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.
A cool 5 mil.
To compare, I’ll check the BOM results for ‘Brisbane Aero’, using annual data from 1976 to 2010 inclusive.
Mean trend = 0.08C/dec
Max trend = 0.17C/dec
Min trend = 0.01C/dec
Diurnal range trend = 0.16/dec
All temperature trends are positive (although the minimum temperature trend is smaller than the error bars, so could be flat or negative).
The diurnal range is positive, the opposite sign of IPCC anticipated global average diurnal range trend.
(Work done in Excel – I am no statistical analyst)
Don’t worry
I also use excel
I am almost halfway
to translate your figures to what I am used to:
Means: increasing at a rate of 0.01 degree C / annum
Maxima increasing at a rate of 0.02 degree C / Annum
Minima increasing at a rate of 0.01 degree C / annum
Is this correct? Are you sure minima were increasing?
You had one error – dropped a zero. To translate per annum and rounding..
Mean trend = 0.01 degree C / annum
Max trend = 0.02 degree C / annum
Min trend = 0.001 degree C / annum
Diurnal range trend = 0.016/dec
Minima has increased, but by so little it’s virtually a flatline for the period. You can get the minima data from this page, on the right, if you want to check (click under ‘download anomaly data’).
But the relative trends make sense. The mean is roughly the mean of the minima and maxima, Because there is virtually no trend for minima, the diurnal range trend is very close to the maxima trend.
While the period from 1976 to 2010 was virtually flat for minima, the minimum temperatures previous to that were much lower. The more data included before 1976, the greater the warming trend. Data set starts January 1910. This is one of the sites marked by BOM on their interactive map of best sites as being influenced by UHI (and hence excluded from the annual temperature analyses). I’m not sure if the data given is adjusted for UHI or not. (My internet connection is breaking down in rural Australia. I’ll try and find out when I’m connected more stably)
Barry
I am almost sure the trend on minima that I will get is a decline
I can see it happening without having done the regressions
and that is in Brisbane from 1976
Again it proves that there is no warming due to an increase in GHG’s
Taking data before 1976 is risky/
I know what equipment was available in 1975. Before that date I am not sure what you will encounter in terms of human error.
In any case, this whole hype around “global warming” came about after 1975 which seem to co-incide (as I now also can see) with increasing maxima.
I will finish the analysis before the weekend and let you know.
I am not a weatherman. I am not sure what you mean with Diurnal range trend?
How do calculate that?
This is the BOM’s anomaly map for diurnal range trends. As you can see, in some places the diurnal trend is negative, in others, positive.
We can see that diurnal range trends are highly variable depending on location. I checked the diurnal trend rate for the same period (1970 – 2010) for the nation. It is slightly positive, which also is opposite IPCC global expectations. However, I am not sure if this is meaningful for less than 3% of the globe. When you start earlier in the data, you get a negative diurnal trend.
I read somewhere that the diurnal range trend will eventually move to positive or neutral, as maxima start to increase as much or more than minima. Perhaps this is a factor, too. I don’t know. It’s something I’ll try to chase up at realclimate when the opportunity arises. I’d search elsewhere, but this internet dropout is making long searches annoyingly difficult.
Barry
here are my prelimary results for Brisbane:
Historical Weather: Brisbane Airport M. O, Australia
Weather station: 945780 (YBBN)
Latitude: -27.38
Longitude: 153.1
Altitude: 4
Period evalauted: 1976-2010/11
1) Mean temperature has remained unchanged over the past 35 years: 0.00 degrees C/annum
2) Maxima have increased at a rate of 0.02 degreesC / annum
3) Minima have decreased at a rate of 0.06 degrees C/ annum
I will publish the detailed results later.
Again, I say that if anyone claims that more greenhouse gas causes warming, then it must be minimum temperatures that should be rising at a rate at least as fast as maxima and means. What I find is always exactly the opposite.
So there is no global warming as a result of an increase in GHG’s. Are we agreed on that?
PS. What currency was the cool 5 mil? I hope it was not 5 million Zimbabwean dollars?
Well, let’s be very specific about the data. If there is no warming trend for minima at Brisbane Airport, then all that we’ve learned is that, nothing else. If there is a warming trend for maxima, then we need to look at other factors that may have caused it. If the mean temperature is warming, then we likewise need to look at attribution, and, of course, try to determine if local, non-climatic influences have biased the data in some way.
Also, this is just one data point (one location). It may corroborate others that you have come across, but I can cite scores of others that show the opposite. The trends at Brisbane Aero ‘prove’ nothing about global temperature trends, or whether the greenhouse effect is ‘real’.
(I think pretty much everyone, including skeptics, agrees that increased GHGs should involve some warming – Pielke Snr, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen and any critic qualified as an earth scientist all agree on that – but this discussion doesn’t really belong in this thread)
I’ll re-iterate that the BOM excludes Brisbane Airport from their national temperature trend assessments – because they have detected an urban heat island influence. IOW, BOM don’t consider Brisbane Airport data clean enough.
Diurnal means ‘night and day’, in this context, and the ‘diurnal range’ is the difference between daytime (maximum) and nighttime temperatures. “Diurnal range trend”, then, is the difference between max and min temperatures over time. The method for determining that is to subtract minima from maxima for each day/month/year, and then derive a trend from the resulting values. Thus, if maximum temps have increased more than minimum over a given time period, then the diurnal range will have a positive slope, or trend. If minima have increased more than maxima over time, you’ll get a negative diurnal range trend. (Also applies to cooling, neutral temps of course – its about the difference between min/max over time)
I thought that the mean temps were derived by averaging max and minimum temps, and that the mean trend would thus be -0.02 degrees C / annum.
I thought that the mean temps were derived by averaging max and minimum temps, and that the mean trend would thus be -0.02 degrees C / annum
NO!
The mean temperature is the average of all the measurements of temps. during the (24 hour) day.
here is my report on Brisbane
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/no-global-warming-in-brisbane-australia
And for the last two years the Skagit Valley tulip folks have been wringing their hands that the tulips were blooming too late for the festival, due to the cold. Nothing is happening globally.
Barry says
(I think pretty much everyone, including skeptics, agrees that increased GHGs should involve some warming – Pielke Snr, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen and any critic qualified as an earth scientist all agree on that – but this discussion doesn’t really belong in this thread)
well, I, me, and myself (I don’t have a big name yet) could not find any evidence that the net effect of more carbon dioxide is warming. Note that we have
1) some radiative warming caused by CO2 at 14-15 um (oxygen/ozone and water vapor also absorbs there), but nobody has any figures on how much warming is caused by the CO2
2) some radiative cooling is caused by the CO2 at various places between 0-5 um, due to deflection of radiation of the sun, especially around 2um and 4-5 um. Again I could not find any test results that would show me exactly how much radiative cooling is caused by the Co2.
3) by taking part in the photo synthesis Co2 causes plants and trees to grow. This takes energy out of the environment. Did you ever see forests grow where it is cold?
Again I have no figures on how much cooling is caused by this, but I suspect it is substantial in comparison to any warming caused by the increase in CO2. I think this is the part that most of the gentlemen you quoted above including of course all AGW supporters have forgotten about.
Earth having become much greener in the past 50 years, I predict that eventually it will be found out that all this all cooling caused by CO2 in 2) and 3) above neutralizes any warming caused by the increase in CO2.