The following post is officially Anthony approved.
Quoting me:
I know I can be brusque. I can also be funny. I can even be kind. Who knows what the wheel will bring on the next spin?
\pontification
Two days ago I received this story tip:
WUWT Tip submission
Lack of sunspots to bring record cold, warns NASA scientist November 12, 2018 by Robert “It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. ________________ “The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” wrote Dr Tony Phillips just six weeks ago, on 27 Sep 2018. https://www.iceagenow.info/lack-of-sunspots-to-bring-record-cold-warns-nasa-scientist/
Yesterday I received this one:
WUWT Tip submission
NASA Scientists: Lack Of Sunspots To Bring Record Cold https://www.technocracy.news/nasa-scientists-lack-of-sunspots-to-bring-record-cold/?fbclid=IwAR3GFqIvnTlNW0IINWAArB8jTYTKn7bSTSM7TtM5LiXNZT1AtdzilxR9NYo
These story tips set off my incongruency radar.
Here are excerpts from the iceagenow.info story
“It could happen in a matter of months,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center.
and
Record cold in a matter of months
“If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold,” says Mlynczak. “We’re not there quite yet, but it could happen in a matter of months.”
This story gave me pause. Who is this NASA scientist saying these heretical things? So I looked up the original article from which the above two derived their stories and quotes.
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2018/09/27/the-chill-of-solar-minimum/
Here are quotes from the article that provide context.
“We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”
And
“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” explains Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.
Mlynczak was speaking of the thermosphere on the edge of space, not the surface climate where people live. His statements in context are not remotely controversial. It is accepted by most mainstream astronomers, atmospheric scientists, climate modelers, climatologists, solar scientists, atmospheric chemists, and just about every field of mainstream climate science that:
The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum (sic).
I view this little episode as illustrative of much of the state of the anti-climate alarmism movement.
My current assignment in charge of this blog is open-ended, unlike the specific length of my previous assignments. I have no idea if I’ll be here five weeks or five years. I intend to try and enhance real skepticism, in context arguments, and real scientific discussions on this blog.
I long for the romantic days when the Godfather of Climate Science skepticism, Steve McIntyre, was active at Climate Audit and there were brilliant discussions, biting comedy, as well as heated arguments, and not just the same echo chamber talking points we so often see today. Yeah, I’m old and I miss 2008 and the days of baby ice for you insiders. Even though some may remember that, did you know I was “jeez”? Those were also the exciting days of Anthony’s making huge waves with his Surface Station project.
Ponder this, Rud Istvan is Iionized here, and Steve Mosher is vilified. Many, if not most of you don’t know that it was Mosher’s prominent “Free the Code” movement that influenced NASA to open up its model code and greatly move toward transparency. A bunch of you recently learned he outed Gleick’s forgery. I understand Mosher is snarky and often behaves like a prick, but most here don’t realize it is because long ago he became fed up with the lack of skepticism and quality arguments I noted in the beginning of this essay.
If you were to sum up the primary scientific disagreement between Istvan and Mosher, it is that both have thoroughly examined the historical temperature record and one believes it is fit for the purpose of analyzing climate and other doesn’t . They can have rational, intelligent, scientific discussions over this disagreement and still stay friendly. Obviously differing policy choices logically flow from this disagreement.
But a core level it all comes down to a legitimate disagreement on the interpretation of data.
There are massive amounts of good here at this blog. I want to nurture that good and make it grow. But the echo-chamber aspects are not helpful to convincing others, or to being taken seriously by the currently unconvinced. I want this blog to be a force for education and to grow in influence and that requires upping our game, and maybe even some growing pains.
\end pontification
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Not a scientist but I understand the significance of the solar minimum in relation to climate is not its affect on the thermosphere, but its affect on the magnetosphere and the resulting increase in cosmic rays entering the earths atmosphere. I understand that research has found a correlation between increased amount of cosmic rays and increased cloud formation. More cloud cover will result in cooling of the climate.
I understand that research has found a correlation between increased amount of cosmic rays and increased cloud formation. More cloud cover will result in cooling of the climate.
I’m very skeptical of this idea.
I like Steve Mosher, he’s wicked-smart and has good insights and science-fu, and I’ve defended him on many occasions in many forums.
The bad news is his drive-by style of commenting, where he acts like he’s being charged a hundred dollars per word … frustrating.
Anyhow, that’s a side issue. Charles, I’m glad to see the direction that you’re thinking of taking the blog. Should make things very interesting.
Best to you all,
w.
Drive by commenting, arrogant dismissal, ad hominem attacks, lazy criticism, lazy perspective, abrasive, combative, intransigent, childish….
The guy is a troglodyte, from what I’ve seen of his commenting. I’ve yet to see anything of substance. Glad to hear he helped with transparency but that is irrelevant to his behavior on this site
when the behavior toward guest posters like Nick changes, I’ll gladly stick around
heck when people start treating you better or Lief better I will stick around
Read any article and comments.
Sarcasm rulz. Well, (SNIPPED) I can do sarcasm, and other annoying things.
Its just become way too much of an echo chamber
So every once in a while I will stick my head in, shout, and then come back after a few days
to watch the pattern of reverberations.
Its always the same.
Except when you show up, THEN its original.
I may do something for CTM.. It will be long
You mean this and others?
Well, yes, Samuel J C wrote
while having zero proof (I think it was Nick Stokes he was referring to) has expended any money. I think what we see here is a personal attack, equating the guest author with the supposed other ‘tribe’. Not nice. But Mosher, you can’t expect people to behave. There are so many people with so many differing views, some sensible, some not, some educated, some knowing, some not. When the language gets too rough, CtM hopefully gets in between. In the meanwhile, please bear and don’t feed the troll.
Don’t feed the troll. I should remember is myself. No sarcasm included.
Steven Mosher
What I find irritating is that when I use the ‘F’ word, it’s moderated.
Stephen gets a free pass.
Any observations Mod?
(When too many bad comments flows by, it gets a lot harder to keep up with it, better if everyone stop being continually upset over what Mosher, Stokes or Svalgaard says, more productive to stay on topic instead. Better yet let everyone try to moderate themselves, which is the desirable way) MOD
when the behavior toward guest posters like Nick changes, I’ll gladly stick around
like the atrocious behavior you supply towards guest posters that don’t agree with you, you mean? Change starts at home, Mosh.
In other words, when all of us start behaving better than Mosher does, Mosher will stick around.
(SNIPPED) MOD
I agree totally Willis. However he doesn’t seem to even answer formal published objections, there is an outstanding list from the Climate Science community.
Record cold in a matter of months?
Try Texas today. According to a friend who works in Houston, it snowed today.
You can blame it on Global Warming. However, building more wind and solar units will not fix the problem of heating homes and offices.
As the woman said – you may chose to ignore reality. However, you still get to suffer the consequences of ignoring reality.
Would love it if this site returned more to its former self. Might actually read it more often. Its turned into a propagandizing echo chamber and the best commenters (for us true skeptics, who appreciate nothing more than real discourse about the ‘science’ issues surrounding AGW and climate) such as Nick and Mosher are regularly derided without any discussion of their arguments/points.
So thanks, a much appreciated move in the right direction!
What points and arguments do Nick and Mosher make? The reason a large number of climate alarmists do not debate “The Science”: because they cannot defend it. Yet those are the “experts” I hear so much about. Just felt obliged to put a spoiler on mutual back-slapping.
I’ll classify this as a ‘personal attack’. Please don’t comment when there are no arguments to comment. When you see an argument, you may comment it (and you then implicitly accept there was an argument).
Looks more like a question to me. (see the question mark at the end?) I’ll classify your reply as a ‘personal attack” seeing as it attacked the poster rather than answer his question.
What arguments does Mosher make. All he supplies is drive-by snark. If that’s your bar for “real discourse” then thanks, but no thanks.
No, it is not a job! A job requires “work”. Laughing at and ridiculing idiots is just good, clean fun! Kicking them in their fecal stained teeth is the height of entertainment.
Don’t forget Steve Mosher (along with Thomas Fuller) gave us “Climategate: The Crutape Letters”, the book that detailed the malfeasance of a significant number of climate researchers over a decade or more. I have read and enjoyed the book from cover to cover at least twice and refer to it from time to time when seeking to confirm events.
We owe Steve a big debt.
I don’t have much problem with people trying to “clean up” the surface temperature record. I personally believe that the data is bad enough, and prior to 40 years ago, scarce enough to make the task impossible. But if you want to spend your own time and money on such a project, go for it.
What gets my goat is the claim by many that this cleaned and “spread out” data results in an accuracy that is an order of magnitude or two greater than the original data.
That is total BS, and I’ll call them on it every time.
PS: Another point, if you want to justify re-working the entire world’s economy you need much better data than has been presented so far.
That goes double to implementing plans that will result in the deaths of millions.
MarkW
With you on both posts 100%.
CTM, “If you were to sum up the primary scientific disagreement between Istvan and Mosher, it is that both have thoroughly examined the historical temperature record and one believes it is fit for the purpose of analyzing climate and other doesn’t.”
Neither Steve Mosher nor those at BEST have “thoroughly examined the historical temperature record,” because they have completely ignored the the most basic source of uncertainty: systematic sensor measurement error. If anything, they have all actively run away from it.
Even more incredible, they also ignore the limits of resolution of the temperature sensors themselves, primarily of the LiG thermometers, which readings make up the bulk of the record.
The published record is an unscientific crock. It’s a product of negligence, that is indistinguishable from incompetence.
I can’t speak to Rud Istvan’s argument about the record because I’m unfamiliar with it.
… LiG thermometers…
I had to look it up – Liquid in Glass
Undefined acronyms jargon and other abbreviations slow the transmission of meaningful information.
Pat, agreement.
Here is a short, subtle consideration. Think liquid in glass thermometers in Stevenson screens.
Imagine their deployment at all earth latitudes, then the validity of thinking them to be similar enough to have results compiled somehow into a global average. Are they same enough to each other? No.
At all points inside the Tropics, the sun is directly overhead at least once a year. At the poles, it is never directly overhead. Therefore, some screens will have roofs heated by direct sunshine. Others will never have sunlight on the roof. The thermometer inside responds partly to air flowing through, partly to radiation from the nearby heated or cooled screen. It follows logically that a screen in the tropics operates basically differently to one at a pole, with those between grading between these extremes.
One might laugh off this difference as too small to worry about. Others might try to quantify the effect to see if it is worth the bother, then they might remember that thermometers like these were replaced by electronic devices in different houses, so how does the direction of incident sunshine affect them?
The example of uncertainty I chose to use here is but one of many, many concepts still unexplored or underexplored in climate research. There are innumerable sources of errors, some easy to describe like my example, others rather more subtle. The nett effect is a large basis of unquantified errors that have the capacity to aggregate into an uncertainty in global warming estimates that is larger than the alleged global warming is.
Concepts like his have not been treated with the seriousness that they deserve. Too often they are shrugged off as annoyances, too often they are in the hands of people who have never been educated in error analysis or don’t want to know.
Serious, good quality scientists to not disregard proper error analysis.
If proper error analysis was the norm in climate research, my informal guess would be that 90% of papers would be rejected before publication because their main result was hidden in the noise and had no real physical meaning. It is a crisis, rather like the reproducibility crisis. Geoff.
I’m in complete agreement with you, Geoff. There are huge problems with the global record, some of which you’ve outlines.
I focused on systematic measurement error because it’s straight-forward and representative errors can be estimated with direct calibration experiments. But it’s only the tip of the problem, as you’ve pointed out.
In my experience, the people compiling the record hotly reject the idea of systematic measurement error. Their papers make outrageous and self-serving assumptions to support an assignment of random error only, such as that any given ship always has the same distribution of normal errors in their SST measurements.
It’s incredible incompetence, and they’ve been getting away with it for more than 30 years.
You’re undoubtedly right that a proper assessment of the errors would lead to uncertainty bars larger than any purported increase in air temperature over the last 150 years.
Just accounting for instrument resolution and the measurement error alone already does that. See Figure 12 on the linked page.
Stevenson screens are painted white. Originally they were painted with white wash, over time, this was replaced by white latex paint.
Only a small fraction of the screens make note of when this change over occurred.
A question was asked, while both paints are white, how well do they reflect the other frequencies of light?
Somebody, it may have been our host Anthony, conducted an experiment. He painted two boards, one with white wash and one with white latex, placed thermal sensors on both and put them into the sun.
It turns out that white wash reflects infra red better than does white latex. As a result the board painted with white latex got hotter. I don’t remember by how much.
One thing that would help is if people didn’t feed the trolls. There are those who are simply contrarian, and then there are those who enjoy stoking the fires, then sitting back and watching the burnination.
Don’t feed the trolls.
live wood doesn’t burn easily. fires clear away a lot of debris.
Climate Science should elevate as a priority the understanding of the Pleistocene and endeavor to understand more fully:
-What causes the Laurentide and Eurasian ice sheets to expand slowly and contract quickly. Is it possible that the arctic was largely ice-free at this time, allowing tropical moisture to move to high latitudes to create heavy sierra-like snows in areas that are relatively dry today?
-How the biomes of the earth respond to the climate changes of the past, and the apparent bare minimal CO2 (280ppm?). Why did the planets rainforests contract while the areas of Steppe expand?
-Why the early present interglacial was interrupted by a “younger Dryas” event while others do not appear to have been.
-Were areas of eastern Siberia and Alaska really ice-free? And if so, could this be tied to poorly understood circulation patterns due to Beringea’s cut-off from the Pacific ocean?
-Why the extinction of so much mega-fauna at the end of the Pleistocene? Is human-driven extinction really plausible?
-Is CO2 gas trapped in ice cores really representative? Are we certain that equilibrium reactions do not occur with the surrounding ice as they they would with water?
It seems to me these are the kind of “Big Questions” we should be investigating before we can drill down into the minor little ups and downs of the present climate.
CTM –
First thank you for your years of service as moderator. Your efforts have kept this site civil, which is something very worthwhile in these times.
I reread your post before writing this comment. This sentence stuck out to me:
“But a[t the] core level it all comes down to a legitimate disagreement on the interpretation of data.”
Would that this were so. If the idea that increasing CO2 might cause the planet’s atmosphere to heat up had not been co-opted by those with a political agenda, then the disagreement might be regarded that way. But unfortunately it has been co-opted for political ends. Those with a political agenda have decreed that “the science is settled” There can be no skepticism. To these people, there are only two groups: (1)those who agree that increasing atmospheric CO2 will lead to catastrophic global warming, and (2) everybody else. If you are not part of group 1, you are the enemy and evil.
All that would be mildly funny, except that those political groups have already done considerable damage to society around the world, and stand poised to do much, much, more damage.
As I understand Anthony’s intent, this is not a website for group 1. It is a website for group 2. How this site is used to large extent will be up to you, and I know you will do a good job. But as for me, I hope it will be used for education, understanding, and yes, perhaps even venting frustration that the ACGW crowd is so powerful and unrelenting.
For many years, we (“skeptics”) heard a constant drum beat: the science is settled, scientific consensus, we must act now, etc, etc… It is my understanding that this site was born to combat this garbage.
The site met this need by giving us a forum to examine research methodologies, published articles, etc. The high standards of critical thinking in this Forum stand as proof that real science was not — and is not! — dead.
I do not see this blog as an echo chamber. The tone has changed a bit of late. Looks to me like this change in tone is due to a sense of relief. Relief that there are politicians currently in power who aren’t just cheer leaders for the climate con crowd.
Well, since a semi inadvertent protagonist here, might as well make a few observations. So important I left the comfort of iPad cruising while watching Thurday night football to fire up the trusty home office MacPro.
1. I fully agree with CtM. Both Mosher and I get tired of refuting the same old threadbare arguments posted by less involved reader commenters. We can collectively up the WUWT game, especially now that Judith Curry is no longer a GIT professor and otherwise more preoccupied with CFAN, and Steve McIntyre has moved mostly on after tiring of winning the same old arguments agains the same old climate paleontology Borg year after year. WUWT is the last major climate skeptic blog left fully standing. Kudos to Anthony Watts.
2. I am relatively neither a newbie or a veteran here, and at the outset had ‘no dog in the hunt’. My first post here and at Judith’s Climate Etc was somewhen in 2011. I had already spent almost two years researching my first ebook, Gaia’s Limits, and had discovered that possible future water and food carrying capacity constraints could not be adequately addressed without reference to the IPCC consensus version of future global warming.
Then I found that NRDC had deliberately misrepresented an NSF report to Congress, which NSF report itself failed to understand a fundamentally flawed paper on US corn and soy crop yields. (The search function of WUWT will probably still take you to that now ancient first post.) That AHA! converted me to instant CAGW skeptic, with parts of one additional ebook and all of a second on the CAGW subject following.
3. For ebook Blowing Smoke, I spent a year researching the global temperature record. My conclusions (with many examples) are set forth in essay When Data Isn’t in ebook Blowing Smoke, foreword by Judith Curry herself. I concluded the surface temp data are not fit for purpose, and no amount of clever effort can salvage them despite Mosher and BEST heroic tries. Steve respectfully disagrees, and that enables a useful and informative science debate. In my view, Land has inadequate global coverage, and the Land rest has insurmountable problems. Ocean is even worse prior to ARGO. As one example, ship engine intake water temp depends on how the ship is laden which determines how deep the intake port is. NOT RECORDED! There are many other examples in that essay. ‘When Data Isn’t’ footnote 25 gives some specific reasons to doubt BEST, that Mosher and I could fruitfully debate as I am not BEST and he is. I would since add to that footnote the BEST ingestion problem at Rutherglen ag station in Australia as a second fundamental example of the futility of trying to correct data not fit for purpose. None of that means Mosher and BEST are somehow wrong or misleading, nor that we should have that debate in comments to this post. It just means I do not think that data is fit for purpose can heroically be fixed, and he does–precisely as CtM says.
4. CtM has persuaded both of us to cooperate with him on a possible series of joint posts upping the WUWT science game. Provisionally, the presently envisioned three include ‘Loser Arguments’ since we are all tired of refuting silly pseudoskeptical comments, ‘Killer Sound Bites’ that provide simple, referenced refutations to the usual warmunist consensus talking points (like Susan Crockford’s oft repeated point that polar bears do NOT depend on summer sea ice for hunting success, so the notion that summer Arctic sea ice decline threatens them is laughable from first principles), and Failed Predictions, for which an unequivocal and irrefutable and referenced long list has yet to be compiled.
Who knows, as we chew on these maybe they will morph or others will emerge. But CtM has inspired us to get going as a team on Anthony watt’s behalf. So we are.
(Edited for paragraph spacing) MOD
I’m pretty sure that I have never lionized anyone on this site.
Regarding Nick Stokes… Every time I discuss a topic here with him I learn something.
Regarding Steve Mosher… The same was true for Steve 5-6 years ago. I still enjoy “debating” things with him because I appreciate quality snarkiness.
I personally look forward to my discussions with both of them.
I have only been reading WUWT for a few years and have only had a couple of discussions with Mr. Stokes on WUWT, but I have always found his comments to be interesting and he has always been very generous with his time in answering my questions. Mr. Tomalty says he is a very good programmer and having worked as a programmer myself for over 40 years, I can appreciate that trait in him.
As a named protagonist, I left my iPad and Thursday night football and went to my main MacPro to compose a lengthly and ‘very profound’ comment. Disappeared. Perhaps God is just after all.
Short version, I think CtM is right. And he has persuaded Mosher and I to work together with him on some future stuff that will further his and Anthony’s goals for WUWT.
Meanwhile, CtM also personally shook me out of my blog ennui, and he already has some nifty (well, IMHO only) new sciency stuff to consider posting. Time will tell on that.
Regards to all
+42
@ur momisugly CTM, I see what you mean, If commenters took the time to provide citations, there would be a lot less undocumented garbage to read through. If folks would tag their opinions (e.g. IMO) it might be much appreciated by others looking for actual information.
Also, much as I hate to admit, overt sarcasm is better replaced with subtle recognition of irony. The boundary between the two remains as subjective as ever, though.
Hi CTM,
Good post, thank you.
A decade or so ago I used to blog on The Air Vent, Climate Audit, etc and it was enjoyable to read Mosher’s inputs. I even wrote him a reference for a job application. Then at some stage in his work on BEST, something changed. It might have been that his hard work gained some criticism from people like me who were not nearly as aware about the finer points of BEST, but there was a personality change in his later blog comments. (Possibly there is one in mine, also.) Mosh’s comments often had a strong element of logic. Same goes for Nick Stokes. I want to be friends with these guys in a two-way exchange of knowledge, laced with logic.
It is not so easy. There are some science fundamentals, such as the proper, classic treatment of errors in measurements, that were taught to scientists my age (late 70s). They do not seem to be taught with the same importance today, if one can tell that from blog comments. Pat Frank knows what I mean. Nick does not seem to. Mosh does not often address this problem, whic has the effect of people getting stuck into each other because they had different educational upbringings.
The other difficulty is that the average sceptic has nothing like the resources that The Establishment has. The average sceptic is likely to be older, retired even, and short of discretionary funds and time to formalise scepticism into a peer-reviewed paper. Our BOM refuses to look at my short essays about errors needing correction, saying only a peer-reviewed paper will be considered. There are moves now afoot in Australia to set up a research group on questionable climate assertions and to prosecute these with formal papers, but it is still early days. Geoff
“knows what I mean.” Boy, I sure do Geoff.
And best wishes to you. 🙂
Charles, as always you inject a different tone, challenge commenters to put forth their best, and have teased them with invited posts from pro green energy/warming proponents. All well and good.
I have been guilty of some of the sins you state. I plead no contest. However, there are a few reasons for a more jaded bunch now than in the “good old days”.
1. The scientific debate on wither climate and the end of days began to end, first with McIntyre’s deconstruction of the hockeystick symbol of doom. It was the first sign that the cat was back and the mice could no longer play with impunity.
2. Climategate glimpse into loaded dice, gatekeeping in the publishing world, discussions on getting rid of the LIA and the MWP, the Karlization of the Dreaded Pause.
3. Coming out into the open of UN, EU officials on the real issue of global governance for which climate change was the front.
4. A realization by proponents from overheating models after 30 years of observations (more than half of which time was The Pause) that warming was unlikely to even reach the once acceptable +2C by 2100. Moreover, they pushed the starting gate from 1950 back to 1850 in order to bank 0.8C and declare 1.5C in 250 years as a threshold to danger!
In sum, they believed they had lost the debate. The plan global progressives had for the rest of us meanwhile was, until Trump came along, very scary and many including myself couldnt see how they could fail to pull it off. Hey, this wasnt a scientific debate afterall.
Charles, you are obviously a very nice, level headed guy that I would value as a friend. But I’m afraid like many you may be mistaking Bertrand Russells Teapot for serious science. BTW, in the 1990s I had no reason to doubt AGW. It was evidentally warming. But when I saw the elite non scientists involved, like Mauruce Strong and the Eurocentric left funding and promoting global poli-econ overhaul policies and then the feloneous goings on with the scientific establishment supporting all this, yeah! BTW I am a geologist and studied paleiclinate in the 1950s, so I wasnt unfamiliar with the subject.
Paleo!
Keto!
koo koo catchoo
I miss Steve McIntyre’s brilliant analyses. You might say he set the Gold Standard.
Yet he did not shoot Silver Bullets with his well aimed shots. The Beast lives.
The commenter I miss mkost is RGB at Duke. Remember him?
PS: I also miss E.M. Smith.
” CtM has persuaded both of us to cooperate with him on a possible series of joint posts upping the WUWT science game.”
Good. Bring it on.
Would prefer that people play fair with their data, opinions and claims.
There seems to be a level of making or refuting a claim using cherry picked periods or data sets that are known to be wrong in bigger picture deliberately.
Nothing wrong with a cherry picked example, has to be proved or disproved anyway for a theory to be right.
There is a dishonest way of changing the answer to something else that looks the same but is not. We had a racehorse like that in Australia called Fine Cotton.
This should be called out and clarified for what it is.
Prickly customers Rudd and Steven, comes with the abuse they get.
Perhaps one of the posts could enlighten us on how many stations are actually used, how many invented, sorry, extrapolated and how many unregistered but real stations and computer unreal composite stations are used to modify the real station data.
What could be good is Steven and Roy Spencer doing an article on how we do not need stations at all. Temperature being entirely dependent on time of day, time of year, elevation, position and cloudiness.
Pick 5 places, plug the details in and voila, no thermometers Mum.
Finally, where appropriate, moderation has a place.
I think the main reason why this is becoming more and more like an echo chamber compared to the “good old days” is that the ammount of WUWT followers has increased a lot. There are still very good comments here and there, but they get a bit “lost in the noise” of the rest. The noise means that there is always someone saying at some point something incredibly stupid, alarmist or skeptic, and then a miriad of people who feel the need to show disagreement. Because replies now appear directly under the original comment, this moves possibly intelligent but unrelated comments further down the list. And given the ammount of comments, yo really need some patience to go through all the unnecessary replies to a stupid comment that didn’t merit a response, to try to find if there is or there isn’t something worth reading somewhere down the list. There might be ways of fighting this without using censure, but it is not easy. It would require giving moderators the power of highlighting in some way the comments that are actually good… but to make this effective, the moderators would need to read all comments. We all know that this is not feasible without involving a LOT more moderators, and knowledgeable ones, than WUWT currently have.
I am one of those non-professional climate consumers who follow the issue with just enough background to read what the experts say and form some impressions and ideas – the general sort of person whose native skepticism the content here might hope to solidify through evidence based common sense and objectivity. I have tried to read the alarmist blogs and can’t make it through a whole entry, because it is so nauseatingly predictable and ideology based. I don’t come here looking for the same.
“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” explains Mlynczak
I doubt it affects the climate. The thermosphere is already in space. The ISS is in the thermosphere. It has the most extreme temperatures on Earth (technically thermosphere is still part of Earth’s atmosphere) from 120 C to minus 160 C in two hours. Earth radiates to space at the tropopause (10 to 17 km altitude)
People love to quote and mis-quote George Santayana, so I’m often referring back to his works. Recently I found this gem on scepticism;
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
The Works of George Santayana p. 65 (This from Wikiquotes, on-line and convenient)
“Fortune favors the prepared mind.” Skepticism can be too harsh.