibly cold (I think we actually had a wind chill of -5°F), and late, winters. I always thought it was more of a shift in seasonal weather than anything attributable to anthropogenic global warming. The annual snowfall had normally come between November/December in the 80’s and early 90’s and then shifted to January/February in the late 90’s.
To you Aggie naysayers:
I know your bosses phone numbers, they’re in the former student directory.
Mr. Goddard,
Actually, the charts are correct.
It is one of interpretation and “cause and affect”.
Where does one begin?
The numbers correlate to a cause, Sunspot activity; affect, greenhouse gases provide the buffer against immediate impact as well as Nitrogen and Oxygen..
Right now greenhouse gases based on various opinions provide a buffer trail behind sunspot activity 5 to 14 years. If Hanson used his chart with greenhouse gases, the would probably correlate.
The “Devil is in the details and not stopping and starting until one is at least back to the Mini-Ice Age. There are 300 years of sunspot data, historical documentations to piece together an idea of the affect sunspot activity causes on the earth.
Then there is the Mini-Ice Age documentation and the Medi-evil warming period. The sunspot activity trail draws cold, but based on present historical data, we could almost build the sunspot cycle. Basically, drought period to drought period is a sunspot cycle.
Most of my work is located at nationalforestlawblog.com, October Newsletter, under my name.
Key points.
If one looks at the world annual temperatures, the have leveled off, the chart is missing the last couple of years and the last year shown is a notch down.
The USA annual winter temps have lost 6 degrees and the annual temps have lost 2 degrees.
It took 200 years to melt the Fjord glacier of Glacier Bay after the resumption of normal sunspot activity, beginning 1700.
When the cycles have a low count, fewer hurricanes. NOAA and CSU are going to really eat crow on this hurricane season. The Atlantic has more variables than the Pacific. It took the Pacific nearly 4 months to cook off a couple of tropical storms with all the water currents staying right on the Equator. Not so with the Atlantic. The Atlantic is one big clockwise swirling action with a lot of players.
Dr. North is probably right about temps for a century ago. The 1800s stayed warm up to end of Gen.Grant’s term in office. By 1911, 30 some years later, Niagara falls froze over. There was one tropical storm in 1914.
There are five to six general areas I know of today affected by sunspot activity.
Droughts, lack of sunspot activity. Over a century a one inch difference in precipitation. That is now lost.
Number of hurricanes and tropical storms. More sunspot activity, more named storms.
Length of the hurricane season
More sunspot activity = LONGER.
Gets meaner and longer as the sunspot cycles get stronger.
Reduced glacier and Arctic Ice as sunspot activity picks up. That is changing and will be more obvious in the next few years.
Earthquake activity follows sunspot spot magnetic activity. Since sunspot activity has dropped off, so has earthquakes. Earth’ temperatures.
We are now in a solar minimum and they las at least two cycles. 30 years of bitter winters ahead.
Most sincerely,
Paul Pierett
James Allison says:
Thanks for following up on this.
“James Sexton says:
[…]
you’re trying to express. (Present company excepted of course.) So, I guess the president thought the American people function at a 10th grade level. What does that tell you about the people he spoke to at his “victory” speech. heh, heh.”
Germans love him. I guess he gives them the feeling they understand American English.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10336934.stm
95% endorsement. The last German to get such a quote was Erich Honecker, head of the East German SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
[snip]
Mr. Goddard,
Thank you for posting my comments.
Paul Pierett
Late of me to chime in, I know, but in case Prof North happens to read this far I thought I should make the following points:
Mr Goddard has done nothing in this piece but accurately report the content of the article in question in the Texas A&M student newspaper and correct the erroneous statements of fact about found therein. It is not generally understood to be the onus upon a reporter to verify third party quotes when they appear, uncontradicted, in the public domain. You will observe that, when you provided contradictory statements he was quick to prominently publish your rejoinder where anyone reading his piece will find it.
So
(a) it is not Steven, but the author of the piece in the student newspaper who is at fault, if anyone, of misrepresenting Mr. North’s statements; and
(b) it is quite unnecessary for Steven or Anthony to “… correct the false impression left on [their] website…”. There is no need to correct accurate statements. In point of fact, their piece here does the only correcting that is called for: of the incorrect statements found in the student newspaper piece.
(c) and finally, Dr. North, if you feel your reputation has been harmed in this affair I suggest you take the matter up with those at fault — i.e., at the student newspaper — and demand a published correction of fact and impression. I assure you that Anthony and Steven have the highest standards of reportage and, if alerted to such corrections, will see to it that there are any appropriate updates here to reflect such.
On a separate note, would you please provide a more specific indication of what you refer to as “hate mail” here? How many emails are we talking about, from how many authors? What sort of attacks to they contain?
As a fellow academic I hold in high regard the free and collegial exchange of ideas, and confess to being impressed at the high standards of discourse within the climate skeptic community as a whole, and of (most!) commenters at WUWT. In contrast I have experienced a general lack of civility on the other side of this debate, for which reason I have stopped regularly visiting sites such as Real Climate and Only In It For the Gold, where dissent is commonly met (by the maintainers of the site — not just anonymous readers!) with ridicule, ad hominem, slander and censoriousness. If you have been receiving any of that I would be surprised if it has any connection to WUWT regulars, but in any case would be interested in what kind of “hate” you feel has been generated by this story.
Dear R. Craigen,
Having worked public relations from rural village social clubs to the Pentagon, it is up to the Author of the story to verify all the facts, clarify the issues and insure the story can not be miss-interpreted.
However, journalism has turn sensational, dark and at best disgusting. Case in point, similar to what you have brought forth to the forum, I received a call one day at the Pentagon concerning the story a major publisher/newspaper printed sometime earlier in a news magazine.
It was full of falsehoods. The follow-up writer asked why didn’t we dispute the story? I said, speaking as a colonel, that is not my job. That is the job of the writer and the editor. If they don’t verify the facts and clearly write the thought in each sentence of the article, they are to blame, not the Pentagon.
Concerning the issue at hand, I defended the good doctor in my initial comments on one point. The problem lies in the interpretation of data. Smaller sampling has its problems. Broad comments have their problems as well. It is up to the writer to be clear.
When I worked as the PR at a college, my work was reviewed by the professor for whom I was writing about and my boss. My work carried two approval initials before going to print and filed away. Zero failure rate. Zero challenges.
As stated in my initial comments about sunspots, I studied my work for a long time and had to start over after a year for I realized NASA was not placing good, unchallenged data on their web site. The same data has made its way to web encyclopedias. Thus, I prefer the raw data and started again from scratch. My work is based on raw and verified data.
Having published, integrity of the article must be above approach or as some say, above reproach.
Sincerely,
Paul Pierett
OK, it’s not A&M, but I did go to an AGGIE school… just in the UC system. U.C.Davis.
One of the lines we learned was: “UC Davis, where the men are MEN; and the sheep are scared…”
(One could consider it an off color joke, but given that one Ag major in my dorm had to learn how to use a glove up to his shoulder to ‘turn a calf’ and on another occasion got to ‘milk the bull’, AND we had a herd of cows with glass portholes sewn into their sides so the students could take samples of cud as the cow was processing it… well, if I was a sheep and looked over at those cows I’d be scared too! We won’t talk about the female Ag major who liked to watch the boys cringe when ‘docking male lambs’ of some un-needed glands “the old fashioned way” involving teeth… though I think tequila was involved… and a dare. Never Ever antagonize a female Ag major… but yeah, the sheep were scared…)
FWIW, one of the “fun electives” was Tractor Driving. I know a high priced SF Lawyer who took that class in his sophomore year. No tequila involved, but a small dare… Now that’s an interesting transcript: Calculus. English Lit. Tractor Driving…
As an Aggie graduate of the Dept of Meteorology (1964, 1968) I have been offended by this posting on the Department’s web site: http://atmo.tamu.edu/weather-and-climate/climate-change-statement. It’s been clear to me that with the reign of Dr. North the school has entered the dark ages and the era of PC. I’m temped to take down my diplomas (BS, MS) and hide then until such time as the Department gets real leadership and returns to educating students in science rather than submitting them to a religious belief in the IPCC.
As I see there are a lot of Texans with degrees in climatology and meteorology, again from Texas. I have a problem with Texas temperature records, maybe some folks here can help to settle the controversy.
It is frequently asserted by AGW proponents that the station coverage for calculating global temperature index is quite satisfactory, and various attempts are made to show that even lesser number of records is sufficient (for proving AGW I guess). It is frequently referred to works like Hansen and Levedeff (1987) that multiseasonal variations across stations are highly correlated, with correlation of about 0.8. “Tamino” also came out with a pamphlet “The Tale of Two Cities” in 2007, about Oxford and Paris, to show similar results, high time correlation between them.
(hHre is the used-to be link: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/04/11/a-tale-of-two-cities/ The only problem with this piece of Tamino is that there is no sufficient record for Oxford area to compare with accurate Paris records, about which fact I tried to inquire Tamino. I checked today, and the entire article is gone! Fortunately, Google can make wonders, and a cached variant can be still found here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ebSmolLsJSYJ:tamino.wordpress.com/2007/04/11/a-tale-of-two-cities/+a-tale-of-two-cities+Tamino&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us ).
I did a little research across Texas, and found several interesting “tales of two locations”. Take, for example, a station in Ada, and a station in Pauls Valley. Both stations have a 100+ years of record, according to GISS database, the one that is maintained by Hansen himself. If I construct a standard correlation between two time series (using Excel’s standard data analysis tool), I get a good deal of correlation, 0.7658 over 1907-2009 time span. So, it looks like the time for Hansen-Lebedeff-“Tamino” to celebrate grand victory. Actually there should be no surprise with high correlation, because these stations are just 63 km apart, and they see nearly the same weather, and see the same skies, and therefore the same backradiation. The problem however with these two time series is that one station, Pauls Valley, has a clear monotonic warming trend (about +0.7C/century), while the Ada station has a very consistent and monotonic downtrend, about (0.15-0.2C/century). Interestingly, if I take a climatologically-long average (non-overlapping 30-years long) for Ada, I have three data points with linear fit to y=-0.0015x + 2.9591. The funny thing is that R^2 coefficient for this fit is 0.9985, which means a perfect straight line. Nearly perfect.
There are several pairs of stations with similar counter-trend behavior. My first take on this was that real spacing of stations does not satisfy necessary conditions for Nyquist-Shannon-Kotelnikov sampling theorem, and real spatio-temporal terrain-temperature field requires many more station to calculate global temperature index to any certainty, especially the long-trend part. On the other hand, this counter-trend behavior does not fit into any physical-meteorolical explanation, and definitely not fit with increased back-radiation from more CO2 in air. I tend to think that the entire idea of global index is so flawed that it is not worth any effort to massage data and trends, this is all garbage.
What do you think, people?