Happy July 4th, and the United State’s 250th anniversary. WUWT readers. Thanks for your support.
Posting may be thin for the rest of the day.
I was trying to think of some comment along the lines of can we have our colonies back, but as any parent knows you have to let your children make their own choices and mistakes as they grow up. Happy 250th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence Day, 4/7/1776-4/7/2026.
I was reading an article about a copy of the Declaration of Independence that was recently in British archives. From July 12 to July 16, 1776 a few hundred copies of the newly signed declaration were printed off and handed out to be distributed amongst the states so the people could know what had happened.
A few copies were given to ship captains so that they could explain to people at the ports they visited, what the coming war was about. (At least from the American perspective).
One of these copies was on a ship that was captured by the British Navy. Military organizations, doing what they do, the copy was filed along with all the other documents seized. And promptly forgotten.
The document is one of only 11 copies known to have survived from that original printing.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/rare-declaration-independence-found-in-uk-rcna352852
Being in the Commonwealth doesn’t mean they are governed by the U.K. Our monarch is the monarch of the country to the north of you, the monarch of Australia and the monarch of New Zealand, however they are all fully independent of the U.K. with each having their own constitution, senate/parliament and judiciary.
Some members of the commonwealth are independent republics. Some are crown dependencies like the Isle of Man, dependant on the U.K. for their defence but have their own parliament and legislature.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,…”
That was the conception of became The United States of America.
The first Government they formed under The Articles of Confederation was to weak usurp the rights of the individual but also to weak to protect those rights.
The second attempt was under The Constitution. A Government strong enough to protect those rights but also strong enough to usurp them.
It wouldn’t pass until The Bill of Rights was included limiting the powers of the new Government.
We’ve strayed from those original ideals. Some only study those documents to find ways around them.
The USA isn’t perfect (there are people in it), But we’re still the freest nation on Earth.
Happy 250th 4th of July!
“The USA isn’t perfect (there are people in it), But we’re still the freest nation on Earth.”
Lol, sure:
“Multiple analysts have regarded these efforts by the political right as a significant crackdown on political speech and dissent in the United States, and an effort to silence criticism of Kirk and the political ideology he promoted. The response was criticized as a form of cancel culture, government censorship, and of bearing similarities to McCarthyism.[2][3]”
Hope he’s doing well, looking up at us from below!
It just becomes apparent when reading “scientific” subjects that there is massive misinformation with no cautions at all. It is all “facts”. No “we think” or “there are other opinions”.
Mostly, my own experience with measurements have taught me that one must be careful and view with a jaundiced eye how uncertain accuracy estimates can be. Measuring bearing clearance with plastigauge, cylinder wall taper, piston ring gaps, Making measurements on electronics I have either designed and made or manufactured devices I repair gives one experience in how measurements can vary.
What too many people don’t understand is that more and more measurements in an average does not reduce standard deviation, it only makes the histogram more complete. The variance is what is important in making a judgement of an estimate of a measurement .
Some wiki pages are useful, but the information they include can be found elsewhere on the internet, mainly university references for classes that have online lecture notes. I always have CoPilot include references that can be verified. That limits hallucinations.
There are on-line classes also where one can learn about measurements and measurement uncertainty. I like WM Briggs although some of his stuff is way out there. There are numerous sites about ISO 17025 that are useful.
It really is odd how the left continuously flips reality on it’s head.
Just a few posts ago, Eld was whining about how the right was full of hate, now here is declaring how glad he is that someone is dead and that he must be in hell.
It’s also fascinating about the left thinks that it is OK for Biden to try and create a department of Truth. but if a leftists is fired by a private company because of something they said. then the first amendment is a dead letter.
Most people have sufficient self-control to avoid raining on the parade. I guess you are a prime example that the United part is aspirational. From the other side of the world it looks as if the elite, the rich and the ordinary people are very far from united.
Consigning someone to hell is not considered neighbourly anywhere else in the world.
While your link may be true or not ( I highly doubt it, as I had never any relevant problems posting things I want to – as long as Israel ain’t involved; but this censorship isn’t actually American),
your comment is 1000% proof what a bunch of shameless, degenerated, fagots you western leftist hypocrits have become.
You guys have been massively censoring on every single topic of new “values” and realities progressives have created and forced on us.
Doesn’t matter we talk about climate, pronouns, LGBT shit, mass migration, mutilating children, the Hunter Biden laptop or exposing the massive crime epidemic caused by blacks and muslims in the west, their duopol in crimes against blacks and trans.
Even the war narratives like the one in Ukraine.
There was a massive coordinated deplatforming of Alex Jones on major platform, a massive purge of YT channels during the time the election was stolen for Biden(you know the guy who got totally trashed by Sanders, but suddenly started winning for absolutely no reason ) –
YT had to remove the downvotes because all of Bidens official videos got regularly 95% downvotes – an absolut statistiscal impossibility for the US president with the most votes in history.
And on top of that even the deplatforming of a US president.
A censorship on Epstein and the dozen flights of Bill Clinton on Epstein plane
that only ended after many years when you were finally able to connect Trump to Jeffrey.
And after all that time while you’ve been silent you have the impertinence of a sociopath to come up with such irrelevant BS.
Not only you but all three AGW – Zealots (you, username/Griff, Piani) come up with stuff that is absolutely nothing compared to what you are doing.
And Charlie Kirk is the best proof and exposure of why the western left is way worse and more evil than anything else on the planet.
TPUSA rallies are now empty.
Even with JD Vance on stage the events are 80% empty – because huge parts on right stopped buying the lies and shit.
While 99% of you leftie morons eat whatever shit they throw at you – child mutilation,
forced vaccines, perversion after perversion.
We muslims rape the shit out of your children and women(only possible as result of censorship) and totally spit and shit on your values while you keep kissing our ass AND attacking your own for criticising us – and even imprisoning people for exposing the truth – and not a single word from you.
But as soon as you have the tiniest thing to nitpick against your own people – here you are, Mr Hero.
There is no censorship going on in the U.S.
The radical Left can say any crazy thing they want.
What the Left is complaining about is them being criticized for their crazy talk. They don’t like it, but there is no constitutional right protecting one from criticism.
The Left doesn’t get to define reality. There are other opinions.
There is also no constitutional right to be employed. If you offend your employer, unemployment quickly follows and no constitutional principles are involved.
As another point of hypocrisy, the left is quick to demand the firing or de-platforming of anyone the disagree with, but they are quick to claim that the first amendment has been violated when someone they agree with gets canned.
Blah, blah, blah – slavery. The mindless mantra of progressive defamers.
And then, ‘positive freedom = “economic security for everyone.”‘
BS. Freedom is the open opportunity to provide for oneself. That is the natural state of freedom from which the American concept grew.
Ironically, economic security for everyone is aka slavery because dependence on government stipends puts one into government thrall. Disobey? No stipend. Complain, reduced stipend. Don’t take that mRNA gene product? No stipend, and no use of that government-paid public transport.
Economic security for everyone, in other words, is CCP China. The slave-state par excellence.
It’s also aka theft of other people’s money, because, after all, there’s no such thing as government money. It’s always citizenry money obtained by taxes. Unless, of course. Trump figures out a way to use tariffs to finance the budget. Given reform and retaining the huge moneys lost to fraud, a tariff budget may ultimately be possible.
Isn’t it wonderful, though, how progressives defame the Founders who owned slaves, and then insist upon enslaving the entire population as the holy alternative.
Simultaneously demagogues and mindless – a fatal combination.
Yes, but the “democratic socialist” promise that their version of slavery will be much more benevolent because they are just such good and caring people. For example, they’ll provide everyone with FREE Healthcare, FREE child care, FREE transportation, FREE housing and a FREE Lunch. Of course someone will have to pay for all this FREE stuff. That will of course be the Rich – at least until the rich are made poor.
A thought to consider: The Obama library had its opening ceremony and they whined about it having been built on “stolen land”. It was built on landfill from the wreckage of the Chicago fire in 1871. So, stolen maybe from the dead and dispossessed from the fire? Not from any previous inhabitant-it was lakebed…or from maybe the fish?
Good points all.
The ‘stolen lands’ argument fails because the pre-Columbian inhabitants had no notion of property ownership.
Tribes occupied land so long as they could hold it. Tribes were regularly dispossessed by war. Occasionally entire tribes were obliterated. The pre-Columbian groups were all living on ‘stolen lands.’
The settlers who came to North America, at worst, exhibited the same morals about land as the people who occupied it before the settlers arrived.
Good points to you, too. Another interesting thought for your morning breakfast–I had an Anthropology Prof. discuss American settlers’ migration patterns and interactions with the indigenous peoples for 400 years or so. Seems there were some -as he put it-very active woodpiles in those days. So, his bottom line was that any American, white, black, brown or polka-dotted whose family had been in the country for 2 generations or more carried tribal “blood”…seems Americans are quite the lively bunch.
Yeah, ditto. I have a French ancestor buried in what is now Joliet, IL-she had some French-Canadian tribal blood in her, and that side of the family also has Iroquois, and Mohawk-that side has been here a long time. The other side has Cherokee. You have me wondering about my French ancestor-Joliet was a fur center back then…I’ll never know, I guess, but it’s a procative thought, Like I said, busy wood piles. Fascinating, isn’t it?
There weren’t any cultures in the world at the time that did not permit slavery. The very people they lionize permitted slavery. The native Americans practiced it. The Africans not only practiced it, they went out and caught other Africans that they then sold to the Europeans. Muslim countries were not only supportive of slavery, if some rumors are to believed, they haven’t completely stopped the practice even today.
PS: The native Americans had been stealing the land from each other ever since the first ones stepped foot on this continent, some 20,000 years ago.
The Souix stole land from the Kiowa. The Kiowa stole land from the Comanche. The Comanche stole land from the Apache. On and on. They warred with each other. They stole from each other. They captured slaves from other tribes.
They were tribal hunter-gatherers. Their societies were normal for this type of living and were similar on most continents. The fact that Europeans had a different type of society that occupied land and built towns and cities does not make them automatically the bad guy. History is replete with this occurring. Romans, Persions, Egyptians, etc. The fact that European society overcame a hunter gatherer society is life. Life isn’t fair, sorry for those who think otherwise..
The founding fathers did not say ths path was the perfect union, they promised this path would lead to a more perfect union.
If you want a more perfect union, then it is up to you to look to the future instead of dwelling in the past. If you deny that the U.S. has not not tried to rectifiy many of the sins of the past, then you are simply a rabble-rouser with no goal for the future.
I would remind you that many of the racial inequities were the result of the Democratic Party. In many ways that has never changed. Stealing money from the productive is dooming that class of people to slavery. In other words, involuntary servitude for the benefit of others. Remember the productive are not just one race or demographic group.
As always, only Europeans are to be judged by modern standards. Africans capturing and selling other Africans into slavery. No big deal. It was their culture.
Europeans buying those who had been captured. The greatest evil in the world an utterly unforgivable act, thousands of generations into the future.
Do you disagree with the ideal?
If you don’t, what country’s Government is closer to governing by at ideal?
The USA has a long way to go to reach it. We probably never will. But which county is closer to that ideal? Name it and move there.
(We were a lot closer, race relations wise plus, before Obama.)
Is your ancestry Japanese? Mine (as far I know) is Irish and Germany.
But the US is supposed to be a “melting pot”.
Here in the US, who isn’t proclaimed “Irish for a day” on Saint Patrick’s Day”?
PS An Irish friend of mine could never figure out why people in made US such a big deal of “Saint Patrick’s Day”. It’s not a big deal in Ireland. I didn’t have an answer then. Now I’d say, “it’s a day we celebrate and come together.” (And pee green the next day?)?
Despite Thomas Jefferson’s powerful, stirring words, one has to be a bit careful in interpreting his phrase “created equal” . . . it really was directed philosophically to “equality” in terms of all individuals being bestowed at birth with natural, God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Obviously, “all men” (inclusive of women and all races) are really NOT created equal in terms of physical strength, physical agility, mental and sensory capacities, resistance to various birth defects and susceptibilities to various diseases (including those originating in DNA-defects), and given societal racial/gender prejudice at time-of birth, all changing over the course of human history amongst different nations.
Heck, even the Constitution of the United States at the time of “The Three-Fifths Compromise”, reached at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, dictated that enslaved persons would be counted as 3/5 (60%) of a free person for the purpose of taxation and determining congressional representation. Sad, but true.
And, despite penning the above-mentioned famous phrase In the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson is well-known in history a being a slave owner during his life from 1764 until his death on July 4, 1826. He assumed full control of his inherited estate at age 21 and held over 600 enslaved people throughout his lifetime.
Nonetheless, although the US as a nation does not have a “perfect record” in treating humans, I believe it is fair to say it is better than most in this regard.
The 3/5ths compromise only encompassed counting individuals in the census for determining of congressional representation.
The slave owning states wanted slaves to be counted fully, the free states did not want them counted at all.
There are some who want to believe that the 3/5ths compromise covered all blacks. It did not. Emancipated blacks and their descendants were fully counted.
“The 3/5ths compromise was just that a compromise between men. It was needed to get all to agree to the constitution.”
Well, now you’re impugning the reputation of some signers of the US Constitution by claiming those individuals put their opinions above “the law and God”.
Time to name names, if you can.
I guess that the “truths” referenced in the second paragraph of the US Declaration of Independence, as penned by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin, were not, if fact, all that “self-evident” eleven years later. /sarc
And no, I am very glad that the United States of America was formed under the articles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, although we’re still not done wrestling with the disagreements over that second document.
If you want to get a good insight into the character of American troops, and the American people, you should read the citations of America’s Medal of Honor winners and their actions in defense of the United States.
I read a book when I was about 10-years-old. It was about Medal of Honor winners.
After reading the book, They were so inspiring, I wanted to be just like them.
LOTS of American troops take action during battle worthy of a Congresional Medal of Honor, but only a few get the award, but their fellow troops know what they did, award or not.
God Bless the troops! They are the ones keeping us in the game.
“I read a book when I was about 10-years-old. It was about Medal of Honor winners.”
Was that by chance a Landmark book by Random House published in 1965 titled “Medal of Honor Heroes” by Colonel Red Reeder?
I have that book. I haven’t read it since I was a kid. I’m 72. Maybe it’s time to read it again!
PS You’re right. Many acts of bravery were never witnessed or acknowledged. Same goes for for acts of cowardice.
I think of the reporting on 9/11. They weren’t military but, how many people held a door open on those stairwells for other people while some shoved people out of the way to get through. We’ll never know. Yet the media and others labeled them all “heroes”.
Recognized or not, I’m thankful we have and have had real heroes out there even if we never know their names.
I’ve read stories about bravery amongst soldiers of all nations.
Most soldiers will go incredible lengths to protect their brothers in arms.
One of the way to judge militaries in general, is how the officers treat soldiers who abuse civilians.
Japanese and German militaries not only did not punish such abuse, in many cases they actively approved of and even abetted such abuse.
On the other hand, the US army hung soldiers who were convicted of rape during WWII were hung.
Happy 250th Birthday, happy Independence Day!
An occasion for me to celebrate the historical closeness and long-standing friendship between the United States of America and France.
Dear friends, I am truly glad that there is something of my country in yours, and of yours in mine.
Long live the strength of the spirit and the intelligence of the heart!
My Dad was in an accelerated med school program, in prep for the invasion of Japan. We dropped the bombs and he went to the Philippines. He wanted to take Mom there after he retired.
I guess there aren’t many of us left whose parents lived through or served during those days.
PS I don’t know the details of how he met and befriended him, but, I got my first set of glasses from one of his friends who survived “The Bataan Death March”. My Mom’s uncle was one Patton’s interpreters. One of my uncles was in the 82nd airborne. The other served in Burma (Ho Chi Min was one of his neighbors). I’ve met a veteran of Iwo Jima, … I was too young to ask them questions about WW2, but, I’m still glad I knew them.
PPS I worked with another WW2 vet. He was in an elite Italian unit. Fought at Stalingrad. After Italy surrendered, the Germans reached his unit before the Allies did. They were ordered to not surrender to the Germans. They fought.
Long story short, After a couple of attempted POW camp escapes, he ended up in Dachau.
Please don’t take that as trying to “one up” you. Your comment just got me to thinking about all I could have learned from those who where “there” but I was to young/ignorant to ask them.
Didn’t take it as a “one up”. Like you, I had family in all the theaters-my Dad as a medic, one Uncle at the Anzio bloodbath as a -well-a sniper is pretty close I guess, and another Uncle flew in Burma. My Mom worked in a torpedo plant …in short we all had family in the war, and all my childhood friends had similar stories about family. They-all the Vets-are gone now and the new generations know nothing. Mores the pity, that, all the knowledge gone. And your comments got me to thinking also…I also was too young/ignorant to ask. They didn’t volunteer stories -I got one story-one!-from each about the horrors. I worry about what’s to come because the new generations know nothing, and have been tought nothing.
I know it was hard for him…I know because my Dad had some very ugly experiences (my Mom told me, not him) and my 2 uncles had terrible PTSD. The one in Burma ultimately drank himself to death, the other dealt with it, but barely. My Dad was pulled off the line and sent to the newly liberated Buchenwald death camp to try and save what prisoners could be helped. That was the only thing he ever spoke of about the war-as a lesson for me to learn about governments, and then only once. He absolutely despised the powers that a gov. could use against its people…but he loved his country even if he distrusted the Gov.
My mothers dad lost part of a lung to TB so he wasn’t medically qualified to serve. He was a machinist and from what I was told, worked on the team that designed the equipment to mass produce the Swedish designed Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft cannon.
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/4/0/40mm_45_Bofors_AA_gun.htm
My other grandfather was paralyzed by polio during the 1930’s. He served as a Methodist pastor for most of his life.
My dad was a doctor at an army hospital in Alabama I believe during the Vietnam war.
Gorge, reading your post brought the memory of this old war song back to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bless_%27Em_All
Great Great grandpa was wounded during the American Civil War at Savage’s Station, survived and came out west for the Alaska gold rush. Didn’t hit it big, but left our family in Washington state. Grandpa was a cemetery caretaker and was too old for WWII, dad entered the Air Force and served in Korea and Viet Nam. I graduated high school 50 years ago thus year, went to work the last year on the Trans-Alaska pipeline, almost literally walking out of the Air Force recruiting offices onto an aircraft bound for Anchorage. Dad had a few good war stories even though he was enlisted and worked maintenance for the Tactical Air Command, who were ‘in the rear with the gear’.
Washington DC’s Fourth of July parade canceled due to soaring temperature
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/washington-dc-fourth-of-july-parade-canceled-extreme-heat
Happy 4th of July!
For my present little spot on the globe (Columbus, Ohio) for today, record high was 104*F in 1911. The record low was 47*F in 1968.
PS The all time recorded high ever was 106*F on little later date in 1934. That whole week in July, except for one day in the late late 1800’s, set record highs in that same year.
Too many coal fired steam engines?
OMG – It’s hot in DC in July. This never happened before we had automobiles and electricity that used fossil fuels. The official records must surely show summer temperatures never got above 80 degrees F in preindustrial times. All those myths about hot summers back in the 30’s are just climate change denier propaganda, right?
/sarc/
“All those myths about hot summers back in the 30’s are just climate change denier propaganda, right?
/sarc/”
Yes:
Source:
Even assuming Tony Heller’s chart is correct, average and maximum temperatures have trended upward.
As the entire temperature distribution shifts to warmer values, days exceeding thresholds like 95°F and 100°F naturally become more frequent.
I can agree with skeptics that the Dust Bowl was an extraordinary, horrific event.
If the background climate continues warming, there’s no physical reason to expect those historical thresholds to remain upper bounds indefinitely.
What grim implications…
Thanks for showing the unbastardized Virginia temperature record.
As is obvious, the Data Mannipulators have been busy, going so far as to bastardize regional temperature records.
But, unfortunately for the Climate Liars, we have the original, unbastardized versions to demonstrate they are lying about the temperatures.
±1.5 C thereabouts.
That graphic is physically meaningless. And NOAA is run by methodological hacks.
If Virginia’s summer mean really had an uncertainty of +/-1.5 °C, I wouldn’t expect North Carolina’s independently compiled statewide summer temperatures to closely track Virginia’s for more than a century:
The two datasets come from different station networks yet show remarkably consistent year to year variability. That doesn’t imply zero uncertainty, but it certainly makes an uncertainty of ±1.5 °C implausible.
“AI Overview
The U.S. “warming hole” is a persistent climate anomaly where the central and eastern United States experienced a cooling or delayed warming trend while global temperatures rose rapidly. Centered mainly in the Midwest and Southeast, this region is heavily influenced by large-scale reforestation and historical air pollution. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The anomalous cooling trend, which emerged sharply in the late 1950s, is attributed to two main factors: [1]
IOW: One size does not fit all.
I continually say here that it is not one dimentional.
CO2 or nothing.
There are regional drivers/feedbacks at play.
https://phys.org/news/2012-04-hole-climate-eastern-states.html
“This map illustrates the observed change in surface air temperature between 1930 and 1990. Observations are from the NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. Credit: Image courtesy of Eric Leibensperger”
You’re right. The uncertainty I mentioned was global, and included the historical SST uncertainty.
Historical land surface measurement uncertainties average about ±0.5 C. The measurement error is deterministic, not random. Driven by the same forces as determine air temperature.
The measurement errors going into the uncertainties will likely correlate over the areal range of given weather systems, the way the temperatures themselves do.
Nevertheless, the temperature anomalies are plotted without uncertainty bounds. We’ve no idea of their accuracy.
As an aside, there’s no question the climate is warming. The central question is whether GHG emissions are the driver. The answer to that question is far from being in hand.
There are two sources of uncertainty when trying to calculate an average temperature for a large area.
The first is the direct measurement error. This includes the accuracy of the instrument and it’s immediate surroundings. The second involves the process of reading.
With the old mercury/alcohol sensors, unless your eyes were perfectly level with the height of the mercury/alcohol in the tube, you can introduce an offset (parallax) to the reading. Then there is the issue that old records were only recorded to the nearest degree. That last fact alone accounts for the 0.5C error in all such records. Any other errors are on top of that.
That deals with the accuracy of any individual reading. And no, taking thousands of different readings at thousands of different locations, does not improve this error.
The second source of uncertainty comes from trying to convert individual readings into an average for an area.
Despite the claims of some, this can be done, but you have to account for the density of readings. With more sensors, the uncertainty goes down. With fewer sensors, the uncertainty goes up.
If it were possible to measure every molecule in a volume at the same time, then this uncertainty would go to zero.
The problem with the historical record is that prior to the satellite era, there were only a few hundred sensors trying to measure the entire planet. And worse, most of them were clustered in Europe and the east coast of N. America. (U.S. and southern Canada) Outside those areas, there were small clusters on the west coast of N. America and in the Pacific coastal region of Asia.
For the entire southern hemisphere there was less than a dozen locations with sensors.
All of the above were land based. Readings over the oceans are even more problematic.
Almost all of the sensor readings that we have were from ships (there were a few stations on islands, if the island is small enough, it is a good analog for ocean air temperatures). Three problems with ship borne air temperature measurements are, the first is location of the ship at the time the measurement is being made. The second is the same as the problems taking readings from land based equipment, with a couple of additions. The ocean environment is rough on equipment, making it harder to keep your sensor properly calibrated and the rolling motion of the ship making it harder to keep you eye eve with the thermometer while taking the reading.
The first is helped with improved navigation. In early days, when navigation had to be done by hand, navigational fixes would be taken a couple of times per day. Locations between these readings were estimates. As technology progressed, readings became more automated so more readings could be taken and eventually with satellite navigation, readings could be more or less continuous.
A properly surveyed station, it’s location on the planet could be identified within a few feet.
The location of a ship at sea depends on the accuracy of the navigational equipment and how well trained the person taking the reading is. This also improved over time.
Like land based measurements, ship based measurements are also not evenly distributed, they are concentrated in the major shipping lanes, which is where most of the ships can be found.
I’m talking air temperature here, not sea water temperatures, which is a separate discussion with it’s own set of problems.
Because of these issues, prior to the satellite era, the belief that we could know the temperature of the entire planet to within a few tenths of a degree is delusional at best.
The reality is we might know the temperature of Europe and the north American New England and adjacent portions of Canada to within say 1 degree, (instrument + reading + distribution errors) for the planet as a whole, knowing the temperature of the whole planet within 5C is wildly optimistic.
“The measurement errors going into the uncertainties will likely correlate over the areal range of given weather systems, the way the temperatures themselves do.”
That hypothesis is testable. If large, spatially correlated measurement errors dominate the NOAA statewide series, then independent high quality reference measurements should show systematic disagreement with it.
I compared the Virginia statewide monthly temperature anomalies with the USCRN station at Charlottesville:
Again, this doesn’t imply the statewide record is completely free of uncertainty, nor that one station should exactly match the state average. It does, however, provide independent evidence that the statewide record is accurately capturing the regional temperature signal.
The only way to determine uncertainty is to co-locate the station sensor with a high-accuracy reference sensor.
Correlated errors mean the rises and falls of the error component will be of similar sign and magnitude over a wide area.
Even the USCRN network has problems because the wiring causes self-heating errors, putting about ±0.2-0.3C uncertainty in the measurements.
Addendum: Thank-you for providing your sources. Your comparison is strictly USCRN with USCRN – both for Charlottesville and for Virginia. It won’t exhibit the uncertainty in the historical record.
The historical climate record used naturally ventilated CRS thermometers before 1980 and MMTS sensors 1980-2003 (single dates assuming instantaneous replacements). The naturally ventilated shelters were the major source of the measurement errors and the uncertainty in the record.
“Correlated errors mean the rises and falls of the error component will be of similar sign and magnitude over a wide area.”
USCRN was intentionally designed differently from the historical observing network.
So if historical CRS shelters have a systematic warm bias due to solar radiation, your correlation argument may apply among other CRS stations in the region, but it shouldn’t extend to USCRN because the instrumentation and measurement system are fundamentally different.
That’s why the comparison is informative. The close agreement suggests the statewide product is capturing the underlying regional temperature signal well. The alternative would be that two fundamentally different observing systems have nearly identical time-varying biases that evolve together month after month.
“Addendum: Thank-you for providing your sources. Your comparison is strictly USCRN with USCRN – both for Charlottesville and for Virginia.”
No, the comparison isn’t USCRN versus USCRN.
It’s NOAA Climate at a Glance’s Virginia statewide average versus the Charlottesville USCRN station. I linked the Climate at a Glance data source upthread, so I didn’t repeat it in my 11:22 AM comment because I assumed it would be redundant.
The former is a state average calculated from many observations across VA. The latter is only one station.
When you wrote “source” in your reply to me, with two URLs, I assumed they were separate source links to the Charlottesville and Virginia data.
In any case, take a look at Leeper, et al. 2015. They did temperature measurement comparisons with co-located (40-400 m) pairs of USCRN and COOP stations. COOP stations are naturally ventilated.
The COOP sites typically produced excessively warm temps during the day, and overly cool temps at night.
Quoting from p. 708: “USCRN daily maximum and minimum temperatures on average differed from neighboring COOP stations by −0.48° and +0.36°C, respectively. … The magnitude of temperature differences were on average larger for stations operating LiG systems, with mean maximum (minimum) temperature differences of −0.66°C (+0.48°C), compared to −0.39°C (+0.31°C) differences for the MMTS system.”
That is, the Virginia COOP stations should have produced ~0.4-0.5 C errors relative the Charlottesville USCRN sensor, over the entire length of the series. The uncertainty bound about the Virginia series should be of order ±0.6 C.
The fact that your two temperature anomaly series are so close implies that the errors that we know must be present in the Virginia COOP data, and that should have been visible in the anomalies, have been adjusted out during homogenization.
Whatever the process was, it clearly disappeared the error, making the Virginia/Charlottesville comparison unreliable.
“The fact that your two temperature anomaly series are so close implies that the errors that we know must be present in the Virginia COOP data, and that should have been visible in the anomalies, have been adjusted out during homogenization.
Whatever the process was, it clearly disappeared the error, making the Virginia/Charlottesville comparison unreliable.”
Why would that make the comparison unreliable?
The primary purpose of homogenization is to remove documented non-climatic influences from the temperature record.
If anything, the close agreement makes the comparison more informative, because it provides an independent check on how well the homogenized statewide product captures the underlying regional climate signal.
There’s no way to extract systematic measurement error from air temperature readings. It’s of unknown sign and unknown magnitude.
Data with systematic measurement error can behave just like good data. It passes all the comparative statistical tests.
The COOP data had that error and should show that error. The fact that somehow the error was processed out makes the data set very suspect.
You can believe it as you like. But, objectively, the COOP time series does not support your case.
“There’s no way to extract systematic measurement error from air temperature readings.”
The Leeper et al. paper you cited estimates systematic measurement differences by comparing co located COOP and USCRN stations.
So while systematic error can’t be identified from a single temperature record in isolation, it can be estimated through comparison with an independent reference network.
“The COOP data had that error and should show that error. The fact that somehow the error was processed out makes the data set very suspect.”
Why assume something suspicious is happening when homogenization is doing exactly what it’s intended to do?
If NOAA had simply taken the raw COOP data and made the discrepancies disappear without a documented methodology, that may warrant skepticism.
But that’s not what happened.
The homogenization procedures are publicly documented and have been extensively tested and validated in the literature.
The Leeper et al., calibration experiment provides an uncertainty estimate for COOP station air temperature measurements. That’s it.
Their experiment provides no number that can be subtracted from arbitrary COOP station measurements to remove the systematic error and make them accurate.
The experiment also shows that the naturally ventilated COOP station shields produce erroneous air temperature measurements. Those errors would show present in any de novo comparison of an independent COOP temperature series with an analogous USCRN series.
“Why assume something suspicious is happening when homogenization is doing exactly what it’s intended to do?”
Homogenization looks for urban heat effects, site moves, instrumental changes, and the like. It makes correlation analyses with nearby stations, looking for discontinuities.
Homogenization ignores measurement errors. The method includes the specific assumption that all measurement error is random (it’s not) and averages away (it doesn’t).
Homogenization methods cannot detect or remove the measurement errors of unknown sign and magnitude caused by naturally ventilated sensors.
COOP station data with systematic measurement errors will not lose correlation with the data of nearby stations – that also have similar errors.
Erroneous COOP station data will also correlate well with the data of nearby USCRN stations, despite that the magnitudes will be wrong.
The fact that the COOP series matches the USCRN series shows either that summation of all the individual systematic measurement errors in the COOP data adventitiously canceled to zero (very unlikely), or that the COOP series was adjusted somehow to make the match.
How ever the latter adjustment may have been done, it was not done using the standard homogenization methods.
“Homogenization ignores measurement errors. The method includes the specific assumption that all measurement error is random (it’s not) and averages away (it doesn’t).”
How so? The algorithms are built around the idea that systematic discontinuities exist and should be detected.
“COOP station data with systematic measurement errors will not lose correlation with the data of nearby stations – that also have similar errors.”
If the error is a constant offset, then it largely disappears when anomalies are calculated. Only biases that change over time would substantially affect the anomaly series. So I’m not seeing the problem.
Socialists are generally either sad or angry at the world.
Socialism is a ideology based on jealousy. Jealousy that other people have stuff that you want, but don’t have.
For some people, merely getting the stuff they want is enough to make them happy. For others, only punishing those who had more is enough to sake their anger.
Happy 4th of July to all on the 250th anniversary of the greatest country on earth.
Condolences to citizens of Buffalo for the cancelation of the fireworks and the celebration of Somalia’s independence which has turned that country into an Al-Shabab terrorist hell-hole. Not sure way Somali’s who managed to get to the US legally or not would want to celebrate Somalia and disparage our country. I think it would be appropriate to help them to return to their former homes they seem to love so much. They obviously don’t appreciate all that this country stands for. All I’d ask is that we recover all the taxpayer money stolen before deporting them.
Congratulations, USA, on a very notable achievement. As Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, and to keep it going longer than most authoritarian empires is a great achievement. Oh yes, maybe it’s something to do with Churchill’s “except for all the others …”. Anyway, I applaud the achievement, I applaud Donald Trump and the Republicans for rescuing the USA from the brink of authoritarian destruction, and I applaud the Democrats for now being the only source (well, almost) of division in American society. Division is crucial for democracy – as George Patton said, if everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. One last thing: have you Americans got your language up to date yet?
Then why not bring it up to WUWT?
“The world continues to rapidly warm because of human activities”
It is astounding to me how many feel the need to be so negative on a simple and positive post like this.
On another note: Did anyone catch Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA” at the National Mall?
The man who wrote that song performing there for the 250th Independence Day – I can’t begin to imagine how he must have felt.
