'One could even ask whether the effort that we have put into RealClimate has been in vain.'

“””””_Jim says:
April 19, 2011 at 8:03 pm
1942 – Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrum communication technique
Missing: any mention of SIGSALY – the digital-based speech encryption system (built around ‘vocoder’ technology, as used in cell phone voice encoding today) developed by Bell Labs and subsequently deployed for meaningful secure comms usage between the top echelons of our government – and Great Britain’s head … it was EVEN posted about here on WUWT … pls also note that patents involving this system, though filed in the 40′s remained classified into the 70′s (Doh!) …
So … WUWT?
WUWT mention and links- http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/23/no-joke-air-force-actually-creates-supercomputer-from-playstations/#comment-630382
Sigsaly/NSA – The Start of the Digital Revolution – http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/publications/sigsaly_start_digital.shtml
Wiki – look at the number of racks of equipment required! – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY
PS: Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil system amounted to a ‘list’ of frequencies one was supposed to ‘tune’ to to receive data … done so in a predetermined manner, like having a pre-determined, written-out list of CB channels one tuned to, in succession, at say, 1 minute intervals to receive a transmission … this is the essence of ‘frequency hopping’, not so much ‘spread spectrum’ (IF BW = signal BW for FH, IF BW = chip rate BW for SS).
I know; I am always the sourpuss with a different ‘take’ on things technical … “””””
Well Jim, you probably already know that one of the most common words in technical patents, or any patents for that matter is the word :- “MEANS”.
Which of course implies ANY way of doing something, whether known or unknown (at the time).
Technology is full of instances where the MEANS of doing something were quite inadequate at the time it was first recognised, that doing whatever was or could be a good idea.
Some people thing thermo-nuclear fusion energy is a good idea, even though no laboratory means of doing that exists. So the idea itself may be patentable when first thought of, even if not realizable at the time. Subsequently, when MEANS for doing so, or improved MEANS for doing so are proposed or developed, those improvements are themselves patentable, even though they may still be covered by the original idea patent.
Hedy Lamarr’s invention of “spread spectrum” communications was a good idea, even if at the time, it was realized by telephoning a selected list of people in order, and giving each of them a portion of a pizza order, to pass on to the pizza shop.
The lady inventor who first proposed the idea of polishing a round tip on the end of a sapphire crystal, to make a longer wearing gramophone needle, got a patent on it, even though she didn’t have the foggiest idea if and how that could be done. Those who did figure out how to do it, and made lots of money doing it, ended up paying her a lot of royalties for having first suggested the idea, of doing it.
“MEANS” means ANY MEANS .

To me this just says that people who believe in global warming, don’t go around looking for proof against it….
…and people that don’t believe in GW, want to know why

Wow, what a hoot. I had never used Alexis before — I checked out my personal webpage/website and was pleased to learn that it is ranked just about 1,000,000 (750,000 or so in the US). By RealClimate standards I’m a Playah! That corresponds to around 800,000 hits per month on my site — down a bit, actually, as I used to get more like 1,000,000 hits per month, but beowulfery is no longer a hot topic and the traffic it used to generate is way down.
I should add a climate section. Specifically, I’ve thought about starting the Open Climate Project to crowdsource both data and code for doing climate science in an utterly open and completely documented development process.
I continue to be struck by temperature differences in my very local sample space. For example, in Durham the NWS temperature is predicted to reach roughly 100F. Yesterday it was reported to have reached 101F. That’s warm for this time of year, although not unheard of, and last week it was cold, next week it will be cool to cold again. However, I subscribe to the Weather Underground service and keep a tab open on it all day, and it lists some 20-30 “local weather stations” belonging to citizens. In it I’ve noted a strange anomaly.
If you visit it right now:
http://classic.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=27705
At the instant I’m typing this, the Durham (RDU Airport) temperature is reported to be 88 F. Since the NWS prediction is 99F (same page) and it is just after 1 pm, the NWS prediction seems a bit unlikely. However, if you scroll down to the list of area weather stations, a strange anomaly is revealed. First, only one weather station on the entire list reads 99F — Westglen, which is actually very near to my house. Westglen and my own household outside thermometer agree if and only if my thermometer is directly in the sun — true for part of the morning (mine isn’t a “weather station” — it is a radio thermometer just hanging on a rail of my deck 2 meters or so from the house, and it spends some part of the day with direct sun on its top).
There is one station reading 93.9F. There are four stations reading between 90 and 93F. all the rest of the stations are under 90F, with an eyeballed mean around 88 or 89F. That would be almost 30 of them under 90F, four a bit above, one more than a bit above, and only one that is roughly 10F or 5C above what is almost certainly the true air temperature outside at 99F. And it is almost certainly sitting square out in the sun.
Guess which one agrees with the “official” temperature in Durham, as far as the NWS is concerned, especially since nobody ever looks at the temperature yesterday, they only look at what the NWS says it will be today. For most people, the forecast is the reality. From the evidence, the NWS reality is true only for a weather station sitting directly in the sun and protected from the wind. There is no way in hell that the temperature outside today is as high as 90F in the shade, it’s actually rather nice.
I’ve verified this pattern fairly consistently — the nice thing about the participating weather stations linked to this page is (and the Weather Underground) that you can click through to them and read off their temperature trace for the day (including the raw data, if you like). Westglen (KNCDURHA20) reveals almost to the minute the time the weather station went into the sun around 10:30 a.m. Compare this to the trace from Falls of New Hope (KNCCHAPE5). These two sites are about 4 miles apart (I live in between a mile from one and 3 from the other) and are actually in somewhat similar terrain — forested suburb, basically. It’s high temperature for the day is 86.7, ten full degrees cooler than Westglen. It has no sudden increase in temperature at 10:30 — in fact, the temperature there levelled off around 10:30, crept up a bit more around 11:30, and has been quite stable since, actually coming down some off of its peak. If you click through on the “Wundermap” on the right you can see where the two stations are relative to one another station 87 is Falls of New Hope, 98 is Westglen. I live in the little blob above the word “Solterra” in between.
No, this isn’t “Urban Heat Island” — Station 90 on this map, Rockwood is in a neighborhood in the city proper, surrounded by houses and malls. If you click on it on the Wundermap you can see its temperature vs time plot! How cool is that! It reveals that it has warmed up to 90F in Rockwood, still far cooler than Westglen. Click on station 89, “Huckleberry Heights” (hey, I don’t make these things up:-). This is the site that registered a high of 94, and look at how it did it! You can see the exact instant it went into the sun at 11:30 and you can see right when it went back into the shade at 1:15. It is a cloudless day, by the way — this isn’t cloud modulation, it is siting. If Huckleberry had gone into the sun earlier, it might have matched Westglen.
Interestingly, even RDU airport (you can find it if you move the map around and click on site 88) shows a T(t) that is only up to 88F. Its graph is actually pretty smooth — no shadows or shade here. Sites 90 and 93 are highly revealing — they are only about 3/4 of a mile apart, both in nearly identical neighborhoods. 93 is KNCDURHA38 and has registered a high of 93F with a very strange bobble that peaked at 90F around 10, went down to 84F at noon, and has risen to 93 afterwards. I can almost see the shadow of the tree sweeping across the box and then leaving it in full afternoon sun. Site 90 (KNCDURHA14) almost across the road from it shows, on the other hand, a smooth warming to a high just under 90F.
The bottom line is that this is the problem that the CRU or GISS is trying to solve! And it is a damn difficult one. What is the average temperature of Durham today going to end up being, in some coarse-grained algorithm that is going to somehow smear that temperature out in some 5×5 bloody stupid latitude/longitude Mercator grid cell? I look at the Wundermap, having all of the data from some 30+ contributing stations literally at my fingertips — and these are all digital electric thermometers, one presumes really good ones in weather stations capable of actually producing these results and transmitting them in real time back to wunderground.com — and I have no idea. Clearly Westglen sucks (even though it is so close to my house, it always reads 10F too warm on a sunny day) but should I trust RDU Airport? We’ve just had a discussion of how airport siting is often horribly biased depending on the wind direction — warm air blowing off sun-heated runways can ruin your whole day’s worth of . How about Falls of the New Hope? How about Rockwood, in the city more than most of the rest?
Now imagine trying to “correct” temperature data from (say) 1954, or 1897, or 1821 and using it to estimate global temperatures in those years. Every one of the thermometers used — usually sampled by humans back in the not so very old days — was handmade or machine made on machines with very limited precision in the earliest of times, but probably continuing well into the 20th century. If they were consistently accurate to 1C I would be amazed. Then there is where and how they are sited. We can see at a glance that the high temperature reading for Durham is going to vary by well over 10F from the hottest weather station to the coolest, and that some of those stations are going to register the day’s high from a 1 hour stretch where the sun swept across the thermometer or the point in the afternoon right before it clouded up to rain. What are the odds that older thermometric records are going to have trapped these brief highs? Yet in modern times those highs are never missed. If there is a ten minute interval where the temperature in your weather station exceeds 100F between 1:30 and 1:40 in the afternoon, it will be recorded as the high for the day.
Back in the old days, people did tend to get up early and go to work early. Early morning is quite consistently the day’s coldest time — it is rare for the coolest part of the day to be anything else. But to record a high, you have to be looking, and to be looking consistently enough to record it you have to be looking to the exclusion of all else, to have nothing else to do. It might happen at 11 am, it might happen at 5 pm. Some days it might happen at midnight. This suggests that if anything, early thermometric records should be biased low — they are much more likely to have recorded the day’s low temperature either accurately or consistently and minimally offset from the true temperature by the bias/error in the time of sampling and thermometer itself. The high temperature, however, is at best the temperature measured at some consistent time in the mid-afternoon, at worst the temperature recorded at the wrong time altogether, perhaps 12 noon or 6 pm at a place where the real peak occurs near 2 pm — except when it doesn’t, which is 1/2 of the time. As a glance at actual thermal traces on the Wundermap reveals, nearly every day the temperatures are nearly flat and stable near the low around dawn, but the high can happen anytime, blink and you’ll miss it.
rgb
REPLY: Welcome to my world of thermometry – Anthony

Real What?

“”””” Paul Westhaver says:
May 3, 2012 at 10:15 am
question…
Why would a traffic rank in another region be so substantially different than in the USA. I presume google is used everywhere and that most people have the same habits regardless of locale… That is everyone wants to download music, check the weather, do banking, etc.
So why would WUWT be so popular in New Zealand but ranked lower in the USA? It is a sociological puzzle to me.
New Zealand is a western society…. they bank, dance, buy cars….What’s Up with That anyway?
“””””
Well Paul, perhaps Lord Rutherford said it best:- ” We haven’t the money; so we’ve got to think. ”
Then there was that famous statement by a former NZ Prime Minister, regarding a principal NZ export industry (brains).
” When New Zealanders emigrate to another country, it raises the IQ of both countries. ”
Well a little poetic licence there; he specifically said it about emigration to Australia, but the general case is also true.
And those Aussies aren’t so dumb either; they just talk funny.

It is a astounding to see how ignorant these people truly are. They ignore all the metrics turning against them and just march on as if it isnt happening ( in their world its not). They use Katrina, well since that year we are below normal as far as US impact goes ( exception 2008) and the global ace has tanked. How has that Moscow heat wave been working for them lately?Within 6 month, crushing cold hit that area and winters are turning more brutal. Its one thing after another. They tried to use this winter as a ploy to push their warped vision here, but 2 winters ago they were pushing the idea that SNOW AND COLD was because of warming.
Next winter, and I am already out as saying I think the JAMSTEC is correctly seeing the cold pdo double nina -nino response such as we saw in 09-10 and 76-77, should be a doozy across the US. These folks will then claim that as evidence, Never mind they ignored the rest of the n hemisphere land masses going into the tank. They have being trying to bet on the ignorance of people to push their point, BECAUSE THEY ARE IGNORANT of what the weather has done and is capable of doing.
The position of real climate, given the mountains of evidence that at least cause doubt and when one considers the physical realities of the minute role ( if any) co2 can have in the climate, make the overwhelming explanation of the ups and downs one that is natural, is pathetic

I hope it was not in vain and will be useful when judges will have a look at the matter.

One of the reasons this site draws traffic is that it provides a forum for discussion, allowing both dissent and agreement. I’ve tried engaging in discussions on other sites but end up being attacked or my posts never see the light of day – as if they’ve been thrown into a borehole. I’m not an expert but sometimes I do have something of value to add to the conversation. Unfortunately if what I have to say contradicts The Team message in any way, then I’m either stupid, need to learn more science, or my reply vanishes. That drives sane people away.
To Anthony and the rest of the staff at WUWT, thank you for the hard work and for providing a FORUM for congenial discussion on these topics.

I just submitted the following comment at RC and it is in moderation:

“One could even ask whether the effort that we have put into RealClimate has been in vain.”
RC did have a major impact. It spun off a great many really high caliber skeptics and that had a significant impact on the current trend toward a more balanced discourse in climate science.
John

That was a sincere comment on my part.
John