Senator Inhofe’s EPW office issued a press release today on the subject of USHCN Climate Monitoring stations along with links to this report from the General Accounting Office (GAO)
…the report notes, “NOAA does not centrally track whether USHCN stations adhere to siting standards…nor does it have an agency-wide policy regarding stations that don’t meet standards.” The report continues, “Many of the USHCN stations have incomplete temperature records; very few have complete records. 24 of the 1,218 stations (about 2 percent) have complete data from the time they were established.” GAO goes on to state that most stations with long temperature records are likely to have undergone multiple changes in measurement conditions.
The report shows by their methodology that 42% of the network in 2010 failed to meet siting standards and they have recommendations to NOAA for solving this problem. This number is of course much lower than what we have found in the surfacestations.org survey, but bear in mind that NOAA has been slowly and systematically following my lead and reports and closing the worst stations or removing them from USHCN duty. For example I pointed out that the famous Marysville station (see An old friend put out to pasture: Marysville is no longer a USHCN climate station of record) that started all this was closed just a few months after I reported issues with its atrocious siting. Recent discoveries of closures include Armore (shown below) and Durant OK. This may account for a portion the lower 42% figure for “active stations” the GAO found. Another reason might be that they tended towards using a less exacting rating system than we did.
Recently, while resurveying stations that I previously surveyed in Oklahoma, I discovered that NOAA has been quietly removing the temperature sensors from some of the USHCN stations we cited as the worst (CRN4, 5) offenders of siting quality. For example, here are before and after photographs of the USHCN temperature station in Ardmore, OK, within a few feet of the traffic intersection at City Hall:
Ardmore USHCN station , MMTS temperature sensor, January 2009
Ardmore USHCN station , MMTS temperature sensor removed, March 2011
While NCDC has gone to great lengths to defend the quality of the USHCN network, their actions of closing them speak far louder than written words and peer reviewed publications.
I don’t have time today to go into detail, but will follow up at another time. Here is the GAO summary:
Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network
GAO-11-800 August 31, 2011
Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 47 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)
Summary
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains a network of weather-monitoring stations known as the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which monitors the nation’s climate and analyzes long-term surface temperature trends. Recent reports have shown that some stations in the USHCN are not sited in accordance with NOAA’s standards, which state that temperature instruments should be located away from extensive paved surfaces or obstructions such as buildings and trees. GAO was asked to examine (1) how NOAA chose stations for the USHCN, (2) the extent to which these stations meet siting standards and other requirements, and (3) the extent to which NOAA tracks USHCN stations’ adherence to siting standards and other requirements and has established a policy for addressing nonadherence to siting standards. GAO reviewed data and documents, interviewed key NOAA officials, surveyed the 116 NOAA weather forecast offices responsible for managing stations in the USHCN, and visited 8 forecast offices.
In choosing USHCN stations from a larger set of existing weather-monitoring stations, NOAA placed a high priority on achieving a relatively uniform geographic distribution of stations across the contiguous 48 states. NOAA balanced geographic distribution with other factors, including a desire for a long history of temperature records, limited periods of missing data, and stability of a station’s location and other measurement conditions, since changes in such conditions can cause temperature shifts unrelated to climate trends. NOAA had to make certain exceptions, such as including many stations that had incomplete temperature records. In general, the extent to which the stations met NOAA’s siting standards played a limited role in the designation process, in part because NOAA officials considered other factors, such as geographic distribution and a long history of records, to be more important. USHCN stations meet NOAA’s siting standards and management requirements to varying degrees. According to GAO’s survey of weather forecast offices, about 42 percent of the active stations in 2010 did not meet one or more of the siting standards.
With regard to management requirements, GAO found that the weather forecast offices had generally but not always met the requirements to conduct annual station inspections and to update station records. NOAA officials told GAO that it is important to annually visit stations and keep records up to date, including siting conditions, so that NOAA and other users of the data know the conditions under which they were recorded. NOAA officials identified a variety of challenges that contribute to some stations not adhering to siting standards and management requirements, including the use of temperature-measuring equipment that is connected by a cable to an indoor readout device–which can require installing equipment closer to buildings than specified in the siting standards. NOAA does not centrally track whether USHCN stations adhere to siting standards and the requirement to update station records, and it does not have an agencywide policy regarding stations that do not meet its siting standards. Performance management guidelines call for using performance information to assess program results. NOAA’s information systems, however, are not designed to centrally track whether stations in the USHCN meet its siting standards or the requirement to update station records. Without centrally available information, NOAA cannot easily measure the performance of the USHCN in meeting siting standards and management requirements.
Furthermore, federal internal control standards call for agencies to document their policies and procedures to help managers achieve desired results. NOAA has not developed an agencywide policy, however, that clarifies for agency staff whether stations that do not adhere to siting standards should remain open because the continuity of the data is important, or should be moved or closed. As a result, weather forecast offices do not have a basis for making consistent decisions to address stations that do not meet the siting standards. GAO recommends that NOAA enhance its information systems to centrally capture information useful in managing the USHCN and develop a policy on how to address stations that do not meet its siting standards. NOAA agreed with GAO’s recommendations.
Recommendations
Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from “In process” to “Open,” “Closed – implemented,” or “Closed – not implemented” based on our follow up work.
| Director: | Anu K. Mittal |
| Team: | Government Accountability Office: Natural Resources and Environment |
| Phone: | (202) 512-9846 |
Recommendations for Executive Action
Recommendation: To improve the National Weather Service’s (NWS) ability to manage the USHCN in accordance with performance management guidelines and federal internal control standards, as well as to strengthen congressional and public confidence in the data the network provides, the Acting Secretary of Commerce should direct the Administrator of NOAA to enhance NWS’s information system to centrally capture information that would be useful in managing stations in the USHCN, including (1) more complete data on siting conditions (including when siting conditions change), which would allow the agency to assess the extent to which the stations meet its siting standards, and (2) existing data on when station records were last updated to monitor whether the records are being updated at least once every 5 years as NWS requires.
Agency Affected: Department of Commerce
Status: In process
Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.
Recommendation: To improve the National Weather Service’s (NWS) ability to manage the USHCN in accordance with performance management guidelines and federal internal control standards, as well as to strengthen congressional and public confidence in the data the network provides, the Acting Secretary of Commerce should direct the Administrator of NOAA to develop an NWS agencywide policy, in consultation with the National Climatic Data Center, on the actions weather forecast offices should take to address stations that do not meet siting standards.
Agency Affected: Department of Commerce
Status: In process
Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.
Lack says:
“I am not sure why you keep mentioning null hypothesis…”
Because it deconstructs the CO2=CAGW conjecture, which has always been nonsense. Trenberth wants to “redefine” the null hypothesis. Why? Because it makes his CAGW nonsense look like the fakery that it is, and Trenberth knows it.
Lack’s ignorance of the null hypothesis isn’t surprising. Those afflicted with cognitive dissonance ignore facts that disrupt their world view. Orwell called it “doublethink”, and most alarmists are afflicted with CD. Skeptics are generally immune to CD because skeptics are simply saying, “Prove it.”
Martin, the causal physical meaning of the recent warming trend can only be supplied by a falsifiable physical theory. That’s how science works.
Presently, the best physical theory of climate is represented by GCMs — the climate models. Over and over, they have been shown unable to hindcast past climate. For a very accessible demonstration of this fact, see Demetris Koutsoyiannis’ recent paper.
Jeffrey Kiehl’s paper (2007) “Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity” GRL 34, L22710, pointed out that different climate models varied by a factor of two in climate sensitivity, but made up for it by using aerosol forcing as a compensating fudge factor. That means minimally there’s a factor of 2×2=four uncertainty in climate model parameters that must be propagated forward through the outputs of every time step of a future global climate projection — imposing time-wise increasing uncertainties in air temperature, precipitation, global cloudiness and so on. Very quickly, the projections of climate models become devoid of predictive meaning even if the results are bounded and seem reasonable.
These uncertainties are virtually never included in papers discussing future climate, nor in any of the publicity releases of the IPCC. The uncertainties of GCMs have been generally neglected in the discussions of climate, and are so large the GCMs are effectively unfalsifiable.
The uncertainty and non-falsifiability of GCMs means that no causal physical meaning can be assigned to 20th century climate warming. All the AGW finger-pointing at melting ice sheets and so forth is so much unscientific correlation = causation argumentation. Climate alarmism has no scientific basis on which to stand. Your MA in Environmental Politics has clearly left you unprepared to evaluate whether you have an objective basis for your position. You haven’t one.
Oh heavens, we have a troll who is willing to admit to a degree in “Environmental Politics”.
If I had a skeleton like that in my closet I might be inclined to keep my mouth shut. I wonder what sort of institution issues such…need to moderate my language here…rancid sheepskins.
@steven mosher So a CRN5 rating is basically any site that’s worse than CRN4? That opens up the scale of bad for CRN6 or higher. What about the ones in the middle of parking lots or on top of buildings with black tar roofs?
“The squeeky wheel gets the grease.”
Kudos to Watts & Company for their tireless efforts to clean up the “system”.
I guess if one has a degree in environmental politics, then one has a strong motive to make sure that there’s a market for it…
I have not got the time to sit on this site all day and every day and respond to every single ad hominem attack by people who cannot even be bothered to check my blog to see if their personal remarks have any legitimacy.
I accept that it was unwise of me to post remarks like “your days are numbered” and “the game is up (you lost)” but, I am not attacking any of you personally – I am just trying to point out to you that you are not being objective or rational in dismissing the findings of climate science as a hoax, scam, or whatever you want to call it.
The world, most politicians, and even some conservative think tanks are moving on; they are trying to tackle the problem. You are merely delaying the effectiveness of that action by slowing it down and – in so doing – you are in effect self-harming because, the longer we delay the harder it gets to take effective action. This is not scientific scare-mongering; it is an empirically-based, laboratory-tested and, now, an observable fact.
Some of you demand evidence but do not accept it when it is presented to you: disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, desertification, crop failures, food shortages, water scarcity. These are all consequences of ongoing AGW not consequences of our attempts to prevent it.
If your response to this is to say that I am being duped by a conspiracy – based on your faulty interpretation of some CRU/UEA emails (or whatever) – then you may be so far down the conspiracy theory rabbit- hole that I cannot help you.
If someone would like to fix the html code in that previous comment, I would be very grateful (although hopefully it does not detract too much from the message)!
Martin wrote, “Some of you demand evidence but do not accept it when it is presented to you: disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, desertification, crop failures, food shortages, water scarcity. These are all consequences of ongoing AGW …”
You’re arguing correlation = causation, Martin. That’s hardly scientific. As I noted above, GCMs are entirely unreliable and it’s therefore entirely unknown whether the added CO2 has caused any perceptible change in air temperature — or ocean temperature for that matter. You’ve been gulled by the partisan IPCC commissariat.
Pat Frank – This appears to be what some of you like to call your null hypothesis, which I understand to mean that you will not accept AGW is real until all other explanations can be proven 100% false. That is ridiculous and will never happen. Solar flares and or cosmic rays (or whatever alternate explanation you are going to roll out this week) cannot explain the steady upward march of CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Playing around with the vertical exaggeration of graphs with two y-axes to make it look like there is no comparative trend in temperatures is pure fakery. The most likely reason why temperatures (in lower latitudes) have not continued rising over much of the last decade is very probably due to global dimming caused by industrialisation in less-developed countries. None of this invalidates the basic science of Tyndall, Arrhenius, etc, the mutually-reinforcing nature of the CO2-temperature relationship through the positive feedback mechanisms whose effects we can now see.
Pat Frank (again) – Re your earlier post that I missed…
You say “The uncertainty and non-falsifiability of GCMs means that no causal physical meaning can be assigned to 20th century climate warming“. Why is it then that 97% of climate scientists think they do know why our climate is changing (I’m glad to see that you accept it is). If you go looking for a WMO/UN/IPCC conspiracy like Andrew Montford did, you will see what you want to see and find what you want to find. But, as I keep saying, your conspiracy is an illusion; whereas the historical evidence for a conspiracy to downplay, deny and dismiss all environmental problems, ongoing since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, is available in any library.
Martin Lack still has no understanding of the null hypothesis, as his comment makes clear. He’s floundering around trying to figure it out.
The null hypothesis is the statistical hypothesis that states that there are no differences between observed and expected data.
All it would take to falsify the null hypothesis is for one temperature parameter to exceed the parameters of the last ten millennia. The fact that this easily testable hypothesis has never been falsified solidly deconstructs the wild-eyed arm waving of climate alarmists like Martin Lack. There is simply nothing occurring that hasn’t happened to much greater extremes, when CO2 levels were under 300 ppmv. As Dr Roy Spencer explains, “No one has falsified the hypothesis that the observed temperature changes are a consequence of natural variability.”
Typically, an alternate hypothesis [such as CO2=CAGW] is tested against the null hypothesis. In this particular case, there are no temperatures, rates of change, or trends that are outside the previous parameters of the Holocene. Therefore, the alternate hypothesis fails. It’s as simple as that. Nothing unusual is happening.
Kevin Trenberth has demanded that the null hypothesis must be changed, because he knows that it falsifies his “hidden heat in the pipeline” nonsense. If the null hypothesis didn’t matter so much, Trenberth would just ignore it. But Trenberth says, “The null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence.” So skeptics would then have to prove a negative, eh? The fact that Trenberth wants it changed tells us all we need to know about the failure of the catastrophic AGW scare.
Next, the “97%” figure that Lack cites has been so thoroughly debunked here and elsewhere that repeatedly deconstructing it becomes tedious. Lack can just use the search function to find out how preposterous and plain silly that number is, and the contortions it took to come up with such a nonsense number.
Finally, it seems obvious from Lack’s comments that he has never read A.W. Montford’s book, which is heavily annotated with an index of 270 separate sources. The book was completed just as the Climategate email leak appeared, and those emails confirm everything Montford wrote.
Lack has a cognitive dissonance-based belief system. In his case it appears incurable, but the record needs to be set straight for others when someone posts the easily refuted nonsense that Lack has been posting here.
Martin_Lack says:
October 3, 2011 at 12:57 am
“I have not got the time to sit on this site all day and every day and respond to every single ad hominem attack by people who cannot even be bothered to check my blog to see if their personal remarks have any legitimacy. ”
Checked your blog. It’s complete drivel.
OK, in response to my request for a halt to the ad hominem attacks, what do I get? More of the same. No surprise there then. I have apologised for my earlier inflammatory remarks, so I am not going to do so again.
To Smokey – I have read Montford’s book and it is supposition based on supposition. Unfortunately, it is all based on a false assumption that the WMO and UN set out to fool the world into funding climate science research through the IPCC. However, if you feel that Climategate is proof of this supposed conspiracy, then, clearly, I cannot help you. Nothing I say will convince you otherwise; but I cannot apologise for saying you are wrong (i.e. that is my opinion – not an insult).
To DirkH – If my blog seems to be “complete drivel to you that is fair enough (i.e. that is your opinion). What I was asking people to stop doing was making assumptions about what I know, what I believe, and what my motives are (so I suppose that I should be grateful that you did not do so).
To all – I say this, your conspiracy theory requires the complicity of so many people, it makes the views of the 9/11 Truth Movement seem highly plausible by comparison (IMHO). Therefore, I am not surprised by your hostility because I am challenging your firmly cherished ideas and beliefs. However, that alone does not make me wrong, however much you might wish it, or however many times you say it. At very least, anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are the best explanation we have for the temperature increases we have seen over the last 100 years and for the observable climate disruption we are seeing now. Obviously, I feel it is far more certain than that – or I would not be getting so angry with your failure to accept this as legitimate cause for concern.
Martin_Lack says:
October 3, 2011 at 12:57 am
Some of you demand evidence but do not accept it when it is presented to you: disappearing sea ice, melting permafrost, retreating glaciers, desertification, crop failures, food shortages, water scarcity. These are all consequences of ongoing AGW…
No, they are not.
They may be consequences of a changing climate or poor land management, but they are not necessarily consequences of ongoing AGW, especially AGW caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions which is the main point of discussion.
Have we been warming since the end of the LIA” – mostly yes, lately not so much, but it is likely that we will begin warming again (unless the folks suggesting we are about to begin a cooling phase are right).
Has the atmospheric CO2 level been rising also since shortly after the end of the LIA? – again, yes.
However, while the rate of the atmospheric CO2 rise has been fairly consistent, the cooling and warming has not, although it has been somewhat cyclic as it moves in the warming direction.
Ask yourself – how much CO2 is put into the atmosphere each year? How much is put there by anthropogenic CO2 emissions? What percentage then is the anthropogenic contribution? Why then, of the about 2 ppm of CO2 being added to the atmosphere each year, isn’t the anthropogenic contribution that same percentage? Wouldn’t that be just as logical as saying the entire 2 ppm is anthropogenic?
Also, I’ve reminded folks a few times that
-Arctic Ice disappearing
-Glaciers retreating
-Coral reef bleaching
-Mt Kilimanjaro losing snow
-Polar bears doing anything anywhere
-Some creature or plant facing extinction
-A change in cyclones/hurricanes/typhoons
-Droughts
-Floods
-Dry rivers
-Computer models or simulations
-A “consensus”
-Al Gore’s movie
-Etc. causing etc. by etc. reported by etc., etc.
are not proof of CAGW by CO2.
Martin, you’ve completely misunderstood the point.
The point is this: climate models are demonstrated to be unreliable. The idea of AGW depends entirely on the reliability of climate models. Since climate models are unreliable, the AGW conclusion is unsupportable.
Figure it out — you claim to be trained in science. If the theory is unreliable and cannot make physically valid predictions, then its outputs are not to be taken seriously.
Climate models are unreliable. Their outputs are not to be taken seriously. AGW is their chief output. AGW is not to be taken seriously. There is no scientific basis — at all — to think that the present warmer climate is in any way due to humans.
That breaks your political rice-bowl — I understand that. You’ll have to find a new career and a new passion. The earlier you start on that, the better off you’ll be.
Here, Martin, take a read of my Skeptic article. It’s backed up by the calculations (892 kB pdf), that support its points throughout.
See if your AGW belief system survives the experience.
I’ve read into the IPCC 4AR — there are references to it and extracts from it in the Skeptic article. The uncertainties expressed deep in the supplementary reports of the back chapters do not support the IPCC statements about the certainty of AGW made in the Summary for Policymakers. That internal self-contradiction is a sign that the leadership has conspired against the membership.
It doesn’t matter that “97%” of climate scientists believe. It only matters what the science itself says. That’s where I’ve focused my attention. So should you do.
Pat – I note your failure to address my challenges regarding the scale of your required conspiracy theory. As part of this, you are seeing what you want to see in AR4: The internal contradictions are a sign of nothing. In science there will always be uncertainty. The summary for policy makers is just that – a summary – of the key points, the most likely scenarios, the best course of action, etc.. This “contradiction” is only sinister because you have decided that it is.
However, thanks for the links to your website and supporting calculations. The former tells me quite a lot about you as a skeptic in general, but not specifically why you have, at some point, decided that most relevantly-qualified scientists are wrong about what they believe to be happening. If you are right (and they are all wrong) you deserve a Nobel Prize for making our problem disappear. If so, could you now turn your attention to solving all our other Limits to Growth problems (such as feeding a growing world population using a decreasing resource base and getting the Catholic Church to embrace contraception)? 🙂
I would dearly love it for you to be right and everyone else wrong but, honestly, how likely is that? Why have you not been able to get your ideas published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Why are they just sloshing-around on the Internet? It is just not good enough to say you don’t believe in the peer-review process (you just appear more of a conspiracist than ever). This is the way scientific knowledge advances. The only thing advanced by the Internet (much of the time) is conspiracy theory. You need to accept this; and act accordingly.
Martin, in the first place, the uncertainties concern the ability of GCMs to resolve any climate process remotely near the energetics of a few W/m^2. They cannot do so. Their errors are easily 10x larger. This is the message deep inside the 4AR. Therefore every claim about the effect of increased CO2 on climate is entirely spurious.
Nevertheless, the SPM insists on the certainty of a profound CO2 influence on climate temperatures. This claim is insupportable by the IPCC’s own document. The IPCC leadership must know this. And yet this knowledge hasn’t stopped them from issuing, and re-issuing, objectively false statements. What would you call that?
Next, my Skeptic article was peer-reviewed — first by the scientists whose names appear in the acknowledgements, next, prior to publication by two climate scientists recruited by Michael Shermer — I had to fully respond to their criticisms — and finally on the web where the article was successfully defended against analytical criticism, including on RealClimate. After all is said and done, that article was reviewed as thoroughly as virtually any published paper, and it is unscathed.
Likelihood isn’t the point, Martin. The point is science. In science, one person could be right against the weight of the entire establishment. I, like almost everyone else here, have come to my conclusion after studying the science. Science doesn’t support any of the alarm about CO2. You need to pay attention to Richard Lindzen; see the video here, for example, or read his article here. He is dead on right.
If that’s true, then why is there so much alarmist hoopla by so many otherwise qualified people? It’s hard to know. I suggest, though, that Hannah Arendt and her thesis on the power populist culture can exert over the normative views of a society might have some insights about that. The German Academy that officially and publicly rejected Relativistic Mechanics included some brilliant physicists. Likewise, AGW has been successfully politicized by the AGW crowd and far too many people are letting their political passions decide their views on a scientific issue.
Martin_Lack says:
October 3, 2011 at 1:45 pm
To all – I say this, your conspiracy theory requires the complicity of so many people….
Martin, you cannot refute the fact that ipcc is not doing real scientific method and principle science by claiming that this fact is impossible! Your own method of reasoning is irrelevant here, so what about the rest of it?
For example, doesn’t it bother you that while 97% = 75/77 actual numbers of “Climate Scientists” apparently boast that they can’t explain the past record without invoking atmospheric CO2 concentrations as the primary driver of atmospheric temperatures and using appropriate forcing adjustments, they can’t get even one prediction correct as compared to empirical reality with the use of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the same general “forcings”?
Here they’ve managed to effectively falsify their own mechanism, but it doesn’t bother them! So the real question you should be asking yourself, Martin, is why doesn’t it bother you? Perhaps it’s something about “challenging your firmly cherished ideas and beliefs.”?
Martin_Lack says:
October 3, 2011 at 12:57 am
the longer we delay the harder it gets to take effective action.
The solar panel and battery car people are the first to proclaim that their costs will decline substantially in the next 10 years. Why buy solar panels and battery powered cars now when the supporters claim they will be ‘almost free’ in a few years time?
If I believe the Solar Power and Battery car enthusiasts then the ‘costs to act’ get cheaper, not more expensive.
Although I’m ultra-skeptical about AGW and de-carbon-dioxidizing, I rather like electric cars — if done right. To date, only TeslaMotors is doing it right. Their cars run from 150-300 miles on a charge, and are an absolute blast to drive. The recently showcased factory for their new luxurious and very fast Model S, half the price of the showcase sport car “Roadster” they put on the road a couple of years ago, is about ready to start cranking (and they are putting the power train in the new Toyota RAV4-EV model). Tesla is planning, it seems, to put fast charge stations every 100 miles along every major route in the US, for free.
As for batteries, there’s a whole lot bubbling just under the surface. Check out this:
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/new-test-appears-to-back-range-claim-for-battery/
or this:
http://www.gizmag.com/3d-thin-film-batteries-recharge-in-minutes/18187/
Anthony Watts etal, should be praised for bringing this corrupted temperature data base to the public’s attention. The Law of CICO always applies. NOAA and the U.S. climate data collections system is supposed to be the world’s best, and if this is corrupted, how can we expect data from elsewhere to be any better? Thankfully NOAA and DOC have been forced by Congress and GAO to address this problem. The bigger problems are: 1—will the corrupted data still be used for future scientific analysis, modeling, and predictions without sifting out all the dubious stations; 2—will all the past analysis, modeling, and predictions be corrected and updated with valid data; 3—obviously past attempts at correction factors have miserably failed or tried to cover-up the corrupted data.