The first press release announcement thread is getting big and unwieldy, and some commenters can’t finish loading the thread, so I’m providing this one with some updates.
1. Thanks to everyone who has provided widespread review of our draft paper. There have been hundreds of suggestions and corrections, and for that I am very grateful. That’s exactly what we hoped for, and can only make the paper better.
Edits are being made based on many of those suggestions. I’ll post up a revised draft in the next day.
2. Some valid criticisms have been made related to the issue of the TOBS data. This is a preliminary set of data, with corrections added for the “Time of Observation” which can in some cases result in double max-min readings being counted if not corrected for. It makes up a significant portion of adjustments prior to homogenization adjustments as seen below in this older USHCN1 graphic. TOBS is the black dotted line.
TOBS is a controversial adjustment. Proponents of the TOBS adjustment (Created by NCDC director Tom Karl) say that it is a necessary adjustment that fixes a known problem, others suggest that it is an overkill adjustment, that solves small problems but creates an even larger one. For example, from a recent post on Lucia’s by Zeke Hausfather, you can see how much adjustments go into the final product.
The question is: are these valid adjustments? Zeke seems to think so, but others do not. Personally I think TOBS is a sledgehammer used to pound in a tack. This looks like a good time to settle the question once and for all.
Steve McIntyre is working through the TOBS entanglement with the station siting issue, saying “There is a confounding interaction with TOBS that needs to be allowed for…”, which is what Judith Curry might describe as a “wicked problem”. Steve has an older post on it here which can be a primer for learning about it.
The TOBS issue is one that may or may not make a difference in the final outcome of the Watts et al 2012 draft paper and it’s conclusions, but we asked for input, and that was one of the issues that stood out as a valid concern. We have to work through it to find out for sure. Dr. John Christy dealt with TOBS issues in his paper covered on WUWT: Christy on irrigation and regional temperature effects
Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming
A two-year study of San Joaquin Valley nights found that summer nighttime low temperatures in six counties of California’s Central Valley climbed about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 3.0 C) between 1910 and 2003. The study’s results will be published in the “Journal of Climate.”
Most interestingly, John Christy tells me that he had quite a time with having to “de-bias” data for his study, requiring looking at original observer reports and hand keying in data.
We have some other ideas. And of course new ideas on the TOBS issue are welcome too.
In other news, Dr. John Christy will be presenting at the Senate EPW hearing tomorrow, for which we hope to provide a live feed. Word is that Dr. Richard Muller will not be presenting.
Again, my thanks to everyone for all the ideas, help, and support!
=============================================================
UPDATE: elevated from a comment I made on the thread – Anthony
Why I don’t think much of TOBS adjustments
Nick Stoke’s explanation follows the official explanation, but from my travels to COOP stations, I met a lot of volunteers who mentioned that with the advent of MMTS, which has a memory, they tended not to worry much about the reading time as being at the station at a specific time every day was often inconvenient.. With the advent of the successor display to the MMTS unit, the LCD display based Nimbus, which has memory for up to 35 days (see spec sheet here http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/nimbus-spec.pdf) they stopped worrying about daily readings and simply filled them in at the end of the month by stepping through the display.
From the manual http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/nimbusmanual.pdf
Daily maximum and minimum temperatures:
· Memory switch and [Max/Min Recall] button give daily
highs and lows and their times
The Nimbus thermometer remembers the highs and lows for
the last 35 days and also records the times they occurred. This
information is retrieved sequentially day by day. The reading
of the 35 daily max/min values and the times of occurrence (as
opposed to the “global” max/min) are initiated by moving the
[Memory] switch to the left [On].
So, people being people, rather than being tied to the device, they tend to do it at their leisure if given the opportunity. One fellow told me (who had a Winneabago parked in is driveway) when I asked if he traveled much, he said he “travels a lot more now”. He had both the CRS and MMTS/Nimbus in his back yard. He said he traveled more now thanks to the memory on the Nimbus unit. I asked what he did before that, when all he had was the CRS and he said that “I’d get the temperatures out of the newspaper for each day”.
Granted, not all COOP volunteers were like this, and some were pretty tight lipped. Many were dedicated to the job. But human nature being what it is, what would you rather do? Stay at home and wait for temperature readings or take the car/Winnebago and visit the grand-kids? Who needs the MMTS ball and chain now that it has a memory?
I also noticed many observers now with consumer grade weather stations, with indoor readouts. A few of them put the weather station sensors on the CRS or very near it. Why go out in the rain/cold/snow to read the mercury thermometer when the memory of the weather station can do it for you.
My point is that actual times of observation may very well be all over the map. There’s no incentive for the COOP observer to do it at exactly the same time every day when they can just as easily do it however they want. They aren’t paid, and often don’t get any support from the local NWS office for months or years at a time. One woman begged me to talk to the local NWS office to see about getting a new thermometer mount for her max/min thermometer, since it wouldn’t lock into position properly and often would screw up the daily readings when it spun loose and reset the little iron pegs in the capillary tube.
Some local NWS personnel I talked to called the MMTS the “Mickey Mouse Temperature System” obviously a term of derision. Wonder why?
So my point in all this is that NWS/NOAA/NCDC is getting exactly what they paid for. And my view of the network is that it is filled with such randomness.
Nick Stokes and people like him who preach to us from on high, never leaving their government office to actually get out and talk to people doing the measurements, seem to think the algorithms devised and implemented from behind a desk overcome human urges to sleep in, visit the grand-kids, go out to dinner and get the reading later, or take a trip.
Reality is far different. I didn’t record these things on my survey forms when I did many of the surveys in 2007/2008/2009 because I didn’t want to embarrass observers. We already had NOAA going behind me and closing stations that were obscenely sited that appeared on WUWT, and the NCDC had already shut down the MMS database once citing “privacy concerns” which I ripped them a new one on when I pointed out they published pictures of observers at their homes standing in front of their stations, with their names on it. For example: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/newsletters/07may-coop.pdf
So I think the USHCN network is a mess, and TOBS adjustments are a big hammer that misses the mark based on human behavior for filling out forms and times they can’t predict. There’s no “enforcer” that will show up from NOAA/NWS if you fudge the form. None of these people at NCDC get out in the field, but prefer to create algorithms from behind the desk. My view is that you can’t model reality if you don’t experience it, and they have no hands on experience nor clue in my view.
More to come…
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
For comparison, the BEST methodology (http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/methods-paper.pdf) does not use TOBS or other metadata – the only metadata they use is dates of operation, detecting gaps of a year or more.
Inconsistencies in temperature anomalies (such as would be seen with a change in time of observation, location, or instrumentation) are detected by a comparison with nearby stations, based upon the well established correlations of temperature anomalies (Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=ha00700d) – and if detected, the problematic station record is broken at that point in an “empirical breakpoint”. Those pieces are then treated as separate records, so that each individual record is without statistically inconsistent “jumps”.
The results from BEST (using a purely statistical approach of local temperature anomaly consistency) are consistent with the USHCN adjustments (using station metadata documenting observation/instrument changes). That consistency between multiple approaches, multiple methods and data (in my opinion) strongly supports the correctness of the USHCN adjustments. And, in addition, indicates that one or the other correction is an improvement from the raw data.
What if the paper isn’t accepted for publication in a scholarly journal?
Entropic man says: August 2, 2012 at 8:51 am & etc
Not rising to that bait. 😉
Smokey says: August 2, 2012 at 8:58 am & etc
Thanks for that clarification of the scientific hierarchy of those similar terms.
TonyG says: August 2, 2012 at 9:09 am &etc
Yes indeed, and Anthony Watts has stated that he and his colleagues do
find the intelligent discourse in here helful in pointing out some errors and
trivial semantics gaffes prior to his proposed formal publication, in some
accredited scientific journal. Few other researchers and scientists have
exposed themselves to the sort of wide ranging criticism that a public
forum such as this affords, before formal publication. It may be that this
technique will prove to be far more robust, than the customary pre-review
that occurs between colleagues and friends of the authors, usually.
KR says:
August 2, 2012 at 9:24 am
“…based upon the well established correlations of temperature anomalies (Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=ha00700d)”
Did you read that paper? The correlations are not great, especially at high latitudes…see Figure 3.
Jan P Perlwitz says:
What error are you talking about? “US global warming” is a nonsense word.
Really?
That would imply that “US global warming” is a nonsense concept. And yet for the past six months we have seen many of your colleagues pointing to US weather events and saying “This is what global warming looks like.”
I seem to have missed your corrective response to such nonsensical claims – though I am quite certain they you made those responses, because you are superhumanly free from bias.
davidmhoffer says:
Yes, and if we’ve been recording their heights from childhood to adulthood, how do we go back after the fact, twenty or thirty years down the road, so adjust for shoes on or shoes off in each year if that information was never recorded? How do we adjust for some periods of time when the rule was “shoes off” but some people recording the info didn’t get the memo? How do we account for periods of time when the rule was “shoes on” but some people said “I’ve always done it shoes off so I’m not changing”?.
Further, what “shoe adjustment” do we apply? The pink-bunny-slipper adjustment, or the goldfish-bowl-platform-shoe adjustment? Metadata for station ID “Elton John” documents the use of both types of equipment.
There seems to be some concern that perhaps many observees wearing moccasins are being given the stilleto adjustment in accordance with the current fashion trend …
A. Scott says:
August 1, 2012 at 1:49 pm
…
A critique of the article from Skeptical Science:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/watts_new_paper_critique.html
A lengthy display of, to me, largely gibberish – intended to refute the Watts paper through obfuscation.
In fact, I (as an non climate scientist) found it quite helpful to understanding of the issues, especially the TOBS, and also very reasonable. The concluding paragraph:
“In conclusion, Watts et al. of course deserve the right to try to make their case in the peer-reviewed literature, however implausible that case appears to be. Therefore, we hope they will consider addressing the important concerns detailed above before they submit the paper to a journal. Otherwise we suspect the paper will not fare well in the peer review process. With said caveats carefully addressed and the conclusions amended if and where necessary, the paper has the potential to be a useful contribution to the climate science literature.”
Frank K. – “Did you read that paper? The correlations are not great, especially at high latitudes…see Figure 3.”
Yes, I have read it (or I wouldn’t have referred to it). Correlations are weaker at high latitudes, around 0.5 at ~1200km distance near the Arctic. Note the variations in anomaly correlation are distributed +/-, not favoring one direction or another. So lower correlations would only lead to a noisier signal, not a biased one.
So, since what I was discussing was the consistency between BEST and USHCN, how would any anomaly correlation issue lead to a better consistency with the USHCN adjustments, which use completely different methods?
I found that piece helpful as well. Anthony’s misgivings about TOBS aside, it is an issue that has to be addressed for the paper to have any potential value. And I don’t see how it gets published without addressing the issue.
Axel says: August 2, 2012 at 1:41 am
Jan Perlwitz
Associate Research Scientist, APAM/
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Well done for finding Jan P Perlwitz and the real reason for his visits today.
I guess if I was in his shoes I’d do the sameFamily loyalty is commendable, but I’d rather teach my kid to discern truth, and if I failed, then I’d pray that my own continuing mindful and compassionate practice of discernment of truth might be a welcome inspiration to someone somewhere. And I hope I’d still be proud to uphold what I know in my deep soul as truth even if I had nothing but opposition.The problem seems to be that we don’t really know who’s barefoot and who isn’t. Based on the oberver guidlines, we assume we know, but we can’t. There’s no way to check who’s got sandals, who’s wearing lifts, and who’s got 6-inch heels. And, people have been known to change footgear from time to time.
[Snip. No d-word labeling of others allowed here. Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
“CAGW is not a ‘theory’. CAGW is also not a ‘hypothesis’. Both a theory and a hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable. CAGW/AGW are not. CAGW (and AGW) are conjectures, the first step in the scientific method hierarchy (Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law). AGW is essentially an opinion. As Dr. Glassman points out, AGW (never mind the preposterous CAGW) is a ‘crippled conjecture’.”
— Smokey
With the permission of an old soldier, I’d like to take your fine analysis one step further. A delusion that becomes widely held, or quite fashionable, is perhaps best characterized as a religion. This may explain why Nobelist in physics, Ivar Giaever, has elected to characterize CAGW/CACC belief as a “religion.” Personally, I think “doomsday cult” is a more apt description.
I should add the caveat that mine is an observation-derived conclusion, and worshipped models are, as all faithful and fashionable scientists today know, the true diviners and oracles of conclusive truths.
Christoph Dollis says: “Jan [Perlwitz] — the Zen monk of science, who has removed all conceivable bias. (Can you spell ‘self-delusion’?)”
Sure: G. L. E. I. C. K.
Dear Anthony,
I have a comment about how the introduction to the paper is written. Unfortunately I don’t think that at any point the introduction “introduces” what the rest of your paper is about. You give a whole lot of background, but I find myself wondering why I am reading it. Your first sentence has zero content in it, maybe I could infer that it has something to do with surface temperature measurement biases, but even that might be stretching things.
Now I know that everyone does this, but that just means that all the papers are badly written. I think that a paper should start by actually telling the reader exactly what they are going to read about, and then introduce any necessary background. For example, the first sentence of this paper could be something like:
In this paper we demonstrate that the United States temperature record is biased towards an increase in temperature due to well sited stations being adjusted towards poorly sited stations.
With the appropriate words to describe exactly what you have done of course. Then following would be a couple of paragraphs giving more detail about what you have done and what you found.
If that was the first thing that I read of this paper then I would actually know what I was reading, and I might be interested in reading the rest. As it is, I feel like I am wading through numbers and history just to get to the point.
I find this article to be a useful guide when I write: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jrs/sins.html, it is title “Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math”. I know that this isn’t computer science or math, but I think it applies just as much.
Sincerely,
Jarryd Beck.
KR says:
August 2, 2012 at 10:40 am
Sorry KR – the correlations are NOT good for a large part of the land surface, no matter how you look at it, and they are NOT “well-established” either, unless you have some evidence to the contrary. Even many nearby stations have r values less than 0.5 (of course, we don’t really know what correlation formulas they used since they don’t show their equations in this section – par for the course for GISS).
“Note the variations in anomaly correlation are distributed +/-, not favoring one direction or another. So lower correlations would only lead to a noisier signal, not a biased one.”
This statement makes absolutely no sense! Low correlation means use of neighboring sites to detect inconsistencies is meaningless – that’s pretty obvious. The reference station method is also pretty convoluted, but that’s another matter (made worse by it abysmal implementation in GISTEMP).
Jan’s employer is Columbia University.
http://sciences.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/index.cfm?fuseAction=people.jumpBio&iphonebookid=23563
That was the second link I looked at. Maybe it was easier for me to find it because I’m not hooked on disparaging Jan for the GISS affiliation.
As for the release headline – why doesn’t Anthony simply take out the word “global”? The study has nothing to do with global temps, only US. We all agree that the word is a misnomer, so why would anyone let it stand when it has already led to a false assertion by a major news outlet (Fox)?
From barry on August 2, 2012 at 6:04 pm:
What’s wrong with it? We are constantly told it’s global warming, the effects felt over the entire globe. In the little tiny contiguous US, with only about 2% of the global area, the correctly analyzed surface land temperature record is only showing half of the warming that is attributed to global warming. The headline is correct.
What’s the alternative, to consider regional climates? That the CONUS regional warming should be considered separately from the global warming?
Take a moment to imagine what madness that leads to! Start considering regional climates, you might find some regions have greater warming, or no warming, some might even be cooling! How can the Climatologist Consensus™ warn us about the impeding catastrophe and undeniably required need for societal restructuring and massive wealth distribution, if it should happen to be revealed that global warming isn’t global?
Think of the children!
barry says: August 2, 2012 at 6:04 pm
“Jan’s employer is Columbia University.”
Yes that’s right, as I pointed out in my August
2, 2012 at 1:41 am comment. But there may be more to this than just some GISS association though, because a certain Judith of the same surname, is the co-author of a paper which is in direct contradiction to what Anthony Watts nascent paper. As you will see she seems to work at NOAA and at University of Colorado at Boulder. At least two of the other co-authors are old adversaries of Anthony Watts, and indeed some would say responsible for the tainted “summary for policy makers”, of the IPCC 4th assessment report, and the East Anglia CRU debacles. No doubt you will all recognise these two names, Ben Santer and Tom Wigley. (did Anthony Watts miss that comment?)
A suspicious person may think this a plausible narrative :
Let us suppose that Watts did not know about their paper, and they did not know about his paper. Still Watts gave fair warning in a lecture at the last meeting of the NIPCC, which video may be seen at the front page of the Fraudulent Climate website. Now then Watts announces that he will make a game changing statement. Neither the two Perlwitzs nor Santer & Wigley et al, knew exactly what Watts had planned. So the carefully constructed paper which the NOAA / Lawrence LivermoreTeam, was about to submit or had just submitted to PNAS ( http://cmip.llnl.gov/cmip5/publications/allpublications ), was in imminent peril of being rejected as founded upon faulty data. Hence one author might use a relatively “unknown” colleague as a sock puppet in here to attack Watts paper, and to act as an agent provocatuer. We are not privvy to the content of their paper, but the US Dept of Energy states that the following “models” are founded upon. ….
BCC-CSM1.1 CanESM2 CCSM4 CMCC-CM CNRM-CM5 CSIRO-Mk3.6.0 GFDL-CM3 GFDL-ESM2G GFDL-ESM2M GISS-E2-R HadGEM2-CC HadGEM2-ES INM-CM4 IPSL-CM5A-LR MIROC-ESM MIROC-ESM-CHEM MIROC5 MPI-ESM-LR MRI-CGCM3 NorESM1-M
and also the following “variables” ….
air temperature land area fraction sea surface temperature surface air pressure
This is only a theory however, or is it a hypothesis?
“What’s wrong with it?”
The announcement headline reads:
New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial
Anthony’s study is about US temps, not global. But Fox is misled:
I’m not sure what your comments have to do with my point. Are you defending the headline on the basis that counterpropaganda is more important than accuracy?
If accuracy is most important, change the title.
For the same time period (1979 – 2008) the linear trend for global warming is about 0.16C/decade*. The US trend trate as calculated in Anthony’s paper [undergoing revision] is 0.155C/decade. Virtually the same, not ‘half’.
Different parts of the planet are warming at different rates, as you point out, therefore it is fallacious to attribute global forcings (TSI, atmospheric GHGs) to temperature changes on such localised scales.
Here’s a warmist version:
“New study shows global warming in the Arctic at half a degree centigrade every ten years”**
This gets out in the press as “Planet heating by 1C every 20 years!”
I prefer accuracy. YMMV.
* global temp trends plotted at woodfortrees using HadCRU and GISS data
** UAH trend for the North Pole is 0.47C /decade
(I realize this has been discussed before, but kadaka asked…)
I can’t thank docrichard enough for alerting me to the critique of Watts et al (2014[?]); and must echo his sentiment that people like A.Scott (who dismiss such a carefully-worded and entirely civil and constructive critique) cannot have read it in an equally fair-minded way.
Once Anthony has resolved who of his co-authors still wish to be associated with his paper and/or taken on board McIntryre’ misgivings about the draft, I really do think he ought to try and address the criticisms of his paper on Skeptical Science (and elsewhere). If he does not, I believe the critics are right: I suspect it will never be published in a Journal but, if by some misjudgement, it is published without major revision… I would be happy to bet the editor will subsequently quit or lose their job.
If the Watts paper has to address TOBS, then EVERY published paper that has not correctly accounted for TOBS should be withdrawn.
Lucy Skywalker wrote, responding to someone named “Axel”:
So, you believe “Axel” has found out the truth. Really! Is this how “truth” is found in the false skeptic universe: by name association, innuendo about agendas, conjecture, and conspiracy fantasies, which are spun here now regarding my person. How deluded your thinking is. And this is what you teach your kid. Your poor kid.
@Christoph Dollis:
You have read something I didn’t say. I’m speaking about economic, political, or ideological motives, not about all possible “conceivable” biases that one could have. “Motive” is not the same as “bias”. Biases related to the workings of the mind in the process of perception of the outside world are much more tricky, since it’s difficult to be aware of one’s own biases. It’s in the nature of biases as a psychological filter mechanism. A catch 22 situation. I can have biases when I perceive things, like you reading something what I didn’t say, but it doesn’t mean that my views and my work in my scientific field are guided by non-scientific motives, like personal economic, political, or ideological motives.
Some people here have made assertions to the contrary in this thread or in previous threads about my alleged sinister motives, including Anthony Watts who made the outrageous, libelous claim that I and my colleagues at GISS would violate scientific ethics in our work for personal motives.[1] Of course, w/o presenting any evidence for such claim. (And then, Watts denied me the possibility to reply to the accusation in the same thread). So, if you want to make these kind of assertions, say what are these alleged non-scientific motives of mine and provide the evidence. The burden of proof is on you. And no, pure assertion, innuendo, or conjecture are not evidence.
[1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/09/this-is-what-global-cooling-really-looks-like/
I was interested in the TOBS, did an analysis of a good data set from a single site and commented on it on the Climate Audit thread.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/09/24/tobs/#comment-345691
One thing I found very interesting was that not only did the time of day affect the data but observations almost any time during the day after 10am gave a significant positive bias to the calc Mean (TMax+Tmin/2) . The biggest difference was early afternoon of about 0.5degC over the “true” midnight to midnight one.
If that was extrapolated to the big picture, that would mean changing from say an 8am to a 4pm measurement time should have elevated historic data. The graph shows the correction going the other way. Was there really a change from afternoon observations to early morning ones?