From the story: The Australian’s overheated time warp misses half of 2010 which had a NOAA press release in it below the fold, Dr. Richard Keen weighs in and does a spot check of the data from his own NOAA station (he’s an official observer).
And if you find this map hard to look at, you aren’t alone in seeing spots.
Keen writes:
Lawrimore’s comment…
“Heavy snow, like the record snows that crippled Baltimore and Washington last winter, is likely to increase because storms are moving north. Also, the Great Lakes aren’t freezing as early or as much. “As cold outbreaks occur, cold air goes over the Great Lakes, picks up moisture and dumps on the Northeast,” he says.”
…shows a complete lack of understanding of weather (which makes up climate).
East coast snows are caused by lows off the coast, and if the storms move north, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC et al. find themselves in the warm sectors of the lows, and enjoy warm southerly winds and rain.
Furthermore, during the snow storms, the winds are from the northeast bringing moisture from the Atlantic (hence the name “nor’easter” for these storms); very little of the moisture comes from the Great Lakes. One of Philadelphia’s snowiest winters was 1978-79, when the Lakes were all but frozen over. Along the east coast, a region that averages very near freezing during the winter, the limiting factor for snow storms is not moisture, but temperature. Most storms are rain.
Now, the spot check.
NOAA’s calculation of the global temperature is based on their analysis of departures at 2000 or so grid points. One of those points included my weather station at Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado, a location with no UHI or other troublesome influences. The NOAA map of June anomalies for the US, based on an unknown selection of stations, has Coal Creek sitting on the +4F contour.
The Coal Creek record is long enough to calculate 30-year normals, and June 2010 comes in at +1.0F above normal.
That’s 3 degrees less than the NOAA estimate for the same location, which is the difference between June being in the top 3 or being in the middle third. Now, this is simply a spot check of one of NOAA’s 2000 grid points, but it leads to the question of how far off are the other grid points?
Dr. Richard Keen
Correction:
In the first 6 months of 2009 the monthly departures from normal are:
+ 1.2 June
– 3.2 May
+ 0.2 April
+ 1.3 March
– 4.1 February
+ 1.1 January
Average of the 6 is -3.5/6 = -0.58
should read “first six months of 2010. the”
larry
R. Gates says:
July 16, 2010 at 11:41 am
“In my last post, this is the full German link I meant to give:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/Klimastatistik/baurtempjahrgross.gif
Tell me why this data is not to be believed? And what explanation would AGW skeptics give for the warmth of 2010 if not AGW?”
Ok, let’s look here:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/Klimastatistik/baur_infos.html
“Prof. Dr. Baur chose the stations in a way that they are distributed homogeneously over Central Europe. For each station, the anomalies from the long-term mean are calculated and averaged over the ensemble of stations. It arises from the use of such an extended observation period, that changes in instrumentation, in the location of the observation site, as well as in the observation interval cause inhomogeneities and trends in the data set. Therefore, Prof. Dr. Baur homogenized the time series. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that the accuracy of the data could decrease the further back in time you look in the diagrams. This could especially affect the temperature diagrams as the average only includes 4 stations here. The general trend should not be affected, though.
”
Baur used 4 stations on average. I didn’t care to read on where these stations were. Somebody else analysed a few more stations in Germany.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/germany-not-warming/
We’re not warming. We have a heat wave right now but we didn’t crack the record this year. So there. Acoordign to the AGW fairytale there should be more warming with more CO2, the record is from 2003 with 40.8 deg C, we reached 38.4 this year in Potsdam. We should be having new records each year, where is that? It’s not there. It doesn’t even correlate with rising CO2 level anymore, the conjecture has fallen on its face and needs resuscitation, a defibrillator and some serious adrenaline injections just to hobble on for another year.
Frederick Michael says:
July 16, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Unless we’ve taken the position that it’ll be cooler — then the warmists will claim they were right.
Actually, a lot of us have been expecting more warm before cooling – and an arctic ice extent, because of the recent el Nino, to be greater than 2007 but substantially less than 2009. The charts at DMI, however, for both arctic temperature and sea ice extent are starting to look a little scary, as if the air-conditioner for the Northern Hemisphere has gotten stuck at max-cool.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
That little down-tick in the temperature graph is unusual for the DMI record at this point in the melt season. If it actually goes through that blue line, it would be unprecedented. I’m watching with interest.
NOAA needed to get attention off their real problem. Huge scandals are being unearthed at NOAA, and about a week ago several congressmen called for the removal of NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco, an Obama appointee. Obama stonewalled, told some of the lawmakers to back off. Lubchenco hired NOAA’s current chief counsel and under Lubchenco’s instruction, the counsel has stonewalled official inquiries into personnel and methods involved in millions of dollars of fraud and abuse, has refused FOI requests. Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick said he’s had no luck getting through to NOAA. NOAA has had problems for many years, but the point is now it is worse than ever because Obama has given it more power and it’s protecting people who should be brought up on criminal charges. Nothing it says can be believed.
I’m in the Seattle Area. Checking the weather underground, we ran just greater than 4 degrees below normal this June. (-121/30) ~2 degrees colder than shown on the map above, unless there is a tiny darker blue area I can’t clearly detect. I took the daily delta from average, and divided the sum of these by 30. On average, we were just greater than 4 degrees below normal.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KSEA/2010/6/4/MonthlyHistory.html#calendar
Kevin G
Richard Keen
Ric Werme
AllenC
Bill Tuttle
Frederick Michael
Paul A Peterson
Gary Pearse
Despite what R. Gates says, he is solidly in the CAGW camp as seen from his comments at other sites. He has also hung around WUWT long enough to have had his questions answered several times over. His actual agenda is to shepherd straying CAGW believers who may be wavering back into the fold and to cast doubts into the minds of anyone else he can.
Of Course he is great fun if you want to sharpen your teeth on a worthy opponent, and very useful in answering the questions that may be lurking in the back of the minds of those to shy to ask questions.
A report at Torrent Freak says the US government has shut down all 73,000 blogs hosted on WordPress. I notice that WUWT is still up and so is ClimateAudit. Does this mean the shutdown has just not reached these blogs yet? Or is this some kind of hoax?
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/#comment-683339
REPLY: I have a confirmation request pending with WordPress staff on this. – Anthony
R. Gates says:
July 16, 2010 at 11:41 am
“In my last post, this is the full German link I meant to give:”
Oh, now i did read on.
“The four temperature stations
De Bilt, Potsdam, Basel, Wien
”
He’s got 1 station for Germany, well 2 if you count Basel but that’s on the border to Switzerland. Hmmmm…. Now if you’re a believer in Hansen you’ll say that 1 station is perfectly reasonable for a country like Germany because you can always extrapolate the temperature out to 1200 km “because, hey, just work with anomalies and everything is hunky-dory”.
And maybe you are a believer in the Hansen principle but my opinion is that Hansen’s temperature products are the climatological equivalent of the Piltdown Man.
[snip – just a bit OTT]
“”R. Gates says:
July 16, 2010 at 11:41 am
And what explanation would AGW skeptics give for the warmth of 2010 if not AGW?”‘
It’s really very simple, the temperature goes up and down. Sometimes it’s an ice age, and sometimes it’s not.
Gates, you know the argument. If the science is settled, if they’ve proved their guess, they wouldn’t still be arguing with skeptics 20 years later and trying so hard to prove their guess.
I’m worse than skeptical, I don’t believe there’s a single person on the face of this planet that knows enough about our weather, short term or long term, to predict the future.
The proof of that, is that every time the weather changes, climate scientists back up, admit they mis-hind-casted the future again, and come out with some other completely new outlandish prediction of the future.
They can’t even figure out what just happened real time, and have no explanation for real time events.
My basic question to this point is this: does anybody believe CO2 causes drastic (or even measureable) increases in global temperatures? Looking at the ice cores, an increase in CO2 concentration trails temperature increases by ~800 years; it also lags temperature declines by 800 years. So are we all getting “hot and bothered” (pun intended) for something that is 800 years in the future (based on CO2 increases in the last 50 years or so)? Or are we hoping that the supposed impact projected out 800 years will coincide with the next Ice Age, thereby negating that truly bothersome climatic change?
Other than that preponderous eventuality, I’m not overly concerned and all this twaddle about red and blue dots is of interest but certainly doesn’t support any hypothesis the Warmers have been propounding. You’d have to wait ~800 years to see the results.
Or am I missing something?
What caused the Medieval Warm Period? See these peer reviewed papers on this climate anomaly.
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
Someone called Professor Paul Jones at CRU agrees when asked this question by Roger Harrabin of the BBC. Do you agree with Jones? What caused the previous similar warm periods?
You see Gates the answer to your question might just be answered when you answer the questions I have asked you.
Alexander K says:
“The concept of an ‘average temperature’ in such an area may be statistically valid, but for all practical purposes is an absolute nonsense. Or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?”
I think you are barking up the wrong tree of course. I’ll tell you a common sense way to think about the problem and maybe that will help.
Lets consider the decade of 1850. and also the decade of 1999-2009. here is what we know. We know that the average global temperature was either
1. exactly the same OR
2. it was warmer then OR
3. it was colder then.
Those are the three logical possibilities. Now, consider the evidence. Is there any evidence whatsoever that it was EXACTLY the same temp? no. That leaves us with
two possibilities. It was warmer or it was colder. Is that a 50/50 bet? or is it more likely that it is warmer now? Is there any evidence whatsoever that it was warmer in the 1850-1860 time period? Any evidence? Not to my knowledge. All of the evidence says that it is warmer now than it was then. All of the evidence. Note, that we are not answering the question of WHY, or the question of IF IT MATTERS, or the question of is the warming today UNPRECEDENTED. we are just asking the simple question, does the evidence all fall on the side of warmer now? Yes. You can look at several lines of evidence. You can look at temperatures from thermometers. True, they are not positioned perfectly. Nor are they present everywhere at all times. But on average they show a warming over time. Consider sea levels. The same story. the measuring system is not perfect, there are complicating factors, but the sea level evidence does NOT point to a cooling. It points to a warming. Glaciers. Yes, they are complicated. Yes there are many factors at play, but on balance that evidence does not point to cooling. It points to warming. Climate proxies of all manner and form. On balance they point to warming. Not cooling. Treeline movement, species migration. All point to warming not cooling. There is no credible case for cooling. None. All of which means we can say this: the world is warming since 1850 or so.
Again, I’m not addressing WHY. I’m not claiming that this warming is “unique” in human history. I’m not saying that it is dangerous. But its not cooling.
Given the utter lack of any evidence of cooling I would argue that we can be relatively certain that it is warming. The question is HOW MUCH.
is it about 1C since 1850 (+- something less than 1C)
is it about .5C (+- something less than .5C)
is it about .75C warmer?
we will never know how much exactly. But we can make estimates. So, should bad measurements at one station make you believe that it was WARMER in 1850 than today? No. Bad measurements at individual sites lessen the weight of the evidence. They dont reverse the sign of the evidence. how about a systematic warm BIAS? well, if they all were systematically BIASED warm and if the real truth was that today is colder, then we would we expect the sea level data to agree with BIASED temperature data? no. but…Maybe its all biased? Whats the chance of that? Are animals that change their migration as a result of warming in on the trick? In short, to believe that its cooling you have to believe the more improbable. So, it’s warming. We can be fairly certain of that, the only question is “whats the best estimate” and how accurate is that estimate. In any case our estimate plus error bars is is this: we are virtually certain that it is warmer today. That is not ‘absolute nonsense’ it’s a logical defensable rational unassailable position to hold.
yet, very few sceptics will even admit this. They will say things like this>
1. Its not warmer, the records are all garbage, but sunspots explain all this garbage.
2. Its not warmer today than 1850, but the MWP was warmer than today and we know this because people grew grapes.
3. Its not warmer, but if it were C02 would not be the cause of this thing that isnt happening.
4. Its not warmer, the records are garbage, but the warming we see is within “normal bounds” and we KNOW what normal bounds are because we believe in
ice core records which show that there is no corrleation between C02 and global temperature, which by the way doesnt exist anyway.
And a whole host of other logically incompatible positions.
To steer clear of being illogical its best to limit your beliefs. “It’s getting warmer” is a good start. You can say you dont know how much. you can say you dont know why. If you want to go beyond that bare belief, and engage in debates about WHY or HOW MUCH, then you are LOGICALLY committed to accepting some form of the record. For when it comes to proving your explanation of WHY, you can only make your case by appealing to the record.
“Heavy snow, like the record snows that crippled Baltimore and Washington last winter, is likely to increase because storms are moving north.”
=============================================
It is often a forgotten fact of just how very, VERY difficult it is to get the atmosphere to snow in temperate, low altitude environments like the East Coast of the USA.
To get the deep-layer cold where it is not eroded away by prevailing higher-dewpoint Gulf of Mexico or even Atlantic air, so that snow crystals can form (and survive on their way down), is always a feat here.
It has nothing to so with storms “moving north”.
Stupid, dumb, uniformed, political quasi-scientific dogma….all at the taxpayer’s expense.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Ian E says:
July 16, 2010 at 11:51 am
Tom Rowan says : ‘If you are at home right now you can watch the British open live. No one told the Brits it is the hottest year on record. Every last one of them is bundled up! It looks like November over there right now. Wool caps, hands in pockets, sweaters, wind breakers and winter coats!’
Actually, we (in GB) have had a couple of very good summer weeks – but this has now reverted to average or sub-average temps for the time of year. Of course, we had a very long, very white and totally wretched winter, followed by a very late and rather poor spring.
______________________________________________________________________
“No spring” would be closer; we went directly from a lousy winter to a few days of summer, followed by a quick relapse, then a few weeks of hot weather, when I changed into shorts and opened windows, and now cold again – back into long trousers and windows shut tight! The hot weather had the Beeb putting out silly health warnings, but it wasn’t much of a heat wave even by British standards. So far, this year has been one of the coldest in my experience, if not the very coldest. There was a harsher but shorter winter around ’79 (can’t remember exact year offhand, I’m going by where I was at the time).
R. Gates says:
July 16, 2010 at 11:37 am
“Alright, as a 25% skeptic (and 75% convinced that AGW is a real phenomenon), let’s suppose that the measurements (even with some errors) as correct, and that 2010 is indeed the warmest year on record, if even by a few tenths of a degree. To what would the skeptics attribute this warmth?”
=================================
To what would the “Believers” attribute the warmth of the MWP, or the Roman or the other ones down through history?
Oh, that’s right. They never happened.
Thanks, R, for always providing good fuel for our fire!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Robert says:
July 16, 2010 at 12:22 pm
So we’re back to trying to say that global temperature methods induces warming despite mosher having proven that they don’t….
_______________________________________________________________
Mosher proved that if you take a data set and manipulate it you get similar results. He did not prove the original data set was correct or had not been “adjusted” see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/20/darwin-zero-before-and-after/
There is a big stink going on in New Zealand because their data record have been fudged too.
Oh….I see Jimbo already jumped on that one!
Sorry….not trying to steal your thunder, Jimbo. Well said.
Chris
Norfolk, Va, USA
Steven Mosher says:
July 16, 2010 at 2:06 pm
And a whole host of other logically incompatible positions.
====================================================
Steven, you left out mine.
We don’t know squat.
Steven Mosher says:
July 16, 2010 at 2:06 pm
“[…]
yet, very few sceptics will even admit this. They will say things like this>
1. Its not warmer, the records are all garbage, but sunspots explain all this garbage.
2. Its not warmer today than 1850, but the MWP was warmer than today and we know this because people grew grapes.
3. Its not warmer, but if it were C02 would not be the cause of this thing that isnt happening.
4. Its not warmer, the records are garbage, but the warming we see is within “normal bounds” and we KNOW what normal bounds are because we believe in
ice core records which show that there is no corrleation between C02 and global temperature, which by the way doesnt exist anyway.
And a whole host of other logically incompatible positions.[…]”
When you say “logically incompatible positions” you seem to assume that these logically incompatible positions emanate from one and the same skeptic. Now, surprise, surprise, skeptics have different opinions and different expertise just like warmists – one might know what the inverse transformation of a logarithm is, the other might have difficulty spelling the word.
What you see as logically incompatible might be just two different opinions. For instance, my take on a global average temperature would be that it’s nice to know (though not terribly important) but GISS does a bad job at computing one. This might well be logically incompatible with the position of some Steve from L.A. but i don’t care.
Ron Cram says:
July 16, 2010 at 1:53 pm
“A report at Torrent Freak says the US government has shut down all 73,000 blogs hosted on WordPress. I notice that WUWT is still up and so is ClimateAudit.”
It’s one server hosting 73,000 blogs. Not the entire wordpress universe. Here’s another report, but it’s from Helium so i don’t know if it can be trusted:
http://www.helium.com/items/1893892-why-73000-wordpress-blogs-were-shut-down-by-the-us-government
If you take the so called 0.7c rise in temps because of global warming the earth now is actually very cold.
DirkH says: July 16, 2010 at 1:35 pm
We’re not warming. We have a heat wave right now but we didn’t crack the record this year. So there. Acoordign to the AGW fairytale there should be more warming with more CO2, the record is from 2003 with 40.8 deg C, we reached 38.4 this year in Potsdam. We should be having new records each year, where is that? It’s not there. It doesn’t even correlate with rising CO2 level anymore, the conjecture has fallen on its face and needs resuscitation, a defibrillator and some serious adrenaline injections just to hobble on for another year.
Dirk H, apart from your logic and your essential argument, which always seem convincing to me, I do enjoy your wicked sense of humour as shown in the above passage – this sort of stuff often makes my day! Thank you Dirk.
Doug
Bill Tuttle said:
“There’s no such thing as a “cold air ‘reservoir’” in the Arctic, the Antarctic, or anywhere else on the planet. Time to read up on atmospheric circulation — concentrate on the Northern Hemisphere for now.”
_____
Actually, if you have a very closed circulation pattern in the Arctic, (i.e. no cold outbreaks with cold air funneling south) you do get a “reservior” (this is a metaphor here people) of cold air in the winter. This past winter, when we get the kinds of high pressure systems forming over Greenland and N. Canada, we get meridonal winds that funnel that cold air from the Artic down further south. We had cold outbreaks in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, and this air was forced down south from high pressure and meridonal winds. A negative AO index in addition to the Dipole Anomaly can set up this situaiton and there is some thought that this might be the case more frequently in winters to come:
http://www.physorg.com/news195485722.html
Also the suggestion that the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s is a “minor” increase is absurd. It is a significant increase in a GH gas, and from a geological perspective, it has happened quite suddenly.
I find it interesting that the global temperature records are being challenged on such a broad front by skeptics when the temperatures are going up just as AGW models say they will, yet even those records untouched by NOAA, NASA, etc, parallal the same basic trends, such as this independent one from C. Europe:
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/Klimastatistik/baurtempjahrgross.gif
I’ve still not heard a satisfactory answer to the basic question: Why is 2010 so warm if not for AGW? What natural cyclical event is driving this? It can’t be El Nino only, as this past one was not as strong as 1998, and we are not where close to a solar max event. It seems the skeptics answer to the warmth of 2010 is “oh, the temperature data is wrong, the process is wrong, etc. etc.” and so the skeptics won’t even offer an alternative explanation to the warm year we’re having globally, but rather would like to deny the warmth, or give their local weather anecdotes.
Robert E. Phelan says:
July 16, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Actually, a lot of us have been expecting more warm before cooling – and an arctic ice extent, because of the recent el Nino, to be greater than 2007 but substantially less than 2009. The charts at DMI, however, for both arctic temperature and sea ice extent are starting to look a little scary, as if the air-conditioner for the Northern Hemisphere has gotten stuck at max-cool.
Yes, yes and yes. Of course, the skeptic community is far from monolithic and lots of people have made moderate predictions. I’m just trying to point out the wisdom of that. The Arctic Sea Ice Extent has held up quite well of late but this picture is discouraging.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_concentration_hires.png
The concentrations are too low. I had believed that this year’s minimum would be above 2009’s but now I think the melt is going to pick up big time later and put us in the range you predict. That’ll be good for shipping. At some point in the future, when we can count on trans-arctic traffic in September, lots of money and time will be saved by some shippers.
You should hear some of the US Navy briefings on how Arctic resources are expected to be a major priority for them. Good things are coming.