Anthony Watts at AGU2015 shows that hot air rises off concrete (it does affect thermometers)

Who would have thought that temperature stations near concrete are warming faster than those over grass?

Anthony Watts carefully analyzed all 1,218 surface stations in the USA and  managed to find 410 good ones in the last 35 years (1979 onwards) — which is an achievement in itself.  But the real point of his paper is to see if the best stations show less warming than the rest. (The good ones are the ones that are not near artificial heat sources, and haven’t been moved around). Watts finds (again) that  the NOAA homogenisation practice appears to be adjusting the good stations up to the bad ones.

About a third of the US recorded warming trend in the last 35 years may have just disappeared…

Watts presents it today at the AGU 2015 conference.

Congratulations to Anthony Watts for what must have been a mammoth amount of work. The irony is that the conclusion — that hot air radiates or rises off concrete, asphalt, and from bricks affects thermometers is banal, yet so few can demonstrate it across such a big network. We have to wonder why no one else was looking… Maybe the Earth’s climate doesn’t matter that much to NOAA? – Jo

_______________________

 The Press Release

NEW STUDY OF NOAA’S U.S. CLIMATE NETWORK SHOWS A LOWER 30-YEAR TEMPERATURE TREND WHEN HIGH QUALITY TEMPERATURE STATIONS UNPERTURBED BY URBANIZATION ARE CONSIDERED

Anthony Watts, US temperatures, adjustments.

Figure 1 – Comparisons of 30 year trend for compliant Class 1,2 USHCN stations to non-compliant, Class 3,4,5 USHCN stations to NOAA final adjusted V2.5 USHCN data in the Continental United States
December 17th, 2015

SAN FRANCISO, CA – A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

Using NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network, which comprises 1218 weather stations in the CONUS, the researchers were able to identify a 410 station subset of “unperturbed” stations that have not been moved, had equipment changes, or changes in time of observations, and thus require no “adjustments” to their temperature record to account for these problems. The study focuses on finding trend differences between well sited and poorly sited weather stations, based on a WMO approved metric Leroy (2010)1 for classification and assessment of the quality of the measurements based on proximity to artificial heat sources and heat sinks which affect temperature measurement. An example is shown in Figure 2 below, showing the NOAA USHCN temperature sensor for Ardmore, OK.

 

 

Figure 2 – USHCN Temperature sensor located on street corner in Ardmore, OK in full viewshed of multiple heatsinks. Following up on a paper published by the authors in 2010, Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S.  Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends2 which concluded:

Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends …this new study is presented at AGU session A43G-0396 on Thursday Dec. 17th at 13:40PST and is titled Comparison of Temperature Trends Using an Unperturbed Subset of The U.S. Historical Climatology Network

A 410-station subset of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (version 2.5) stations is identified that experienced no changes in time of observation or station moves during the 1979-2008 period. These stations are classified based on proximity to artificial surfaces, buildings, and other such objects with unnatural thermal mass using guidelines established by Leroy (2010)1 . The United States temperature trends estimated from the relatively few stations in the classes with minimal artificial impact are found to be collectively about 2/3 as large as US trends estimated in the classes with greater expected artificial impact. The trend differences are largest for minimum temperatures and are statistically significant even at the regional scale and across different types of instrumentation and degrees of urbanization. The homogeneity adjustments applied by the National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly the National Climatic Data Center) greatly reduce those differences but produce trends that are more consistent with the stations with greater expected artificial impact. Trend differences are not found during the 1999- 2008 subperiod of relatively stable temperatures, suggesting that the observed differences are caused by a physical mechanism that is directly or indirectly caused by changing temperatures.

Key findings:

  1. Comprehensive and detailed evaluation of station metadata, on-site station photography, satellite and aerial imaging, street level Google Earth imagery, and curator interviews have yielded a well-distributed 410 station subset of the 1218 station USHCN network that is unperturbed by Time of Observation changes, station moves, or rating changes, and a complete or mostly complete 30-year dataset. It must be emphasized that the perturbed stations dropped from the USHCN set show significantly lower trends than those retained in the sample, both for well and poorly sited station sets.
  2. Bias at the microsite level (the immediate environment of the sensor) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend. Well sited stations show significantly less warming from 1979 – 2008. These differences are significant in Tmean, and most pronounced in the minimum temperature data (Tmin). (Figure 3 and Table 1)
  3. Equipment bias (CRS v. MMTS stations) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend when CRS stations are compared with MMTS stations. MMTS stations show significantly less warming than CRS stations from 1979 – 2008. (Table 1) These differences are significant in Tmean (even after upward adjustment for MMTS conversion) and most pronounced in the maximum temperature data (Tmax).
  4. The 30-year Tmean temperature trend of unperturbed, well sited stations is significantly lower than the Tmean temperature trend of NOAA/NCDC official adjusted homogenized surface temperature record for all 1218 USHCN stations.
  5. We believe the NOAA/NCDC homogenization adjustment causes well sited stations to be adjusted upwards to match the trends of poorly sited stations.
  6. The data suggests that the divergence between well and poorly sited stations is gradual, not a result of spurious step change due to poor metadata.

The study is authored by Anthony Watts and Evan Jones of surfacestations.org , John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M , John R. Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and represents years of work in studying the quality of the temperature measurement system of the United States.

Lead author Anthony Watts said of the study:

“The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts. This study demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend. It suggests that the trend for U.S. temperature will need to be corrected.” He added: “We also see evidence of this same sort of siting problem around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global temperature record”.

The full AGU presentation can be downloaded here: https://goo.gl/7NcvT2

Figure 3 – Comparisons of well sited (compliant Class 1&2) USHCN stations to poorly sited USHCN stations (non-compliant, Classes 3,4,&5) by CONUS and region to official NOAA adjusted USHCN data (V2.5) for the entire (compliant and non-compliant) USHCN dataset.

[1] Leroy, M. (2010): Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land, Climate, and Upper-air Observations JMA/WMO Workshop on Quality Management in Surface, Tokyo, Japan, 27-30 July 2010
[2] Fall et al. (2010) Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/r-367.pdf

9.2 out of 10 based on 103 ratings

150 comments to Anthony Watts at AGU2015 shows that hot air rises off concrete (it does affect thermometers)

  • #

    Ben Franklin would have loved what’s come to be called citizen science nowadays. ie Theory playing catch up with data, which appears to be a whole brand new concept in the area of climate science.

    Pointman

    ps. Don’t forget to visit my gaff and vote for CPotY. Speak up or forever hold your piece …

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    George McFly......I'm your density

    Well done Anthony et al

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    • #

      Well done Anthony. Airports must be the worst places for UHI.

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        Ted O'Brien

        Airports were chosen because they were expected to remain open space. Even with the visible problems, that is still a valid concept.

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          AndyG55

          Then why the heck are so many temperature stations so darn close to the runway.

          They are set up for aviation purposes… NOT Weather. !!

          It is just laziness on behalf of the climate worriers… or intent.. who knows which. !!

          Maybe once the current low solar output starts to bite, they will set up temperature stations away from the runways.

          That way they can push the next GLOBAL COOLING agenda.

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            @AndyG 6:40pmFor aviation purposes, I think you are absolutely right air temps and pressures are very important, our airport has shut down few times because the air was to thin for take-off of large planes. the situation does rarely happen and does not last long but you can see the importance of that. But I support AW’s study using “clean” sites.

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            Duster

            I don’t about Australia, but in the US, weather has always been in the charge of the Department of Commerce. Back in the days of hardline telephones and actual telephone directories, if you wanted to check the official weather forecast, you dialed a US Government number listed under the Department of Commerce. That would get you a recorded forecast. It was never primarily about science, but rather to try and insure that farmers, and later truckers, city workers and the like could plan harvests, transportation routes and work days efficiently. The number sites dropped from the USHCN inventory are by-and-large “redundant” sites whose commercial utility was diminished.

            Even now both NOAA and NASA are run by the DoC. I grew up here (in the US) and was astonished to learn that NASA was DoC. I had always thought it was Air Force run. Anyway, airports are of commercial significance as are cities, highways, etc. In the 19th century farming was much more important and stations were weighted more to rural locations. That explains a lot.

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    • #
      Ron C,

      Moreover, the effects of urban heat sources offer an explanation for the current plateau in temperatures.

      https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/when-is-it-warming-the-real-reason-for-the-pause/

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        ScotsmaninUtah

        Ron a very interesting link and well worth the read. The conclusion that “the pause” is a result of the end of urbanization is intriguing.

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        Duster

        That is a brilliant observation and well worth considering closely.

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    Annie

    Well done Anthony and Co.

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    pat

    try telling Adler & Shermer:

    17 Dec: WaPo: Jonathan H. Adler: Consilience and the case for climate science consensus
    (Jonathan H. Adler teaches courses in constitutional, administrative, and environmental law at the Case Western University School of Law, where he is the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation.)
    The refusal of many conservatives and libertarians to confront the reality of climate change has been a repeated subject of my blog posts over the years. The subject is a frustrating one for me because it’s clear that many partisans see what they want to see in the available scientific research and close their eyes to the rest. It’s even more frustrating because this approach has effectively sidelined the case for more conservative or market-oriented climate-related policies — policies that would pose a much smaller threat to individual liberty than the various regulatory initiatives typically championed by environmentalist activist groups…
    Over at Scientific American (LINK), Michael Shermer (“Skeptics” Society) makes this general point — and makes it better than I did. In an essay titled “Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong,” he explains why it is the cumulative weight of the available scientific evidence — and the convergence of this evidence — that should be particularly persuasive in assessing this sort of question…
    As Shermer explains, while scientists have offered alternative explanations for the available data, these various explanations are not cohesive or consistent. They do not converge. Indeed, they contradict each other. The case that humans are contributing significantly to climate change, on the other hand, is based upon a wide range of studies, employing a wide range of methodologies and looking at a wide range of evidence. The result is that if we throw out one — say, Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” or overly sensitive computer models — ample evidence remains…
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/12/17/consilience-and-the-case-for-climate-science-consensus/?postshare=9731450378994662&tid=ss_tw

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      Graeme No.3

      He completely misses the point, or did he mean to do so?

      Nobody denies that there has been warming since 1850, indeed a case can be made for some warming starting about 1710 (the really cold 1709/10 winter in Europe) after the Little Ice Age. Glaciers melted rapidly in France, Switzerland and Austria from 1850-1869, although not much in Norway and Iceland as AGW theory expects. The evidence for man-made warming is minimal; if the proponents of AGW devoted as much time to confirming the mechanism or quantifying the effect instead of frothing at the mouth and/or running around squawking hysterically in decreasing circles then they would get more people listening.
      That he relies on the Scientific American, which abandoned the science part many years ago, for confirmation puts him among those dwelling in an ivory tower. I doubt that reality gets much attention in his waking hours.

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        Papy Boomer

        To Shermer – Frederick Seitz replies, 13 august 1996, Wall Street Journal :
        « …[Professor Frederick Seitz] compared the draft approved by the authors of IPCC-SAR Chapter 8 (Detection and Attribution) and the final printed text. He noted that key phrases had been deleted from the approved draft before printing. »
        « In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report. »
        “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”
        “No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes.”
        “Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”
        The reviewing scientists used this original language to keep themselves and the IPCC honest.

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        gnome

        Not quite “nobody” G3. I still hold the view that the recent temperature record doesn’t show any movement one way or the other, and I think anyone looking into it objectively, such as Ken (of Ken’s Kingdom) is coming to a similar view.

        I may be wrong on both points, or I may be wrong on one point or the other, but either way, CAGW is total crap.

        We need to get over this politically correct presentation, that warming has happened since the LIA, or it was warmer in the MWP. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. The statistical evidence is only gathered locally and can’t be extrapolated worldwide.

        Anyone who says it was warmer in the LIA and we are climbing out of it is no better than someone who tells us their school didn’t need airconditioning, so it must be getting warmer.

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          Graeme No.3

          You baffle me. Where did I claim that it was warmer in the L.I.A.? It wasn’t in Europe, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, China and the USA. Many papers have been published, I’m told over a 1,000, about the cooler weather in other parts of the World in the L.I.A. The great pioneers of climatology H.H. Lamb and Reid Bryson said so, and neither of them ever endorsed AGW.

          There seems little doubt that the raw figures show the 1920’s and the 1930’s were warmer than 1890-1910 at least in Europe and the USA. The case for temperatures being higher there now than in the 1930’s is weak, as is the claim that temperatures in Australia have risen since the 1890’s in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. ( I presume that is one reason why the BoM doesn’t want you to access records before 1908 ). But we are talking of a rise of 0.3℃ in the last 36 years (except in the fevered imaginations of Hansen, Schmidt, Flannery and Gore etc.) and at that rate a possible rise of 0.29℃ by 2050.**
          I repeat “The evidence for man-made warming is minimal; if the proponents of AGW devoted as much time to confirming the mechanism or quantifying the effect instead of frothing at the mouth and/or running around squawking hysterically in decreasing circles then they would get more people listening”. It is obvious that none of them understood Aesop’s story of The Boy who cried Wolf.

          ** DISCLAIMER: linear extropolation of trend, highly unlikely to occur, especially as the sun is becoming less active.

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      Robk

      Shermer used to be a good read. It appears he’s been drinking the cool aid too. SciAm used to be in-depth and balanced until about a decade ago or so. I had subscribed to the magazine for some 25 years but couldn’t bring myself to renew after they started going political.

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      Greg Cavanagh

      “Jonathan H. Adler teaches courses in constitutional, administrative, and environmental law…”

      I’m going to say that this man is conditioned to accept the word of authority, and that authority is absolute (not the vodka). He is clearly in thrall to the prognostications of the Scientific American.

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        llew jones

        Adler is a lawyer with an interest in the environment. Reading the sort of Adler nonsense the alarmist WP publishes reminds one why most alarmists, even including some scientists mistake a range of data for cause. Look at Adler’s piece and you will find he makes the mistake that certain phenomena, such as melting ice, in specific locations can only be caused by AGW. That’s the sort of nonsense most alarmists parrot.

        Further he quotes John Cook’s infamous 97% Consensus of the scientific community as if it were an accurate portrayal of reality. Nor does it seem to get through to him that rigging the temperature data, which he accepts may have happened, affects the significance of the anthropogenic factor. In fact it is the sort of unscientific nonsense lawyers seem, as a class, to be afflicted with.

        Sherman writes on science but is not a scientist but rather a psychologist. Like Adler he doesn’t seem to understand the postulates of the “settled science” such as the need for significant positive water vapour feedbacks to produce any significant warming from an increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. That necessary feedback postulate follows from the logarithmic nature of the effect of the extra atmospheric CO2 on global temperature as understood in the “settled science”.

        The Washington post is about as ignorant as the New York Times when it comes understanding the limitations on any real climate science, even the of historic sort from Arrhenius onwards, used to suggest catastrophic anthropogenic Global Warming.

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      Ted O'Brien

      For over seventy years I escaped having to confront that word: Consilience.

      After looking it up, I highlight two very important words: independent and unrelated. There isn’t much at all in the AGW machine that is either independent or unrelated.

      In the Ted Cruz Senate Inquiry a very impressive witness was retired Admiral Titley. His acceptance of AGW rose from the fact that when “they” ran the numbers there was warming, when they ran them again they found more warming, and every time they ran them they found more warming. Yet it apparently escaped this highly qualified and impressive individual that this might represent political bias. How could he fail to see it?

      He answered that himself. Questioned on the completeness of evidence he told us something like that in wartime if you wait for all the evidence to arrive you’ll lose the war.

      Which surely disqualifies him as a witness in this war.

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      MarloweJ

      Why throw out only one or two studies? You could probably throw out 97% of them.

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      Dave N

      Two key phrases:

      “..these various explanations are not cohesive or consistent..”

      A true skeptic would consider the possibility that this means there is still a great lack of understanding when it comes to climate. You only have to read various alarmist sources to observe the lack of cohesion and consistency in their work. That’s comparing against each other, and sometimes even themselves; they continually self-contradict and move goalposts. “cohesive or consistent”? It is to laugh.

      “..ample evidence remains”

      Define “ample”, and “evidence”, and for the latter, contrast with “proof”. Also contrast the whole notion against the amount of evidence that suggests that most warming is caused naturally.

      I used to like Shermer, however he has become yet another “fake” skeptic.

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      Evan Jones

      We have too few unperturbed APs to assess, and they do not appear to unduly bias the record. (Perturbed is another story, but we are currently focusing on the unperturbed.)

      If they are far back enough from the runway, they appear okay.

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    • #
      Duster

      Schermer is a journalist for a reason, and that reason is not that he is a great scientist. Schermer’s argument about the weight of evidence would be valid, if there was any unbiased assessment of the weight of evidence. There is not. Worse, if you consider the suggestion that Ron C. offered above, we might very well not even HAVE evidence which we actually understand. One distinctive aspect of the USHCN (and NOAA) is that it was established and exists to serve the mission of the Department of Commerce, not to provide data to science. That is at best a by-product of Commerce’s mission. I know of no discussion of how that purpose might have biased USHCN site locations historically, much less any careful examination of those effects now, except for the effort of Anthony Watts, and even Watts is a luke-warmist. It is quite possible that he has but a shotgun round through the bottom of the floating duck blind. Even his “well-sited” stations are subject to cultural effects because they rural, not in wild lands. It is highly probable that the change from wild to rural agricultural is a greater effect than the rural->urban shift.

      Adler is a lawyer, ’nuff said.

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        Duster

        Another thought. The really staggering possibility is that the “adjustments” data are merely “adjusting” our misunderstanding of something we never have properly understood.

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  • #
    PeterS

    Good work. It confirms similar work I’ve seen over 10 years ago about the urban heat island effect, but for some reason was ignored by the scientific community (probably because it would upset their milking of the scam).

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    Robk

    Anthony has been on the case for years and it would appear it’s still not right. These things should be in the error calculations but that would show the whole exercise futile.
    It should be impossible to influence public policy when the data is shown to be suspect, the modelling is shown to be suspect and the motivation is shown to be suspect. Why are we doing this unwarranted scheme?

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    macha

    GIGO…..garbage in garbage out. Add that to a poorly constructed model in the first place and sometimes the errors cancel out. Like a clock being correct twice a day. Ha!!

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  • #
    pat

    Question: what’s the point of…the Met Office?
    (all over the MSM even before 2015 has ended):

    17 Dec: BBC: Matt McGrath: Met office says 2016 ‘very likely’ to be warmest on record
    When compared to the pre-industrial levels, the forecast predicts that next year’s temperature will be 1.1C above the 1850-1899 average. This is edging closer to the 1.5C level that governments agreed last week they would do their best to keep under in the long term.
    Last year, the forecast for 2015 predicted a central estimate of 0.64 above the average. Observational data from January to October this year shows the global mean temperature so far this year is running at 0.72 above 1961-1990…
    “The forecast for next year is on the back of some other strong years,” said the Met Office’s Prof Adam Scaife.
    “In 2014 we had 0.6 which was nominally a record, 2015 so far we’ve had 0.7 which is also nominally a record, and next year we are talking about 0.8 – so you can see that very rapid rise over three years and by the end of 2016 we may be looking at three record years in a row.”…
    The impact of the strong El Nino that started this year continues through the first half of next year…
    The forecasters at the Met Office say it is responsible for up to 0.2C of next year’s value. In combination with continuing climate change, the forecasters believe it will lead to new records.
    “There is an uncertainty range, the bottom end of the range for 2016 is very close to the current value for 2015, so it’s not impossible that it will come out the same as 2015 but it is very likely to be higher,” said Prof Scaife.
    The Met Office says that the rise in temperature predicted for next year may not continue indefinitely…
    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35121340

    Answer: to reinforce the CAGW orthodoxy on behalf of:

    17 Dec: ReutersCarbonPulse: COMMENT: Carbon markets in the Paris Agreement – an early holiday gift
    (The below blog was originally published on the World Bank’s website) By Vikram Widge, Head of Climate and Carbon Finance at the World Bank Group)
    http://carbon-pulse.com/13506/

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    But don’t the weather bureaus ‘adjust’ for this extra heat? They seem to ‘adjust’ everything else.

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      RoHa

      I have long been impressed by the large number of weather stations that are based at airports. To me, a simple-minded philosopher, it seems likely that the combination of tarmac and jet exhaust would raise the local temperatures, but I’m sure a trained climate scientist would be able to disabuse me of such foolishness.

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      • #

        That, and major CBD centres etc, are where you’ll most likely find CO2 monitors as well.

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          RoHa

          “major CBD centres etc, are where you’ll most likely find CO2 monitors as well.”

          Well, that makes sense. That’s where most of the CO2 is likely to be, so that’s where you should put the things that monitor it. If you put them out in the country, you might record very little CO2. Think how embarrassing that would be.

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        PeterH

        Weather stations were placed at airports because pilots need to know the weather. The use of those stations for climatology was an afterthought.

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        ROM

        Horsham in west Vic also has the BOM station located about 60 metres from and inside of the 90 degree junction of two sealed runways.

        One runway is a 30 metres wide seal, the other about 22 metres wide seal, both of them as I can testify from innumerable numbers of times I have worked and stood out there on those sealed runways launching gliders, get bloody hot to the point where one moves off the seal on a really hot day as soon as one can.

        Horsham’s airfield located BOM station is also on the eastern side and southern side of the two runway junction.
        This is downwind in the prevailing winds of the region so the station cops the downwind drift of the runway seal’s much higher temperature air mass on a hot day.
        The Horsham BOM station is also situated about hundred metres east, ie down wind of a large complex of heat retaining aircraft hangars.

        On a southerly wind day on the approach to the north / south runway from the north towards the South and still down wind from the hangar complex, quite strong turbulence created by the hangar complex is first encountered about a half a kilometre from the runway threshhold and below about 500 feet altitude.

        So the effects of the hangar complex extends a long way downwind and by inference most likely has a fairly strong effect on the station’s recorded data when the wind direction is across both the hangars and the station, a wind situation which is quite frequent.
        —————-
        And don’t EVER TRUST the media, any of it, to tell the truth or anything much that has a passing resemblance to the truth. They just lie through their teeth or are alternatively are totally incompetent and just make it up as they go along.

        Example. A regional commercial TV station this evening reported that the BOM station at Longerenong, about 15 kms east of Horsham and one of Victoria’s oldest stations, had reached 44 degrees today

        In short it was really hot and it was but of course the media in their almost innate and pathological inability to ever give an honest and accurate report had to “hot” the temperature up to make it sound even worse.

        A couple of minutes was all the time required to find the 24 hour data recordings for Longerenong today [ Fri. 18 Dec. ] and this from an old farmer who doesn’t get a cent to find this sort of information unlike the media fools who financially do very nicely thank you for spreading lies and crap as some sort of “news”.

        The maximum temperature today at the Longerenong station was a 3 minute spike of 42.7 and 42.8 degrees @ 1450 and 1453 EDT

        The pre spike 1440 temperature was 40.8 C.
        The post spike temperature at 1500 was 41.3 C

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  • #

    Lets save the trolls some time and go through the problems.

    1. Not peer reviewed
    2. Watts is a crank
    3. Study was funded by Exon Mobil
    4. Your not smart enough to understand homogenization
    5. We need to act just in case because you wouldn’t not insure your house right?
    6. Watts hates dolphins

    Did I miss any?

    But seriously Im expecting that will be the range of responses from the so called scientific community. I don’t think data matters anymore. Paris put the final stamp on the problem being solved and the world being saved… is there even a problem to worry about now?

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  • #
    Geoff

    The real issue in the climate change debate is just what would all the persons who are currently rent seeking from taxpayers and the Federal Reserve do if confronted with no more money?

    Are they capable of doing anything useful for society?

    Has the advent of technology removed these persons from the useful workforce permanently?

    Is it only the government money that makes them useless or could work be found in private enterprises? Or, do they have no useful talent?

    If society becomes flooded with well credentialed but not useful individuals whose only means of support is the taxpayer or money printers is a debt deflation spiral inevitable?

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    Truthseeker

    Maybe the Earth’s actual climate doesn’t matter that much to NOAA?

    There, fixed it for you …

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  • #
    Ruairi

    Alarmists don’t get too upset,
    If minimum standards aren’t met,
    Such as how to correct,
    The heat-island effect,
    Which skews the results that they get.

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  • #

    Anthony Watts at AGU2015 shows that hot air rises off concrete

    It also rises off blog pages. It deepens ignorance.
    Dimwits read blogs and substitute opinion for science.

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    • #

      Damn I missed that one. Oh well no one is perfect.

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        Greg Cavanagh

        No, I think you covered it with:
        2. Watts is a crank
        4. Your not smart enough to understand homogenization

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      MareeS

      Numbers, he’s all pervading, pops up everywhere like those little bars, but not nearly as entertaining.

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        MareeS

        For those here who are not familiar with Numbers, 1735099 is his army number, assigned when he was conscripted to the army in 1968 or thereabouts.

        He served in Vietnam as a dixie-basher (kitchen hand) and back here in Australia went into the teaching game. Now retired, on public service super, and probably TPI for all the trauma of peeling thousands of potatoes at Nui Dat.

        How do I know this? He is notorious as a troll on any non-left blog, including veteran sites.

        Anyone who quotes their army number 50 years after the event clearly has a problem. Especially when said person was a kitchen hand, unlike my spouse, who was an infantry forward scout and sometimes sniper.

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          Raven

          Anyone who quotes their army number 50 years after the event clearly has a problem.

          Perhaps.
          I recall our big burley Dutch platoon sergeant saying our service number would be used so often during our two years that we would remember it for the rest of our lives. He was right about that.

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        • #

          Thanks for the introduction, MareeS, but in the interests of accuracy, a couple of points –
          1. For the majority of my service in Vietnam my my posting was rifleman.
          2. No potatoes were peeled by Australians on operational service in Vietnam. the army had better things for us to do. When at the Dat we ate reconstituted mashed potato. We weren’t often at Nui Dat. Operations Finschhaffen Concrete, for example, saw us in the bush for periods longer than six weeks. Spuds may have been peeled at Vung Tau or Saigon, but that wasn’t where I served.
          3. There was no such posting as “sniper” in infantry units in Vietnam. Sniping is not all that useful in jungle warfare. Do you husband the credit of telling the truth about his service. You have been reading too many Yank warries.
          4. I’m not retired, and not TPI.
          5. I was conscripted in 1969, not 1968.
          As for my tag, my regimental number was given to me – I didn’t ask for it.
          I’ll use it as I please.
          Besides, it provides a useful reminder to those who have no memory of the era, of the moral failure of a political philosophy that conscripted a minority of young men to fight during peacetime in an invading army against a nationalist movement. The Vietnamese fought (in sequence) the Japanese, the French, the Americans and in 1979, the Chinese. They call it the “American” war to distinguish it from the other conflicts.
          Happy to set you straight:-)

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          • #
            RB

            “No potatoes were peeled by Australians on operational service in Vietnam.” and “Spuds may have been peeled at Vung Tau or Saigon, but that wasn’t where I served.”

            Make up your mind.

            “There was no such posting as “sniper” in infantry units in Vietnam.”

            You might want to read ‘Inside the Crosshairs: Snipers in Vietnam’ by Col. Michael Lee Lanning.

            Australia never trained anyone for sniper duties until 1978 but that there was no such thing as a “sniper” in infantry duties is rubbish. Some units trained individuals for the role.

            SMH has a story on Ian Robertson who talks about his role in Korea and jsut mentions that he went to Vietnam.

            Wikipedia has

            Long rifles continued to be used by snipers, but infantry patrols favoured the use of assault rifles such as the L1A1 and M16.

            I’ll give you the potato thing, sort of. The Australian army introduced a potato peeling machine for Vietnam. Ration packs would have had dried powdered potato.

            Any chance you would apologise for being insulting and misleading people?

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              Make up your mind.

              I reckon you’re the one who is confused.

              “There was no such posting as “sniper” in infantry units in Vietnam.”

              This statement is correct.
              Your own link to Digger History confirms it –

              Australia never trained anyone for sniper duties until 1978

              Vietnam was well and truly over by 1978.
              Ian Robertson’s name doesn’t come up on the Vietnam Nominal Roll, so his unit in Vietnam in 1970 is unclear. I’ll wager he wasn’t a sniper. Much of what was happening at that time (long distance secure patrolling early in the tour and ambushing out from the Horseshoe later) had no place for snipers. Without stretching the metaphor too far, old mate – you’ve shot yourself in the foot.

              Long rifles continued to be used by snipers, but infantry patrols favoured the use of assault rifles such as the L1A1 and M16.

              Wikipedia is correct.

              I carried an L1A1 (SLR) and an M72 rocket launcher. I never saw a sniper rifle in Vietnam. Note that Wikipedia makes no mention of Australians using snipers in Vietnam.

              Any chance you would apologise for being insulting and misleading people?

              The only thing I have done in relation to this issue is to tell the truth.
              I’m not in the habit of apologising for that.

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                RB

                Ian Robertson’s name doesn’t come up on the Vietnam Nominal Roll

                WOW. Considering your tantrum when someone commented in Michael Smith’s blog doubting your service, this is disgraceful. There are half a dozen to choose from. This guy was born in 1927 and was in Vietnam to train

                SNIPERS?

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              RB

              Long rifles continued to be used by snipers

              and your reply is “Note that Wikipedia makes no mention of Australians using snipers in Vietnam.”

              You’re either insane or have delusions of adequacy when it come to BS ability.

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            RB

            And one more thing. I did check up on you and you did 10 months service in Vietnam as a Nasho. Now 10 minutes in a war is not something that I wish to do but I am not impressed by your use of that service to push your views especially demeaning the service of a regular army member.

            I also find it strange that you would promote it when taking a pot shot at people who studied science and can actually understand what is going on. Very weird.

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            • #

              I am not impressed by your use of that service to push your views especially demeaning the service of a regular army member.

              I do not use my service to “push my views”. Who is this “regular army member” whose service I have demeaned?
              I use my regimental number as a tag. It irritates the bejesus out of some, but that’s not my problem.
              It’s interesting to note that my service only became an issue on this blog when MareeS tried to make fun of it.
              Any “demeaning of service” was done by her.
              BTW, Vietnam Vets typically do not draw a distinction between Nashos and Regs.
              Nor did the VC.

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          AndyG55

          “Anyone who quotes their army number 50 years after the event clearly has a problem”

          Hey… if its the only way he can identify himself.. 😉

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            Yonniestone

            1735099 meet AndyG666. 🙂

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            Greg Cavanagh

            He’s identifying himself by what was done to him “conscripted” 50 years ago.
            The man is suffering from some serious trauma (and I’m not belittling it at all, this is a serious case of long term mental trauma).

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              David-of-Cooyal in Oz

              G’day Greg,
              Your use of “conscripted” suggests that was not possible 50 years ago here in Oz. There was conscription in the 1950s in Australia, terminated before I had to do my second bout of a split intake in about 1956/7. It was later re-introduced with a ballot system for the Vietnam war and only ended after many anti-war demonstrations.
              Cheers,
              Dave B

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                Greg Cavanagh

                Re: “Your use of “conscripted” suggests that was not possible 50 years ago here in Oz.”

                I never suggested any such thing David. 1735099 said himself that he was conscripted, so I used that word.

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    • #

      It also rises off blog pages. It deepens ignorance.
      Dimwits read blogs and substitute opinion for science.

      Since you read blogs that support your beliefs, you must, by your own definition, be a dimwit. And, to add insult to injury, as you also read blogs that don’t support your beliefs, you must be an uber-dimwit.

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        Since you read blogs that support your beliefs,

        I don’t.
        Can’t see any point in agreeing with fact – it’s always more productive to expose nonsense.

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        • #

          You should ponder the irony of your posts.

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        • #

          Ponder this:

          1. You say that you don’t read blogs that support your beliefs, yet you quote a blog that supports your beliefs. Do you simply pick links and references without even knowing what they contain?

          2. You say you don’t read blogs that don’t support your beliefs, yet here you are, clearly reading and responding. Or don’t you read anything here but simply take pot shots and respond at random, hoping that your responses are coherent?

          3. You only read peer reviewed science (which nowadays is somewhat of an oxymoron), however, much of that is regaled in blogs. Does that mean you don’t read the opinions of those who are peer reviewed and post in blogs?

          4. Peer reviewed papers are often quoted and discussed in blogs. If a peer reviewed paper is discussed in a blog, even by the writer, is it just opinion?

          Little wonder the Left has made such poor headway with their quest to convince everyone that the world is doomed.

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      Garry

      Is that your opinion, numbers? Because the science says otherwise, as I am sure you already know.

      You should change your name to Eureka0.3, to reflect the real numbers.

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      Raven

      Hello Bob (aka 1735099),

      My number was only a few hundred after yours.
      From one Nasho to another, did you believe the war was just and right?
      Neither did I.
      I don’t believe this one is just and right, either.

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      • #

        Not sure what war you’re referring to Raven, but I agree with Peter Cosgrove about Vietnam.
        That doesn’t diminish the service and sacrifice of those who fought there, whether Nashos or Regs, willingly or otherwise.
        I think it was in many ways tougher for the Regs who volunteered and discovered the reality when they got there.
        This puts it in perspective.

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        • #
          Raven

          I was referring to the Vietnam conflict.
          Perhaps I was being rather too oblique but I reckon there’s parallels to be drawn with the Climate Wars.

          Thanks for writing that piece. I concur and suspect you’ll find more agreement among peers than perhaps you realise.

          Cheers,
          Gavin (aka 1736682)

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      JustAnotherPerson

      You seriously want to make the case that this is an opinion? Do you think they would’ve allowed Watts et al. to present this at AGU’s scientific conference if it was simply their opinion? Watts and Jones may not be that credentialed, but the latter two are both climatologists, Nielsen-Gammon a Regent’s Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Texas A & M University and Christy a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at UAH. All authors have published in the peer-reviewed literature on this topic (see here:)

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      • #

        When you post peer reviewed science, I’ll pay attention.
        When you post a link to a blog, I’ll ignore it.
        The first is science – the second opinion.

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          AndyG55

          Peer-review is a journalism thing.. it is actually NO PART of the scientific method.

          But a grunt like you wouldn’t know that, would you.!

          This paper is published.. its there in front of you for all to see…

          and it is totally open to peer-review.

          And that peer-review ill be FAR more thorough than anything published in some AGW cult journal, because the peer-review is open to everyone, not just the climate science™ pal review spell checking.

          Do you worst……. or nothing.

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            Robk

            The paper is bringing presented at a conference of atmospheric scientists. That’s a room ful of peers to review. They’ll soon let it be known if there’s an issue with the paper.

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            scaper...

            The guy is a fake. He is another planted irritant on the blogs that follows the same flaming methodology.

            The desperation is revealing. Either ignore or tear strips off this dilettante!

            A heads up.

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        • #
          JustAnotherPerson

          Forgive me, but my reply accidentally was posted as a reply to my reply of your original comment. See that for my rebuttal. I forgot to mention that Nieslen-Gammon and Christy are both State Climatologists. I also wonder where all those red thumbs came from!
          Forgive me again if my link to the AASC website doesn’t work, for some reason it didn’t in the preview.

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          Vlad the Impaler

          Greetings, ‘numbers’:

          You cite ‘peer review’ as some kind of holy grail of science. I became scientifically aware and competent in the early 70’s, earning two University degrees in one of the hard sciences.

          One of our tasks as undergrads, and as grad students, was to read, study, understand, and ultimately synthesize previous research.

          First, there is no such thing as ‘settled science’. Science is a body of knowledge, as well as a disciplined methodology. Today’s dogma is tomorrow’s discarded hypothesis. Far from making it useful, this makes science one of the greatest tools we possess; it evolves as new information becomes available. Even in my academic career, we had ‘holdouts’ who clung to discarded ideas, and continued to teach them to us. Since we were trained to undertake our own research, we knew what was current, and what was obsolete.

          Second, the quality of research, for one reason or another, has changed significantly since the 1970’s. We see routinely that the promoter of a certain idea is less transparent today than his/her forebears. We are told, ‘trust me; you don’t need to see the raw data’. Many are the papers I read and studied which contained appendices of the raw data, not just the results of some processing scheme.

          Third, climate science specifically has put the conclusion before the study. The IPCC was charged with finding out the magnitude of human influence on climate, not whether there was an influence.

          We can discuss (at length) the impact humans are having on climate; I accept that there are natural influences, and human influences, but unless and until each is quantified, any conclusions are suspect. The IPCC routinely touts this nebulous ECS value of 3.5 Celsius degrees of warming per doubling of CO2, yet I did a regression on the last 22 published papers estimates of ECS (all of which, by the way are far lower than the IPCC estimate), and if the trend line is any indication, in the next few years it will become clear that Lindzen & Choi’s value of 0.7 Celsius degrees is closer to the mark.

          Your vaunted ‘peer review’ is something you can participate in. Perhaps you have noticed that Dr. Evans has been publishing his thesis on climate, climate change, its cause(s), and drivers. I have lost count of the number of comments, corrections, clarifications, changes, and general improvements to his thesis which have occurred right here on this “blog”. How ’bout you step out from behind your veil of secrecy (‘ … pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’), pony up to the bar, and show Dr. Evans why and how he is wrong. Engineers, physicists, mathematicians, meteorologists, geologists and what-not have all commented, and “reviewed” his work here. It is out in the open; it is available for anyone with the cajones to shoot it down. I’ll wager it is getting more ‘peer review’ here than thousands of ‘published’ papers in the scientific literature over the last few decades.

          As soon as I see any excuse from you, then we’ll all know your true status.

          Regards,

          Vlad

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        JustAnotherPerson

        You want peer-review? That paper is going through that process as we speak, but I already linked you to one supporting a skeptic argument about data quality-there’s your peer-review.
        Anyway, I never even linked to a blog! Even if I did, you should read it-unless you don’t want me to read your blogs, because I won’t if that’s the standard you want to set.
        Blogs often contain scientific content, just look at Climate Audit or RealClimate.

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      handjive

      Re: Dimwits

      “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” Socrates

      Quite so.

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      AndyG55

      “It also rises off blog pages. It deepens ignorance.”

      One thing for certain.. YOUR ignorance cannot get any deeper.!

      It is at the bottom a big dark fetid pit.

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        el gordo

        “It also rises off blog pages. It deepens ignorance.”

        Old vet, blogs are debating clubs. Welcome.

        Are you aware that CO2 doesn’t actually cause global warming?

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      RB

      Dimwits read blogs and substitute opinion for science.

      “Science” is a method. It is not the word of appointed peer-reviewed scientists. You have the details of the method to comment on but you link to a blog that treats the 97% consensus as fact.

      Dimwitted by any chance?

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      Evan Jones

      Depends on the work, doesn’t it?

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  • #
    Doug Proctor

    The graph internal text says it shows the “1979 – 2008” interval, while the caption suggest the data goes from 1979 – Dec. 17, 2015 ……..????????

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    • #

      @ doug proctor, rom the article’s side notes. I believe this will be corrected in the published text.
      Some might wonder why we have a 1979-2008 comparison when this is 2015. The reason is so that this speaks to Menne et al. 2009 and 2010, papers launched by NOAA/NCDC to defend their adjustment methods for the USCHN from criticisms I had launched about the quality of the surface temperature record, such as this book in 2009: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? This sent NOAA/NCDC into a tizzy, and they responded with a hasty and ghost written flyer they circulated. In our paper, we extend the comparisons to the current USHCN dataset as well as the 1979-2008 comparison.

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    TdeF

    So what has been established by NOAA is that the areas around where people live have been getting hotter, even if not as hot as they would like. As well as concrete, this could also be what I could call an ACE, Air Conditioner Effect where cities pump the heat out of their houses and offices into the streets, increasing the average. This started in the 1950s. Naturally this shows an increase over the measurement period of rapidly expanding human habitation.

    The very idea that a measurement in the street has an absolute accuracy of 0.1K is incredible. You can now measure a temperature to a resolution of say 0.01K, but to ascribe global planetary meaning to that temperature or even thousands of such temperatures and to make policy decisions on that basis is to abuse the very idea of objective science.

    We are so grateful for satellites, if only because they are literally far above it all and completely objective and also measure the air over the vast oceans which cover 66% of the planet and over places like Siberia, the Gobi and giant Antarctica, where nothing lives. Not even polar bears or plants. In fact below the Tropic of Capricorn, Australians are part of only 2% of humanity with 1/3 of the globe to themselves which is why our BOM data is so important on a global scale and so subject to editing, deletions and unexplained and unjustified revisions upwards. As for CO2, 98% is from overseas, but we are per capita classified as world climate criminals, apparently. We need to be punished according to our Great Leader and his friends. Does the UN take credit cards or Bonds?

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      TdeF

      It is not just the concrete of the city which produces the well known heat island effect. Consider the vast energy consumption of cities which all ends up outside as heat, including the heat pumped out of buildings by airconditioners which are part of life in most cities today. It does not matter whether that comes from wind, water, solar or coal. It all ends up in the air around cities but we are to believe heating is due solely to an increase in trace gas CO2?

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        TdeF

        We are also taxed to death on aerosols because the Ozone Hole which only affects the very South of the Southern Hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand and 2% of all people is due to the use of aerosols? Why isn’t there one in the Northern Hemisphere where 60% of the world’s population lives? Governments are using science to raise monstrous taxes, to help the environment apparently. It’s as good an excuse as any to tax everyone.

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  • #

    Trying to eliminate bias within the data is extremely important if you want to understand the real world. Watts et al. will have two sets of reactions.
    For true scientists the results of the paper – showing that NOAA exaggerates warming – will help explain why the surface warming trends are higher than the satellite data.
    For the climate believers the results of the paper will be false, as the “corrected” surface temperature data is now more out of line with the climate models.
    At the core the reaction comes down to two different world views that come to the fore when theory and experience seem to be contradictory. Do you modify the data that you cannot explain by theory or reason, or modify the theory, and by so doing achieve a better understanding of the real world? I spent the first half of the year looking a temperature homogenizations – the step after getting accurate readings from thermometers to achieve an average temperature anomaly for a given area. The reaction in the comments by somebody who thinks that it is reality that must be adjusted to theory was to divert, throw out “semi-philosophical” comments, and generally have a paddy.

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    graphicconception

    Climate science is not about the data any more. Some time ago the atmospheric physicists began to hold sway and then the computer modellers took over. The model is now the thing and the data is used only for testing the hindcasting – and programmers are never keen on testing!

    We have moved into the computer generation. You can find anything on the Internet and that is how climate science seems to be done these days. Even the famous Hockey Sticks of MBH98 and MBH99 were not based on data collected by the authors. They just ran other people’s data through a computer program.

    At least one of the 97% surveys was done the same way (e.g. Cook et al). It is all done by people who never look out of the window but can download some files. That is not what I think a scientist should be.

    They make much play of the peer-review process but the raw data is not peer-reviewed. It is almost inconsequential whether it is right or not.

    What I don’t understand is how they think that performing statistics (e.g. correlations) on poor data, that changes each time Karl et al get out of bed, can produce any meaningful results.

    We have a hottest year ever then they change the data. When did they ever revise their past hyperbole based on the latest data changes? If the models match the data then you change the data how can they still be said to match?

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      AndyG55

      “the data is used only for testing the hindcasting “

      And because the data has been so massively altered from what was actually measured, any hindcasting they do will be totally meaningless anyway.

      Even if their models were reasonably good, they are always destined to have a large built-in warming trend…. unless they go back to the raw data, with its big 1940ish peak etc.

      A massive catch 22 situation for them 🙂

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        AndyG55

        Ahhhh. still the utter cowardly 3 red thumbs..

        Thanks guys.. I know I have annoyed you 🙂

        Come on little worms.. bring it on.. if you have the intestinal fortitude…. As If !!!

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    pat

    COP21 showed no interest at all in the science of CAGW and, frankly, the CAGW crowd don’t care if it is true or false:

    16 Dec: UK Telegraph: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Even if the global warming scare were a hoax, we would still need it
    China is the low-carbon superpower and will be the ultimate enforcer of the COP21 climate deal in Paris
    Chinese scientists have published two alarming reports in a matter of weeks. Both conclude that the Himalayan glaciers and the Tibetan permafrost are succumbing to catastrophic climate change, threatening the water systems of the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Mekong…
    Whether or not you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming is irrelevant. The Chinese Academy and the Politburo do accept it…
    Eight of the world’s biggest solar companies are Chinese. So is the second biggest wind power group, GoldWind. China invested $90bn in renewable energy last year and is already the superpower of low-carbon industries…
    The Chinese plan to build six to eight nuclear plants every year, reaching 110 by 2030…
    It is true that regional governments took advantage of newly-devolved powers to approve another 155 (coal) plants for 123GW this year, alone equal to Brazil’s annual use. Horrified officials in Beijing are trying to reverse course. The expansion makes no sense since coal thermal plants are already running at below 50pc of capacity…
    Greenpeace, which first revealed this planning frenzy, doubts that many of these plants will ever be built, and if they are built, up to $110bn will go up in smoke on stranded assets…
    Hedge funds and finance houses are already acting on this inference. Goldman Sachs thinks the mix of tougher rules and vaulting technology is so potent that global emissions will peak in 2020, much earlier than widely supposed…
    Electric and hybrid vehicles will reach sales of 25m by then, driven by plunging battery costs and tightening car emission rules in China, Europe and the US. Goldman says these curbs are nearing the point where car producers will stop investing in the internal combustion engine. That is when the switch to electricification will become a stampede…
    In the end, the sums are dizzying. Abyd Karmali from Bank of America says the low-carbon economy is worth $5.5 trillion a year and the Paris deal will now “turbocharge” an investment blitz…
    We are in a similar 1930s low-growth trap today. The world savings rate is a record 25pc of GDP. It is the root cause of our malaise. So even if global warming were a hoax, we would need it to make our great economic escape.
    The German philospher Hegel had a term for such historical twists. He called it the Cunning of Reason.
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12052582/Even-if-the-global-warming-scare-were-a-hoax-we-would-still-need-it.html

    so much happening on the financial side of CAGW, including Oreskes attacking Hansen/Wigley/Caldeira/Emanuel for their nuclear advocacy at COP21 (Oreskes says wind/solar etc are sufficient), I’m posting it all on jo’s previous ETS thread.

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    • #
      Eugene WR Gallun

      Pat

      Our great escape from wealth into poverty. Muscle power is so non-polluting. The
      progression is from the gasoline powered car, to the electric powered car to the rickshaw.

      Eugene WR Gallun

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  • #
    Bulldust

    O/Topic but there is a garbage consensus / nutjob “denier” piece at The Age today:

    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/people-pick-and-choose-over-scientific-discoveries-at-their-peril-20151216-glpj3z.html?rand=5372216#comments

    Copied because I doubt their mods will allow rational debate to taint the moral fauxrage:

    On my, oh my. There are some entrenched misconceptions running rampant here. First off… language. Anyone using language like “denier”, “consensus” and “climate change” is talking politics, not science. Science does not deal in ambiguous language, politics does. Also, in science the best idea or model wins, not whatever a committee decides is the preferred one. Key point: the “I: in IPCC is interGOVERNMENTAL, not interscientific. That should be clue number one.

    In science we care about observable facts. The fact, which even the IPCC couldn’t ignore, is that satellite measurements (both UAH and RSS) show a slowing of warming over the last couple of decades despite the highest CO2 emissions ever (by humanity, which is but a small contributor BTW). Some will point to the highly manipulated data sets from GISS, and NOAA’s “pause buster” transformation, but needless to say there are many established climate scientists sceptical about that latest effort.

    People are right to say “follow the money” or cui bono? Oddly the mysterious millions that Big Fossil Fuel is supposedly funding climate “deniers” is never found. I guess their bookkeeping is tricker than Enron’s. What is easy to see is the tens of billions poured into the big government-alinged universities and think tanks, let alone the additional monies spent by environmental groups. As is rightly pointed out, money corrupts, big money corrupts powewrfully. You don’t have to have read Freakonomics to understand this, but I highly recommend it nonetheless.

    The OP wasn’t much for evidence, but anyone can go to Wood For Trees and plot a graph or two. Knock up RSS lower troposphere mean for the last couple decades. See a trend? Me neither… hoax is too kind a word with so much money involved.

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      Bulldust

      Ahhh my comment made it into the rejected pile. I wonder what part of The Age’s guidelines I transgressed…

      Unlike teh ABC, at least the tell you outright that the comment was rejected.

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        Bulldust

        LOL they let through my snarky comment complaining about their moderation bias… they have their heads up their posteriors at The Age.

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          Bulldust

          Ahh another commentator considers me a conspiracy nutter now because I called out the bias. Shame comments are closed. Why is the earlier post (would have been one of teh first) ignored and the latter one (which contributed nothing) included? Makes no sense whichever way you look at it. But then The Age and SMH stopped being real newspapers a long time ago… I make the mistake of thinking they still are.

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    doubtingdave

    Please may i ask a question of the better informed, more knowledgeable than me , on this article , because i’m finding it difficult to get to grips with the technical jargon in it . Have Anthony and friends compared the “actual” raw data from their chosen ” pristine sites ” to the UHI affected one’s , or have they used the official ( already adjusted ) raw data from NOOA ?? If its so called raw data from NOOA that they have used , their results could be underestimating the difference . Thanks

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      doubtingdave

      My apologies , from NOAA not NOOA

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    • #
      Robk

      I took it to be that they isolated a subset that didn’t need adjustments because they’d not changed over time, so these had adjustments removed. Then compared it to the remainder as homoginized. They pointed out that the adjustments were mainly upwards.

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      Evan Jones

      We find UHI to have little effect on trend. Well sited urban stations average much lower trends than poorly sited non-urban stations.

      Microsite is the New UHI.

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  • #
    AndyG55

    Some dates on the horizontal axis would be nice.

    I see two distinct periods of BASICALLY ZERO TREND, with a step about 2/3 of the way along.

    I still do not like the maths/logic of putting a linear trend across what is obviously a single step change.

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    TdeF

    One thing which has puzzled me about these ‘average‘ temperatures is weighting, not even homogenization. To talk about the temperature of a planet or even of a whole country as big as the US, you have a finite number of places where readings are made. To talk about the temperature of a huge area, you have to assign weightings to every reading based on area represented.

    So imagine two stations 200km apart. One in a river valley and the other next to a mountain range. Is either representative of the area in between? Each has to be given a weighting. Do you draw 100km rectangles around each is it done on known significant meteorological formations, like rivers, hills, vegetation, salt pans, human populations, areas of intensive irrigation, known wind barriers or corridors? Then you have Jo’s solitary station in the middle of WA. How do you effectively extrapolate and interpolate? Is it even representative let alone scientifically meaningful? If you draw a line between two points, are the places in between going to be on that line? No. What about oceans and effects like Monsoons and whole masses of the planet where there are no stations at all? Having 10,000 in Europe does not allow you to tell the temperature of the Southern ocean.

    So now you have to average over varying length night and day effects and from pole to pole and then over the whole year. Now you have to claim this number is accurate and meaningful to a tiny 0.1C. Averages only make sense if you are averaging the same thing and have smooth variation. 90% of the people of Egypt all live in the very narrow and long and deep and humid Nile valley. None of their readings are relevant. You would have to wonder if it is even meaningful to say the world has warmed by 0.8C in a hundred years. Has it? Visually read thermometers were not even so accurate one hundred years ago. There were no computers.

    The results appear to say that despite small local variations like the dust storms and drought in the US in the 1930s and Australia’s big droughts every century and El Ninos and La Ninas and the rest, within measurement accuracy of one degree the world temperature has been remarkably constant during the whole period where CO2 has increased 50%. So what was Paris about again? We have to pay a carbon tax to the UN’s friends? Why?

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      TdeF

      You would also have to say that computer based recordings only became the norm in the late 1980s through 1990s meaning a slow 0.5C latitude joining of these two data sets during the ten year upgrade of all the instruments. The ‘sudden’ 0.5C increase matches that time and none since? This looks more instrumental change and perhaps warming confirmation bias than any real warming. Of course 0.5C in ten years meant 5C in 100 years and that was the whole basis of the original IPCC scare. Now having done nothing at all significant except taxation, they are talking of only 1.5C in 100 years. What happened to the certain 5C or was it just politically motivated rubbish conjecture based on a massive change in instrumentation? Sure looks like it.

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      AndyG55

      And remember that a VERY LARGE proportion of the land surface actually has NO THERMOMETERS.

      As much as half the land data is probably a TOTAL FABRICATION or GUESSTIMATE.

      And lets not even bother talking about the ocean data.

      To pretend even 1ºC accuracy is a joke.. more like 2-3ºC if they are lucky.

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        TdeF

        Yes and consider the average over time. Not even a whole year, just a day at one spot. Midnight to midnight. What was the average temperature today? Did you weight by time spent at a given temperature or by just half way between the top and the bottom? The meaning of such a number is debatable. Taking lots of such numbers does not make them more meaningful or representative. In hilly areas do you take the top of the hill or the bottom of the valley? A north facing slope or a south facing slope? A windy spot or a sheltered spot? Does anyone really think these numbers will be the same to 0.1C? Now pretend the number is also a measure of somewhere 100km away and to 0.1C. Would you believe it? Why would adding up lots of these numbers weighted by arbitrary areas any more meaningful and accurate. Still, even doing all that, the numbers have not changed for nearly 20 years. Why isn’t Global Warming busted?

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          Yonniestone

          I’ll vouch for the variable temperature alright, while riding around at work today it got to 36°C but the heat wasn’t constant as travelling from different surfaces, treed areas, topographical change, wind conditions gave a very different feel in temperature compared to what was being recorded at the Airport.

          In one area at the base of a large treed hill the heat was coming in waves between cooler air, it was like a giant microwave effect I guess, the idea of locating a Goldilocks area for a weather station might be folly.

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    Sunray

    Tank you Jo for that excellent and extremely important information, which leads me to ask, why are we not surprised?

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    el gordo

    ‘In a statement released on Friday, the Climate Council said November was the eighth month to set a new record for global average temperatures in 2015, meaning it was “now virtually certain that 2015 will surpass 2014 as the hottest year globally on record”.

    Guardian

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    Peter C

    In the Age today;
    Science Deniers reject authority and the facts by Patrick Stokes
    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/people-pick-and-choose-over-scientific-discoveries-at-their-peril-20151216-glpj3z.html

    A truly bizarre article by a lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. Many logical errors which a philosopher should not be committing including conflating Climate Skeptics with anti vaccinationers and calling us all deniers.

    He may inadvertently have convinced some of his own readers of the wrongness of his ideas.

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      Yonniestone

      The so called deniers will reject so called authorities not just by so called facts, how about…

      – Refusal to openly debate.
      – No logical explanation for data adjustments.
      – Including political memes in the scientific method.
      – Emotive pseudo religious drive to achieve desired results.
      – No admittance for continuous failed predictions.
      – Underlying threats made towards dissenters of their beliefs.
      – Reliant on public money and compliant MSM to falsely prove a null hypothesis.
      – Demonizing CO2 while their well heeled lives depend on producing it.
      – Demanding everyone should do with less except them.
      – Inflicting the world weapons grade stupidity.

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      David-of-Cooyal in Oz

      I agree Peter,
      I think his article will bring even more disrepute to academia. It made me wonder if the paper is having trouble getting acceptable comments from science academics.
      Cheers,
      Dave B

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      el gordo

      Propaganda leaves a lot to be desired.

      ‘He ends his letter with a note of alarm: “I think the system of education that could leave the mental condition of the public body in the state in which this subject has found it must have been greatly deficient in some very important principle.”

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    retiredphysicseducator

    TODAY’S EMAIL TO OVER 100 AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS …

    The climate hoaxers have been caught out cheating.

    As I have been saying, ALL climate change is natural. Correct physics PROVES carbon dioxide and water vapour COOL rather than warm.

    Now the FIDDLING of the records has been exposed and we see that US climate records (which dominate the global average calculations) have been tampered with (“adjusted”) so that good weather station records have been adjusted upwards by about 30% so as to show the steeper warming measured in poorly located weather stations that have been affected by urban crawl – that is, the encroachment of buildings and large masses of artificial material like concrete.

    “The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts. This study demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend. It suggests that the trend for U.S. temperature will need to be corrected.” He added: “We also see evidence of this same sort of siting problem around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global temperature record.”

    See full report here http://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/watts-et-al-temperature-station-siting-matters/#more-20689

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    Eugene WR Gallun

    Watts et al — They the men!!!!

    Eugene WR Gallun

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    David S

    Hopefully the powers that be will investigate the institutional [snip sigh] that has been undertaken by the alarmists world wide. The excellent work by Jennifer Marohasy which identified serious issues with the collation of data from the Bureau of a Meteorology in Australia which I think before the change in leadership was going to be investigated by the government. I hope that in the US the Republicans will instigate a proper investigation and potentially charge certain warmists with fraud. Maybe they could also be sued for the damages by citizens who have had taxpayer funds diverted to their pockets. I see this revelation and proper investigation and prosecution as the means of stopping the global warming juggernaut that threatens our life style.

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    Christine

    Hi Joanne. Semi-regular reader of your blog. First time I’ve commented. Always impressed with your ability to distill complex & interesting topics into succinct, easy-to-read articles!

    I”ve been actively participating on a blog on the digital Australian all day, in reply to an excellent article written by Senator Matthew Canavan titled “We need publicly funded sceptics to challenge CO2 witch-hunt”. (I have the Top Comment of the day with 77 likes & counting! Most excited. New to blogs).

    Not sure if you’re aware, but in the last few hours some participants raised you & your husband in the blog. Quite disparaging. But, you also had me + others giving you spirited support. Wasn’t sure how else to reach you, but I thought you may wish to know.

    Keep up the magnificent work, you remarkable lady!

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    ScotsmaninUtah

    The British are deluded about AGW and teeth

    The century-old American stereotype — that the English have terrible teeth — has been disproved in a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

    of course it was conducted by the BMJ.

    meanwhile the MET office are pushing ahead with next years weather forecast.

    It is going to be damn hot !!

    and the UEA are hoping to release their new version of the hockey stick, stolen from the famous American kids program Sesame Street also known as the letter “L”.(fallen down drunk L) to be exact.

    alologies for the O/T post.

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    ScotsmaninUtah

    great post Jo 😀
    and I am glad to see one of the authors is John R. Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
    A very respected scientist indeed and one whom has gone head to head with Gavin Schmidt.

    Climate Scientist in the USA should be deeply concerned about the fact that over 2/3 of the temperature sensor network has been affected by external influences.

    The remaining 410 sensor’s locations were not specified so it is unclear if there are gaps in these areas of the network.
    This is obviously another potential problem of even distribution.

    I wonder if anyone has news on the ARGO network … there have been reductions in the number of bouys due to maintenance issues resulting in gaps in the network monitoring ocean temperatures at depth.

    It is strange that certain science journist still make statements confirming the oceans are heating up despite the status and health of the monitoring networks.

    This obviously needs rechecking …

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    Andrew McRae

    I searched this page for PDO, Pacific, AMO, Atlantic, and there were no matches because neither Watts nor Jo nor anyone else has mentioned them yet. So I guess the duty falls to me. Fine.

    The AMO and PDO are two different metrics for what is believed by some oceanographers to be the same global cycle in temperature. It’s currently about 60 years in cycle duration, and it was going upwards for the first 24 years of Watts’ study. It has been previously shown by Don Easterbrook that these cycles alone can explain the majority of the USA temperature record.
    That means as much as 0.09°C/decade of the post 1978 USA trend is probably due to this recurring cycle.
    Watts et al says the high-quality station trend is 0.2°C/decade.
    Subtract the AMO component of 0.09.
    This leaves a residual of only 0.11°C/decade, which is the combination of CO2 and all other natural factors not already accounted for, known and unknown. Not much variance remaining to explain.

    Watts’ revelation of UHI bias in the USA is relevant to global warming only to the extent that the USHCN is a significant percentage of global weather stations and has biased the global trend to that extent.

    Globally, the climate establishment have already tried to boost CO2 attribution by claiming there was an extra aerosol cooling effect in recent decades which contributed to the Pause, as well as The Ocean Deeps excuse of course. A UK MetOffice report on The Pause concluded:

    Current observations are not detailed enough or of long enough duration to provide definitive answers on the causes of the recent pause, and therefore do not enable us to close the Earth’s energy budget.

    Whatever effect CO2 radiation has on temperature has been recently overridden by natural factors (such as the AMO) to such an extent that it is beyond present day technology to detect it.

    So from the UKMO we hear there’s not enough space or deep ocean data to explain Global Pausing and from Watts et al we see the surface data is biased by UHI. Poor quality data at the top, middle, and bottom, yet our politicians think this science is settled enough to pass global taxation treaties about.

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      el gordo

      ‘…and observations suggest that the Pacific Ocean may play a key role.’

      The PDO is a prime mover, as is SAM, but the Klimatariat is not interested in discussing heretical ideas.

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    Rud Istvan

    A couple of clarifications. The ~410 stations were unpreturbed. That means not moved, no TOBS change… This solves the methodoligical problems pointed out in the 2012 draft paper. Of these unpreturbed, only 92 were unproblematic CRN 1 or 2 microsites. The most important finding is difference beween unproblematic microsite unpreturbed and problematic microsite unpreturbed. It is large and highly statistically significant. And, since unproblematic unpreturbed do not need homogenization, AW and coauthors had a large sample (92) to show that homogenization imports problems–ei fails do do what is claimed. In effect, the paper found and analyzed 92 US Rutherglens, and found that about half the warming trend in the 92 is spurious owing to microsite deterioration over time elsewhere that homogenization imports to contaminate the good records..

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    Littleoil

    Isn’t the main point that we are looking at less than 1 degree C increase since 1880?

    Many of the early temperature readings have been adjusted and there is uncertainty as to their accuracy.

    Measurement of temperature in terms of variation from an average rather than plotting the baseline temperature creates the illusion of significant increases and this has happened because of the newness of climate science and the lack of defined procedures.

    Does a world average temperature have any real meaning at all?

    This possible small increase in temperature has not resulted in any increase in natural disasters so why are we about to spend so much money on a misdirected effort to stop further warming?

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    Belfast

    For years I played in the Nowra Town Band (12th cornet). I did physics at Uni for one year. Putting this experience with the theory, I can endorse this article.
    When we played out on grass you could scarcely hear us, the grass would not reflect the sound.
    Heat light and sound have similar attributes when it comes to reflection.
    When we played on asphalt or concrete outside, we roasted. On grass we were cool.
    Enough said.

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