I’m traveling today, so an open thread seems useful. Some topics might be:
1. Schollenberger’s coup with SkS ratings data
2. Will Steve Goddard issue a correction, or just ignore it?
3. Why is Dr. Mann playing with fire on Twitter? Is he just being an emotional child or does he want another lawsuit? We’ve been down this path before. See: Monday Mirthiness – Watch the genesis (and retraction) of a smear.
Yet, he persists, as if he can’t help himself:
Michael Mann-child accuses @WattsUpWithThat of being paid to lie by @HeartlandInst. Example? Or just libel? pic.twitter.com/KkMfDS3rqc
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) May 10, 2014
Mann’s bogus claim asked and answered here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/faqs/
If I’m paid (I’m not) to spout “disinformation” as Mann claims, why do I publish posts like this one and this one correcting other skeptics and true disinformation.
Of course, his hateful claim might just be misdirected rage at having been sliced and diced by McIntyre again.
“Nothing is so burdensome as a secret.” – French proverb
Ckiff Mass, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington, has taken the Pacific Northwest section of the National Climate Assessment and filleted it like a fish. Mass is a “middle ground” type on warming who thinks it’s happening, but who also thinks it’s exaggerated by the alarmists.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/05/northwest-climate-change-did-2014.html
Dr Mann and the climate mainstream [obligatory anti-lawsuit disclaimer follows: *seem to me to have*] a “funding model” that assumes forcing under politically motivated sponsorship, such as George Soros or the MacArthur Foundation, and, and feedbacks in echo chambers such as BBC or NBC/CBS/ABC broadcast news. Variations in public opinion trends, therefore are due to OTHER well-funded forcings and media feedbacks, attributed to Koch and Exxon as counter-forcing, and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh as counter-feedback.
Or, perhaps the forcings and feedbacks don’t matter under this mental model, because they know (anti-lawsuit disclaimer: in my opinion) that “everybody lies about climate: us, them, EVERYbody!”
Natural variation is denied.
Anthony, I know it’s not your style; but if you would sue I, and doubtless thousands of others, would donate! Deal? (!)
Remember, Dr Mann’s is also speaking as a representative of Penn State (according to their own regulations), so anyone suing should also sue Penn State.
You should be careful when claiming absolute authority over what is disinformation and what is not. Those 10 points by Roy Spencer have themselves been rebuffed (and who still seemingly can’t grasp that a cooler body CANNOT make a hotter body hotter still).
“Anthony, I know it’s not your style; but if you would sue I, and doubtless thousands of others, would donate! Deal? ”
I second that motion.
Scientists like him killed my appetite for a continued career in research. How many other gifted new-comers to scientific research have left too early or never started because of these out of control madmen???
As I recall Mann is at some university in PA. As a start, how about a letter to the department
in which he teaches(?). Hard to imagine someone who recently claimed that global warming hasn’t stopped, it’s just slowed down, as being employed by a university as a faculty member. As a janitor, yes, but not as faculty. I wonder if he realizes just how sappy he appears in his photographs?
I hope Steve does follow up. He was not wrong but more information and a slightly more analytical method provides better evidence going to his basic point: the adjusted temperature record is deeply flawed and the flaws reflect an agenda. Nothing that you, Zeke and Nick have done changes that; rather you have bullet proofed Steve’s argument.
Too bad Mann didn’t have guys like you around to check his work on the Hockey Stick.
Pamela, there isn’t a field that doesn’t have jerks and liars in it.
It’s just sad that other people tend to be driven away, which lets the jerks and liars keep up their mischief, because few want to deal with them.
Law? Journalism? Auto mechanics? You name it. What degree you have or what your uniform is (three-piece, coveralls or lab coat) does not exempt your field.
Science in particular has maintained a reputation that reduced outside scrutiny (by claiming both harsh internal scrutiny and inscrutability), which allowed the weeds to flourish.
“Anthony, I know it’s not your style; but if you would sue I, and doubtless thousands of others, would donate! Deal? ”
I’d be in.
News flash: Mann says Koch money is good!
“Anthony, I know it’s not your style; but if you would sue I, and doubtless thousands of others, would donate! Deal? ”
I second that motion.
-I want in too
I vote for a legal response to Mann and his protector/enabler Penn State. Someone has to reign him in, be responsible.
The problem with tweets like Mann’s is that they become molecules of disinformation in the universe of the naive who continue to believe, and repeat. Someone, at a dinner party will say something and another will say, “Oh, but Anthony Watts is paid to do that. The Koch boys fund him…”
And another will say, “I never heard that…. I though he did it for the love, for the sport…. for the science.”
“Nope,” says person Number One. “Michael Mann knows and tweeted it. The Koch brothers fund everything Watts does….”
And, there you have it.
Stop Mann, Anthony. And, get rich at the same time. ….Lady in Red
El Nino on it’s way! Higher temperatures, more storms, more sea level rise……………….!
I would donate if you need money.
Merovign says:
May 10, 2014 at 1:47 pm
“Pamela, there isn’t a field that doesn’t have jerks and liars in it”
What makes the Mann’s of the world so toxic, odious, and deleterious is that climate science has been politicized and the far-reaching actions being taken by EPA, Energy Dept., NASA, etc., and Obama himself to “prevent” climate change/global warming are based on the poor and/or manipulated science of Mann and the rest of the Klimate Nomenklatura with Congress being ignored or bypassed. Unfortunately at this time the “jerks and liars” are controlling the narrative.
ilma630 says:
May 10, 2014 at 1:18 pm
(and who still seemingly can’t grasp that a cooler body CANNOT make a hotter body hotter still
Soo… That insulation in my attic that is cooler than my house doesn’t result in my house being hotter? As insulation is to conductive heat transfer, CO2 is to radiant heat transfer. The mechanism is hugely more complicated, but it does result in a hotter hot side, just like insulation does.
Sixty American scientists have written to Ed Davey pointing out the disastrous fallacies in his policy for biomass.
Will he listen? Do pigs fly?
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/scientists-say-daveys-biomass-policy-misguided/
I’ve just spent the afternoon reading Dana’s blog posts at The Guardian and I feel like I need a shower with disinfectant.
Why is it so hard for this guy to realize that some people aren’t motivated by money or fame?
Jay Curry points out: “Nothing that you, Zeke and Nick have done changes that; rather you have bullet proofed Steve’s argument.”
As the person who first suggested the late station reporting behind Goddard’s “adjustments” hockey stick that is now broken since it wasn’t an up-adjustment at all, merely his use of absolute temperatures instead of anomalies that are vertically re-centered along a zero line that meant that the fewer number of stations in the raw data resulted in a naturally upward spike since more absolute (in-filled) numbers were included in Steve’s final average, I agree with Curry that now that Goddard’s software itself *has* been independently verified, his overall exposure of real adjustments is stronger for it as skeptics demonstrate their admirable use of the scientific method, despite sporaric confusion, invested egos, and snickering activist hacks.
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)
Note to self: your iPhone spell checker doesn’t work here, or at best “sporarically.”
Just imagine how hot it would be if the satellite record had not come along to moderate the “adjustments”
Pamela Gray says:
May 10, 2014 at 1:29 pm
Scientists like him killed my appetite for a continued career in research. How many other gifted new-comers to scientific research have left too early or never started because of these out of control madmen???
When I was growing up I thought I wanted to be a scientist. Drift and failure at college drew me into aerospace engineering. I am SO GLAD. In engineering things HAVE to work. I like that.
All Mann does, is to set himself up for a great fall.
By opening his big mouth, pride gone, without prompt or persuasion he continues to dig himself in deeper
Mann, all that this guy is, a paid shill of USgov.Penn-state/climatealchemy/organ, as the vacant din of Mann made graffiti fades away into the background noise. At some point, [and with a lot of luck] eventually – an authentically small ‘c’ conservative
RepublicanUS President may posit the question, “what the hell are we doing encouraging and funding this guy?”(I hope i’ve got all my indentations correct.)
For background (which may have legal implications), over two years ago I posted:
Eight months ago, this exchange occurred here:
One month ago this exchange occurred:
Today, Mann tweeted (on May 10, 2014 at 11:59 AM):
“#AnthonyWatts getting paid good money for his disinformation by Koch-funded HeartlandInstitute [link to Sourrcewatch:]”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts
whose 1st paragraph states:
“Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weathercaster and non-scientist, paid AGW denier who runs the website wattsupwiththat.com. . . . . Watts is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, which itself is funded by polluting industries.[1]”
The “[1]” footnote links to this site:
http://www.watoday.com.au/environment/climate-change/scientist-denies-he-is-mouthpiece-of-us-climatesceptic-think-tank-20120215-1t6yi.html
which cites material hacked by Gleick from Heartland. Its early paragraphs state:
“The documents show [Australian] Professor [Bob] Carter receives a “monthly payment” of $US1667 ($1550) as part of a program to pay “high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message.
“Professor Carter did not deny he was being paid by The Heartland Institute, but would not confirm the amount, or if the think tank expected anything in return for its money.”
Two paragraphs of quotes from Carter follow, then:
“Altogether, more than $US20 million had been spent funding and co-ordinating the activities of climate sceptics and bloggers since 2007, the documents suggest. Other cash recipients include Anthony Watts, the leading US climate sceptic blogger, who is to receive $US90,000 for his work this year.”
That last sentence plainly implies that Watts was “[an]other cash recipient” like Carter, who was therefore also being paid on an ongoing basis to “regularly and publicly counter the alarmist [anthropogenic global warming] message.” I.e., that he was being paid for his blogging.
This was wrong in two ways. The Heartland document stated (IIRC) that he was getting a one-time fee, not for expressing opinions countering the alarmist message, but to provide a user-friendly front-end for a government-run website containing data about its high-quality weather station network.)
So (if I am right about what the Heartland documents said about Watt’s project), the quotes from the WATODAY website were knowingly false and malicious.
The Sourcewatch site tried to distance itself from making this libelous claim by citing WATODAY as its source. But it included no qualifying phrase like “According to WATODAY.” It simply made a bald assertion. And it went beyond WATODAY, which didn’t explicitly claim that Watts was being continually paid for blogging.
But Sourcewatch should know better by now, and so should Mann (who similarly hides behind his citation of Sourcewatch), since Watts’s rebuttals have been posted on his site, as I cited above (there are probably more, which a little Googling would turn up), which site alarmists like them monitor. So I suspect that they are on thin ice, legally.
OTOH, I suspect that they could defend themselves by saying that Watts hadn’t contacted them directly with a lawyer’s letter presenting evidence to the contrary. That should probably be Anthony’s next step: or at least see a lawyer.
If there are any legal beagles reading this, please weigh in with your opinions.
I have a question
When is Joe Bastardi going to discuss this: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/W-5/
I’ve added a few more pages to my hobby site, specifically regarding analysis of Crysophere Today anomalies. You can now see, for instance, that the average Antarctic anomaly for January through April this year was the highest on record:
http://www.climatenerd.com/antarctic-sea-ice-stats-averages.php?data_calc=avg_an&mva=10&yrb=1950&yre=2014&mnb=1&mne=4
As always, I’m open to feedback, suggestions, corrections, etc.
Mann is wrong about most things…why can’t we just let him be wrong about this too?
Let him blow himself up. People spitting venom do not endear themselves or their views to anyone else.
The fact that he has to indulge instead of ignoring you means your views are reasonable and resonating loudly in his space
On the article re hitting the sea ice extent Average by August why not put up a countdown clock on it?
I know it might not come true [especially when you try due to Murphy’s Law] but you will attract more attention by putting it out there as an example of what things need to happen to disprove global warming as a major concern.
sorry if it backfires but the interst it might generate could be worth it?
Whether you are being paid a zillion by Coke or a billion by alqaeda or F’all by anyone that fact remains the same – your points stand or fail on their own merit. If there is a falsehood Mann needs to identify it or Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform.
an obviously insecure Bob Ward nonetheless feels ***”secure” in his job:
11 May: UK Independent: Ian Johnston: Nigel Lawson’s climate-change denial charity ‘intimidated’ environmental expert
Academic claims that the former chancellor’s foundation complained to his employer.
A think-tank that has become the UK’s most prominent source of climate-change denial is embroiled in a row about its charitable status. There are also claims that one of its trustees tried to exact “retribution” on the person who complained about it to the charities watchdog…
In his submission to the commissioners, Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said the “continual activity has damaged the public interest” and was a breach of the rules governing charities…
Mr Ward, well known for his attempts to hold climate-change deniers to account, said he had submitted the complaint in a private capacity. But he revealed that a trustee of GWPF had written to his employer, the London School of Economics, earlier this year accusing him of making “unacceptable”, “ill-informed” and “ranting” comments in the media about global warming and energy policies despite not being an academic.
In one letter, the trustee said the LSE should be aware that a “distinguished Oxford scientist” had told him: “It’s appalling that the LSE employs people like Bob Ward.” The trustee, whose identity Mr Ward requested be kept anonymous, did not mention his own link to the GWPF…
“This is the way in which the foundation goes about its business, trying to intimidate its opponents into silence,” he told The Independent on Sunday. “For someone in a less ***secure position than [me], this could be extremely damaging.”…
The Charity Commission said that Mr Ward’s complaint was still an active case.
“The commission has been engaging with the trustees of the charity [GWPF] since we received a complaint relating to some of its statements and published material,” it said.
“We advised the trustees that we did not consider that all the contents of the website advanced education, as required of a charity. In addition, we had raised a question with the trustees about whether all the content of the website was in line with our guidance on campaigning and political activity by charities.”…
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/nigel-lawsons-climatechange-denial-charity-intimidated-environmental-expert-9350069.html
comment by Leslie Graham:
At what point does deliberately spreading lies about climate change to protect the short term profits of the carbon corporations become a criminal offence?
Freedom of speech does not extend to shouting “There is NO FIRE!” in a theatre that is rapidly filling with smoke.
I hope I live long enough to see such repellant individuals stand trial.
a trifle dogmatic!
10 May: The Weather Network: U.S. Climate report: Time is now for Canada to take action on climate change
by Scott Sutherland, Digital Meteorologist
A new climate assessment report released this week gives a detailed and honest look at the present and future climate change for the United States. However, Canadians should sit up and take notice of this report and its contents, as they will apply equally to us as well…
Most importantly of all, we are going to have to adapt the way we think – to accept the reality of what we’ve done to the planet, to leave behind the notions of what we typically expect from the weather, the seasons and the climate, so that we can better deal with the changes that are to come, and to embrace the idea that we can change things for the better if we act now.
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/us-climate-report-time-is-now-for-canadians-to-take-action-on-climate-change/26932/
10 May: NYT: Coral Davenport: Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts
Today the work of Robert and William Nordhaus is profoundly shaping how the United States and other nations take on global warming…
Bill Nordhaus, 72, a Yale economist who is seen as a leading contender for a Nobel Prize, came up with the idea of a carbon tax and effectively invented the economics of climate change. Bob, 77, a prominent Washington energy lawyer, wrote an obscure provision in the Clean Air Act of 1970 that is now the legal basis for a landmark climate change regulation, to be unveiled by the White House next month, that could close hundreds of coal-fired power plants and define President Obama’s environmental legacy.
Called the Manning brothers of climate change, the mild-mannered, dry-witted Nordhauses are scions of a New Mexico family long rooted in the land, which powerfully shaped who the brothers became…
“I tend to have lots of crazy ideas, and I run them by Bob first,” Bill said by phone from the Acela train between Boston and New Haven, Conn. He described himself as “an academic economist” who has stayed out of policy debates, although his ideas have not.
Bob agreed. “Bill’s work is about what needs to be done and how soon, using the tools of economic analysis,” he said over a recent lunch in Washington. “My work is: How do you convert that into a legal and regulatory policy?”
The two have a friendly rivalry, but both believe that cutting carbon pollution is crucial to protecting the environment and the economy from the risks posed by climate change. They also agree on the best way to do it: A Bill-style carbon tax, they say, would be far more effective and efficient than a Bob-style regulation…
In the ensuing decades at Yale, Bill developed an economic model that put a price tag on the effects of climate change, like more droughts, flooding and crop failures and stronger hurricanes. He called it the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, or DICE…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/us/brothers-work-different-angles-in-taking-on-climate-change.html?_r=0
a “Climate Parent” in Wyoming fights back!
10 May: Star-Tribune Wyoming: Cate Cabot: Lots of Wyoming parents want climate change taught
Do Wyoming citizens not want their students to learn contemporary peer reviewed science that has been found excellent by Wyoming scientists and teachers? The small opposition minority making this claim is working hand in glove with the national right-wing organization Truth in American Education, who have been supporting state efforts against the Common Core and NGSS across the country – truly the pot calling the kettle black. TAE does not want science taught to students at all!
So let me ask you, do you want your children and grandchildren to have access to what highly respected Wyoming teacher Elizabeth Horsch, a veteran of over 30 years in standards development, described as “the best science standards she has ever seen?” …
Are the people who claim that the NGSS is not wanted in Wyoming really speaking for you? They are absolutely not speaking for me. I live in Wyoming. I am a Wyoming resident, born and raised. I am a member of the coalition Wyoming for Science Education. And I am a parent engaged with fellow Climate Parents across Wyoming…
Write letters. Pick up the phone. It will take consistent effort from many of us to demand that Gov. Mead and the Wyoming Legislature accept the original conclusion of the highly merited committee appointed by the state Board of Education. Otherwise you will watch the best interests of Wyoming students get washed away in the hysteria of a small anti-science minority driven by a national right wing group – and political manipulation.
http://trib.com/opinion/columns/cabot-lots-of-wyoming-parents-want-climate-change-taught/article_29df988a-98af-5bcc-9e23-669845edc42a.html
The coming mini Ice Age. Piers Corbyn.
http://youtu.be/6R26PXRrgds
I am going strictly by the title of the piece: Mann Overboard. My first thought
was that when the end does come, Mann will be tossed under the bus. Once
he becomes an embarrassment, the end will get really ugly!
The video I left above was suggested by:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/tinkering-around-with-nonsense-doesnt-work/
Don’t sue. That’s Mann’s game.
— Bad News
pat says:
May 10, 2014 at 6:45 pm
Well teaching non-sense as science is hardly an advance. See the video here by Piers Corbyn. It is not CO2 it is solar magnetic fields. He predicts a mini-Ice Age for the next 20 to 25 years. Maybe the “scientists” are wrong. Maybe those evil Republicans are right. Then what?
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/tinkering-around-with-nonsense-doesnt-work/
One question I have is about TOBS. (Time of Observation). Why not just take the max and min temperatures regardless of what time they occur?
More of the left’s tactics when they are losing ground and do not have a leg to stand on… as in their efforts to tie-in Republicans with being racist, they tie you in to what they try to demonize – the “filthy greedy upper 1%” – aka the Koch brothers. Unfortunately, the less educated masses (and the better educated masses whose brains have been washed with excessive amounts of party-line Clorox) are going to fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. Basic psychology, though becoming increasingly pompous, asinine, and belittling in the approach.
ROTFLMAO … there’s a seriously fkdp ‘journalist’ at The Guardian, Nafeez Ahmed, who blames the abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls on climate change. What’s more, he even tries to defend his claptrap from the ire of commenters. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/09/behind-rise-nigeria-boko-haram-climate-disaster-peak-oil-depletion
“Jimmy Haigh. says:
May 10, 2014 at 7:38 pm
One question I have is about TOBS. (Time of Observation). Why not just take the max and min temperatures regardless of what time they occur?”
Here is an experiment that EVERY SKEPTIC can do.
why? because it was already done and posted YEARS AGO on John Daly’s site
The experiement is simple. You take stations that record data hour by hour or minute by minute
You then Set your time of observation to be 7 am.
record the max and min.
Then Using the EXACT SAME DATASTREAM you change the time of observation to
1am, 2,am ect.
And you will see with your very own eyes how changing the TOB changes the min max
Historically in the US ( one of the FEW countries to change its TOB) the change results in cooling the past
Lets wind the clock back to 2007. 2007.
climate audit
http://climateaudit.org/2007/09/24/tobs/
here is the comment
http://climateaudit.org/2007/09/24/tobs/#comment-107763
Now, in 2007 I was highly skeptical of adjustments until I found JerryBs work
http://www.john-daly.com/tob/TOBSUM.HTM
“When using a pair of min/max thermometers for daily temperature observations, the time of day at which the readings for the previous 24 hours are observed, and the thermometers are reset, will often cause a time of observation bias (TOB). If readings are taken near the times of daily highs, or daily lows, those highs, and lows, often affect the readings of two days. Annual averages of the effects of TOB on recorded temperatures can be more than 1° F (0.56° C) at many locations, and near 2° F (1.11° C) at some. (This review of TOB is limited to temperature observations using min/max thermometer pairs, and/or electronic min/max thermometer sets which yield comparable results. Temperature observations using other kinds of thermometers may also have some kinds of TOB, but they are outside the scope of this review.)
In the “United States Historical Climatology Network” (USHCN), one kind of temperature adjustment is a TOB adjustment relative to midnight for observations made at times other than midnight. The occurence of TOB, and adjustments for it, are particularly important factors if the time of observation at a weather observation station changes.
In order to gain a better perspective of this bias, hourly temperature data of 190 US locations were used to calculate estimates of TOB relative to midnight, as well as estimates of some other items that seemed interesting.
The approach used is to choose several hypothetical “times of observation”, and to calculate what high, and low, temperatures a 24 hour min/max thermometer set would have “observed” at those times based on the hourly temperature records. These estimates cannot be precisely accurate partly because hourly observations will miss highs, or lows, that occur between the times of those observations, but hourly observations can provide at least an approximation of TOB. ”
here is my challenge. Ive made it many times on WUWT.
Go through the data. Do the work. I did back in in 2007.
to date I dont know of another person who has been willing to actually look at data on this.
when you do you will see that the TOBS adjustment is absolutely REQUIRED.
and ya, the US is one of the few countries that had to do this ( norway, canada, australia, and japan have a few isolated examples )
Id laugh my ass off if the Koch bros decided to sue Mann for libel.
“Streetcred says:
May 10, 2014 at 7:58 pm
ROTFLMAO … there’s a seriously fkdp ‘journalist’ at The Guardian, Nafeez Ahmed, who blames the abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls on climate change. What’s more, he even tries to defend his claptrap from the ire of commenters. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/09/behind-rise-nigeria-boko-haram-climate-disaster-peak-oil-depletion”
The USA (current admin )wants the UN Security Council to change its charter from peacekeeping ,to “green helmeted” world police invasion force .In order to to quell any type of unrest attributed to climate change.Susan Rice proposed it again in 2013.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/robbins-report/2011/jul/21/your-taxes-work-un-global-warming-force/
I genuinely think there is something wrong with Mann – he seems to me to be one of those people who can’t even admit the possibility they are wrong. If I am right, by his twisted logic, anyone who disagrees with him must be insane or corrupt – because they can’t be right.
Steven Mosher says: May 10, 2014 at 8:48 pm
“Here is an experiment that EVERY SKEPTIC can do.
why? because it was already done and posted YEARS AGO on John Daly’s site”
Thanks for the reminder, Steven. I put up some histograms from Jerry Brewer’s cogent 2005 TOBS analysis here.
Admad says:
May 10, 2014 at 12:33 pm
Video …
If you look to the right at the list of videos, there are some by Mann that only have 15 and 45 views respectively LOL
There is one video from Apr 14 2014 that makes the ‘Nobel Prize Winner Michael Mann’ claim LOL LOL
Gunga Din on May 10, 2014 at 3:44 pm
Why is it so hard for this guy to realize that some people aren’t motivated by money or fame?”
————–
Psychologists call it “projection”.
Thanks for your comment, Steven Mosher. I would add to that, the fact that the adjustments almost invariably make the past cooler and the present warmer, is perfectly explainable. Back to you for that explanation.
Thought not.
Steven Mosher says:
May 10, 2014 at 8:48 pm
I have just gone back to the data posted in the J Daly thread.
One aspect that has seems to have been totally ignored for Glass/Mercury Thermometers is when statements are made like “and 8 AM would all have indicated a low of -5.6 from the previous morning at 8 AM.”
How can the reading from the previous day be carried over in to the next 24 hour period when the Thermometer is supposed to be Reset with the magnet supplied each time the reading is taken.
ie if the reading was taken at -0.6 by 11 AM the previous day the “Indicator would be rest to -0.6 not left indicating -5.6 which has already been registered as the low for that day.
What do the proposers of TOBS think the Magnet was supplied for?
Can we have someone who has actually run an official weather station explain what the “Official Procedure” was for taking the temperatures?
A C Osborn says: May 11, 2014 at 3:08 am
“what the “Official Procedure” was for taking the temperatures?”
Complete instructions here (Sec 6.7).
But there’s no mystery. Once a day the thermometers were read and set. The observer recorded min aand max (from the pins) and the current temperature.
So, how does the Min Max get carried over to the next day?
In the example given at what time of day would the temp be taken that could allow it to be carried over?
If you have ever used a min/max thermometer, you are aware of the time of observation bias problem. It is not a subtle problem.
Suppose you reset your thermometer at 3 pm, and the temperature is 60F. At 4 pm a cold front comes through and drops the temperature to -10F. The next day you bundle up in your Arctic expedition gear and go to read the maximum temperature. It reads 60F. You realize that the number is ridiculous, because it hasn’t been above 0F all day.
The solution is obvious, you reset the thermometer at night before you go to bed. I figured out the solution to the TOBS problem when I was seven years old, and I am sure just about every other station owner did too. You would have to be a complete idiot to not figure it out.
That being said, the actual TOBS “adjustment” being done by USHCN software doesn’t even vaguely match their documentation. The whole thing is complete BS.
According to that Training the Temperature should be taken every 6 hours and Reset, not reset once per day.
Only the Highest and lowest highs and lows are then recorded for tha day’s high and low.
So I ask again, how can a High or low get carried over to the following day to justify using TOBS?
stevengoddard says:
May 11, 2014 at 3:54 am
Am I correct in thinking that they adjust all temperatures for TOBS regardless of the weather conditions?
The weather you described does not happen that often to justify such adjustments.
A C,
The TOBS adjustment described in the USHCN docs is a statistical adjustment. It is not based on the actual station data.
“Nick Stokes says:
May 11, 2014 at 3:23 am
….current temperature.”
Wrong on so many levels…seriously!
Nick Stokes said
‘Complete instructions here (Sec 6.7).
But there’s no mystery. Once a day the thermometers were read and set. The observer recorded min aand max (from the pins) and the current temperature.’
In theory yes, in practice not always. Hann remarked on the inconsistencies a century ago. Even in high quality observing countries such as the US and UK the procedures were not always followed, in munch of the rest of the world readings were more haphazard.
When thermometers were more of a scientific instrument some 200 years ago the readings were probably taken by more qualified people than those taking them a century later.
tonyb
A C Osborn
I went into the methodology of historic readings some 3 years ago. The article is here.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/23/little-ice-age-thermometers-%E2%80%93-history-and-reliability-2/
tonyb
Simply looking at my back porch thermometer I usually see the coldest temperatures just at dawn, however when it is clear at sunset and cloudy at dawn, especially when a warm front is approaching, the coldest temperature may be right after sunset, which is “yesterday” and not “today.” If I use the overnight low to determine “today’s” mean temperature in such a case, my numbers are not fully accurate.
A further problem is that there are all sorts of other things that can screw up my measure of how cold or warm it has been. This past winter I noticed the warm sector of storms might pass over in a matter of a few hours, spiking temperatures up with the warm front and crashing them down with the cold front, yet on one occasion, because it happened between ten PM and two AM, it straddled midnight, and therefore a warmth that lasted only 4 hours gave me my high temperatures for two days. 4 hours of mild breezes trumped 44 hours of bone-chilling cold, or at least altered the mean upwards.
What it didn’t alter was the frozen slush on my driveway. Because the warm sector only lasted, in one case, 90 minutes, the ice really didn’t have time to thaw before it was freezing again. That frozen slush, with an IQ of zero, knew something that I, with all the data from my back porch thermometer, didn’t.
This was particularly obvious last winter because warm-sectors had a hard time budging the cold air over New Hampshire, and when they finally rushed past a cold front usually was right on their heels. When this happened fifteen times during the course of a winter it meant there were fifteen occasions when my back-porch mean temperatures were uplifted, even as the frozen slush on my driveway told me it had stayed cold.
There are times when the official statistics tell me one thing, but my frozen farm pond, or the refusal of trees to bud in the spring, and many other things I witness outdoors and call “signs”, are telling me something quite different. What should I trust? Numbers on a sheet of paper? Or the reality I am amidst?
What should I be concerned more about? A 0.05 degree adjustment some geek sneaks into a spreadsheet? Or a cold west wind from still-frozen Great Lakes?
A C Osborn says: May 11, 2014 at 3:55 am
“According to that Training the Temperature should be taken every 6 hours and Reset, not reset once per day.”
It says “For designated stations…”. There’s no doubt that Coop stations read the min-max thermometers at a time of day agreed with NWS. If they wanted to change it, they had to ask. They couldn’t just decide to read it again to capture another max. In my post, I linked to the papers of Karl et al 1984 and Vose et al, 2003. These are senior NOAA scientists. Vose et al give this plot of variation of TOBS over time. The second curve, described as the method of DeGaetano, is interesting. Because observers gave the current temp at reading as well as min/max, knowing the diurnal pattern you can work out independently when they are observing. It tracks the agreed time pretty well.
Here’s how Vose describes it:
“The majority of weather stations in the U.S. Cooper- ative Observing Network (and therefore in HCN) are staffed by volunteers. Consequently, the network has no mandatory time at which daily measurements must be taken. Most individuals prefer observing times other than midnight, resulting in an observation day that differs from the standard calendar day. For example, at a station where the volunteer reads the thermometers at 0800 LST, the observation day extends from 0800 LST the previous day to 0800 LST on the current day. “
Insulation doesn’t make a house hotter. It merely slows the rate of heat loss. If there is no source of heat inside the house it will eventually, through heat loss however slow, become as cold as the outside. What makes a house hotter is turning up the heat.
Eric Worrall says:
May 11, 2014 at 12:33 am
I genuinely think there is something wrong with Mann………….
pathological narcissism
And a happy Mother’s Day to all of the applicable WUWT readership. If you raised your children in the proper manner, you should be reaping your reward in chocolate right about…. now :o)
Mosh> Historically in the US ( one of the FEW countries to change its TOB) the change results in cooling the past
=========
..and if it warmed the past….they would have said it was wrong and not used it /snark
“Lying about your addiction, particularly if your addictive behavior is illegal, can become second nature. It can even give a sense of power – “I got away with that.”
chris moffatt says:
May 11, 2014 at 4:56 am
Insulation doesn’t make a house hotter. It merely slows the rate of heat loss. If there is no source of heat inside the house it will eventually, through heat loss however slow, become as cold as the outside. What makes a house hotter is turning up the heat.
If the insulation was balanced with the heating supply so that the heat lost was equal to the heat supply and the heat supply was permanently on, what would happen to the temperature in the room if you then increased the insulation.
Mann has much in common with King Louis-Phillipe of France and going pear-shaped:
“In the late 1820s Louis-Philippe (also known as the Citizen King) came to power. He immediately set about relaxing the defamation and sedition laws that were stifling the press. Ironically this led to a flush of cartoons ridiculing him, especially by the publisher/cartoonist Philipon, and Honore Daumier.
“In 1831 Louis Philippe sued for defamation, the charge being ‘For Going Too Far’. Philipon had been caricaturing him as a pear, ‘la poire’ at that time referring to someone or something foolish. We still have a similar reference today in the phrase “going pear-shaped”.
“The case dragged on for months, causing great hilarity throughout Europe, especially in France’s European rivals, and the cartoons were published and republished all over the continent.
“The king won the case and Philipon was sentenced to six months jail. The court also ruled that there could not be any more drawings of pears published.
“So in the next issue of Philipon’s magazine “Le Charivari”, the results of the court case were published with the type formed in the shape of a pear.
“The king had made an enormous fool of himself, and it became a convention among the ruling classes of France, and later most of Europe, to accept ridicule rather than be seen not to have a sense of humour. This later became a tradition and was important in the development of the ‘free-press’ in the gradually forming democracies.”
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Public_Information_and_Events/occalect/transcripts/~/link.aspx?_id=9F481BE4EA9B43E8AAE9A9D8065A1EBE&_z=z
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1602088&partId=1&people=133914&peoA=133914-2-70&page=1
Louis-Phillipe was later mocked by the cartoonist Daumier who drew him with his head sandwiched in a printing press to illustrate the foolishness of the ‘elite’ in trying to silence the press.
I suspect the smarter warmists knew all along that warmer weather and more CO2 would mean more abundant crops. But they didn’t want that and were really looking forward to the returning ice sheet crushing everyone.
I’d like some more information on the TOB issue. I read John Daly’s “Time of Observation Bias in temperature records: an introductory review” page, and have some questions.
He mentions the thermometers being “reset.” What does this mean, exactly? Does it just mean to start recording another 24-hour period, or is the actual reading adjusted somehow?
Why the insistence on a 24-hour period? Isn’t the interest on temperatures for a particular day? It’s instantly obvious that if you take a long series of hourly readings and move a 24-hour window around on them you will get different statistics for each window. That’s not a bias, that’s a completely different sample of a different 24 hours.
How is any calculation beyond XX.X ± 0.5 degrees even possible from integer readings? I look at that table with three significant decimals and my head hurts.
Kelvin Vaughan says: “what would happen to the temperature in the room if you then increased the insulation.”.
The first thing is that you have now altered the balance so that heat loss does not equal heat input. Therefore, the room will become warmer because less heat is escaping. This doe not mean that insulation, of itself, is making the room warmer, merely that it is allowing less heat to escape. The heater is causing the room to get warmer.
Pat @ 6:33pm
What is a “Digital Meteorologist”?
One who wets his finger and sticks it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing?
Kelvin Vaughan says:
May 11, 2014 at 7:11 am
Yes, and this is a critical point because insulation works both ways; in the summer months, insulation also helps keep the interior of your house cooler than the outside air.
Insulation retards energy transfer, but it cannot forever prevent the inevitable.
Without an energy source (heating or a/c), the interior temperature of a house will eventually more or less match that of the outside air and ground. More or less because any structure alters the environment (creates shadows & heat sinks, holds pockets of air…)
mfo says:
May 11, 2014 at 7:29 am
And yet…
He who laughs last, laughs best.
Steven Mosher. Thanks for the reply on TOBS and I’ll look into it.
@JamesS… Resetting a min/max means repositioning the min/max markers (small metal wire slides in a glass tube thermometer – u-tube design), typically by using a magnet to cause them to drop or be dragged back to the liquid. The markers are pushed by the expanding/contracting fluid. For a digital meter, of course, it means resetting peaks. Mannian min/max thermometers only reset the min reading. The max reading never comes back down…
Most readers of this thread will have missed my LONG comment above, because it was posted only after many hours in moderation. Check it out!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/10/open-thread-weekend-20/#comment-1633276
Or keeping the heat constant (not by a thermostat, which will turn it down to maintain a constant temperature) and adding insulation.
@Paul Coppin Thanks. That’s pretty much what I thought, but I don’t see why there should be any bias. If you’ve got a timestamped series of temperatures taken hourly, you can select any 24 hour period you want to get tmax, tmin, tmean, whatever. You’re not bound by mechanical pointers or digital settings. So what is the point of calculating an “adjustment”? What is being adjust “from” and “to” what? If I’ve got a 24-hour series of temperatures taken every hour on the hour, what difference does it make when I look at that record to determine tmax, etc? It matters what 24-hour window of readings I use, but not when I’m performing that calculation.
I took the series of measurements from the DAT file at John Daly’s site and converted the year-month-day-hour columns into a true timestamp field and loaded the lot into an Oracle database table. This lets me play with different time slices of the data very easily. Why isn’t this done with the real data?
One thing I don’t understand from Daly’s page is the definition of the mean as ” (tmin+tmax)/2 over the past 24 hours”, and then the concept of the “average (smoothed) temperature over the past 24 hours.” There might be a word for adding the max and min values of a data series and dividing by two, but that word is not “mean.” Why is such a value used as the mean and not the true mean?
(kJ/kg K) ~% of Vol Heat Index x Volume
Nitrogen N2 1.04 78.0 0.8112
Oxygen O2 0.919 20.0 0.1838
Carbon dioxide CO2 0.844 0.04 0.0003376
1. CO2 absorbs some amount of heat and quickly cools the same amount when the heat source is removed. The heat index of CO2 combined with it’s inability to hold heat and insignificance in volume makes CO2 a non-factor in global temperatures. A far greater consideration than CO2 gas is the 3% atmospheric water vapor with a heat index of 1.93 kJ/kg K.
2. 67% percent of the planet is cover with water. Water has the highest specific heat of all liquids except ammonia.
As for Mainly Mannly Mann : Narcissistic Personality Disorder is “an all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy, usually beginning by early adulthood and present in various contexts,” such as family life and work. Mainly Mannly Mann feels grandiose and self-important (e.g., exaggerates accomplishments, talents, skills, contacts, and personality traits to the point of lying, demands to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements); He is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, unequalled brilliance (the cerebral narcissist), bodily beauty or sexual performance (the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion;he requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that, wishes to be feared and to be notorious, thus the need to sue in court. At least I have heard this somewhere…don’t recall. 🙂
James Martin PHD., Sadly, the left has already injected race into the subject
of the environment. I have lost track of all the columns and news stories that
pushed the idiotic notion of “Environmental racism” I have read over the
decades.
You see, those evil and greedy capitalists seek out sites in the inner city to
build lead acid battery companies and chrome plating shops. At first, these
stories accused the businesses of exploiting inner city minorities. Within a
decade, they were intentionally exposing inner city residents to chemical
substances for some unstated reason.
Before long, it will be said that they poisoned inner city minorities because
that meant less chemicals to clean up when the businesses closed.
I can’t help but wonder if what Mann is only succeeding in doing is sending more views WUWT’s way. Every time he shrieks … ah … tweets, is there a corresponding up-tick in traffic?
Other than that, he sounds like a tantrum-throwing overgrown child. I can hear better any day in the supermarket. That’s where the real experts practise!
One day he’s really going to hang himself. It appears the more Anthony sits pat, the more our Mannikins rants and rails and the more likely he is going to really put his feet in it. That’s the time to wait for.
“stevengoddard says:
May 11, 2014 at 4:11 am
A C,
The TOBS adjustment described in the USHCN docs is a statistical adjustment. It is not based on the actual station data.”
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
The process works like this.
Karl collected hourly data on stations over the entire US. 1/2 of these stations are set aside for validation.
Using the sample data an empirical model is generated to calculate the TOB bias as a function
of,, Latitude, longitude, sun position, time of year. Then the empirical model is tested and validiated
with the out of sample data. This bias model has been validated in two separate papers.
Next, we validated the approach, by using a purely statistical approach.
Goddard does not know what he is talking about I’ve pointed him to jerryB data for 7 fricking years
7 years people.
7 years the data to show you that the adjustment IS REQUIRED has been out there.
7 years since we discussed this at CA
7 years. and still the only people to look at data is me and nick stokes.
You can also do the same work with CRN data. Yup 110 stations with 5 minute data.
You can test the TOBS adjustment with THAT DATA. Guess what?
VALIDATED.
Its time for people to move to the REAL science questions.
There is one real science question left: microsite and UHI.
Every word that this site devotes to the bogus Goddard issues is a distraction from the TOUGH science question, the question that anthony raises.
The best critic of the temperature record is Anthony. he is the only one doing real work, real science.The only one publishing real papers.
@mosher an important point…TOBS adjustment is only required for stations that have had a shift in the time of observation, not all stations.
A C Osborn says:
May 11, 2014 at 3:59 am
stevengoddard says:
May 11, 2014 at 3:54 am
Am I correct in thinking that they adjust all temperatures for TOBS regardless of the weather conditions?
The weather you described does not happen that often to justify such adjustments.
###################################################
1. Not all temperatures are corrected.
2. The correction depends upon
A) the change in time
B) the geographical location of the site
C) the time of year
D) sun position ( as I recall)
Here is how the correction was determined.
HOURLY data was collected for the entire US
A sample of this data was selected to create an EMPIRICAL correction model.
For example, take the state of ohio. you collect say 100 hourly stations. You set 50 aside.
using the 50 remaining you create a model that predicts the bias for moving observation
from midnight to 7 AM. This bias is a function of the time of year, sun position.. etc.
Then you apply this bias model to the “held out” data and you validate the model.
Of course there is another approach, the Berkely approach.
What we do is when the Time of Observation changes, we say “its a new station”
That is we do not adjust for the time of observation, we split the record. it IS a new station.
Why? because you changed the time of observation and we KNOW that this biases the
answer. So we split the station. after spliting we krig all the segments. Our answer
matches the explicit TOBS adjustment. That is, our kriging solution which is automated
matches and validates the “manual” adjustments created by the bias model.
If you change the time of observation you WILL bias the record. The data proves that.
That bias can be removed in TWO ways.
A) an explicit manual empirical model that adjusts a stations time series.
B) splitting a station record into two records. one for station A) when the time of observation
was midnight (say ) and one for station B) when the time changed.
All analysis on this, analysis by NOAA, analysis by JerryB, analysis by me in 2007,
analysis by Berkeley earth and others shows one and only thing.
1. TOBS bias is real
2. TOBS bias can be corrected
3. There are independent methods for doing this correction and they all agree
There is not
1) one SHRED of empirical evidence that the bias is not real
2) one shred of evidence that the bias cannot be removed.
3) one single critique of any of the methods for correcting this.
Look the same situation exists when you change instruments at a station.
Changing instruments can bias the record.
Changing the site ( adding an air conditioner) can bias the record
Changing the altitude
Changing the time of observation
All of these things can bias the record. heck, Anthony’s work is founded on this idea: changing the conditions when temperature is recorded CAN bias the record.
Changing TOBS biases the record. we know this.
The corrections have been validated and there is nothing but lies from goddard to suggest otherwise
Steven Mosher says:
Its time for people to move to the REAL science questions. There is one real science question left…
Here is a real science question: when will you admit that the climate Null Hypothesis remains unfalsified?
Because if you admit that [and it is true], then you will be admitting that what is observed today is neither unusual, nor unprecedented. It has all happened before, and to a much greater degree — and when CO2 was much lower.
Let’s discuss things that actually matter. Because tenths and hundreths of a degree T fluctuations just do not matter. At all. That minor fluctuation is well within normal climate variabilty.
Exactly none of the scary scenarios and predictions by the climate alarmist crowd have happened. They are all wrong, 100.0% of them.
When one group is completely wrong in every runaway global warming prediction they have made over the past twenty or more years, the only rational response is to completely reject everything they are telling us as psedo-scientific nonsense. Really, what other response should rational people have to a group that has been completely wrong in every prediction they ever made?
So let’s discuss the things that matter: let’s discuss why the alarmist crowd has any scientific credibility at all. Because from a scientific skeptic’s perspective, they have none.
Kelvin Vaughan says: “what would happen to the temperature in the room if you then increased the insulation.”.
If your door is open, then the flow of heat from inside out increases.
God bless you Steven Mosher for your persistence. I’m not good enough at math to know if what you are saying is true, but I surely believe that the UHI, microsite, and station dropping have skewed the stats.
Your last comment was a welcome clarification of your position, seeing as I haven’t kept up recently, and puts your comments re TOB adjustments in perspective.
Thanks &
Cheers,
Mosher is looking at a grain of sand on a beach and missing the entire rest of the world.
Is this intentional?
totuudenhenki says:
May 11, 2014 at 12:53 pm
Let’s not forget: it’s a two-way door.
In the summertime – in most parts of the world – the heat flows outside in, assuming that the interior was cooler than the exterior before the door (or window) was opened.
Opening a door, or window simply adds a breach to the insulation, like any hole in the wall.
“It’s symptomatic of people who think as specialists they are superior, that only they understand. They may know much about one small piece of a giant puzzle, but not know where or how that piece fits. Those with political reasons who support the claim human CO2 is destroying the planet are particularly vocal.” Dr. Tim Ball
– See more at: http://drtimball.com/2011/climate-science-multidisciplinary-study-in-age-of-specialization/#sthash.CyOvlS8T.dpuf
Somebody help me here with the TOB issue. If I’ve got a timestamped series of temperature measurements taken every hour on the hour for days, why am I depending on when someone goes in and resets the thermometer to determine when my tmax and tmin are?
My point is this: let’s say NOAA sets the standard 24-hour period to be from 0000 to 0000 local time (there is no such time as 2400 hrs). Our local thermometer-minder doesn’t want to get up at 0000 hrs local to take his measurements; he does his at 0900-ish after his morning coffee. He resets the thermometer for another day’s measurements and goes back for coffee #2. He should then log his readings over the last 24 hours, look at the period from 0000 hrs the day before to 0000 hrs that day (9-ish hours ago), and log the tmin and tmax for that period.
Where does any bias come in? Why even bother with the tmax or tmin readings from the thermometer itself, whether mechanical or digital, when you’ve got the hourly readings to look at?
Massive ego and a very thin skin are not a good combination , the good news is sooner or later Mann will go a step to far and then watch his ‘friends’ line up to throw him under the bus to save themselves.
JamesS says: May 11, 2014 at 1:49 pm
“Where does any bias come in? Why even bother with the tmax or tmin readings from the thermometer itself, whether mechanical or digital, when you’ve got the hourly readings to look at?”
You don’t have hourly readings to look at. You just have 100+ years of records where people observed and reset min/max thermometers once a day at an agreed time. By agreement that time could and did change. That’s the record we have.
Its really hard for me to see how TOBS could be a problem if a rational decision on when to read/reset the instrument is chosen. I would naively choose 10 PM, 7 hours after today’s maximum (at 3 PM) and 7 hours before tomorrow’s minimum (at 5 AM). 3 PM or 5 AM would be chosen if one wished to deliberately confound the record. I am wondering what assumption about “prehistoric” temperature records is made to justify a TOBS adjustment. Surely not that the observers were deliberately choosing 3 PM to observe the day’s readings. What were they told to do? Or is it assumed that they made the worst possible choice?
@Nick Stokes. Thanks. I did some Googling of “time of observation bias,” and I can see that’s a problem if all you have is tmax and tmin for a day. But Mosh was talking about having 100 stations in Ohio with hourly records, and setting aside 50 of them and building an empirical model out of the other 50, etc.
Where is the need for TOB adjustments there? Surely, in the 21st century we can get automated hourly recordings for every weather station out there so that this statistical nightmare can go away from now on.
JamesS says: May 11, 2014 at 2:31 pm
“But Mosh was talking about having 100 stations in Ohio with hourly records…”
Yes, that’s how they now try to figure it out. TOBS creates a bias because if you read a max on a warm afternoon, it’s likely the second day will record a max which was not that day, but a second counting of the warm afternoon, post 5pm (if that’s the reading time). If you read in the morning, you’d double count cold minima. TOBS doesn’t say the actual reading was wrong, but the statistics are biased. That hurts when you change reading time.
You can quantify how much by looking at modern hourly records (same place or nearby) to get the diurnal cycle. If you imagined a min/max thermometer with setting time but knowing those hourly records, how much would the bias be? That’s what Steven is talking about.
“Where is the need for TOB adjustments there?”
This is all about making sense of old records. Modern data – no problem.
Reading what Nick wrote, it makes me wonder in there is a latitude bias to TOBs.
See how day length varies http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n4/fig_tab/nclimate1430_F1.html
In reply to John Eggert May 10, 2014 at 3:11 pm, in turn quoting ilma630 at May 10, 2014 at 1:18 pm:
Just as there’s no such thing as a “flashdark” (casts a beam of non-light), the cold body does not and cannot impart heat to the warm body. It CAN impart a bit of *radiation* but radiation is not HEAT.
The EFFECT of doing so is the same as insulation. Insulation does not make your house warm. It merely reduces heat loss. If your house is -10 C and you wrap it with a meter of fibreglass insulation it will still be -10 C.
Unless of course you have a heat source inside. THAT is what warms your house.
CO2 does not warm the earth. It does have an ability to help the earth KEEP some of its heat.
Anthony Watts says: May 11, 2014 at 3:54 pm
“Reading what Nick wrote, it makes me wonder in there is a latitude bias to TOBs.”
I’m sure latitude has an effect. Even time zones do – 5pm is different meteorologically depending on where you are. But Vose et al 2003 describe in detail how TOBS is implemented. They do a simulation of the kind Mosh describes at each of 500 US stations (map at Fig 2). Each station then gets the TOBS adjustment calculated on the stats of the nearest of that 500 (and of course, the known change of TOBS). So that should account for the latitude effect.
OK, I have a stupid question.
Why are we worried about adjustments for TOBS at all?
Yes I am serious. If the task is to determine the temperature of the earth. would not the most sensible procedure to be to take all the temperature measurements at the exact same time? Yes that would mean taking the temperature in some places in noon and on the other side of the earth at midnight, but provided that you had enough spatial coverage (I would argue that we don’t) you would get the temperature of the earth at that point in time. Min and max and adjustments for TOBS all become immaterial if you do it that way.
If one was trying to determine the temperature of a large installation like a steel mill for example, you wouldn’t take the min and max temps at various points in the plant at various times of the day and then try and come up with some way to average it. The only sensible thing would be to take the temperature at as many different points as possible all at exactly the same time. You’d then repeat that daily. or weekly or whatever interval made the most sense.
By worrying about mins and maxes and TOBS, we’re really mixing up a lot of weather that just makes the whole think that much more complicated by naturale variability and that much harder to tease the trend from the noise.
Yes, I know, it is unlikely we have the observational data to do that, not even the satellites come close. But if you asked ME to determine the temperature trend of the planet, that’s pretty much what I would do. Get as many measurement points as possible, and pick a time. Noon eastern standard time for example.
Comparing Tmax at 2:00 on a given day on a given spot on earth to Tmax at 3:30 PM in a completely different time zone just seems like a rather awkward and nonsensical way to go about it. If you want to know the temperature of the earth at any given time, then PICK THE TIME and read all the thermometers in the world AT THE SAME TIME.
If course that still leaves the issue of a metric that doesn’t vary linearly with energy flux anyway, but it would be a more reasonable approach in my opinion.
I’m rather gobsmacked by the Vose et al 2003 paper. In it, the author states, “suppose an
observer reads the maximum and minimum thermometers at 1700 LST on April 1, then a cold front passes through the area overnight. If the temperature on April 2 never exceeds
the value at 1700 LST on April 1 (when the thermometers were last reset), then the recorded maximum will actually be the temperature at 1700 LST on April 1.”
Is he really saying that there is no way to reset the thermometers to ensure this doesn’t happen? I understand the point, but what are the thermometers reset to that would allow this to happen. I’d have thought the min would be set to 200F and the max to -100F so that you’d know you’re getting a true min and max for the day.
Obviously, if you go to an hour-by-hour collection, the TOB goes away. But I am absolutely amazed that no one ever came up with a way to ensure that the max/min temps collected really were the values for that day, and not possibly carryovers from the previous day.
JamesS says:
The point is that they do not KNOW if it happened or not and have no way of finding out now, but they apply the “correction” any way.
And they call it Scientific?
The basis for the TOB adjustment seems to be the assumption that, over the period when no metadata giving the actual time of observation is available, the observers’ preferred observing time changed from that giving the least favorable TOB adjustment (evening observations when high temperatures may carry over) to that giving the most favorable one (morning observations when low temperatures may carry over), neither of which is a rational choice for an observing time (see my above comment).
Steven Mosher says:
May 11, 2014 at 12:32 pm
In answer to my question Steven catagorically states “1. TOBS bias is real”
But is it real for every applicable station?
Is it the same amount for every station?
How often do they calculate the possibility of bias occuring?
How big is it, I have seen anything from 0.03 to 0.6 degrees quoted?
How much affect on the overal trend can that bias have?
The usual suspects and the MSM have gone absolutely bonkers. Wessssssst Annnnnnntarrrrrrrrctic Ice Sheeeeeeeeeeet allllllllllllllllllrrrrrrrrready innnnnnnnnnn colllllllllaaaaaaaaapse! Read all about it ….
That’s not an accurate analogy, because CO2 is a one-way insulator. It lets in energy in one form but reflects back (in part) that energy after it has bounced off the earth and been changed into another form. So adding more of it will have a warming effect on the earth.