This just appeared on the PBS Blog, apparently the mere presence of my interview was enough to push NOAA into responding. It seems they are in full damage control mode.
CLIMATE — September 18, 2012 at 6:08 PM EDT
Climate Change From Different Perspectives
By: Spencer Michels
Anything dealing with climate change is bound to provoke an argument. And our story on Berkeley physicist Richard Muller’s recent conversion to a believer in man-made global warming, which he made in an op-ed in the New York Times, certainly stirred the pot. In addition to preparing a video story on the PBS NewsHour, I had written a blog that included extended remarks from Anthony Watts, a well-known blogger and prominent voice in the skeptic community. Watts — a former California TV weatherman who runs a company that provides weather data to TV stations — says he doesn’t completely discount global warming, but he says that much of the data recording temperatures are flawed because the stations are in areas like urban settings which retain heat and therefore read too high.
The idea of the online post — in part — was to let the audience hear more about the views of a prominent voice from the community of skeptics. In the past, we have on occasion provided a more expansive view from the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who say climate change is real, an ever-growing problem and one that is getting significantly worse because of our own contribution to greenhouse gases. (In fact, my colleague Hari Sreenivasan posted links to some of that prior reporting earlier today.) We thought the online post with Watts would provide a chance for viewers to hear more about the skeptical perspective than we have done recently.
That said — and as many of you wrote us to complain — we should have not ONLY posted additional comments from Watts’ perspective. So we have more interviews and responses from the scientific community about climate change. Let’s start on the question of whether temperature data is flawed. That was raised by Watts, and his views on that are being heavily criticized on the web today.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote a response to us and stands by its record on temperature data. Here is what NOAA sent:
The American public can be confident in NOAA’s long-standing surface temperature record, one of the world’s most comprehensive, accurate and trusted data sets. This record has been constructed through many innovative methods to test the robustness of the climate data record developed and made openly available for all to inspect by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. Numerous peer-reviewed studies conclusively show that U.S. temperatures have risen and continue to rise with recent widespread record-setting temperatures in the USA. There is no doubt that NOAA’s temperature record is scientifically sound and reliable. To ensure accuracy of the record, scientists use peer-reviewed methods to account for all potential inaccuracies in the temperature readings such as changes in station location, instrumentation and replacement and urban heat effects.
Specifically, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center published a scientific peer-reviewed paper (Menne, et al., 2010) that compared trends from stations that were considered well-sited and stations that received lower ratings on siting conditions, which found that the U.S. average temperature trend is not inflated by poor station siting. A subsequent research study led by university and private sector scientists reached the same conclusion (Fall et al. 2011). Additionally, the Department of Commerce Inspector General reviewed the US Historical Climatology Network dataset in July 2010 and concluded that “the respondents to our inquiries about the use of and adjustments to the USHCN data generally expressed confidence in the [USHCN] Version 2 dataset.”
Looking ahead to the next century, NOAA has implemented the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) – with 114 stations across the contiguous United States located in pristine, well-sited areas. Comparing several years of trends from the well-sited USCRN stations with USHCN shows that the temperature trends closely correspond – again validating the accuracy of the USHCN U.S. temperature record.
NOAA also provides this link for those who want more information. [Note from Anthony, see what we found using a new method (not employed by NOAA but endorsed by WMO) in Watts et al 2012, here. Strange that they don’t mention the General Accounting office report on USHCN (what the erroneously refer to as the inspector general’s report) was due to my inquiry, not theirs.]
There are plenty of other links where you can find data and information about this question of temperature measurements. One of note that we are including here is the website, skepticalscience.com, which examines and pushes back on the critique from the skeptics’ community.
One point that we tried to make in the broadcast piece was that Richard Muller, in fact, had his own doubts in the past on temperature readings with some issues that were similar to Watts’ criticisms. But he and his daughter, mathematician Elizabeth Muller, told us they looked closely at climate data and now clearly believe that human-induced climate change is happening. Here’s more of what they told us:
You can read the full story here.
I’m surprised that in the body the story, they’d link to SkepticalScience given what has transpired there recently with the conspiracy mongering, secret forums, hate speech and all that.
I’m still waiting for PBS to make the correction I asked for.
Did Lissy Muller already sell a few GreenGov units? How’s it going at Muller And Associates, and how’s geo-engineering business at NOVIM?
Richard Muller a reformed sceptic??? Can someone tell me when he was a sceptic and when he reformed?Muller in quotes:
I he was ever a sceptic then why did he turn? Money has nothing to do with it. Never listen to people who tell you follow the money when it comes to climate scientists
cashing in.Then there is this funny looking graph from Muller and Associates which causes me to panic.
http://mullerandassociates.com/articles/PffP-10-climate_files/image004.gif
Ally E. says:
September 18, 2012 at 9:44 pm
“Anthony said about the interview: “On the plus side, he [Mr Michels] said something off camera that I thought was quite curious at the end of the interview: You don’t seem that extreme.””
The cult-like atmosphere surrounding climate change in the media (cult-like as they try to shield the members from controversial information; a primary cult-forming technique) means that members of the cult have a distorted view of reality. In this case, Michels was confronted with reality and had to choose whether to believe his cult programming or his own eyes.
His programming is probably falling apart rapidly now…
Collecting data, then adjusting it using fairly opaque methods, then looking for a ‘signal’ of about the same magnitude as the adjustments….. I guess that is what is called 21st Century Science 🙁
Typo:
IF he was ever a sceptic then why did he turn?
i also give some credit to Spencer Michels for giving Anthony space, just as i give credit to Anthony for going through what is essentially an Ordeal by MSM.
it’s timely to read or re-read Christopher Booker’s GWPF Report:
PDF: 2011: GWPF Report: The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal
by Christopher Booker
http://www.thegwpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Booker-BBC.pdf
the more cunning BBC alarmist crew would never have been so accommodating to Anthony, so thank you Spencer. may you thrive, and not be cowered.
If just one person takes a step back and asks themself if it is the catastrophe claimed and if it is a bogeyman scare spread by ecofacists, then it was worth it.
Talking about data sets, how is it NOAA, GISS and CRU data sets all show a different rate of trend, that in it’s self does not give any confidence in their accuracy, is it more a reflection of there advocacy? It will be interesting to watch how they compare with each other in the future, especially if temperatures fall away. By the way Mr Watts, after your well balanced interview, I was disgusted at some of the comments directed at you, they were bordering on insanity,
Keith Gordon
Keith Gordon:
At September 19, 2012 at 3:58 am you ask
A complete answer to your question is provided by my submission to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry (i.e. whitewash) into climategate.
The submission is in the Parliamentary Record where it can be read at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
I think you will want to read all of it but I commend you to read its Appendix B because that provides an assessment of the reasons for different trends in the global temperature data sets,.
Richard
A terrible indictment on the freedom of speech, we are supposed to enjoy in the western world.
If you are for AGW et all you are allowed to speak lies and drivel and not be taken to task, however try it the other way around and the Fascists arrive in droves. Dr Goebbels stated that “if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it , it will be believed”.
He was a nice honest chap was he not, any dissenting voices were silenced, usually by force.
PBS should run a meet the “fascists in our midst” half hour and list the ones who have had a “hissy fit” at Antony appearing.
Maybe PBS started this ruckus as way of hiding the decline?
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pbs.org#
As well as Anthony did, why did PBS only include a quote from Dr Curry and not a full interview from someone in academe. Further why didn’t they interview any of dozens of scientists who are also skeptical of a variety of assertions by the AGW crowd. PBS did not really want an unbiased piece, since if they did there were many, many more voices they could have drawn on. Of course if they did a completely fair and balanced show, there would have been a complete revolt on their hands by the true believers. And then what.
While not a fan of consensus science, will any completely credible and unbiased organization do a study of what the total climate science community really thinks. It could be something like showing the median or mean or mode expression of the proportionality between AGW and natural variability. That is the real issue. Something like “the average breakdown between AGW and Natural Variability among these scientists is 50% AGW and 50% NV or any such distribution between the 2 factors. It drives me crazy to see and hear the “97% of scientists believe AGW” when the sampled population was so small.
NOAA: “one of the world’s most comprehensive, accurate and trusted data sets.”
And that’s the problem.
The next headline that includes “Anthony Watts” and “NOAA” should be: “President Romney appoints famous blogger, Anthony Watts, as NOAA director.”
Urban Heat Island Effect
Seems to me that a certain number of Urban sensors are essential to properly sample the landscape of USA. Urban areas are relevant. The question is how many urban sensors ought there be to adequately map, proportionately, the surface of USA including urban areas. I suspect that urban area represents 1% or less of the land area in the USA consequently 1% or less of the sensors ought to be in urban area, and in area within the urban setting that is representative of the nominal surroundings.
Is land area the normalizer to assign sensor density?
Seems to me that it should. However I can see that the number of sensors near populations should be high to increase resolution of data for USA inhabitants. Weather is relevant to public safety so you need sensors where people are located.
If the latter is the case, then the more remote sensors ought to be weighted based on the land area that the sensor represents.
UHI A North American Homunculus.
If the human body was physically built based on the uniform density of the sensory organs, the body would look like the image here:
http://www.autismindex.com/Therapies/Therapy_Key_Word_Site_Map/sensory/motor_1.jpg
In a similar fashion, I wonder what the Amerunculus would look like. How distorted would the surface map of the USA be based of the normalization of the sensor area density.
Seem to me that this in in Anthony’s wheelhouse. If I had the data i could draw a map of the USA based on sensor density. I bet you would not be able to recognize the USA.
Nerd says:
September 18, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Wow. Warmists have gone crazy. This reminds me of good old days of debates over whether consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol really cause heart disease (they don’t at all) and lately at least for me on whether sun really causes skin cancers (a huge catch 22 considering vitamin D is very potent cancer fighter that can prevent all kinds of cancers considering that most people are deficient in vitamin D).
Things never change with these “liberal” people.
_____________________________________
Nerd is absolutely correct. The current situation of nutrition and medicine is so similar to CAGW it’s uncanny. You have a growing number of skeptics who are questioning the conventional wisdom (stay away from fat and cholesterol, eat your “healthy whole grains” and take your statins) and fighting the powers that be (government, industry, ignorant public) who use the same tactics as the alarmists. As with CAGW it all started with an obviously flawed study (Ancel Key’s Seven Countries Study – the equivalent of MBH98) that got government via the USDA, FDA, AHA, ADA and the NAS to promote a theory that has enriched the big corporations (Big Ag, Big Medical, Big Pharma) while leading to an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and autoimmune disorders due to chronic inflammation.
I’m not trying to take this off topic but if you follow the conventional wisdom regarding your health you should probably start using the same skeptical approach you use for CAGW to what you end up putting in your mouth.
“”Comparing several years of trends from the well-sited USCRN stations with USHCN shows that the temperature trends closely correspond – again validating the accuracy of the USHCN U.S. temperature record.””
Closely correspond? If they’re not dead on the same numbers than the rest of your stations are WRONG. A trend is a wiggly line, not a hard data-set.
[“then the rest” rather than “than the rest” ?? ]
“There is no such thing as man-made global warming. There never has been and never will be either. It violates the first and second laws of Thermodynamics – the very laws of physics.”
Back in the 1960’s my very first physics instructor made it very clear that our culture of energy use could in no way affect climate one way or another. He was in his 60’s at the time and saw the future of this debate. His comments around the political based science were the beginnings of my question everything.
As for UHI, that is not climate change but rather a local effect. Just as is lake effect climates, or mountain effect and so forth. While my north side front porch is 81 F, the south side patio is 115 F; my very own local climate change weather maker. The folks in the AGW camp are mean spirited and their agenda is obviously not science based, but rather the never ending ageless narcissistic greed factor.
Anthony,
FYI – One of the best graphical illustrations I have seen of an Urban Heat Island appears in “The Washington Star Garden BooK” by Wilbur H. Youngman. The Washington Star was an old Washington DC newspaper. Near the back of the book (on page 231), two maps of the Washington DC area are shown – “Average Dates of Earliest Freezing Temperatures in The Fall” and “Average Dates of Latest Freezing Temperatures in The Spring.” These maps are credited to C. A. Woollum U.S.W. B. which I assume is the U.S. Weather Bureau as it was called then. The maps were based on observations for the period 1946-1960. It even calls the highest temperature center the “Urban Heat Island”. The center of the UHI includes National Airport which I believe is where the “official” DC temperature is measured.
Anyone else notice the similarity between a non-alarmist opinion appearing in a forum like PBS’s and cartoons of Mohammed appearing in the Middle East? Extreme orthodoxy does not tolerate apostasy and heresy well.
In reply to RACookPE1978
RACookPE1978 says:
September 18, 2012 at 7:34 pm
William says:
September 18, 2012 at 6:29 pm
RACookPE1978,
I do not understand you comment.
I provided a link to two peer reviewed papers both of which support Anthony Watts’ assertion that the surface temperature measurements by weather stations is contaminated by the urban heat affect.
Planetary temperature rise as measured by satellites shows significantly less warming than planetary temperature as measured by the weather stations which supports the assertion that the urban heat effect is contaminating the surface temperature data.
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-321.pdf
[1] This paper investigates surface and satellite temperature trends over the period from 1979 to 2008. Surface temperature data sets from the National Climate Data Center and the Hadley Center show larger trends over the 30-year period than the lower-tropospheric data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems data sets. The differences between trends observed in the surface and lower-tropospheric satellite data sets are statistically significant in most comparisons, with much greater differences over land areas than over ocean areas. These findings strongly suggest that there remain important inconsistencies between surface and satellite records.
The second paper analyzes nightly low temperatures as compared to afternoon high temperatures and finds evidence of the urban heat effect as the difference between the two is decreasing.
There are three issues 1) those who are nobly manipulating data to push the extreme AGW paradigm do not acknowledge the obvious contamination of the surface temperature data by the urban heat affect, 2) those how are nobly pushing the extreme AGW paradigm do not acknowledge that satellite data shows the planet was warmed significantly less than the surface temperature data, and 3) those who are nobly pushing the extreme AGW paradigm do not acknowledge that top of the atmosphere radiation measurements vs ocean surface temperature changes indicates that planet’s response to a change in forcing is to resist the forcing change by increasing or decreasing clouds in the tropics (negative feedback) thereby reflecting more or less sunlight off into space.
If the planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative (resists forcing change) as opposed to the IPCC general circulation models’ assumed forcing amplification (positive feedback) a doubling of CO2 will result in less than 1C warming with majority of the warming occurring at high latitude regions which will result in the biosphere expanding.
The so called “skeptics” have won the scientific argument. Those who are nobly pushing the extreme AGW paradigm do not acknowledge that the “skeptics” have won the scientific argument. That is the reason why there has not been a public scientific debate concerning extreme AGW.
There is no extreme AGW problem to solve. We therefore do not need to spend trillions of dollars with a resulting massive increase in debit and unemployment to fight a problem which is not a problem.
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/r-345.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/04/11/a-new-global-warming-alarmist-tactic-real-temperature-measurements-dont-matter/
A New Global Warming Alarmist Tactic: Real Temperature Measurements Don’t Matter
What do you do if you are a global warming alarmist and real-world temperatures do not warm as much as your climate model predicted? Here’s one answer: you claim that your model’s propensity to predict more warming than has actually occurred shouldn’t prejudice your faith in the same model’s future predictions. Thus, anyone who points out the truth that your climate model has failed its real-world test remains a “science denier.”
This, clearly, is the difference between “climate science” and “science deniers.” Those who adhere to “climate science” wisely realize that defining a set of real-world parameters or observations by which we can test and potentially falsify a global warming theory is irrelevant and so nineteenth century. Modern climate science has gloriously progressed far beyond such irrelevant annoyances as the Scientific Method.
There is no extreme AGW warming problem to solve.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/09/uah-global-temperature-update-for-august-2012-0-34-deg-c/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/06/uah-global-temperature-up-06c-not-much-change/
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. … ….We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity…. ….However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007)….
This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5C to 5C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth….
What’s funny is that Spencer Michels is probably scratching his head wondering why the alarmist are being so irrational about the benign inclusion of Anthony Watts’ reasonable statements.
Spencer Michels is probably having his eyes opened to the absurdity of the alarmist bullying methods. This might cause him to take a deeper look and become a skeptic himself.
PBS Ombudsman link: Go on and post a well done for them.
http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback.html