My sincere thanks to everyone who has provided widespread review of our draft paper. There have been hundreds of suggestions and corrections submitted in comments and in email, and for that I am very grateful. That sort of input is exactly what we hoped for, and such input can only make the paper better, and so far it has.
Edits are being made based on many of those suggestions. My sincere thanks go to WUWT moderator Bob Phelan for help in collating the online comments to remove duplicates and group comments and corrections by category. Using that, I’m hoping to post up a revised draft, addressing many of those comments and corrections in the next day or two. I had hoped to have an update ready today, but the editing is taking more time than I thought initially. I will likely create a separate dedicated page for Watts et al 2012 so that it gets separated from the press release, and can be managed better.
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in Watts et al. 2012 that was placed online for review. We thank critics, including Zeke Hausfather and Steve Mosher for bringing that to attention. Particular thanks go to Zeke who has been helpful with emailed suggestions. Thanks also go to Dr. Leif Svalgaard, who has emailed helpful suggestions.
The authors are performing detailed reanalysis of the data for the Watts et al. 2012 paper and will submit a revised paper to a journal as soon as possible, and barring any new issues discovered, that will likely happen before the end of September.
The idea of online pre-peer review, and likely peer review itself, is in my opinion where the future of science publishing lies. I think we’ll all learn useful lessons for that future from this experiment. As the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
My sincerest thanks to everyone for their input and consideration.
Look for future updates, along with some technical discussions as we proceed.
UPDATE: A work page has been established for Watts et al 2012 for the purpose of managing updates. You can view it here.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Anthony:
I don’t want to “burst you bubble” on you understanding of history, but may I humbly point out that Gutenberg’s Bible was published in GERMAN…or the venacular.
More so than the general availability, (actually, as I understand it, ANY Catholic church member could access the Latin Vulgate by Saint Jerome). However, the catch was you needed to learn Latin. (A lot of peasants went around quoting Vini-Vinae-Viche…or the like, NOT..!)
So the SCANDAL was in making the INFORMATION GENERALLY AVAILABLE.
Can you see the parallel here with regard the “High Priests” of the AWG church???
Maybe we’ll end up calling you: Martin Luther Gutenberg Watts…
Max
Have you got a journal in mind for where you would like to get the paper published?
Our best critics are our best friends.
[Educated] Crowdsourcing at Donna Laframboise’s place thoroughly destroyed the AR4 credibility.
We tend to think of UHI as creating bad sites. I think that that is not totally correct. The sites are measuring the temperature that they see. The problem is that the readings are only valid for the surrounding area that is of the same makeup. Temps taken in the middle of a city are representative of the city, but only for that area. So if the city comprises .001 percent of the area of a grid cell, then it should be weighted by that amount instead of rejected or “adjusted”.
Here is my hypothesis based on that. I’ve been thinking about this after reading your paper that, for both the 1/2 and 3/4/5 sites, the NE region is showing the largest trend. If you think about mesoscale siting (city size) as opposed to microsite issue, where might you find a signal of man made warming (not CO2 related)? The industrialized NE would be a prime candidate. This might explain why the sat temps show more warming even after accounting for the 1.1 to 1.4 multiplyer. The sats are seeing the warming from the industrial areas that would be edited out of some of your calculations because they are deemed contaminated by UHI.
Mailman says: “Can only agree with Daveburton…for the simple reason that the big brains won’t like mere mortals…”
Given, past experience with tenured “big brains” of hallowed halls – What they said.
next time can you create a separate area for attaboys and kudos. When not combined with a critique or at least a highlighting of areas of import and discusion they make the thread to long and hard to follow.
[Reply: By posting this in Tips&Notes, Anthony will see it. It is impossible for one person to read every comment in every article. This site has too much traffic to for Anthony to read everything. ~dbs, mod.]
Figured out why TOBS adjustments were changing without the metadata showing it. They have been using “inferred” metadata based on these papers by A. DeGaetano.
DeGaetano 1999
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%281999%29012%3C3443%3AAMTIOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Degaetano 2003
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450%282003%29042%3C1823%3AAMFODO%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Degaetano 2005
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.1183/pdf
They will use these against your argument about observers not adhering to their reading times. But I don’t think the random nature of that would be picked up through this method. A sustained departure would have the highest likelihood of being caught. And of course the false flags that happen.
I looked at the Vose et al 2003 paper again. I had mistakenly thought they just used the 7am and 5pm times, but they did use the 500 stations from the Surface Airways Hourly between 1965-2001, to come up with adjustments for every hour. I imagine they are averaged from this time frame. I still wonder, though, if a changing climate and weather patterns will affect these adjustments. There are so many more stations with hourly data available now, even online, that it would be interesting to see if those adjustments are truly robust. I have an airport and even home stations right nearby with available data online, that I could do checks like VOSE et al did. That goes for anyone.
Anthony
I believe you are right to say that one day all drafts of papers will be put online for criticism. Following this crowd review by some extremely knowledgeable people- and those who may not be ‘experts’ but bring a valuable and different perspective to the party- the paper can then be amended rapidly
Hopefully a standard of ‘peer review’ acceptable to the science community can then take place -probably online but privately- and then the paper will be uploaded to a suitable site with no paywalls.There will however be much gnashing of teeth by those with a vested interest before that happens, but it seems inevitable.
tonyb
This is just fantastic because the old-boy guard of oligarchical peer-review practiced by Mann, Hansen, Trenberth, et. al. has got to go. We have far too many pressing human problems, and far too little resources and capital to address them from cliques with narrow political agendas. Crowd sourcing is the ultimate in market economics, because it allows us to wrest every last drop of productivity and truth so we don’t waste the precious human seconds on nonsense like CAGW.
We are in the early phases of seeing in manufacturing – or at least boutique production – what the Web has done for publishing. Granted, it’s a lot easier to turn words into images on a screen than it is to laser a bunch of powdered steel into a sintered body, and WordPress is a whole lot cheaper than Solidworks, but…
Josualdo says:
August 2, 2012 at 11:48 am
[Educated] Crowdsourcing at Donna Laframboise’s place thoroughly destroyed the AR4 credibility.
Well some of us may have not been that well educated — but the shenanigans were still obvious..
I wonder if any particular politician from the past now wishes the internet had not been invented. 😉
Brian D says:
August 2, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Figured out why TOBS adjustments were changing without the metadata showing it. They have been using “inferred” metadata based on these papers by A. DeGaetano.
DeGaetano 1999
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%281999%29012%3C3443%3AAMTIOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
============
Quote from the above paper:
“Furthermore, personal experience has also indicated that some published
observation times may be in error. To my knowledge, the validity of the published observation times has not been rigorously scrutinized.”
Wouldn’t it make more sense to find out if the data is any good to begin with?
Easier to just build a model and adjust what you got, I guess.
It gets worse, also from the DeGaetano 1999 paper
Based on the limited evaluation of isolated areas with
low classification success in Fig. 8, it appears that existing
observation time metadata files are marred with
errors. Since these data are used in a range of applications
from adjusting heating degree day normals to
standardizing reference climatological time series for
climate change detection research, the implications of
erroneous observation time documentation can be far
reaching.
To Anthony re your reply dated Aug 2 @ur momisugly 9:51 am re Gutenberg. The Church was glad to see the printing press invented. Gutenberg was a Catholic and the bible he printed was the Catholic version with those 7 1/2 extra books. Until then few could read and no one had a Bible except the very rich. The Church spent much time and many resources getting the Bible to their members but it was mainly read to them in Church. It wasn’t until the 18th century that printing was cheap enough so that many could afford a Bible and literacy levels increased to where Bible reading athome was common. That was also when newspapers and magazines became common. If you go deeper into history you will find the Church wasn’t the ogre you make her out to be.
I heartily agree. It can only make your final paper better. Now, as for climate science Pal Review, that’s another question.
Another benefit of “people-review before peer-review” for someone like me is the learning and explanations of terms, acronyms etc. that come up in the comments. For example when “TOBS” started to show up in the comments I didn’t know what people were talking about. I thought it might be some technical or statistical term that’s I’d need to take a course to comprehend. Once I realized it refered to the observers reading their thermomers at different times of day, it was no longter an obscure term. I understood. As I mentioned in one of my comments elsewhere, I’ve dealt with it myself in reporting our rainfall to the NWS. I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.
A suggestion for the paper when it is posted here, not the submitted version, would be to include a glossary of accronyms and abreviations at the end for those of us that are ignorant of the terminology used.
The accepted practice is to spell out acronymns at first mention in each paper it is used in with the acronym in parenthesis. From then on, you use the acronym in the body of the work. Even well known acronyms should be handled this way.
Only problem I see with thsi approach, Anthony, is it gives The Team plenty of time to launch a counter-offensive and stack the deck against you for publication. Despite the ground-breaking effort in this area to refine and make the surface record significantly more accurate, this info is NOT in their best interests…
Curt Lampkin says:
August 2, 2012 at 1:25 pm
To Anthony re your reply dated Aug 2 @ur momisugly 9:51 am re Gutenberg. The Church was glad to see the printing press invented. Gutenberg was a Catholic and the bible he printed was the Catholic version with those 7 1/2 extra books. Until then few could read and no one had a Bible except the very rich. The Church spent much time and many resources getting the Bible to their members but it was mainly read to them in Church. It wasn’t until the 18th century that printing was cheap enough so that many could afford a Bible and literacy levels increased to where Bible reading athome was common.
======================================================================
I was going to add something to my previous comment then saw this and it seemed to tie in to what I was going to add.
Aside from the printing press making the Bible more available, it also aided those such as Luther and Tyndale that were translating it into the language the common people spoke. They didn’t have to learn Latin. They just needed to learn to read.
Presenting draft papers in the manner Watts et al has been presented with all the comments helps those like me understand the concepts behind what may seem like it’s “Latin to me”.
Pamela Gray says:
August 2, 2012 at 1:36 pm
The accepted practice is to spell out acronymns at first mention in each paper it is used in with the acronym in parenthesis. From then on, you use the acronym in the body of the work. Even well known acronyms should be handled this way.
======================================================
True. And it’s from the comments that sometimes, for me anyway, the definition of what is spelled out sinks in. (Sinks in a little at least. I can be pretty thick at times.8-)
REPLY: When Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented the printing press, he broke the monopoly the Catholic Church had on publishing with their army of scribes. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth then too. In a few years, we’ll wonder how we ever managed to do effective review in “the old days”. – Anthony
My thoughts exactly. Of course it was printing [Internet] plus translating the Bible into the vernacular [blogs like WUWT] that facilitated the rise of the Protestant Reformation – oh, plus all the 95 Theses naming Catholic corruptions [well…. how about 153 Theses of “bullet-proof” rebuffs to each of the 153 Articles currently on SkSci ] that Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg church.
tonyb says:
August 2, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Anthony
I believe you are right to say that one day all drafts of papers will be put online for criticism. Following this crowd review by some extremely knowledgeable people- and those who may not be ‘experts’ but bring a valuable and different perspective to the party- the paper can then be amended rapidly
=================================================================
It’s been a long time taking off, but http://arxiv.org/ is now growing rapidly.
Anthony I hope to see you crowdsource creative but feasible methods for winkling out statistically significant sense in the TOBs confusion. I’d love to see Jeff Condon and others on the case, with suggestions for cunning uses of statistics, for eg:-
* sampling different station types
* close look at grade 1-2 stations with frequent temp measurements, estimating effect on results for different TOBs
* monte carlo simulated runs
* use of existing TOBs data, notes of gaps, some quantification of fudge factor practices
* use of interpolations or estimates in records where two or more consecutive max/min are discovered to be identical.
* etc
to build up a new paper on TOBs, this time highly and visibly dependent on crowdsourcing, so that as the saying goes
If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.
re Gutenberg: Luther cannot have imagined anyone could translate and reproduce his critique so easily. Unlike Luther the amazing Mr Watts has actually invited public discussion. Can Watts et al. evolve and get general approval? Is that even possible?