Happy birthday to WUWT – 5 years today

Thank you, Anthony!

Well done from Down Under!!

Congratulations and thanks.
Try to get (good) advice on how to delegate and yet stay in control.
You are sorely needed, as are Steve McIntyre and the Bishop.
Preserve your health, your family and your enthesiasm.
This is not a sprint – unfortunately it is a marathon.
But the truth is slowly coming out and being understood more and more widely.

Anthony, you have so many friends world wide who value you for your honesty, committment and
openness to questions where the science is not settled.Thank you for WUWT.
Best wishes to you and your family.

Congratulations on your great contribution to the public!

Congratulations Anthony on 5 years of dedicated work and a great blog which tells the whole story of climate science.
Here is my good, bad & ugly list.
The Good
I am now much more aware of climate issues, with both the science and the politics and can hold my corner against anyone.
I revel in arguing the point with anyone who will take me on. It is so much easier when you have the data and truth on your side, which is very important to me, being from a scientific background.
The Bad
Whilst I cannot put a figure on it, my business must have suffered greatly financially, as I have to have my morning fix of WUWT before getting on with managing my business effectively, so I can sympathise with your situation Anthony, where WUWT would seem to take even greater priority over your business interests. I am of course writing this comment when I should be getting on with my work.
Three of my best friends, who also happen to be the three most prosperous, have all had solar PV fitted and have all profited greatly from the various FIT schemes. Following their boasting of how business savvy they are, I have almost lost each of them as friends in pointing out how unethical they are in using their wealth to screw the ordinary fuel bill paying public, especially those who have been forced into fuel poverty by such policies.
The Ugly
I cannot, but poor scorn and contempt on all our politicians who have promoted and even benefitted from the AGW scam. As I am British, my greatest contempt goes to the leading politicians on both sides of the political divide, but especially Huhne, Cameron, Clegg, Blair, Milliband and Brown.
I revile all the celebrities who use their position to promote the concept of AWG, whilst at the same time doing absolutely nothing to moderate their disproportionate footprints. I hold particular contempt for Stephen Fry, because he has enough intelligence to know better and because I used to greatly enjoy his television series QI until he succoured up to Ted Turner in his series Fry in America and called us “Deniers.”
I hate the BBC for taking every opportunity to push the AWG message and to deny the sceptical voice a platform under their duty to give fair and balanced programming.

Thank you for providing such a rational and well balanced, all things considered,blog.
Many happy returns of 5 year celebrations.

Congratulations for your success and your powerful committment to science. I discovered WUWT 4 years ago and instantly changed from a being a CAGW believer to a skeptic, embarassed at how deluded I had been. Were it not for WUWT and the other outstanding skeptic blogs, the USA would have cap and trade and, green totalitarianism might have overwhelmed our country as it has in Europe and Australia. I am confident that the tide is starting to turn in this war but there is much hard work and determination remaining for us all.
“Live long and prosper.”

Anthony, congratulations! I deeply respect the enormous amount of effort you have put in this blog and also congrats to the different moderators to keep the blog within light moderation in contrast to some well-known other blogs…

Congratulations Anthony. Your stand for honesty and integrity is very much appreciated.

If you’re writing papers, here is a free suggestion or two.
It is alleged that the increasteed CO_2 in the atmosphere traps heat. There is little doubt that this is true, and is likely partly responsible for urban island heating, which is a bete noire in the sampling network, and one of the places where the AGW crowd most shamelessly manipulates and renormalizes the far more reliable data (from the point of view of demonstrating real changes) from rural stations.
There are two ways to fix this. One of them is that weather (not climate, weather) stations such as Weather Underground have at this point got a huge number of volunteer weather stations feeding in data to the WU servers. These stations are GPS-located and marked on Google Maps so you can see exactly what their distribution is. Some are inside of cities or towns; many are completely rural. All are owned by people who are interested in weather enough to buy a “certified” weather station and the requisite software that permits the data from the station to be sampled and collected in real time and communicated to WU for use in its tables.
Where I live (Durham, NC), these stations provide an enormously clear signal of UIH. Raleigh-Durham Airport is the “official” weather station, where record heat or cold is recorded and so on. When RDU records began, the airport was a single runway in the middle of the countryside with a single “big” road nearby. It is now rather large — three terminals, multiple runways, trees stripped and replaced by a square kilometer or more of additional tarmac. Where before a half dozen or dozen prop-driven planes landed every day, now big jets land and take off every five or ten minutes on two different runways. The airport now lies flanked by three MAJOR highways that carry rush hour traffice between Raleigh, Durham, and the Research Triangle Park, spending five or six hours total every day filled with bumper to bumper car traffic across a total of maybe 14 lanes, in between cities and suburban developments that have grown from a population of a quarter million to maybe 2-3 million, from cows and deer and trees to vast tracts of housing (see e.g. Cary, NC, or Morrisville, both within a few miles of the airport, and the sprawl visible on Google maps around US 70 on the other side).
I live in Durham, on the “outskirts” of the city along a “country road” between Durham and Chapel Hill. I have my own electronic remote monitoring thermometer sited in the backyard, although I haven’t invested in a full weather station (yet). Basically, I have Duke Forest (and a small suburban tract) around me — deer in the back yard most nights but only a mile or so from a major thoroughfare between Durham and Chapel Hill and a third of a mile from a heavily trafficked road ditto. RDU is routinely 1 degree C warmer than my back yard, sometimes 2, almost NEVER cooler. It is basically blanketed by CO_2 from jet engines and automobiles 100% of the time AND is basically a huge chunk of concrete centrally, although it does have the usual buffer of grassy fields and woods and ponds between it and the roads (and I’m guessing but not certain that the weather station is located out in these “woods” to at least try to ameliorate the UIH effect, although perhaps not).
My own weather is routinely roughly 1C warmer than the temperatures reported by stations about four or five miles further “countryward”. NC has lots of towns that end quite abruptly and give way to real country, not even plowed fields but trees, hills, isolated roads and houses and small farms. Twenty miles out even the light pollution reflected from the high-humidity urban haze that also blankets the “interior” of the triangle of cities fades (which actually is likely to be even more responsible for the trapping of heat than “just” CO_2) and you are finally back to conditions that approximate the airport’s weather station back in the (say) late 40’s and 50’s when it was first built.
The point being that the data is right there, publicly accessible. One could take it and “effortlessly” (well, almost:-) create a contour graph of best-fit isotherms and transform it into a UHI \delta-T, city to countryside, for the whole US. Since the distribution of stations is “random” and “double blind” in the calibration of the contributing thermometers, you simply ignore it — on average they will read high as often as low on the basis of where they are sited and poor calibration or drift — some are inside the cities, some are far outside, nobody arranged to put good ones inside or bad ones outside. Besides, the absolute temperature isn’t what you are looking for, only the contour map of DELTAS relative to the COUNTRYSIDE as the baseline assumed “good” temperature readings. The granularity is even fine enough to smooth over real microclimate differences, if somebody wants to claim that they exist so that they can use them to re-inject confirmation bias into the averages.
Second, an experiment that hasn’t been done AFAIK — but should be — is to go to the very middle of the world’s various deserts — places where the humidity is perpetually very, very low, far from any urban or even suburban source of LOCAL CO_2. By hypothesis, only the CO_2 that is important to “global”, not local, heat trapping is over these locations, the actual 380 ppm or whatever that is supposed to be doing the job all over the world and not the 400-500 ppm that might exist over an airport.
In suitable locations, build remote-readable weather stations that are directly exposed to the night sky. As is well-known, deserts are very hot during the day but get very cold — almost down to freezing much of the time — at night because they have none of the heat-reflecting humidity that is ubiquitous everywhere that is NOT a desert. Their CO_2-based heat retention “signal” isn’t corrupted by confounding and constantly fluctuating water vapor “noise”; the rate at which they lose heat in the form of blackbody radiation straight out to the unblanketed sky is limited PRIMARILY by CO_2 and the other stable components of the atmosphere (N_2 and O_2 mostly).
Measure the temperature at a granularity of (say) one minute from (say) 100 of these stations in 100 different deserts, along with the local relative humidity. Reject any parts of the timeseries where the local humidity was greater than a trace. Ignore the ABSOLUTE temperature day to day, as that will still vary seasonally; look instead at two things — the starting temperature at a fixed time in the evening (say, two hours after sunset) and a fixed time in the morning (say, two hours before sunrise). Scale this data according to the starting temperature and you can extract the nearly pure “cooling signal”. Collect data for (say) five years, long enough for atmospheric CO_2 concentration to have increased by (say) 1% or more. If the AGW hypothesis is correct, there will be positive feedback and the cooling RATE will have decreased by an easily detectable amount (remember, at this point you are accumulating at least 2000 to 3000 “iid” traces per year, where any systematic errors in a given apparatus are themselves averaged out over 100 stations and the fact that you’re using DELTAS, not absolutes.
In this way you can directly measure something even the satellites seem unable to measure — the differential effects of ONLY the CO_2 increase (or at least with minimal confounding by that pesky water vapor that trap heat an order of magnitude more efficiently and that exists in far greater concentrations even on a “dry” day everywhere there are green plants).
Since one is taking the time to build all of these stations in the first place, it is probably worthwhile to install a few other devices in them. For example, a very accurate low-intensity spectrograph, one capable of measuring the BACKSCATTER radiation from the sky overhead right after sundown as the desert cools. The spectrum of this radiation is once again pure data, even better in a lot of ways than the thermal trace. CO_2 reflects PARTICULAR BANDS in the BB spectrum, bands that can be differentiated from O_2 or N_2 or O_3 or CH_4 or perhaps even H_2 0. Detectors can be built that are particularly sensitive and accurate in just these bands. By measuring the backscatter AND the outgoing radiation (perhaps from a tower 100 meters over the desert with a detector facing down) one can get at least the differential increase in backscatter as a function of the ever increasing CO_2 concentration, perhaps even the absolute integrated spectrum over its bands, a direct measure of the amount of the outgoing flux that is being trapped by CO_2 itself and not so much by everything else that isn’t “anthropogenic” or water.
To be really truly scientific, send up a balloon a day onsite to measure the CO_2 and humidity profile all the way up to the top right over the sites — this would be even better than rejection due to measurements at the ground.
Sure, it would cost a few tens of millions to do this, but honestly, that isn’t a lot of money for a “big science” project with the potential to influence TRILLIONS of dollars in public money and an enormous amount of pain for all living humans. Connect it up with satellites measuring some of the same things from overhead, and you can even contemplate properly normalizing the satellite data without the confounding effect of having to punch through the wet parts of the atmosphere (that is, nearly all of it).
As good as your soda bottle experiment is, this one is better. It attempts to directly measure something that so far is little more than a theoretical computation in physics combined with enormously complex models with adjustable parameters that represent things that are unknown — feedback sensitivity, for example — and that can be adjusted to give nearly any answer you like, an open invitation for confirmation bias in their adjustment. By simply providing an actual in-situ estimate of the baseline CO_2 trapping coefficient as a function of concentration, it instantly clarifies much of the discussion both ways — if AGW is a plausible cause of 20th century warming outside of urban heat islands that are currently being exaggerated into “global” warming caused by mankind (as opposed to anthropogenic LOCAL warming that everybody knows is indeed taking place in urban areas) this should quite clearly provide evidence of this, evidence that cannot easily be twisted by confirmation bias as the raw data can be processed by anybody that wishes to, best of luck with it. If it is implausible, that too will be unmistakeably revealed.
My own prior bias — the experimental hypothesis, as it were — is that temperatures in the desert will swing through a range (normalized with e.g. Wien’s Law and coarse-grain averaged) that does not detectably/significantly change over 5 years. This will be further supported by measurements that show no meaningful increase in the backscattered flux in the CO_2 bands that are supposedly primarily (nonlinearly) responsible for trapping the heat, much less than a naive linear response theory would predict because of secondary scattering and thermal diffusion into unblocked modes. That is, a 1% increase in atmospheric CO_2 will not produce anything like a 1% increase in backscatter in the relevant infrared bands, any more than doubling the thickness of a pane of glass on a greenhouse doubles its greenhouse heat trapping.
If this is verified, it would justify if not openly rejecting the AGW hypothesis, at the very least a deep re-examination of its assumptions and the physics. If not, it should in all fairness cause all of us, myself included, who are rather skeptical of both the claim and the correctness of the physical model of trapping underlying the claim to increase our degree of belief in AGW at the expense of our current skepticism. Evidence matters. Not corrupt evidence — one has only to look at the function applied as a “correction” to a straight up average of temperatures from all reporting weather stations in every computation that reveals unrelenting warming to suspect a mix of cherrypicking and confirmation bias, as the null hypothesis is “all reporting weather stations are equally good/bad, accurate/inaccurate” and should be corrected — for example, by throwing out ALL of the urban stations, not trying to a posteriori “correct” their data — only with the greatest trepidation. Direct evidence.
The satellites, to be honest, should be able to observe the hole burned by reflection (if any) in the outgoing spectrum as well, but they sample most of their data most of the time through wet air that confounds the results (oceanic SSTs, for example, simply CANNOT be measured through air with low humidity). AFAIK, they have been unable to make anything like a direct measurement of the CO_2 induced heat trapping, not even an ABSOLUTE measurement let alone a differential measurement, even over the 30 odd years that we have halfway decent data from halfway decent instrumentation overhead.
Teamed up with stations on the ground, directed to “look” the other way at the same time those stations both record conditions on the ground, record the RADIATED spectrum as a function of time PLUS “look” up at the directly reflected spectrum and record THAT as a function of time, PLUS directly measure the associated local temperatures (and changes) to directly feed blackbody radiation computations, if the satellites still can’t detect a meaningful hole in the tranmitted signal in coincidence with complete knowledge of the starting signal at ground level over years of observations it is because their ain’t any signal to detect.
rgb