Guest post by Thomas Fuller
There would be no global warming without new technology. And that’s not because new technology uses so much energy.
It’s because new technology has allowed us to measure new phenomena, and old phenomena with radically more powerful tools.
Mike Smith gives us an example in his book ‘Warnings’, a great story about how technology addressed the warning system for U.S. tornadoes (and which is advertised here on the right hand column).
He notes that many tornadoes that are called in to reporting centers today would never have been noticed before, thanks to a growing American population and the ubiquity of mobile telephones. So although it may look like we have more tornadoes than in the past, it’s just more and better measurements.
The same is more or less true of hurricanes. Before satellite coverage began in 1969, we really didn’t know exactly how many hurricanes actually happened in a given year, nor how strong they were. If they didn’t make landfall, they would only be catalogued if planes noticed and reported them, and they would only be measured if specially equipped planes basically flew through them and charted their strength. Some have tried to estimate hurricanes from previous eras (and Judith Curry is talking about the subject on her brand new weblog), but different scientists have come up with different answers.
Funnily enough, the answer that indicates hurricanes are getting stronger got published in the IPCC, while the answer that contradicted it resulted in the resignation of its author from the IPCC. Time will tell.
The phenomenon is certainly also true of measurements of ice extent, volume and area, which would not be possible without satellite imagery. Without satellites, we would be blissfully ignorant of what’s going on there, or at least in the same condition of partial ignorance that led the New York Times to predict global warming or a new ice age several times in the 19th and early 20th Century. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose…
New technology has had a radical effect on the time series of measurements made for extended periods before the technology was adopted. Sailors used to measure sea surface temperatures using a thermometer in a bucket lowered into the sea. When Argos buoys began providing a network of more accurate measurements, there was a break in the timeline.
When surface stations converted to electronic thermocouples on a short leash, the adjustments required caused another break in the data series. (I guess readers here might know something about that already.) Scientists have worked hard to make adjustments to correct for the new sources of data, but the breaks are still pretty noticeable.
The sensible thing would be to give the new technologies time to develop an audited series of measurements long enough to determine trends, rather than grafting new data on top of older, less reliable series. But there are two objections to this: First, who’s to say another new measurement technology won’t come along and replace our brand new toys and resetting the clock to zero? Second, and of more concern, there is a whole scientific establishment out there saying we don’t have time to wait for a pristine data set. Some say we’ve already waited too long, others say that if we start today (and they really mean today), we just might avoid climate disaster.
And if you start to muse on the remarkable coincidence that warming apparently started at the same time as we got all this new-fangled technology, why that makes you a flat-earth denialist. Or something.
As it happens, while serving in the U.S. Navy I took sea surface temperatures with a thermometer in a bucket. There were not many detailed instructions involved. Should I have done it on the sunny side or the shady side? Nearer the pointy end of the ship (that’s technical talk) or the flat back end? How long was I supposed to leave the thermometer in the water?
I wouldn’t want to make momentous decisions based on the quality of data I retrieved from that thermometer, which wasn’t calibrated–I think the U.S.N. stock number was like 22, or some other low number indicating great antiquity. I much prefer what comes out of Argos.
But there are times I wish all those fancy instruments on the satellites were pointing at another planet.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
Thomas Fuller href=”http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfulleThe Joy of Innovation Thomas Fuller
There would be no global warming without new technology. And that’s not because new technology uses so much energy.
It’s because new technology has allowed us to measure new phenomena, and old phenomena with radically more powerful tools.
Mike Smith gives us an example in his book ‘Warnings’, a great story about how technology addressed the warning system for U.S. tornadoes (and which is advertised here on the right hand column). He notes that many tornadoes that are called in to reporting centers today would never have been noticed before, thanks to a growing American population and the ubiquity of mobile telephones. So although it may look like we have more tornadoes than in the past, it’s just more and better measurements.
The same is more or less true of hurricanes. Before satellite coverage began in 1969, we really didn’t know exactly how many hurricanes actually happened in a given year, nor how strong they were. If they didn’t make landfall, they would only be catalogued if planes noticed and reported them, and they would only be measured if specially equipped planes basically flew through them and charted their strength. Some have tried to estimate hurricanes from previous eras (and Judith Curry is talking about the subject on her brand new weblog), but different scientists have come up with different answers. Funnily enough, the answer that indicates hurricanes are getting stronger got published in the IPCC, while the answer that contradicted it resulted in the resignation of its author from the IPCC. Time will tell.
The phenomenon is certainly also true of measurements of ice extent, volume and area, which would not be possible without satellite imagery. Without satellites, we would be blissfully ignorant of what’s going on there, or at least in the same condition of partial ignorance that led the New York Times to predict global warming or a new ice age several times in the 19th and early 20th Century. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose…
New technology has had a radical effect on the time series of measurements made for extended periods before the technology was adopted. Sailors used to measure sea surface temperatures using a thermometer in a bucket lowered into the sea. When Argos buoys began providing a network of more accurate measurements, there was a break in the timeline. When surface stations converted to electronic thermocouples on a short leash, the adjustments required caused another break in the data series. (I guess readers here might know something about that already.) Scientists have worked hard to make adjustments to correct for the new sources of data, but the breaks are still pretty noticeable.
The sensible thing would be to give the new technologies time to develop an audited series of measurements long enough to determine trends, rather than grafting new data on top of older, less reliable series. But there are two objections to this: First, who’s to say another new measurement technology won’t come along and replace our brand new toys and resetting the clock to zero? Second, and of more concern, there is a whole scientific establishment out there saying we don’t have time to wait for a pristine data set. Some say we’ve already waited too long, others say that if we start today (and they really mean today), we just might avoid climate disaster.
And if you start to muse on the remarkable coincidence that warming apparently started at the same time as we got all this new-fangled technology, why that makes you a flat-earth denialist. Or something.
As it happens, while serving in the U.S. Navy I took sea surface temperatures with a thermometer in a bucket. There were not many detailed instructions involved. Should I have done it on the sunny side or the shady side? Nearer the pointy end of the ship (that’s technical talk) or the flat back end? How long was I supposed to leave the thermometer in the water?
I wouldn’t want to make momentous decisions based on the quality of data I retrieved from that thermometer, which wasn’t calibrated–I think the U.S.N. stock number was like 22, or some other low number indicating great antiquity. I much prefer what comes out of Argos.
But there are times I wish all those fancy instruments on the satellites were pointing at another planet.
Thomas Fuller href=”http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
r
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
How fortunate we are that AGW is occurring at a time when we have supercomputers, complex analytical equipment and satellites to warn us. If this had happened only 50 years earlier just imagine how catstrophic it would have been! [sarc/off]
cheers David
It’s not too difficult to measure hurricanes by proxy. A paleoclimatologist was doing a good job in the Florida swamps. He took core samples and you could clearly see beach sand [dropped by the hurricanes] at regular intervals. Better than tree rings as aproxy for temperature as there was only one variable.
cheers David
“As it happens, while serving in the U.S. Navy I took sea surface temperatures with a thermometer in a bucket. ”
Thanks for those pictures. I’m sure the bucket had “other uses”. So you were the official ship climatologist? ;^)
The problem is that we are obsessed with granularity. With a big enough microscope, everything becomes significant. Take probability calculations for example – it’s totally ridiculous to even talk about a probability out beyond 2 digits, yet many will claim a prob = .955 is “more precise” than prob = .95. In fact, in most practical applications there is no reason (and no logical justification ) to go beyond a single digit.
Just because Excel will return 16 places to right of the decimal doesn’t mean all 16 should be taken into consideration.
The degree of granularity should be commensurate with logic and the application. Space flight deserves more significant digits than driving a car, for example.
Or you can break the series at each technology change and use the first difference method. The ignorance about this is stunning, both in climate science and skeptical circles.
Re: Grumbler
I guess that Alex, Bonnie, Colin, Danielle, Earl, Fiona, Gaston, Hermine, Igor and Julia from this year have all left their own distinctive bits of beach sand in the Florida swamps.
“Damning New Investigation Into Climategate Inquiries”
A review of the Climategate investigations. Indeed, damning stuff.
http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/Climategate-Inquiries.pdf
Pointman
Tom,
This is OT a bit, but is so good that I hope you will understand:
http://wizbangblog.com/content/2010/03/16/confirmed-selfrighteous-envirnonmentalists-really-are-jerks.php
For Grumbler/David, In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s there were great public and private works to drain most of the swamp land in Florida. Due to this there was a great amount of collapse of the sediment where the swamps had been located. For instance there are now a great many canals and a large levy system around Lake Okeechobee. Part of the drainage was to blow the falls out of the Miami river (named for proximity to Miami) and the Peace river near Fort Myers. This caused a nearly 13 feet drop of water level in the everglades and by this a drying and collapsing of the sediment exposed to the sun and air. There are now very large subdivisions located where just several decades ago there were several feet of water standing even during the Florida dry season. While the core samples are good indications of past hurricanes there may be problems with the time series involved due to the land use changes having occurred during the past 150 years from Orlando Fl. south to the Keys.
Just food for thought,
Bill Derryberry
Thomas Fuller,
I have previous criticised your posts for lack of skepticism regarding the core of AGW ‘science’; the theory that man is causing the earth to warm and he is doing this through the continued release of CO2. I find your absolvement of the scientists and the IPCC in you articles critical of AGW hype excessive and occasionally incorrect; I will draw the line at saying disingenuous because you have not replied to my previous post that I repeat here:
“Philip Thomas says:
September 13, 2010 at 6:09 am
‘[Major media campaigns] ignore IPCC scientists so they could insist that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.’
I was under the impression that this claim was made by the scientists in the IPCC report. These facts were reiterated on numerous occasions by Rajendra Pauchari.
Here is the IPCC’s statement on the matter.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/himalaya-statement-20january2010.pdf
Unless I have greatly misunderstood what you have said, it seems completely incorrect to say that the media pushed these errors in the face of IPCC protest.”
The climate debate is littered with the comments of the nefarious whose sole purpose is to disseminate misinformation and cloud the truth. I would like to think that you are not included amongst those. I have, however, previously debated people with various ulterior motives and have learned to know as much about the authors of articles that I read because I simply do not have the time to fact check everything.
Is it possible you could tell us about the consultations you made to the UK Government regarding green technologies?
On Googling your name I was led to a testimonial you gave: http://www.pep-partnership.co.uk/testimonials.asp
‘Bill understands how business happens in the governmental sector, especially the European Commission. He’s a hard worker and next time I need a big proposal for an E.C. tender, there’s no doubt that he’s the guy to go to.
Tom Fuller, Managing Director, nQuire Services Ltd’
Can you elaborate on your business interests with the EC? Do you worry that the tenders would be less forthcoming if you were critical of the accepted climate science consensus?
Sorry to put you on the spot but someone who gets so many posts on WUWT should have their cards on the table. These are hard times.
“There would be no global warming without new technology. And that’s not because new technology uses so much energy. It’s because new technology has allowed us to measure new phenomena, and old phenomena with radically more powerful tools.”
Tom, ordinarily I’d point out that this is an example of the left wing subjectivist world view at work, that warming only exists because we can measure it, but I am more inclined to think this is just poorly phrased. I think you mean that “there would be no claims one way or the other about what global temperatures were doing without the technology to measure them (accurately or not).”
The global warming and or cooling phenomena would occur whether we observed them or not, this isn’t quantum mechanics 😉 (to physics savvy people who may want to say that this is a misunderstanding of QM, it’s a JOKE people!)
Um, perhaps I haven’t understood something but when a new measuring technology is introduced, wouldn’t it be sensible to use both the old and the new tools alongside each other for a while and compare their measurements? Am I being too simplistic?
Didn’t the medical field note this phenomenon some years ago?
What appeared to be sharp increases in the incidence of certain diseases in modern times was simply the enhanced ability to detect it’s presence today, versus the inability of doctors (historically) to always accurately ascertain cause.
OT yet innovative:
http://climategate.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/KNMI_voordracht_VanAndel.pdf
I was once told of a lighthouse keeper whose job it was to record the Met Office data for that location. What they didn’t know and he didn’t tell them, was that his heart condition made it very difficult for him to get up and down the steps … so he just made up the figures. That is to say, one out of three readings from that station were just made up based on the last readings and what he thought the weather was like going out onto the balcony.
It’s also extremely unlikely that temperatures were taken at the specified times. A good shower of rain might delay the readings and a sunny morning might mean readings taken early so as to leave more time to spend in the garden.
Similarly in hotter countries … who wants to go out in the hot of the day, when you could wait a few minutes and it would just be that tad cooler!
But when you realise that temperatures vary at up to 1-2C/hour, then even 15minutes difference would be 0.5C
Great post, Thomas.
Many years ago I designed a low cost, lightweight and mechanically simple device for weighing livestock in the field. This was prior to low-cost digital technology becoming available and I was concerned that the level of accuracy of my invention being inadequate until a scientist put me straight on this, by pointing out that the cattle, sheep or pigs being weighed would have ingested an unknown weight of water and feed, and would have excreted an unknown weight of manure and urine. He also told me that weighing a significant number of animals at pre-determined times in their feed cycles was suficiently accurate. He made it very clear to me that weighing a beast to four decimal places of a pound or kilo is merely a form of scientific delusion and also introduced me to the First Difference Method in the course of his instructing me in the methadology of measurement.
I’ve always found it rather amusing that at the very moment we get the ability to cobble together anywhere near the computing power to build the crudest and most simplistic of climate models – those models show… (wait for it)… the world is about to end!!!
Is it pure coincidence that these two events arrive together? Why, for example, could the models not show that the world will end in 1,000 years time, or that it should have ended 500 years ago?
When serving in the RAF on Search and Rescue helicopters I used to take daily sea temperature readings for the UK Met Office. Te instrument was a shielded mercury thermometer on a rope which we lowered into the sea for 5 mins and then took the reading. Probably not accurate but a consistent error can still produce a result.
“Before satellite coverage began in 1969, we really didn’t know exactly how many hurricanes actually happened in a given year, nor how strong they were”
Yes. But we still have some reliable data.
Consider for example this technical memorandum from the NOAA National Hurricane Center.
The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Tropical Cyclones From 1851 to 2006
Appendix A: Chronological List of All Hurricanes which Affected the Continental United States: 1851-2006.
For 2007-2009 anyone can do her own research.
I have simply added up the Saffir-Simpson Category numbers of hurricanes making landfall in the lower 48 states for each year as a crude measure of cumulative hurricane activity in that region. The graph is a 25 year running average of this quantity, assigned to the middle year.
Hurricane_Intensity_in_the_Continental_US_1851-2009.jpg
As we can clearly see, there is nothing unprecedented in the current storm surge, just some weak recovery after the exceptionally low activity of the 1970s and 80s. The overall trend is slightly negative.
Should you wonder how representative is this sample of the North Atlantic region, have a look at the UNISYS Tropical Storm Tracking by Year page.
In the medical field years before all of the lab testing process of disease detection, differences of opinion on the “real diagnosis” between doctors were always settled by reviewing the autopsy results later.
“…there is a whole scientific establishment out there saying we don’t have time to wait for a pristine data set. Some say we’ve already waited too long, others say that if we start today (and they really mean today), we just might avoid climate disaster.”
You speak of a “sensible thing”…then in the same paragraph you speak of two objections to that “sensible thing”. Are the objections sensible – especially that second one “of more concern”? Are you implying that scientists are indeed guilty of alarmism, after previously laying the blame on “savvy media professionals”? Or is something else implied here?
Thomas, I must admit I’ve been playing a little game lately. It’s kind of like “Where’s Wally” for adults. It’s called “Spot-the-AGW-Message-in-the-Skeptical-Article”.
The same situation has been seen in pollution control issues. As technology allowed detection and monitoring of trace chemicals at parts per billion and parts per trillion concentrations, “contamination” started being reported at levels that were totally undetectable just a few years prior.
At the same time, when dealing with very small quantities you have the issues of precision, and repeatability in measurements causing the appearance of significant shifts when the changes are irrelevant in real world terms.
A change in contamination from 3 parts per billion to 4 parts per billion could be claimed to be a 33% increase in contamination (4/3). That may be correct in absolute terms but in a practical sense 3 parts per billion and 4 parts per billion are still for all practical purposes zero in almost all cases.
Just because we can detect it or the sensor will return x many digits on the lcd screen does not necessarily mean that those digits have any significance.
This has led to an interesting trend in pollution monitoring as soon as technology improves to allow detection of contamination at an order of magnitude smaller concentration, some bureaucrat tries to lower the allowable levels of contamination to a value near the new detection threshold.
We need to re-introduce some common sense evaluation, and appreciation of significant digits back into the class room for not only science and engineering students, but the general population, so they realize that just because they can measure it, does not mean that it is useful information or that they either can or should try to control it.
Larry
Tom says:
September 14, 2010 at 5:10 am (Edit)
The sensible thing would be to give the new technologies time to develop an audited series of measurements long enough to determine trends, rather than grafting new data on top of older, less reliable series.
Or you can break the series at each technology change and use the first difference method. The ignorance about this is stunning, both in climate science and skeptical circles.
**********
Tom,
folks are not ignorant of the method. In fact, it used to be used by NCDC. However, the method has some very indesirable qualities. You can read about them in he primary literature or go over to jeffIds site and read his work on it. Personally, I use to like FDM for just the reason you cite, but after reviewing the math and the tests of the method on synthetic data it’s clear that the method is inferior to others.
AGW “science” is so bad that it can’t properly be called science at all; rather, it should be called anti-science.
When you are paid to find “evidence” for unprecedented warming, and to make ominous pronouncements about what it means, then I suppose it is human nature to do so. Though that doesn’t say much for our survival as a species.
@ur momisugly Alexander K:
September 14, 2010 at 6:13 am
It’s like the way they used to weigh a pig in Maine. They tied the pig to the end of a plank, on which they’d previously found the middle point, put that over a log and piled stones on the other end until the two masses balanced.
Then they guessed the weight of the stones.