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.
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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 @ur momisugly 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.