Real Climate Science

Anthony Watts has shown that NOAA temperature anomalies are off by an order of magnitude from legitimate data, largely due to UHI.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/watts-et-al-station-siting-7-29-12.ppt

h/t to John Silver

Last night I was riding my bike over to the gym about 10 PM, and noticed what I always do. Temperatures in open space are much cooler than temperatures near asphalt. As soon as I leave open space and enter a neighborhood, or particularly a parking lot – the temperature goes up 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit. Most UHI effects are due to proximity to asphalt and brick. Even a small town can suffer significant UHI effects.

Boulder and Fort Collins, Colorado are very similar cities. They are college towns close to each other, at the same elevation, about the same size, and both situated up against the foothills of the Front Range.

But there are a couple of big differences. Fort Collins is growing rapidly, and its temperature station is poorly sited in a parking lot in the center of the city. As a result, Fort Collins has a serious UHI problem, and Boulder doesn’t.

Fort Collins has warmed four degrees since 1950, while Boulder has cooled. None of the standard techniques for UHI estimation would have detected this huge discrepancy, and if data from one station was filled in to replace missing data from the other one, the result would be grossly incorrect.

Random number generators form the basis of much of science and engineering.

For example, you can’t design a nuclear weapon by modeling the behavior of each particle. Rather, they use very sophisticated random number generators to model the average behavior of the particles.

My approach to calculating temperatures from large data sets uses the same principle – I assume that the errors in the data set are distributed randomly and thus do not bias the absolute temperature or trend. That is the normal way which scientists deal with large data sets which have no systematic bias.

Zeke apparently can’t comprehend this, and believes that absolute temperatures can’t be calculated with data sets which have missing data.  His approach is to hide the missing data by calculating anomalies for each month. In doing this, he loses vast amounts of important information – like what I have been uncovering.

Zeke and Mosher think I should the same grossly flawed methodology which they use, and thus come up with the same wrong numbers which they do.

If there is a systematic human bias behind the post-1990 station data loss, their approach will not find it – and will in fact cover it up.

Earlier I showed that the USHCN stations which are losing data since 1990, were much cooler stations than the ones which aren’t losing data. NOAA is replacing cold station data with warm station data.

So now lets look at what has happened since 1990, when the station data started disappearing. The stations with complete data are warming much faster than the ones which are losing data.

There are two ways this could be interpreted.

1. They are replacing missing cold temperatures with warm ones, and creating a fake warming trend.
2. The stations losing data are by some spectacular statistical fluke selectively losing warm data.  That gross impossibility is the fundamental assumption behind the FILNET adjustment.

I did an experiment (below) to see what happens to the absolute temperature if you randomly remove 30% of the months. Not surprisingly, it has very little effect on the trend, which is what I was trying to explain to Zeke.

This leaves the only real possibility – NOAA is losing cold station data, and doing a large warming adjustment when they should be doing a large cooling adjustment.

Bottom line is that USHCN data alterations are either fraudulent – or just plain stupid. Take your pick.

GISS shows about 0.1 C cooling in the Northern Hemisphere from 1950 to 1980, and about 0.2 C warming in the Southern Hemisphere during that time. It is simply not credible that the hemispheres could move opposite each other for 30 years. They both are driven primarily by sea surface temperatures, and warm and cool in phase with each other.

Looking at satellite data, there is almost perfect correlation between the trends in the two hemispheres. The northern hemisphere swings are larger, but they both swing in the same direction.

Police are generally focused on ticketing generally harmless speeders, while completely ignoring dangerous driving like tailgating and weaving through traffic.  Last week I had a semi driving no more than 10 feet behind me on a freeway. I saw about five cars pulled over for speeding on that half hour trip.

Actor and comedian Tracy Morgan was critically injured in a six-vehicle accident Saturday morning that left at least one person dead, police said.

Two tractor-trailers were involved in the crash, and one of them may have rear-ended the limo bus

Tracy Morgan critically injured in car accident | Fox News

The Guardian says that rising sea levels due to global warming are washing away bodies in the Marshall Islands.

Rising seas wash Japanese war dead from Marshall Islands graves | World news | theguardian.com

Sea level in the Marshall Islands is almost exactly the same as it was in 1997. As usual, the Guardian fails to do any fact checking.

http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/1838.php

The current Republican leadership would rather accept dictatorship than suffer through an unpleasant discussion with Barack Obama.

The purpose of gun control is to make sure that only government and other gang members are able to defend themselves.

Yesterday I was walking my dogs on two long leashes, and got very annoyed by a bicyclist. Today I was riding my bicycle and got very annoyed by someone walking their two dogs on long leashes.