After a week of mostly stories of this flavor, “Scientist smacks down filthy climate change denier, film at 11“, this article in the Telegraph by Tom Chivers is refreshing and gets it close to 100% right.
Click image for the full report.
So many stories have been written this week with my name and words in them, and only two journalists contacted me in advance to ask me to comment. The first was Oliver Morton of The Economist, the second was Andrew Revkin of the NYT. I thank them.
Another new report worth having a look at is from AAAS here. Mr. Eli Kintisch was gracious enough to correct an error he made, and very quickly. He interviews Dr. Muller after the hearing, and it is well done.
This contrasts with the Salon.com reporter Andrew Leonard who not only left an error in place (conflating Willis Eschenbach with me) but refused to do anything about it, even when it was pointed out that many bloggers downstream were repeating the error without checking. Then without permission, Leonard published my complaint emails and that of Mr. Eschenbach in a second story. I’m truly disappointed in his lack of basic journalistic etiquette. I’m also disappointed that the salon.com editors have not responded at all to our early emails. Suffice it to say I won’t be talking to anyone at salon.com ever again.
I appreciate Mr. Chivers taking the time to read, understand, and present the situation in a thoughtful way.
The only thing I dispute, and it’s a minor point, is his characterization that I was blaming Professor Muller in my comment “post normal science political theater”. I’m not, and if anyone got that impression besides Mr. Chivers, I say that is why it is always best to ask. My comment is labeling of the event and the situation, not the person(s) involved. Muller was asked to testify, he didn’t go seeking it.
In fact, it may surprise many to learn that Dr. Pielke Sr. and I have been carrying on a constructive dialog with Dr. Muller via email this week. We’ve been in touch every day. Dr. Muller has shared some additional results with me, Dr. Pielke and I have pointed out what we feel are some errors, he’s countered, we are both looking at the issue. We are also both trying to understand the situation about station siting better. While it appears simple on the surface (no pun intended) it is a much more complex problem than I thought it to be when I started out. I hope to have more in a future post. For now I have more important duties, see the upcoming announcement at 3PM PST.
For another look at station siting analysis done entirely independently, I suggest this recent article on WUWT:
An investigation of USHCN station siting issues using a cleaned dataset
Mr. Gibbas (who did that study linked above) has agreed to provide more data, and in a post upcoming soon, the cleaned data he used will be made available online.
Tom is an ignorant green watery melon who tends to sit on the fence. His arguments are always weak, and he has little opinion of his own. Compare him to some of the more outrageous posts from Jim Delingpole, or the more demure, but sounder comments from Chris Booker, and you will see what I mean.
He is a light-weight.
To Mindbuilder re: Heat Islands….I just want to throw a real quick model at you and get your feedback. For the purpose of the model, I’m going to simplify it.
There are only two surfaces on earth.
Grass.
Blacktop Pavement.
Snow never covers either.
If the same sun hits both surfaces at the same intensity, how do the heating effects differ?
Grass – Absorbs energy in only some wavelengths. Some reflection. Converts some of that energy in concert with CO2 into mass. Lower conversion of sun energy to heat.
Blacktop Pavement – Absorbs energy in almost all wavelengths. Little reflection. No conversion to mass. Higher conversion of sun energy to heat.
Ball in your court….please advise as your argument above necessitates that both surfaces are in fact identical and don’t impact temperature readings in urban areas….either that or the data you are pointing to is inherently flawed (which is much more sensical than denying the difference in physical properties of urban and rural surfaces).
ugh –
First: what Muller et al actually said was that the 2% data sample as they had it broadly tracked the trends claimed by others. Duh. Imagine how utterly absurd the contrary position would be – “our 2% sample showed that all the data alleged by everybody else was wrong..”
Second: the Chivers report attempts to be fair but doesn’t reflect a long term engagement with the wattsupwith that community or Mr. Watts. Both, I think (?) are much more deeply committed to trying to understand the issues than to fighting for one side in a dispute. This mis-understanding arises, I think, because alarmists usually see only one side of the story and so regard any attempt to see both as an attack on revealed Truth.
Third: it’s not obvious to an outsider what Dr. Muller’s agenda is or how his methods will work out but judgment should be suspended, I think, until he produces a formal set of results and we can review them – and, in that context, I’ll make this prediction: he’ll find that the data is inadequate to support any of the conclusions currently being offered by alarmists and deniers alike.
Anthony’s initial checks found some stations were neither in the correct position or set up properly but the really interesting one was the site that was warmer in the winter than the summer. Enter Steve McIntyre who sorted it out with NASA and temps were adjusted down a little due to a wrong data screen being used after the YK2 concerns (or scam depending on your viewpoint).
What really matters is how the planet is behaving as time goes on and what do historical records show.
The monthly Global Anomaly is definitely going down, there is no significant heating of the mid troposphere and ocean heat content also appears to be in decline.
On top of this Prof Bob Carter recently sent me several graphs on all sort of things relating to the climate and I particularly liked one showing 6 million years of temperatures on planet earth.
Shall we just say the wild up and downs of many, many years ago have been followed by relative stability during the last 5,000 years all well within the constraining bars…..including the present day!
What a farse. It is impossible to find temperature of the world with decimal degree precision. Curious that the incompetent journalist in Telegraph talks about North Pole but doesn’t talk about Pacific Ocean. Maybe that is not Earth.
But this silliness is to be expected, people need to find the “truth” in their lives not 50, 100 years later.
Matthew says:
April 8, 2011 at 12:15 pm
“To Mindbuilder re: Heat Islands….I just want to throw a real quick model at you and get your feedback. For the purpose of the model, I’m going to simplify it.
There are only two surfaces on earth.
Grass.
Blacktop Pavement.
Snow never covers either.”
Matthew, you are talking about physical hypotheses. To Warmista, physical hypotheses are the same as crucifix and garlic.
It is extremely easy to demonstrate UHI. Consider two skyscrapers side by side. Not across the street from one another but side by side. Each is 600 feet high and 300 by 300 laterally; you know, like in a Fascist (Communist) country. They are 50 feet apart. The sun heats them equally during the day and illuminates fully the space between them only for a couple of hours around noon. Ok, that is the physical situation.
According to our beloved Blackbody theory, the buildings must lose through radiation at night all the radiation received through the sun; otherwise, they gain heat daily. Has anyone noticed that the radiation coming from the sun and the radiation from the buildings are asymmetric. Consider the two surfaces of the buildings that face one another. The radiation from those surfaces does not travel into space; rather, the two buildings heat one another. That is UHI. In this idealized case, it is huge. But there is much in the real world that approximates this idealized case. Take Manhattan as a case in point.
Obviously, a thermometer placed between these two buildings is measuring a great deal of UHI. Of course, urban environments are dynamic and one should not use this model only. Think of this model applying to tractor trailer trucks parked in a huge lot or wasted double-wides from Katrina occupying ten acres. Think of any of a bazillion different situations. All of it is UHI. Suburban America is now the land of the privacy fence, the big high privacy fence. That is UHI.
Where did Jones just do a study of UHI? London. What is thoughtless about that. For one thing, the sun does not shine in London. Even on the rare cloudless, fogless days, London’s July sunshine is less than Central Florida’s January sunshine. For another thing, Brits are seriously less wealthy than Americans. They don’t have high, expensive privacy fences. For another thing…well, you get the picture. Jones should go to the old city of St. Louis, MO and try his UHI study. Or why not in the financial district of Manhattan?
@beng – My quote of Anthony Watts wasn’t claiming that cities are not hotter than rural locations, it was claiming that no affect on temperature TRENDS was found. In other words, something like if the city is 5deg hotter than the surrounding countryside today, then it was also 5deg hotter many years ago, so there is no global warming trend from the UHI effect. You may find this implausible. I also find it hard to believe. But this is the result of Anthony Watts study. I have quoted it and linked to it at the bottom of this post. Go to the link, search the page for what I quoted and read the context. It is clear.
@Theo Goodwin – I don’t think there is much equivocation in the abstract of Anthony’s study. Go to the link, search for the quote, and read the context.
@Mathew – I thought basically the same as you on this issue, and maybe Anthony’s study misses some trick the alarmists have played on the temperature record, but it appears from Anthony’s study that well sited rural thermometers have been showing the same warming trend as cities. The only thing i can think is that maybe many city thermometers have been moved from warm dirt lots a century ago to cooler grass lawns today. But my theory there seems very weak. This needs more investigation. Here is the quote and link again:
“…the mean temperature has no statistically significant trend difference that is dependent of siting quality…” – Anthony Watts – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/31/clarification-on-best-submitted-to-the-house/#more-36957
Anthony’s initial checks found some stations were neither in the correct position or set up properly but the really interesting one was the site that was warmer in the winter than in the summer. Enter Steve McIntyre who sorted it out with NASA and temps were adjusted down a little due to a wrong data screen being re-instated after the YK2 concerns (or scam depending on your viewpoint).
What really matters is how the planet is behaving as time goes on and what do historical records show.
The monthly Global Anomaly is definitely going down, there is no significant heating of the Mid Troposphere and Ocean Heat Content is I understand in decline as well.
On top of this Prof Bob Carter recently sent me several graphs on all sort of things relating to the climate and I particularly liked the one showing 6 million years of temperatures on planet earth.
Shall we just say the wild up and downs of many, many years ago have been followed by relative stability during the last 5,000 years all well within the constraining bars…..including the present day!
As regards urban areas being warmer due to UHI, why does C02 have to come into it?
I regularly experience UHI when I go to football at Old Trafford….I get there an hour before kick-off and on a cold day it can go right through you. Part way into the game and with 75,000 human “UHI’s” around me it gets warmer.
Mindbuilder says:
April 8, 2011 at 3:13 pm
“@Theo Goodwin – I don’t think there is much equivocation in the abstract of Anthony’s study. Go to the link, search for the quote, and read the context.”
If y0u do not put the matter in your own words how am I to know that you know what equivocation is?
@Theo Goodwin – I don’t see that it makes any difference if I know what equivocation is(though I do know of course). Did you read the context of the quote of Anthony from his abstract? Is it clear that Anthony is saying that UHI has not had any effect on the trends of average temperatures in cities, though cities seem to be getting warmer lows and cooler highs compared to rural sites? Have I distorted his results?
I’m going to put the link in again because too many people don’t seem to be looking at my previous posts:
“…the mean temperature has no statistically significant trend difference that is dependent of siting quality…” – Anthony Watts – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/31/clarification-on-best-submitted-to-the-house/#more-36957
@Theo Goodwin – I should answer your questions more directly. I don’t think Anthony was relying on the adjusted trend calculated by the alarmists. I think he used the raw temperature records of well sited rural stations as his reference standard. I don’t know how raw the raw records he used were. I doubt he viewed and entered the original written logs first hand. But apparently he failed to find any significant difference between the trends of rural stations and city stations. I agree, it’s hard to believe. Did I misinterpret his report?
As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Re Engechamp, April 8, 2011, 12.13pm
Yes, Tom Chivers is a comparative lightweight, maybe with as little real understanding of the issues discussed here as I have. But he has the gift of communicating well and a platform on which to do it. (I don’t on both counts.)
But IMHO he is so much more persuasive than most who blog here without being able to condense their admittedly extremely complex points into digestible chunks for ignoramuses like me and those who inhabit the corridors of power.
So, the more purposeful will downplay negative personal evaluations and work to bring him to understand the skeptical case, so that he can pass it on.
Make friends and influence people!
Anthony:
Reading the first few sentences, and the headline for the article my first thought was this:
“A journalist in the UK is pondering how a group of scientists at UC Berkley, Calif. will influence your blog.”
So how cool is that???
Congratulations on yours, and the communities’ success at Watt’s Up With That?!
Theo (to Mindbuilder)
Mindbuilder did that upthread, and then simply quoted the abstract when no one spoke directly to the information. In fact, every reply bar mine has deflected his question.
I remain curious about this revelation in the abstract to Anthony’s paper. It appears to corroborate Muller’s (premature) testimony, so it’s right on topic. Is anyone apart from Mindbuilder and I capable of addressing this specific matter head on – that Anthony’s paper indicates the average temperature trends are not affected by siting issues?
“…the mean temperature has no statistically significant trend difference that is dependent of siting quality…”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/31/clarification-on-best-submitted-to-the-house/#more-36957
I realized I might as well reproduce the context of Anthony’s quote here.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/31/clarification-on-best-submitted-to-the-house/#more-36957
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/2011/04/08/the-science-so-far/
“The impact of increasing amounts of freshwater entering the Arctic from sea ice and glacier melt, as well as from rivers, is the focus of Catlin Arctic Survey 2011”
Fresh water sea ice eh
****
Mindbuilder says:
April 8, 2011 at 3:13 pm
@beng – My quote of Anthony Watts wasn’t claiming that cities are not hotter than rural locations, it was claiming that no affect on temperature TRENDS was found. In other words, something like if the city is 5deg hotter than the surrounding countryside today, then it was also 5deg hotter many years ago, so there is no global warming trend from the UHI effect. You may find this implausible. I also find it hard to believe. But this is the result of Anthony Watts study. I have quoted it and linked to it at the bottom of this post. Go to the link, search the page for what I quoted and read the context. It is clear.
****
You’re not thinking this thru. The temp records, w/almost no exceptions, don’t go back far enough in time to capture all the UHI effects. The very longest (official) US records don’t start before 1880 or so, many later than that. Were these cities just getting started then? Of course not. From Dr Spencer’s UHI work, the greatest UHI effects occur just when the cities get started — when the land is cleared & buildings first erected. Cities in desert areas may have less effects if there were no forests/grasslands to begin with, but even those produce a UHI effect from the increases of sunlight-absorbing/retaining surfaces produced by buildings & roads. So even the most accurate, official city temp records just don’t cut it, UHI-wise.
The only reasonable method to determine real UHI effects is to compare a city-center or airport temp w/the closest, truly “rural” spot one can obtain (hopefully upwind & same latitude & altitude). That may not even be possible for many locations of spread-out development, like Washington DC. But if it were possible, the UHI effect would be the difference between the average temp of the two sites. Granted, the daytime differences would almost certainly be less than the nighttime, given that wind speeds are greater in the day, and there is some thermal “inertia” in the cities in the morning (takes some time for the building/road surfaces to warm up compared to trees/grasslands).
Mindbuilder quotes Watts’ abstract as follows:
“According to the best-sited stations, the diurnal temperature range in the lower 48 states has no century-scale trend.”
What more do you need to know? You seem to be suggesting that Watts and Muller can agree on this matter. If Muller found this statement from Watts’ abstract acceptable, he could not have said what he said before Congress and avoid lying.
barry says:
April 8, 2011 at 11:09 pm
Theo (to Mindbuilder)
“I remain curious about this revelation in the abstract to Anthony’s paper. It appears to corroborate Muller’s (premature) testimony, so it’s right on topic. Is anyone apart from Mindbuilder and I capable of addressing this specific matter head on – that Anthony’s paper indicates the average temperature trends are not affected by siting issues?”
Fortunately, Mindbuilder quoted the abstract. What Anthony (and others) say in the abstract is that the errors in poorly located stations cancel one another and give the appearance of no trend. Let me quote the crucial part:
“The finding that the mean temperature has no statistically significant trend difference that is dependent of siting quality, while the maximum and minimum temperature trends indicates that the lack of a difference in the mean temperatures is coincidental for the specific case of the USA sites, and may not be true globally. At the very least, this raises a red flag on the use of the poorly sited locations for climate assessments as these locations are not spatially representative.”
Let me spell it out:
“while the maximum and minimum temperature trends indicates that the lack of a difference in the mean temperatures is coincidental”
See the word ‘coincidental’. You do know that coincidence is not permitted in scientific explanations, right? When our science depends on coincidence, it is not genuine science and in fact is worthless. Now look at the last sentence of the paragraph above. See the phrase “red flag.” Surely, I do not have to explain the meaning of that phrase.
Muller is not deterred by coincidence. He does not actually use facts, such as temperature measurements and the metadata that explains the relative quality of the stations that collect the facts. Muller uses novel statistical techniques to create “trends” and then claims that his unintelligible product is somehow related to the facts – but we idiots cannot understand it. McIntyre, McKitrick, and Montford really need to open a graduate school of Analysis and Criticism for Statistical Methods in Climate Science. All so-called “Climate Scientists” should be forced to attend indefinitely.
Mindbuilder says:
April 8, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Thank Your for your excellent response. If you will read the abstract once again, the abstract that you quoted after making this response, you will find that Anthony says that the maximum and minimum temperatures contain errors that cancel one another and give the false appearance of no trend. He says this is a red flag. Look for the word ‘coincidental’.
It seems to me the southern Indian Ocean is getting a bit cooler?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/marion-island-assessment-of-climate-change-in-the-southern-indian-ocean-due-to-the-increase-in-greenhouse-gases
Any comments?
Like this?
Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous
United States, Peterson (2003)
Barry cites the Peterson paper. What utter bilge
From the conclusions of that paper, the reason the study is useless:
“All analyses of the impact of urban heat islands on in situ temperature observations suffer from inhomogeneities or biases in the data. The data used in this analysis were the most thoroughly homogenized and the homogeneity adjustments were the most rigorously evaluated and thoroughly documented of any large-scale UHI analysis to date.”
Blender science. Homogenization smears urban and rural sites together, rendering differences nil. Of course they’d conclude there’s no UHI!
Idiots.
barry,
From your link:
Summary and conclusions
All analyses of the impact of urban heat islands on in situ temperature observations suffer from inhomogeneities or biases in the data.
So they didn’t use the raw data from the signed B-91 forms, they used homogenized “data.”
GIGO.