I’m a bit burnt out, so this is a just a few notes to quench some speculations about Steve McIntyre’s role and to help everyone understand what this week has been like.
- Evan and I have been working on this since June 2011, complete redo of all station ratings…huge amount of work. Evan deserves a huge a amount of credit. After Muller could not find strong signal that we knew must be there by physics of heat sinks…and neither could we in Fall et al 2011, we went looking, and discovered the new Leroy 2010 classification system and WMO ISO approval. We knew it would take a lot of work to get old metadatabase into shape. And so it began.
- Started on paper in Spring 2012, but some of the team of people onboard had no vested interest, and with their academic burdens and no budget to pay them anything they could only devote small bits of time for reviews and writings. No fault of theirs, but like herding cats when there’s no funding and all is pro bono.
- Evan and I decided to go ahead anyways and I started writing, steep learning curve as this was my first stint as lead author.
- About a week ago I learned Muller was going to release and do the media blitz, thought he’d be at EPW Senate hearing on August 1st too. (turns out he was passed over, John Christy will be there though.). IPCC deadline coming up too. Added anxiety.
- Tried to get stats guy to the stars Matt Briggs onboard early last week (he was on list of original authors) to help with significance tests, last big hurdle. Most graphs and analysis was done.
- Turns out Briggs was on vacation camping, no fault of his, it is summer…so I figured only way I was going to get this done was to shut down WUWT and stay home from short vacation with wife and kids in Yellowstone. They went on with grandparents and I went on authoring blitz with Evan and with Dr. Pielke Sr. helping edits. Christy provided support too and I helped him craft his EPW section on this.
- So made announcement Friday. Figured on Sunday at noon so WUWT could provide peer review, and dumped my plane tickets in trash. Admittedly I was a bit overwrought when I wrote it. I’m truly sorry if anyone was mislead. Dialed it back. Went on crash self taught stats diet…not my thing, but capable of learning. and being a broadcaster, deadline pressure is a huge motivator. You learn to get it done. On-air waits for nobody. Careers die when you miss deadlines.
- In his post Friday, Steve McIntyre truly didn’t know what this was about. He was out of the loop.
- Steve McIntyre, being the classic gentleman he is, emailed me and said “anything I can do to help, I’m here”. I took him up on the offer and he did all the stats tests from Friday afternoon to Saturday night, then polished last bit of text/graphs early Sunday morning. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. He is a true gentleman and a scholar.
- Joe D’Aleo and Willis helped with editing/proofing too. Gary Boden solved an Excel map issue for us. Evan came up with powerpoints and helped editing. He was a machine. Pielke Sr. helped with edits and citations. Bob Phelan helped with some PR language. Thanks to all.
- And the result is what you see in the press release today.
- Finally got to take a shower today about 2PM. Prior to that, Kenji was offended.
- Now on to final polish thanks to WUWT peer review and submission.
Thanks everyone for your support and patience! – Anthony
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Bobl says:
July 30, 2012 at 6:55 am
there was an Australian study that showed if the average temperature was calculated from hourly temperature rather than min-max the trend is much less, pronounced. Now if we could combine hourly obs, with Anthony’s siting analysis I wonder what falls out?
I believe you are referring to an article written by me, about the work of Jonathan Lowe an Australian statistician. It hasn’t been formally published in a journal. Although I urged Jonathan to do so.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/4/australian-temperatures.html
Anthony,
G-E-T
S-O-M-E
S-L-E-E-P
🙂
Then a few years ago I was on a hill and could see Boston on a bright, clear blue cloudless day. Except that there was a cloud lens over the downtown urban area, and nowhere else.
While I think the heat sink theory of warmer nights in poorly sited stations has merit, I don’t think it is the only effect at work. I think nighttime aerosol seeded clouds over urban areas also play a role.
It is scandalous that there has never been a published study on the effects of urban aerosols on minimum and maximum temperatures. Despite many studies that clearly show the effect of urban aerosols on other aspects of weather.
“I’m truly sorry if anyone was [misled.]”
Actually, the whole thing was fun. It certainly attracted a lot of attention. Bishop Hill got over 250 comments on his “Cryptic” WUWT thread. Many thanks, well done. I’m impressed with your boffin bunch, some very big names in this field. They are to be congratulated and thanked for their fine (and arduous) work, too.
Thank you Anthony. All your hard work is greatly appreciated.
@Phillip Bradley
Yes, that was the one, although It wasn’t your article that led me to Lowe’s Blog, The simplistic min-max average seems to me to be just that – simplistic. Lowe clearly shows that there are factors at play (like cloud cover) that clearly form part of the trend. I revisited and Lowe has posted a bunch more stuff. Some interesting reading ahead.
As I said in my previous posting, where might we be if we combines Lowe’s methods with Anthony’s revelations regards siting. Perhaps that will account for more, If we find that the trend is all at one point in the day IE; where maximum cloudiness occurs, does this change things… Well yes.
Yes, I agree with you that Lowe should publish!
Thanks for putting on the record where Lowe’s work can be read, he deserves exposure here for those still reading this thread its here http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com.au/
Thank you Antony!!!!!
I have kept a post of Steve McIntyre’s in my favorites since 2007. It shows clearly how adjustments have been made to favor a warming trend, cooling the era prior to 1960 (particularly the 1930’s) and warming the later years.
Thank you Anthony—we now know how some of this distortion of the record has occurred.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/02/16/adjusting-ushcn-history/
Tallbloke said something that didn’t quite make sense to me: (paraphrasing) that this isn’t a big deal outside of the US.
I disagree because this is supposed to be the best, largest national data set available, and also because if these problems exist in that data set, they will probably exist in most others. Anyway, SurfaceStations.org did a wonderful job, and it would be great if interested parties in other nations can organize similar data-collection efforts; perhaps then, Watts et al. (or others) will use the Leroy 2010 classification scheme and similarly analyse those data sets.
Then Watts et al.’s recent paper will truly prove to have been of momentous importance in the advancement of climate science.
What a mammoth achievement. Well done, Anthony! Tip – you need to take your holiday.
“I started writing, steep learning curve”
Truth. It is so hard to write. I’ve gotten to the point that I can “read” a scientific paper in about 20 minutes. First look at the title then look at the figures then scan through the equations then decide if I actually want to read the text. I’ve found that’s the best way to write one. First put all my figures in order then write out all my equations then write the text. Oddly the last part I write is the abstract which I used to write first thinking it helped organize my thinking.
Dinostratus says:
July 31, 2012 at 3:43 pm
“I started writing, steep learning curve”
Truth. It is so hard to write. I’ve gotten to the point that I can “read” a scientific paper in about 20 minutes. First look at the title then look at the figures then scan through the equations then decide if I actually want to read the text. I’ve found that’s the best way to write one. First put all my figures in order then write out all my equations then write the text. Oddly the last part I write is the abstract which I used to write first thinking it helped organize my thinking.
This is how I do it too. Works for me.
Where I begin to walk back slightly my initial acceptance of this discussion paper and await further clarification and improvements.
“So made announcement Friday. Figured on Sunday at noon so WUWT could provide peer review, and dumped my plane tickets in trash. Admittedly I was a bit overwrought when I wrote it. I’m truly sorry if anyone was mislead. Dialed it back. ”
Anthony, I think your excitement was appropriate. If it holds up, it’s a genuine game changer. I see all sorts of arrogant, dismissive statements of course from the true believers…none of it based on substance.. But the implications are profound.
Even if you didn’t have to shut down for 2 days..which I understand you did…it was a great pr move. They play it, so should we (hope you don’t mind the 1st person plural..I like to think we’re all in this together… even if all most us rank and file skeptics can do is cheer from the sidelines and contribute a few shekels from time to time.
Congratulations on the results are way too premature. Let’s see how the substance of the [final version of the] paper stands up to rigorous scrutiny. Beware confirmation bias, people.
Congratulations on the work done – which includes the marvelous volunteer effort for surfacestations.org – are entirely appropriate, and I heartily add mine.
[snip . . that adds nothing to what we know. kbmod]
Re the claim that a constant temperature bias does not modify trends:
– that would be so for something like inaccurate placement of a thermometer glass on the card giving the scale (thus a constant offset if the scale is linear as it usually is).
– but are thermodynamic effects from heat sinks and sources constant? If not the trend is amplified. Frederick Michael reminds us of the obvious, that sites deteriorate due building/paving – wasn’t PHX the airport poster site for that?
– are there as many sinks as sources, and of what relative magnitude? Obviously in summer there are many patches of asphalt absorbing heat in the day and releasing it at night, but no ice sheets (just vegetation?). OTOH, in winter the ashphalt may or may not be covered (more likely to be uncovered to increase use, i.e. snow clearing), snow does vary a bit and could be icy (though on the edge of a lake is probably not a good site anyway). Seems to me it is not simple, so it will be a long time before most corrections can be made. (Image analysis may be possible etc. but huge task, may be better to stop using poorly sited stations and build new ones instead of analyzing the bad.)
– and my mind keeps coming back to min-max-mean, or more logically the integration of temperature and time. Recall that some data shows the min increasing more than the mean or max – higher min should help life, higher max in an already hot area probably hurts but in some areas would help (depending on the vegetation). Please remind me why anyone should care about monitoring global temperature, given that the climate has already disproven alarmist predictions (models/theories), and allegations of human causes of significant change have been disproven.
– in any case reality (shown by Watts et al 2012 and some other papers) is that station siting creates major errors in the trend of increasing temperature.
– as for “homogenization procedure”, what is that in each case it is used? A paper by Steirou and Koutsoyiannis claims it causes large errors (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/17/new-paper-blames-about-half-of-global-warming-on-weather-station-data-homgenization/ for news on that, and search http://www.climateaudit.org for “Station Homogenization as a Statistical Procedure” in which Stephen McIntyre comments on the difficulty of doing it properly).