I’m off on a small adventure today, chasing and logging a USHCN weather station which had been misidentified in the early days of the surfacestations project.
One of the results of the project is that it forced NCDC to provide better metadata in their online MMS database. This includes adding a USHCN flag to identify which stations were in fact USHCN from the more numerous COOP stations. When we started, lat/lons were coarse, and there was no such identification. Now there is and ID and the lat/lons are accurate enough to locate the stations reliably.
I have a feeling this one will be interesting, given the description of the location.
In the meantime, talk quietly amongst yourselves, don’t make be come back here.
😉
Off topic but the sun is spotless for the first time in 198 days.
[Nothing is O/T (except per site Policy), this is an Open Thread. ~dbs, mod.]
Texas drought is worst in recorded history. Rolling blackouts as Texas Electric Grid declares Level 1 Emergency. So where is all that much-touted wind energy we spent so much money on?
See http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/texas-electric-grid-declares-level-1.html
Turns out the wind blows when you least need power – suckers!
well down under we are getting ready all our signes and we are all going to wear black because it is our darkest day since the 2nd world war . the rally will be 16th of august 12 noon CANBERRA GROVER THE TRUCKIE IS WALKING FROM ALBURY. the other night at a motel sombody broke in and stole his signes he was very upset but sombody gave him new ones
LazyTeenager says:
August 13, 2011 at 6:22 pm
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Someone needs a geology lesson.
Philip Clarke-I recommend you learn to separate issues in your mind. Whether Singer generally makes valid points or not, and whether some specific point was wrong or not, is irrelevant to whether the man has the right to defend himself from attacks on him personally. On the matter actually at hand, what evidence have you to refute the arguments that Singer makes in his own defense against attacks by Oreskes? Can you justify her blatant falsehoods and misrepresentations with the sole objective being the Character assassination of these individuals? I think not, since you chose, apparently, to indict the character of one of those individuals on the basis of an incident which appears to have peak the ire of one UK columnist and yourself, but has other than that escaped the attention of most people paying any serious attention to meaningful issues.
By the way, if we want to use individual incidents to judge the character of individuals, Monbiot is perhaps well judged by his recommendation to solve floods in Bangladesh by drowning airline executives…
@DCC:
– Texas is not having, and did not have, rolling blackouts during the recent heat wave. A level 1 alert simply calls for conservation, such as time-shifting discretionary electrical usage, plus calls on all available generating resources. To quote the ERCOT website, ” EEA 1 gives ERCOT operators authority to call on all available power supply, including power from other grids if available.”
Texas ERCOT did issue a stage 2 alert, where some consumers were shut off – with their prior agreement.
source: http://www.ercot.com/content/alerts/html/normal.html
Texas today and yesterday is receiving rain, with 3 inches of rain in some places. (South of Lubbock, per a close friend of mine who lives there.)
Wind power is not designed to replace dispatchable power such as gas-fired power plants. Not until economically attractive, grid-scale electric power storage (or the equivalent) is available will wind power do so.
Wind allows natural gas-fired power plants to throttle back, and use less gas than they would without wind power. The impact is exactly the same as having part of the grid load reduced. Wind power, in its current form, is simply a way to produce power without burning natural gas, or in some places, coal. It is not meant to be, nor is it, a replacement for dispatchable power.
I missed it , but yesterday was Cost of Government Day in the U.S. If your working this weekend you can actually make some money for yourself, at least if your lucky enough to still have a job
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/08/happy-cost-of-government-day-august-14.html
DCC says:
August 13, 2011 at 6:52 pm
@pokerguy who said “every time I even bring [AGW] up among my liberal friends, it takes about 5 seconds before tempers flare. It just seems so hopeless for now…”
Agreed. The believers either get mad or refuse to debate intelligently. It might be best to get a new set of friends. If that’s too onerous, stop bringing it up in their presence. Nothing short of time will solve the problem. Give them a way to save face by never having to justify their beliefs again. However, if they bring it up and try to provoke you, just smile and say “You know I’m waiting to see some of the more unusual forecasts to come true. I am not willing to modify the economy ‘just in case they might.’”
=======================================
Switch the topic to polar bear populations. Most people who don’t follow this think that there are maybe 12 or 15 polar bears left or something. The fact that you can tell them that polar bear populations have increased, and back it up, even with data from warm-ish sites the following day, has been a kind of impeachment moment for them on more than one occasion.
Actually, the super highly educated people I hang out with frequently here in the Berkeley area know this is a crock. If you think they’re Al Gore fans, forget it. I’ll expand on this, if anyone’s interested.
Lazy Teenager says:
And what’s the new volume? Hint, it is not the same.
No kidding. There are three direct factors, pressure and temperature are only two of them. Determining cause and effect is impossible other than the fact that the energy is from the sun.
As long as the volume can adjust, sure.
Actually, the amount of energy is determined by the energy input from the sun relative to the the amount of energy that escapes. The pressure, temperature, and volume will adjust accordingly coupled with other factors as well (gravity.)
Mark
John R T
Paul Johnson writes interesting history. Modern Times was the first one I read and I learned alot about how the world operated then.
and we need to beware, both in science and politics, of dictatorial edicts.
Pokerguy – there have been some excellent responses to your very important question. I’ll add one from a slightly different angle: You can use all the responses given here, but generally speaking you aren’t going to suddenly convert dyed-in-the-wool warmists or even give them a slight glimmer of understanding. What you can do, however, is influence third parties – those in less committed territory. So keep engaging warmists, keep putting out proper scientific arguments, but understand who your real audience are. It’s a lot less frustrating if you see it that way…..
RE: Philip Clarke
Monbiot says:
“I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures, throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat. ”
Yet a search for 1989 “Science” articles with “glacier” in the text provides 31 results including:
and
and
Philip Clarke,
Now that John W has shown Moonbat to be mendacious, you have an opportunity to be a stand-up guy and retract your accusation that Dr Spencer “lied.”
Or, you can prevaricate.
netdr, thanks for the video, but I don’t understand his equation. Note that I can do differential and integral calculus in my sleep. But why is it that the energy from the “glass pane” that comes back down to Earth isn’t reflected back up? The infinite sum of halves is the original value. For example, start with 1 and add up all successive halves, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc. and you will get a total of 1. Note that this has to be true, otherwise you’d have only half the energy going back into space and have a runaway black hole system (though I’m dubious about the exact 1/2 figure he’s using anyhow as this would effectively create twice the incoming energy if Earth was a black body).
Also, his faucet and sink analogy is flawed. The obstacle to the drain works with the sink because the output path is independent from the input path. With the atmosphere, the obstacle would block both incoming and outgoing energy. I know he’s talking about CO2 blocking infrared and not sunlight. But this won’t be true of all greenhouse gases.
Here is one for discussion: MIT study finds IPCC underestimated Arctic ice melt
After comparing IPCC models with actual data, Rampal and his collaborators concluded that the forecasts were significantly off: Arctic sea ice is thinning, on average, four times faster than the models say, and it’s drifting twice as quickly.
The findings are forthcoming in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans. Co-authors are Jérôme Weiss and Clotilde Dubois of France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Université Joseph Fourier and Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques, respectively, and Jean-Michel Campin, a research scientist in EAPS.
Part of the problem, Rampal says, may be inadequate modeling of mechanical forces acting on and within the ice in the Arctic basin. Thus far, the IPCC models have largely focused on temperature fluctuations, which are one way to lose or gain ice. But according to Rampal, mechanics can be just as important: Forces such as wind and ocean currents batter the ice, causing it to break up. Ice that’s in small pieces behaves differently than ice in one large mass, which affects its overall volume and surface area.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/arctic-ice-melt-0810.html
Solar cooking…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/theweekinpictures/8698574/The-week-in-pictures-12-August-2011.html?image=31
Doesn’t give the prices of the menu.
@Pokerguy, re how to engage true-believers in the CAGW topic.
I have had lots of opportunity because I give speeches on the topic of AGW. One of the most effective questions to ask is, “Why does CO2 ignore some temperature-measuring locations, and warm up others that are very close by?” Then demonstrate that many, many locations show either zero warming, or an actual decrease in temperature trend over a roughly 100 year span. Most warmists do not know this…. and are stunned to learn it. I did a post on my blog this that shows many locations in the USA have zero warming or a slight cooling, with graphs and trend-lines for each. If CO2 were an agent of warming, it must behave impartially. It cannot pick and choose which locations to warm, and which to ignore. Those who think this through, find it devastating to the warmists’ argument.
Here’s the link if you care to have a look, or share it with the warmists.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/usa-cities-hadcrut3-temperatures.html
I am not an accredited scientist, just an attorney with a background in chemical engineering. However, at least one other person with serious credentials has published roughly the same thing, James D. Goodridge, the former state climatologist for California. His work in 1991 or 92 showed that counties in California with small populations had zero warming, while counties with large populations had a measurable warming. I find it very strange that CO2 would ignore an entire county just because there were few people living there. Very strange, indeed.
Also, our host, Anthony Watts, has stated that Dr. Goodridge was instrumental in turning his attention to the inconsistency in warming by location.
The citation for Dr. J.D. Goodridge’s paper is “Goodridge JD (1992) Urban bias influences on long-term California air temperature trends . Atmospheric Environment 26B (1): 1-7”
u.k.(us) says:
August 13, 2011 at 7:52 pm
LazyTeenager says:
August 13, 2011 at 6:22 pm
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Someone needs a geology lesson.
————–
Feel free to teach me that rocks float on water.
Discussing CO2 as an atmospheric percentage, I throw this out as 4 parts in every 10,000. So if the parts are meters (or metres), select 10 kilometres as a familiar distance between two local landmarks known to you and your audience. Then say less than 4 metres of that distance is the atmospheric CO2 content.
Substitute yards, feet or miles as needed.
philincalifornia @8:11 p.m.
Phil, please do expand on your experience with highly educated individuals in Berkeley. I’m curious as to your experience talking with such individuals. Do they buy into CAGW or do they think it is nonsense, but just keep their thoughts to themselves for the most part? Other observations?
Mark reckons
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Actually, the amount of energy is determined by the energy input from the sun relative to the the amount of energy that escapes. The pressure, temperature, and volume will adjust accordingly coupled with other factors as well (gravity.)
Mark
————
mostly correct since you paraphrase what I said.
But for an atmosphere fixed in quantity the pressure at the surface is a constant– you were wrong about that, it does not change with temperature.
RE: Philip Clarke
“The World Glacier Inventory contains information for over 100,000 glaciers through out the world.” http://nsidc.org/data/g01130.html
“Mass balances of more than 300 glaciers have been measured at one time or another since 1946. All of these data are included, but the short analysis represented in these tables and graphs emphasizes the 1961-2001 time period.”
http://nsidc.org/glims/glaciermelt/index.html
LOL, 0.3% have been measured “at one time or another” and yet they can definitively say that the statement “most glaciers are growing” is incorrect! Yea right. From the looks of their database about all they can definitively say is where a glacier used to be the last time they looked.
You can access their database:
http://nsidc.org/glims/
If you can get anything useful you’ve got my kudos. What a mess, you’d think the hocky team were in charge of their data. There’s no way to compare one year’s to another year’s extent or volume or any other measure of any significant number of glaciers that I could figure out.
But, take a look at their map:
http://nsidc.org/glims/
Notice all that blue down there where the “warming” don’t go (sub-peninsula Antarctica). There’s no way of knowing for sure either way, the data base just isn’t complete enough, but if I was a betting man I’d bet most glaciers (or at least most glacial ice) are in Antarctica and are probably growing.
Check this out:
http://www.criticalthinking.org/starting/
@ur momisugly pokerguy, re interacting with CAGW believers: (posted these on my blog, but copied them over here for convenience.)
Below are some additional questions (about a dozen) that CAGW believers may be asked to get them thinking:
– When CO2 was much higher in the past compared to today, why did ice ages occur? Why didn’t the earth have runaway warming with hotter summers and melting polar ice caps with much higher CO2?
– What caused the ice ages to end, was it increasing CO2? There have been dozens of ice ages with warm periods in between. Precious few humans were around, though.
– How did the recently-discovered ancient hunter get beneath a glacier in the Alps, especially since he was mortally wounded with an arrow? Did he dig a hole through the glacier to die under there? Or was it so warm in those days (roughly 6,000 years ago) that the Alpine pass was free of ice, so that later snows covered the body and became a glacier? How could our time be the warmest on record, then? (refers to the pre-historic man’s body found in an Alpine pass, as the present glacier continues to recede.)
– The Roman warm period, and the Medieval warm period were both much warmer than today, so how did Polar bears survive those warm periods? PETA and WWF were not around back then.
– Why is the sea level decreasing off the coast of California? If CO2 causes oceans to rise, why is the Pacific not rising?
– Why are sunspots so very critical to earth’s average climate? Why were there so few sunspots during both the recent cold events (Maunder and Dalton)? Why were there so many sunspots during the 1980’s and 1990’s? (in all fairness, it is painfully obvious that no one understands sun spots, as the recent lack of sunspots came as a bit of a surprise, even to the experts.)
– Why do climate scientists (Mann, Hansen, and others) hide their data for years, and never reveal their calculation methods? What are they hiding?
– Why is the Main Stream Media so silent on Chiefio’s blog results, the March of the Thermometers? see http://chiefio.wordpress.com
– Why do thousands of scientists say (signed their names) that man-made global warming is junk science?
– Why do process control engineers know that increasing CO2 above 350 ppm cannot possibly have any role in changing earth’s climate? (This refers to Dr. Pierre Latour, and his excellent writings in Hydrocarbon Processing, and my summaries on my blog. In short, for CO2 to be the control mechanism for the planet’s temperature would completely violate the laws of process control. However, those laws are inviolable. Nobody can defeat those laws; they are much like the laws of thermodynamics.)
– If the science is settled, why are governments funding additional research in the billions of dollars per year?
– And this one just to get them thinking about the entire concept of Environmental Doom: if the oceans are so fragile and vulnerable to oil spills, how did the oceans manage after all the millions of barrels of oil were spilled in World War II attacks on oil tankers? Hundreds of oil tankers were torpedoed and sunk, and many hundreds more of other oil-fueled ships went to the bottom, leaking oil from their fuel tanks. (reference: “The Prize” by Daniel Yergin, pp 350 – 370) For those who doubt this, travel to Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii and visit the sunken battleship Arizona. One can stand on the memorial just above the Arizona, and personally observe the oil still leaking out. I have done this. It’s still leaking.
Keith Minto says:
August 13, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Discussing CO2 as an atmospheric percentage, I throw this out as 4 parts in every 10,000. So if the parts are meters (or metres), select 10 kilometres as a familiar distance between two local landmarks known to you and your audience. Then say less than 4 metres of that distance is the atmospheric CO2 content.
Substitute yards, feet or miles as needed.
————
I know this is a popular debating point but it is wrong.
The power of CO2 to absorb IR radiation depends on it’s partial pressure. In other word IR absorption depends on the number of CO2 molecules per cubic meter.
This means that the number of molecules of any other gas does not affect the absorption except in a very indirect way.
Therefore claiming the absorption power of CO2 depends on it’s percentage in air is just plain wrong. You might as well express the percentage of CO2 with respect the total mass of the earth and claim that is a convincing debating point.