I’ve been reading the comments about my press release at WUWT, Bishop Hill, and at Dr. Judith Curry’s place and most have been positive. There is the usual sniping, but these aren’t getting much traction as one would expect, mainly due to the fact that there’s really not much to snipe about other than Steve Mosher’s usual whining that he wants the data, and he wants it now.
Sorry Mosh, no can do until publication. After trusting people with our data prior to publication and being usurped, not once but twice, I’m just not going to make that mistake a third time.
Some of the sniping in comments has to do with defending existing methodology for using all of the data in the surface temperature record, with warts, bumps, abscesses, and all that and expecting to be able to apply blanket algorithms to fix all those widely varied problems. The insistence that methods can fix even the most sickly data reminds me of this kind of a cure-all:
Well to be fair, it isn’t THAT bad, they design their methods with good intent, but I have always puzzled why climate science prefers to try to “cure” the data, rather than just find data that hasn’t been affected by various ills and use it. That’s basically all we have done with our new study, and yet the tendency seems to be with some, that all they need is a better miracle data tonic.
This comment at Judith Curry’s place pretty well sums up my thinking:
Yep.
Judith Curry’s venue is a reasonable source of independent verification, one needs all the reasonable sources of independent verification available.
John
Stop the fricking bus. Anthony paid for his results – it isn’t the result of a government grant money. Anthony’s paper was self-funded, too. Everything about Anthony’s paper is sole-ownership. Nobody, especially climate whiner Mosher is entitled to anything. Anthony, and his self-funded whim will do what best serves Anthony regarding the source data, analyses, and summary. Welcome to self-funded private ownership – I hope he paywalls it. Contrast that with government-funded alarmists who use our money to MSU for the purpose of driving agenda policy and then withhold their data because they think we just want to find something wrong with it.
Right On !!!!!!!
Yep. John Galt vs. Saul Alinsky. “Get off my lawn” has more legitimacy than some people realize.
“The insistence that methods can fix even the most sickly data reminds me of this kind of a cure-all:”
Was there supposed to be a graphic or something after that colon? Not showing up here. /Mr Lynn
Trusting Mosher is liking going to McDonalds because someone told you all their food is low fat, organic & gluten free.
Look here, Watts old horse, you’ve made a cardinal mistake when you say that the true temperature rise trend is only two-thirds the reported one. One should base %ages on the true reading, not the false. Therefore you should have said that the false trends are 150% of the true.
Apart from that, warm congratulations: you’ve done mankind a notable service. You and Steve McIntyre are heroes.
The cleanest data is the AMSU satellite series, which has also been validated by balloon measurements. Unfortunately that doesn’t fit the meme so has been ignored.
They won’t be able to ignore all the snow though, unless they can adjust upwards the melting point of water.
Nope. UK Met has officially declared that all the cold and snow is caused by global warming.
Never thought of that.
Maybe I’ll give it a shot and see what I can come up with. What if I shifted it from 32 deg. F up to 40 deg. F, so it’s a nice decimal number instead of a nice binary number.
That would just about fix all the projected CO2 mayhem for the next 200 years.
I’ll try and shift that 104 deg. angle between the two Os, and see if that changes the melting point. Maybe 100 degrees is where it should be.
g
Dammit, the giants here keep getting taller and taller. Standing on their shoulders the poet in me feels like he is on an elevator.
Eugene WR Gallun
Let’s be realistic: better methodologies wouldn’t give them the desired result.
“Some of the sniping in comments has to do with defending existing methodology for using all of the data in the surface temperature record”
Apparently even the measurements that weren’t actually measured are really important.
They should just rename GISS to GIGO and be done with it.
Izzat the Godawful Installation for shitty stuff ??
I think CaptDallas would be flattered to be mentioned on your blog. And it is a statement worthy of quoting.
captdallas2 .8 +/- .3 is an awesome commenter. I scan through at Judy’s, and I always stop to read what he has to say. He hasn’t been that involved lately, but has a long and distinguished history. Guy knows his stuff.
I suppose what I am trying to say is that you can’t tell the future and do not know the past, beyond the timespan of the record.
Nyquist tells us not only that bad things start to happen as your sampling approaches close to that of the underlying signal.
He also tells us that the lower frequency floor is bounded by a single sine wave over the timespan of the series.
Once beyond that point the ‘quality of detection’ of the observed data falls off rapidly, especially in the presence of noise.
To draw a straight line of any noisy time series graph, then you are implying an infinite frequency band which exceeds his observations.
The science does not support that.
It is propaganda and hope, not science, to draw a straight ‘trend’ line IMHO.
Well there is one problem with temperature series and CO2 measurements that some folks haven’t ever thought about.
Sometimes the CO2 goes up (mostly does) but at the same time, the Temperature might also be going up or sometimes it goes down instead.
Now I gotta tell you; there is NO situation wherein a number goes up but its logarithm goes down. The number and its log can never go in opposite direction.
Ergo there is no possibility that Temperature could be the logarithm of CO2 abundance.
Just can’t happen.
g
The Climate system consists of two paths that energy entering the system has a way of eventually leaving it.
One.
The short, fast, local, vertical path to space. This method reacts in Minutes.
It is interesting to note that we are often closer vertically to space than we are to the nearest human habitation horizontally.
Easy thing for mind/eye to ‘forget’ if things get presented (squashed) to make them ‘fit’ the page.
That path has been laboratory demonstrated to be a potential problem concerning CO2’s effects on Climate.
Two.
The long, slow, global, horizontal path to the poles and thence to space. This method reacts in Years to Centuries and beyond.
There appears to be no direct CO2 mechanism that can effect this horizontal movement. The ‘glass’ is thinner at the poles and the vertical distance to travel shorter there as well when it gets there. Any CO2 effects are correspondingly reduced. These are the last tailings of energy though. Some have been ‘stored’ in water, ice or Biology for a while and then released later elsewhere. The rest have been ‘’lost’ vertically on the way here.
Sure this may be a greenhouse, but it is a greenhouse without side walls and it is continuously shuttling from side to side centred over some spot on the ground. The panes of ‘glass’ above your head may not be fitted together well also.
The thickness of the ‘glass’ overhead may or may not be changing, but that does not mean that the temperature of the space underneath will rise indefinitely, or indeed statistically measurably change at all except, just maybe, in the VERY long term.
It’s like a rock being placed into a stream on the edge of a waterfall. Big rock, small stream, large effect. Same rock, large stream (same depth), hardly any or no difference at all.
How wide is the Climate ‘stream’? How big is the CO2 ‘rock’?
Question – how much work would it be to extend the data comparison out to 2015?
I understand the reasons stated by Anth_ny for ending in 2008. Makes perfect sense.
But at end of day, everyone will want to see the data going forward to current.
It wouldn’t change the paper results a whole lot if it focused on the data ending in 2008, but perhaps as an additional piece, showing it extended out to 2015 as well.
I agree. I think the data should be extended to 2015 just for reference from these 410 station subsets. Does it agree with the 18 yrs 9 months of global non-warming? (even though it’s just for the CONUS)..
Extending the series would be entirely counterproductive, and would be poor methodology, as well, for the purposes of testing the hypothesis.
for the purposes of testing the hypothesis.
There’s nothing stopping you from doing exactly what is needed to test the hypothesis and then as an extra exercise, extending the series to 2015
True, yes, but there are other problems. The unperturbed 410 station set (92 well sited) will be smaller, potentially much smaller, if extended to 2014. We do cite the CRN-COOP comparison during that interval and find no diversion. During those relatively trendless times, there is no diversion, which fact supports our hypothesis.
We may go there in more detail in future, but I have to take this one step at a time, lest we go off the rails. We must tread carefully and meticulously.
The unperturbed 410 station set (92 well sited) will be smaller, potentially much smaller, if extended to 2014.
Ah. I hadn’t considered that. The longer the time period, the less unperturbed stations there are within the time period. Got it.
Hang on, are you saying that it is not possible to extend this comparison accurately because there are not enough stations? That seems a bit damning of the methodology for long term studies.
No. He is saying that you cannot assume the 92 good stations remained good years after they were surveyed.
“Apparently even the measurements that weren’t actually measured are really important.”
Is that “vapordata”?
The climate science community appears to believe itself to be the modern day, much enhanced embodiment of Rumpelstiltskin, able not only to spin straw (bad data) into gold (good data), but also to spin nothing (missing data) into gold (good data) as well. I’m sure the Brothers Grimm would be impressed.
Forget about ‘adjustments’, they are still making up the numbers.
Monthly temperatures which are marked with an “E” are “estimated” rather than measured. More than half of the current data for 2015 is fake.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/28/the-scientific-method-is-at-work-on-the-ushcn-temperature-data-set/
Any word on this 18 month old problem and did anyone see the fix / correction / statement?
Never did read about any corrections and from the above now near 45% (up 5%) still fake they are only making more.
Interestingly, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon did a very nice infill method on our series (which will be used in our future efforts). The results were much the same.
He and I calculated separately in order to make sure there were no problems regarding method.
As the saying goes, “treating the symptoms is not a cure.”
Dog said-“As the saying goes, “treating the symptoms is not a cure.”
It’s more like taking the infected out behind the barn and shooting them, and then declaring that because there are no sick people “in the hospital” now, there never was a worrisome illness in the first place.
It can be. But you have to do it right.
I have never asked for someones data before publication, but the release of results before publication is certainly unique. Of course, it took over a hundred people to create this data. With no budget on a volunteer basis to collect the quality control data. Without calculation it took tens of thousands of volunteer hours. NO, think about that folks. Tens of thousands, it cannot be less. To put this effort together.
Human years spent. Lifetimes given as a piece of their own. This is no exaggeration. Add up the hours yourself that it would take to travel to these stations and record and report the data. The hours to process, the hours to reprocess, collate, summarize.
You can legitimately wait to release that data, and do it with confidence Mr. Watts! Not because of the previous attempts to usurp your publications, but because it is a UNIQUE and UNPARALLELED situation in climate science. Despite hundreds of billions spent on climate change, the same effort with tree rings would have yielded the single largest data collection in the market
Because of the leadership of Anthony Watts, those of us who are considered ‘skeptics’, have done more quality control of the United States temperature stations than the US could pull off with a climate budget larger than NASA.
+1
Anthony is a born leader and has spent countless hours on this project.
I spent an estimated 3000+ hours making the ratings and analyzing the data. I located over 200 stations and supplemented the surveys of almost the entire set (over a thousand, in all). It has consumed my life. It is ongoing. We shall persevere.
Whether or not we ultimately prevail will depend on competent independent review. This is right, just, and proper. And in accordance with scientific method.
. . I forgive you !!
Compelling evidence CO2 has no effect on climate requires only (1) Understanding that temperature changes with the integral of the net forcing (not directly with the instantaneous value of the forcing itself). and (2) All life depends ultimately on photosynthesis which requires CO2. The 542 million years of evolution on land required substantial atmospheric CO2. The integral of CO2 (or a function thereof) for 542 million years could not consistently result in today’s temperature. Documented in a peer reviewed paper at Energy & Environment, vol. 26, no. 5, 841-845 and also at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com which also identifies the two factors that explain climate change (97% match since before 1900).
I think CO2 has had a modest, but statistically significant effect. But that is not the subject of this paper.
I agree with Evan
Can you explain exactly what “statistically significant effect” means?
Is it; that it’s measurable?
Or is now a measured quantity?
Do you really mean to say “effect”?
And what exactly does this “statistically significant” mean in regard to the effect?
How do you explain 542,000,000 years of substantial atmospheric CO2 with no correlation whatsoever with temperature?
Do you realize that, because of (1) the Vostok measurements of CO2 and temperature going up and down together is actually compelling evidence CO2 has no effect on climate?
I hadn’t considered that.
The metadata issue in a nutshell:
Basically, the shorter the time series, the more unperturbed stations are available because it only has to be unperturbed during the period of study. Twice as many stations are unperturbed for our 1999 – 2008 series as for the 1979 – 2008 period (the increased number of eligible stations at least partially compensating for the 10-year shortness of the series).
For a station not to be dropped, it must have no record of moves (where previous location is unknown or the rating has changed even without a move). It must have no significant TOBS flips (if any occur further than 10% of the interval’s start or end point). And if you don’t like how we did it, we provide the TOBS changes and you can make up your own mind what to exclude. It’s an Excel tool: Anyone can do it.
At some point I want to bin by AM vs. PM observation times and see what effect (if any) that has on the trends.
But for all that stuff, you need metadata. We don’t infer it. Not yet, anyway.
Now, I am always thumping on the models (most of them) for their lack of a top-down approach. But there is a time for the ground-up approach, as well, and metadata is a good example. Having been immersed in the metadata, I can now start working on better ways to adjust the poorly sited stations, even take a shot at pairwise without going apples to oranges (for a change).
If this had no advantage, we would probably not do it (it is somewhat circular logic with a random element thrown in), but adjustment does have one critical advantage: it brings more stations into a set, improving coverage and (arguably) statistical robustness. That’s why NOAA likes to do it and BEST is absolutely compelled to do it.
Easy for us: we have only 30 years of the densely covered, data-metadata rich USHCN. Mosh has the mangy, rangy GHCN for the whole darn stretch, with distressingly uneven coverage . No way he can do the easy (like us) and simply drop. If we go global, we’ll have to adjust, too. And even we are not providing totally raw data: I’ve removed the major-flagged stuff, and adjusted for MMTS. So not even our stuff is entirely raw (just as raw as we could make it).
evenmjones; I’m not sure who you were answering, but you didn’t address my questions or answer Dan’s question.
Much of the theoretical effect of Man’s CO2 is claimed to be confirmed by the surface station records. Hansen made “catastrophic” claims about Man’s CO2 and temperature based on Greenhouse theory and the surface station records. (Which he continued to diddle with.)
This paper doesn’t address CO2 at all but rather the surface station records themselves.
It is important.
Politically, Man’s CO2 is being treated as a bullet fired from a fossil-fuel-powered gun. Politicians love to blame something and then control it.
The 1% invested in oil stocks, and the oil companies are devastated by this. But the 97% of consumers and trucker and poor and middle class are cheering that this form of cheap energy continues. I am!!!
http://www.bloomberg.com/energy
I have no idea why you posted this comment and link. Why not go to the Puffington Host site?
You’re right. I was wondering myself – meant to post it on a related article. I think I saw ref. to it in some article that was closed to comments…
Just received this: Ms. Stevens,
I’m not sure that you understand that no theory has one piece of evidence or data that proves it. The theory of the greenhouse effect is not the result one single line of evidence, but rather there is a convergence of evidence from centuries of science, laws of physics, laboratory experiments, direct observation along many different lines of inquiry. This information dates back to 1820 with Fourier, followed by Tyndall in 1861. Tyndall first published results that identified CO2 as a greenhouse gas that absorbed long wave radiation. http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/151/1.full.pdf+html More precise research has been done since that time by numerous scientists, including measurements by Herzberg 1953 and Burch 1962 and 1970.
More recent studies include:
Harries 2001 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
Griggs 2004 http://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.556803
Evans 2006 https://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm
Chen 2007 https://www.eumetsat.int/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_FILE&dDocName=pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v&allowInterrupt=1&noSaveAs=1&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased
Feldman 2015: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html
Summary: https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_wg1_report_the_physical_science_basis.htm
This is a very robust, widely-accepted scientific theory.
Best regards,
Susan
Susan Callery
Manager, Earth Science Public Engagement Office
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109-8099
Tel (818) 393-1545
Clearly Susan Callery doesn’t understand. She presumes that skeptics reject the ‘greenhouse effect’.
But most skeptical scientists say that rising CO2 has some effect. Susan’s problem is that neither she nor anyone else has ever been able to measure the fraction of global warming caused by human CO2 emissions, out of total global warming from all causes such as the planet’s emergence from the LIA, or the thirty or so times more CO2 than humans emit, that are emitted by natural sources.
She links to those papers because she cannot produce any verifiable, testable measurements quantifying the amount of global warming she believes is caused by humans. In fact, none of those authors have measured human-caused global warming, either. No one has.
So we’re left with a group of people heavily subsidized by the government, whose President constantly says that “climate change” is caused by human activity.
Does Susan want her cushy job? If she dared to question the government’s ‘climate change’ narrative, she would be out of her job in a hurry, and someone more compliant would take her place.
That’s what we’re faced with. And that’s why Susan Callery’s comment means nothing as far as honest science goes.
Eve, are you Susan Callery?
If no, why did you post her letter?
If yes, What does your letter have to do with this post? Anthony et al are researching the validity of the Surface temp data, they are saying nothing about greenhouse warming. Did you even read the post?
J..
Mosher’s unflinching defence of the indefensible for several years now is what has got my goat.
USHCN 1218 stations and as state only 400+ unchanged and usable.
Over half are now virtual, put together by data from the other sites. There are some sites added in and a drop out rate of 30 sites a month that have to be repaired .
Mosher claimed to have looked into siting and that the urban heat effect did not exist for all practical purposes.
What he really did was check that the already adjusted figures matched each other.
He has never admitted the paucity of real stations.
Without real stations you can use dodgy maths to produce however much warming you want.
Given his staunch support of friend and colleague Robert Way who is a Skeptical science advocate and associate and has tried to disprove the hiatus with a “perfect” algorithm, that is it never produced negative cooling figures, makes any early input of his counterproductive.
He has a lot to do to earn any trust and respect back.
An easy step would be to say how many real USHCN stations are actually in use.
Hmm????
Thought so.
Have never had this figure in three years from Zeke , nick stokes or Mosher
Mosh is trying to adjust the others. We expect we’ll be trying that, too, down the road. I’ll at least be looking at getting some of the more severely truncated stations into the set. But that is trickier than it sounds if you are dealing with startpoint and requires at least a rudimentary pairwise.
My objection to BEST is that its pairwise is not adequate to deal with pairwise involving a systematic error of omission, i.e., microsite. His method is dandy for detecting and splitting jumps, but microsite is not only a systematic issue, it does not create jumps — its effects are inherently gradual. So unless he targets microsite, he will miss out on it.
If he redirects some of his equations and does it his way but according to our classifications, we might be singing the same tune down the road.
Question for Mosher:
Seems that your money comes from the taxpayer, so what value does the taxpayer get from paying money to Mosher?
Looking forward to your detailed reply, Mr “Leech” Mosher.
Interesting method with potentially valuable application. if his stuff gets linked up with our stuff, I think much good could come of it.
I don’ mind what they [NOAA, GISS, HadCRut et al] do with the data T sets, and other splicing jiggerypokery but what is the point of hiding your methods if…. you purport to be an honest injun?
Publish it and then we’ll all see.
Mr Watts, in this quite enormous endeavour and sifting for the truth, we sit in wonderment and awe filled admiration.
http://blog.primalpastures.com/uncategorized/time-magazine-says-eat-butter/ Judith Curry uses this as an example on the dangers of Consensus and the problems it can cause. We should all write Time Magazine to show them are making the same mistake on Climate Change and took 40 years to correct after every one is Sick and on Multiple Drugs.
I think AW is showing some skill in the game of climate change politics. He gets a very respected co-author and then with bravado calls for a press release and refuses to release data until publication. If the warmist tribe blocks publication then they never get the data to de-bunk his claims and the most powerful skeptic on the www gets the volume turned up for his cause. All he needs to do is insist that he has a viable study and quote climate-gate with a Spencer-Brasswell-Dessler-Trenberth inference and he scores a political hit. For the warmist tribe they better hope that they can find something like 2012 TOBS issue or this paper could have “pause” like legs.
Some quotes come to mind.
“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Sowell
“People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays
Noise is noise and noise is a problem because it replaces detail or meaningful data, not because it obfuscates it. No noise algorithm will create new detail, and often removes some amount of detail that was there in the process of removing the noise.
It is even worse in climate data, since the noise comes in what seems a limitless potpourri of forms.
The best that can be expected from data that requires extensive curing or cleaning up is a better picture of how poor the data is.
Noise can be useful in some cases however.. You can add it to a low level signal and, by statistics, resolve a better A/D answer. Done all the time.
You can average it over a period and possibly recover a signal buried in that noise. Again done all the time.
Bad things happen when signal and noise get closely entangled in frequency and amplitude. That’s all.