As many people will have read there was a glitch in the surface temperature record reporting for October. For many Russian stations (and some others), September temperatures were apparently copied over into October, giving an erroneous positive anomaly. The error appears to have been made somewhere between the reporting by the National Weather Services and NOAA’s collation of the GHCN database. GISS, which produces one of the more visible analyses of this raw data, processed the input data as normal and ended up with an October anomaly that was too high. That analysis has now been pulled (in under 24 hours) while they await a correction of input data from NOAA (Update: now (partially) completed).
There were 90 stations for which October numbers equalled September numbers in the corrupted GHCN file for 2008 (out of 908). This compares with an average of about 16 stations each year in the last decade (some earlier years have bigger counts, but none as big as this month, and are much less as a percentage of stations). These other cases seem to be mostly legitimate tropical stations where there isn’t much of a seasonal cycle. That makes it a little tricky to automatically scan for this problem, but putting in a check for the total number or percentage is probably sensible going forward.
It’s clearly true that the more eyes there are looking, the faster errors get noticed and fixed. The cottage industry that has sprung up to examine the daily sea ice numbers or the monthly analyses of surface and satellite temperatures, has certainly increased the number of eyes and that is generally for the good. Whether it’s a discovery of an odd shift in the annual cycle in the UAH MSU-LT data, or this flub in the GHCN data, or the USHCN/GHCN merge issue last year, the extra attention has led to improvements in many products. Nothing of any consequence has changed in terms of our understanding of climate change, but a few more i’s have been dotted and t’s crossed.
But unlike in other fields of citizen-science (astronomy or phenology spring to mind), the motivation for the temperature observers is heavily weighted towards wanting to find something wrong. As we discussed last year, there is a strong yearning among some to want to wake up tomorrow and find that the globe hasn’t been warming, that the sea ice hasn’t melted, that the glaciers have not receded and that indeed, CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Thus when mistakes occur (and with science being a human endeavour, they always will) the exuberance of the response can be breathtaking – and quite telling.
A few examples from the comments at Watt’s blog will suffice to give you a flavour of the conspiratorial thinking: “I believe they had two sets of data: One would be released if Republicans won, and another if Democrats won.”, “could this be a sneaky way to set up the BO presidency with an urgent need to regulate CO2?”, “There are a great many of us who will under no circumstance allow the oppression of government rule to pervade over our freedom—-PERIOD!!!!!!” (exclamation marks reduced enormously), “these people are blinded by their own bias”, “this sort of scientific fraud”, “Climate science on the warmer side has degenerated to competitive lying”, etc… (To be fair, there were people who made sensible comments as well).
The amount of simply made up stuff is also impressive – the GISS press release declaring the October the ‘warmest ever’? Imaginary (GISS only puts out press releases on the temperature analysis at the end of the year). The headlines trumpeting this result? Non-existent. One clearly sees the relief that finally the grand conspiracy has been rumbled, that the mainstream media will get it’s comeuppance, and that surely now, the powers that be will listen to those voices that had been crying in the wilderness.
Alas! none of this will come to pass. In this case, someone’s programming error will be fixed and nothing will change except for the reporting of a single month’s anomaly. No heads will roll, no congressional investigations will be launched, no politicians (with one possible exception) will take note. This will undoubtedly be disappointing to many, but they should comfort themselves with the thought that the chances of this error happening again has now been diminished. Which is good, right?
In contrast to this molehill, there is an excellent story about how the scientific community really deals with serious mismatches between theory, models and data. That piece concerns the ‘ocean cooling’ story that was all the rage a year or two ago. An initial analysis of a new data source (the Argo float network) had revealed a dramatic short term cooling of the oceans over only 3 years. The problem was that this didn’t match the sea level data, nor theoretical expectations. Nonetheless, the paper was published (somewhat undermining claims that the peer-review system is irretrievably biased) to great acclaim in sections of the blogosphere, and to more muted puzzlement elsewhere. With the community’s attention focused on this issue, it wasn’t however long before problems turned up in the Argo floats themselves, but also in some of the other measurement devices – particularly XBTs. It took a couple of years for these things to fully work themselves out, but the most recent analyses show far fewer of the artifacts that had plagued the ocean heat content analyses in the past. A classic example in fact, of science moving forward on the back of apparent mismatches. Unfortunately, the resolution ended up favoring the models over the initial data reports, and so the whole story is horribly disappointing to some.
Which brings me to my last point, the role of models. It is clear that many of the temperature watchers are doing so in order to show that the IPCC-class models are wrong in their projections. However, the direct approach of downloading those models, running them and looking for flaws is clearly either too onerous or too boring. Even downloading the output (from here or here) is eschewed in favour of firing off Freedom of Information Act requests for data already publicly available – very odd. For another example, despite a few comments about the lack of sufficient comments in the GISS ModelE code (a complaint I also often make), I am unaware of anyone actually independently finding any errors in the publicly available Feb 2004 version (and I know there are a few). Instead, the anti-model crowd focuses on the minor issues that crop up every now and again in real-time data processing hoping that, by proxy, they’ll find a problem with the models.
I say good luck to them. They’ll need it.
Re: 349
Tom, I suggest that you have a look at my blog (click on my name) where more than 440 articles, each a piece of the climate change puzzle, have been posted in black & white for all to see (flamboyant or emotional trash not included).
Read, study, learn, enjoy.
[him UNSOUND] — LOL!
In reply to comment #339 Ray Lambury: “William Astley, Cite please on GCR fluxes. I’ve seen no evidence with any of my satellites–and believe me, I’d know. There is a normal modulation out of phase with the solar cycle (max during solar min–min during solar max). That’s not unusual. Is this over and above that?”
First GCR was low in the 20th century.
http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sspvse/oral/Ken_McCracken/wintergreen1.pdf
Conclusions:
In the modern era (Since 1954)
(1) The galactic cosmic ray intensity near earth has been one of the lowest in the past 1150 years
(2) The frequency of occurrence of large solar particle events has been low compared to the long term average for a period similar ot 1889 – 1901.
(3) The galactic cosmic ray intensity was higher compared to modern era by factors of:
– 7.0 AT 100MeV
– 3.5 AT 300MeV
– 2.25 AT 1.0GeV.
(4) The frequency of occurrence of large SPE was a factor of ~5 times compared to the modern era.
GCR levels are inversely proportional the solar heliosphere strength which explains why GCR levels are high now.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/23sep_solarwind.htm?list826300
> …. solarwind
The second link includes only this on climate:
“… there are controversial studies linking cosmic ray fluxes to cloudiness and climate change on Earth. That link may be tested in the years ahead.”
No argument with that.
William Astley,
You have still not provided a reference for you claim that GCR flux rates are 20% higher. The NASA blurb you provided says the drop in solar wind dates only from the latter half of the 90s–so it can’t explain the observed warming.
Add to this that there is no generally accepted mechanism to amplify a flux of 6 particles per square cm per second into a global forcing. There is also no evidence that the atmosphere is particularly starved for cloud nucleation sites, nor that if such a mechanism were to be active that it would be moreso during the day than at night, as would be necessary to provide cooling. Frankly, I don’t think we quite pass the straight face test here.
Of course, then you’d also have to explain why physics fails and CO2 magically stops acting like a greenhouse gas when you get above 280 ppmv. That would be a neat trick too.
Warm and cool ENSO may be linked to more and less cloudiness. Cool ENSO in the 1920s and 30s may have resulted in an absence of cloudiness driving the climate during dust bowl, Great Depression, years.
http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/ENSO/soi-1876-1998.gif
Tamino,
Try adjusting the averaging time of the sunspots (a surrogate for solar heat flux and for the intensity of the solar magnetic field) data so that it approximates the characteristic time of the system response to the heat input change. That should improve your correlation coefficient. Also remember that there lag time in the system response. The probable mechanism is that the bulk of incoming heat is first stored in the ocean and released to the atmosphere slowly. That means that the solar flux today is relevant to temperature changes in the future. If you make those changes in your procedure, you will be able to improve your correlation.
Also, if you will include the entire 20th century temperature and carbon dioxide record you will find that the first 30 years of the century showed rapid temperature rise with little carbon dioxide and that the period between 1940 and 1970 shows cooling in spite of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. Inclusion of those two periods will reduce your correlation coefficient drastically. The past 10 years don’t help the correlation much either.
I made another comment (in 326) that no one has explained. That comment was that the data show that temperature surrogates, such as glacier retreat, sea level rise and growing season length, began changing in the early 1800s long before combustion of fossil fuels became significant. What I did not point out, which also is true is that the rate of change of those effects did not change as the fossil fuel combustion began increasing. If carbon dioxide were causing warming, it would seem to me that the rates of the effects of the warmth would accelerate as the concentration of carbon dioxide increased. The lack of an accelerated response appears to support the hypothesis that the increasing temperature of the oceans may cause releases of dissolved carbon dioxide as Henry’s Law implies that it should. If that were true, one would expect an excellent correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. However, we must be sure that we have the cause and effect ascribed correctly.
snorbert zangox (356) — Here are estimates of human-caused CO2 emissions since about 1750 CE:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm
Those are annual emissions, not summed. Recall that CO2 forcing is logarythmic in the atmospheric concentrations:
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/samples.html
so using the concentration data of 280 ppm in 1750 CE and 288 ppm in 1850 CE, you can readily calculate the CO2 contribution to warming over whatever period interests you; from 1750 CE to 1850 CE I obtained about 0.05 K of warming, using a climate sensitivty of 3 K but also using that only 60% of that is expressed ‘immediately’.
Most of the rest of the warming in the early portion of the 19th century is certainly due to recovery from the 1815 CE eruption of Mt. Tambora (and possibly a following lull in volcanic activity).
The IPCC is quite clear that there’s a direction the available information goes, but some things are more certain than others. For example, the Attributing Climate Change section on page 86 of the WG1 Technical Summary in AR4.
Snorbert Zangox, You do realize that to anybody who knows what they’re talking about, it’s very clear that you don’t, don’t you? Just because I enjoy watching you squirm, how do you get the heat in the oceans without heating up the atmosphere?
#356 (snorbert zangox)
Your latest comment looks like nothing more than a lame attempt to avoid admitting that your original comment was pure bull.
I reiterate my original request: please tell us exactly what datasets, and what time intervals, you’ve used to get correlation of temperature and CO2 in the low-to-mid 20s, and correlation with sunspot activity in the high 80s. And since it now seems you want to “adjust” things to get correlations, specify precisely what adjustments you applied.
Be very sure of this: we’re gonna check your work.
#356 (snorbert zangox)
While you’re at it, inform us all of your sources for the claims that “glacier retreat, sea level rise and growing season length, began changing in the early 1800s long before combustion of fossil fuels became significant,” and “the rate of change of those effects did not change as the fossil fuel combustion began increasing.”
Be very sure: we’re gonna check your sources.
> If carbon dioxide were causing warming,
> it would seem to me that ….
“Committed warming” is the search you need.
Then try “radiative equilibrium” next.
Also, try “Start Here” at top of page, and the first link under Science, right hand sidebar.
You haven’t read the very basic information needed to follow the discussion yet. It won’t take you all that long.
Re snorbert @356: “the period between 1940 and 1970 shows cooling in spite of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.”
No, it does not. It shows cooling only from aprox 1945 to aprox 1951, and a very shallow slope warming trend thereafter to 1970.
And strange that you make no mention of rising aerosols in tandem with those increasing CO2 concentrations being at least partially responsible for that cooling episode and subsequent shallow upward trend.
Hmmm, I wonder why that is….
Snorbert also said: “The lack of an accelerated response appears to support the hypothesis that the increasing temperature of the oceans may cause releases of dissolved carbon dioxide as Henry’s Law implies that it should.”
Except for the inconvenient fact that the increasing ratio of 13C to 12C means that the increase in CO2 is not coming from the ocean.
Do yourself a favor and take Hank’s advice.
Or not.
Capcha’s advice: finally no
#355 Pat, I agree about correlating ENSO events with clouds, when down South I am always amazed by Cumulo Nimbus formations and everything about them, including anvil tops, ice crystal clouds, similar to those in the Arctic, there may be a connection at the cloud seeding level, between anvil seeding and fallout from them, not only over the Arctic but everywhere in the world. During El-Nino there should be more dumping of moisture in the stratosphere which quickly dehydrates, but the smaller particles may “hang out” just on top of the Tropopause.
Ray, GCR theories imply immediate daily causations which should be readily observed, after witnessing 2 consecutive extensive sessions, one cloud free, the other nothing but clouds in the High Arctic, during a solar minima to top it off, I don’t see GCR’s at work but rather more earthbound aerosol feedbacks. Also, I am very curious about our solar system planets being claimed as warming by a solar mechanism, if this is true, lets say Jupiter is warming by the sun then
the Earth should warm at least 7 times more by reverse of squares distance, Given that I can’t find other quotes in journals other than Jupiter warming internally by +10K at the equator… Never the less, assuming that it warms from a hotter sun by 1 K, Earth should warm by 7 K or more… I am curious what they are claiming as the sun induced temperature increase on Jupiter?
In reply to Ray Ladbury #354 “There is also no evidence that the atmosphere is particularly starved for cloud nucleation sites, nor that if such a mechanism were to be active that it would be more so during the day than at night, as would be necessary to provide cooling. Frankly, I don’t think we quite pass the straight face test here.”
Ray,
Your comment shows that you are not familiar with the mechanisms or with the research. Saying something does not make it so.
Kirby’s paper provides a review of the research in the area.
As I said the reason the issue has not been resolved is the difficultly in measuring planetary albedo and cloud cover.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1938
Jim (363), your reading of the graphs is worse than snorbert’s so you should sit on your chastisement. If you do a LS “trend” from 1940 to about 1970+, global temperature decreases (per most temp data sets anyway) as snorbert says and you deny. Your characterization of the shorter periods (down for 45 to 51 and slightly up from 51 to 70) is also true, though your attributing the cooling until (only) 1951 to aerosols does not match aerosol production which didn’t really start to decrease until the 70s.
Re #365 Wayne,
Higher surface moisture (dewpoints) are shown at climate stations for El Nino years, in the U.S.
http://www.mnforsustain.org/climate_snowmelt_dewpoints_minnesota_neuman.htm
Re: #367 (Rod B)
Skeptic, chastise thyself.
The decreasing “trend” from 1940 to 1975 is not statistically significant — there’s no valid evidence of a downward trend from 1940 to 1970+. And if you do the same LS fit starting in 1945 (rather than 1940) up to 1970 or 1975, the trend rate is positive rather than negative, although again the “trend” is no trend at all, failing statistical significance.
Rod @367; the short duration of the circa 1945-1951 cooling and subsequent slow rise to circa 1970 has been discussed repeatedly here at RC. You might want to look it up.
Don’t read graphs. Read the underlying numbers, or trust someone competent in statistics to help you understand them.
Graphs are pictures. Here are some from one of the longest temperature records available, from central England.
Look at the pretty pictures. To understand them, though …
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/cetave.jpg
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/cetsmooth.jpg?w=500&h=391
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/cetlater.jpg?w=500&h=391
… you’d have to read the text. Here:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/central-england-temperature/#more-743
…
…
…
…
Self-test — are you leaping at the keyboard to discuss the pictures or did you read enough to learn what they mean?
William Ashley #399:
“Ray,
Your comment shows that you are not familiar with the mechanisms or with the research. Saying something does not make it so.
Kirby’s paper provides a review of the research in the area.
As I said the reason the issue has not been resolved is the difficultly in measuring planetary albedo and cloud cover. ”
Bill, your comment shows nothing that proves your idea. Saying something does not make it so.
RodB #367 The slope up until 1970 could be slighter than it would have been without aerosols. After 1970 ish when (as you attest) aerosols were reduced, the real heating of the indistrial revolution went unhindered (more so anyway).
So the slighter slope doesn’t prove that Jim is wrong.
Please try again.
I recommend rereading the many prior references to the same cosmic ray idea here. It’s been brought up over and over as though new.
Tamino (369): Nobody wants me/us to go down this path again! None-the-less — — Nobody in the posts on this discussion, including me, said anything about statistically significant. I don’t think Eager’s 5-year trend was meant to imply statistical significance. Statistical significance or no, there ought to be (and usually is) a physical/physics reason or theory why global mean temperature changes even from year to year — or at least over a few years (too few for that statistical significance thing).
Jim (370), as has been the aerosol induced cooling through the 70s or so…
William Astley,
I’m all ears, William. Educate me. First, tell me the mechanism whereby CO2 stops acting like a greenhouse gas at concentrations above 280 ppmv.
Next you can tell me the magical mechanism of how you amplify a flux of 6 particles per square cm per second into a forcing of several Watts per meter. I’m guessing it has to do with clouds, since every mechanism I’ve heard of that invokes GCR does. If so, I’m particularly interested in how you get a galactic mechanism to operate during the daytime when clouds would cool things and not during the night when they would produce a net warming. Neat trick that.
What I’m really interested in is how you get the GCR into the atmosphere without them being detected. No increases in neutron counts. No increases in satellite measurements–either direct or indirect. See, William, every satellite out there has detectors in the form if its electronics. In particular, devices like solid-state recorders are astounding particle detectors, since a good portion of the particles that pass through them produce bit flips. Designers know this, and they have designed in error correction codes and other mechanisms that correct these errors. However, they keep track of the errors as part of housekeeping. If there were an increase in GCR flux, I’d have panicked designers camped outside my office. So, since there is evidently this vast body of research out there that proves these seemingly nonphysical ideas, I’d be really interested in hearing about it.
I’ve been trying to find this looking back on a couple of threads, and searching RC and elsewhere, without success. So–I thought I saw a reference to four datasets (presumably instrumental record) relied on by IPCC. I’m aware of three: HadCRUT (UK met with significant input from the University of East Anglia), GISSTEMP (Goddard Institute by way of NOAA), and SR05 (the Smith & Reynolds product used by NCDC.) So is there another that I’ve somehow missed, and do I understand the provenance of the three I mentioned more or less correctly?
(Come to think of it, this could be a FAQ, too–though that’s another thread, of course!)
RodB 375. But in a five year sample, the “trend” is more likely to be just random coincidence than any mechanism.
So if the “mechanism” is “random chance” what does that bring to the table?
NOTHING.
After all, the Israeli Air Force had a sample where the number of female children were much higher than could be statistically explained.
But someone pointed out “Why did you look there, then?”. To which the answer was “Because we saw that there were more girls than statistically possible”. So the mechanism in this case is that if you select millions of groups, the one-in-a-million chance will happen even if there’s no reason for it. If they looked 5 years later, it could have been “Industrial sewerage plant operators in Ukraine” that had the strange effect of having too many girl children.
So, why were those five years picked? Because they showed something you and your mates like to think is true. AGW is overblown at best.
But why didn’t you pick five years from 1993-1998? If you had, you would have seen catastrophic global warming. Oh, that’s the reason. Sorry.
Now what you SHOULD do is pick a period that is statistically significant. 30 years at least. And what does that tell you?
Or is the answer “AGW is real” not the answer you’re looking for?
Further to 375.
What time did you get out of bed on Wednesday 19th November? It wasn’t the average time, so there must be a physical reason why you got up at that different time.
MUST BE.
Yes?
(no, there’s no physical reason, just that getting out of bed varies randomly because you are not an automaton)
Rod B., There are many, many causes for variation–changes in insolation, changes in frequency of large volcanic eruptions, and on and on. There are so many different causes, that it can be quite difficult to disentangle their influence. One thing these causes have in common is that they typically manifest on short timescales (decadal at most). Many of them are also rather small in magnitude. CO2 stands out from these becuase it acts on very long timescales–nothing else does, so that is why the influence of CO2 stands out and why it is well established by the evidence.
William Astley (166), in Kirby’s review of GCR research he thoughtfully omits the papers cited by the IPCC that discredit the GCR hypothesis. Why do you think he does that?
From the IPCC AR4, Chapter 2, (2.7.1.3) (links provided at upper right of this page)
“…In particular, the cosmic ray time series does not correspond to global total cloud cover after 1991 or to global low-level cloud cover after 1994 (Kristjánsson and Kristiansen, 2000; Sun and Bradley, 2002) without unproven de-trending (Usoskin et al., 2004). Furthermore, the correlation is significant with low-level cloud cover based only on infrared (not visible) detection. Nor do multi-decadal (1952 to 1997) time series of cloud cover from ship synoptic reports exhibit a relationship to cosmic ray flux. However, there appears to be a small but statistically significant positive correlation between cloud over the UK and galactic cosmic ray flux during 1951 to 2000 (Harrison and Stephenson, 2006)…”
Ray (377), in my thinking there is a serious question if the greenhouse effect of CO2 maintains its marginal differential or tapers off. Though coming to a stop at 280ppm is way too big a stretch.
Mark (379, 380), why do you often bring in non sequiturs to turn a, well, molehill into a mountain discussion?
You have just squashed Mt. Pinatubo, El Niño, other oceanic oscillations, most of aerosols, and countless other effects that AGW proponents have long used to further explain their position. I trust you can answer to them. For instance, I assume you reject Jim Eager’s explanation of the 1946 to 1951 and 1951 to the 70s periods. (BTW, I said Jim was wrong about snorberts 1940 to 1970 period, not about his own 46-51 and 51-70s period.)
As I said earlier (though maybe ahead of your post), nobody said anything about statistical significance.
> nobody said anything about statistical significance …
Context, Rod! It’s a science forum. Everyone here knows that if you can’t show there’s a trend with statistics, there isn’t one for purposes of discussion.
Look to the numbers behind the pictures. If the numbers don’t work, there’s nothing happening — all you have is pictures showing nothing happening, and people who want to profess beliefs.
Do we get continuous Mt Pinatubo, RodB?
Are volcanoes climatic????
Woo, are we in for “interesting times”…
Rod wrote:
> in my thinking there is a serious question if the greenhouse effect
> of CO2 maintains its marginal differential or tapers off
Rod, look it up. It’s an interesting hypothesis — do you know which decade it’s from and how it was investigated and the results? (The secondhand opinions you find on blogs are from people who didn’t bother looking it up, they just liked the question and didn’t want to know.)
If you don’t know, Dr. Weart’s website awaits.
Science — it’s more than you think.
More to 367, Rod, it seems quite clear that the drop in the mean temperature anomaly from 1945 to 1951 was significant because it dropped and then stayed well below the 1945 high for almost 30 years before recovering:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
This hardly means that I do not attribute the sustained 30 year lower anomaly to aerosols, just that they only produced an actual sustained negative slope in the trend line, or “cooling,” from 1945 to 1951.
But perhaps it’s a problem of definition and I’m being too narrow. On one hand it can be said that there needs to be a sustained negative slope in the trend for there to be “cooling,” just as there needs to be a sustained positive slope for there to be “warming.” But I can see that it is also possible to say that during that 30 year period of erratic year to year change with no significant sustained trend that aerosol induced “cooling” masked or negated GHG induced “warming,” making it cooler than it otherwise might have been. But I can hardly imagine a skeptic or denier using “cooling” in that sense, though, because they would then be admitting to the underlying warming of GHGs.
Kevin 378:
The IPCC AR4 discusses the three main surface analyses and the two main satellite-derived tropospheric analyses, i.e. from Mears and Wentz at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and Spencer and Christy at the University of Alabama (UAH). NCDC is often left out of the various discussions, leaving the remaining ones as the “big four” datasets.
Oh! Hank! All someone said is that the temperature at three Alaskan sites drifted downward over a 10-30 year (or some such) period. I know that just drives you guys crazy and you will go to no ends to make it go away. But as I said once before, one aspect of science is looking at something red and saying, “That thing is red”. With that statement nothing, nada, zip is said about the thing’s religion, sex, gender, attitude, composition, size, longevity, etc., and, well, about its statistical significance for heaven’s sake! You might ask why is it red; but that’s about it. It’s entirely no big deal and you guys really ought to get over it. Or just keep feeding us maniacal skeptics softballs.
Mark, if you assert that Mt Pinatubo (or some such) is never used as an explanation for some climatic conditions, you ought to wake up more often.
Rod B. OK, so you think the greenhouse effect tapers off above 280 ppmv. Why? There must be a mechanism whereby it does so. None is known at present, particularly given the well mixed nature of CO2 concentrations. What is more, the paleoclimate (e.g. PETM) shows that the greenhouse effect can heat things up a whole lot more that it has to date. I cannot see what you would base such a supposition on other than wishful thinking. Enlighten me.
No, Rod, that’s not all someone said. Note ‘Pacific Ocean’ and aerosols in the same posting. Three cities out of the many available isn’t a good basis for making an argument about climate — use what’s available, not just what fits the argument.
RodB, three alaskan sites out of how many?
Ever heard of “microclimate”.
And do you have any reasons
a) why Hank would deny they went down (he hasn’t so far)
b) why they are significant (you haven’t so far)
because without a good answer to a, you’re persecuting Hank, making up bad things he’s doing to paint yourself as the “good guy” and Hank as the baddie (so he can be dismissed summarily, all hail RodB). And without a good answer to b, it doesn’t matter if it is accepted or denied as a fact. It doesn’t change AGW facts and doesn’t disprove AGW unless it is a significant event.
An example: if you asked for sites that dropped over a 5 year period, would you get about 10? If over a 10 year period, 3? And 30 years, 1? What about over 50 years? None?
Now if you want to talk about what is making them, if you take *any* five year period, would you see 10 showing a trend downwards? If so, then this is just self-selection bias. You’re looking for a down trend and if you hadn’t found any, you would look for something else (flat trend or no significant change up).
Have you done that, RodB? That’s what a skeptic would do, especially if they ALWAYS bleat on about how they want the raw data. Since you seem to have a thing for how fiddling figures go (or could go) on, how do you know that these three stations are looked at by the same person, who is in the pay of an oil company? Or all three next to Exxon CEO’s summer house?
BE SKEPTICAL!
Rod B, also Mt Pinatubo did not change the climate. It changed weather over a few years.
Unless we get that level of eruption regularly enough to even out and add up to a climatalogically significant change, THEN you can say your hatstand comment in #390. Until then you may as well say that the sun coming up each morning has an effect on the global climate.
Thanks for the clarification, Deep Climate (#389.) That does indeed help, and I appreciate it.
So SR05 is the “Chrysler” of instrumental records, I suppose. . .
Mark, stop the personality stuff please. Focus on the science.
If you get rhetorical about people you just waste time. Even bad questions are teachable, because the assumptions can be pointed out. Lack of clarity says someone’s having a bad day or night, but like bad papers can lead to interesting results.
The stuff starting with
> without a good answer to a, you’re persecuting …
is language used in victim trolling, and those connotations are unavoidable. It’s always a mistake going there. Troll FAQ.
Focus on the science. Trust the Contributors here, they control the filter on what gets posted. If we want to help out, as ordinary readers, we cope and be patient and helpful (or pretend to, while we’re here!).
> Pinatubo — it’s important in climatology:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/5573/1687
That paper was cited by 162 other papers so far; click the link.
Read. That’s the measure of good science — later citations. Just like the measure of evolutionary fitness is having more grandchildren. It’s an outcome, not a pure quality per se.
Point being, there’s no simple line — weather? climate?
How many data points can be _collected_ to test for a change, against the naturally varying background? With Pinatubo, plenty, quickly.
A sufficiently big volcanic injection of sulfate shows up as a change in climate.
Why? It’s _bigger_ than the background noise/annual variation.
It’s not hidden as are smaller forcings over that short time span. It sticks out, it’s detectable around the world, it’s climate change.
It’s a brief change, because the sulfates wash out.
October one of the coldest years in of the last 115 after “corrected”? Or so say one Swedish newspaper, where did he get that number from?!? Any ideas?
http://www.svd.se/opinion/brannpunkt/artikel_2085447.svd
Magnus, (#398)
It beats me. I read a similar claim by a Canadian poster (although the specific numbers were different.) I couldn’t see anything supporting it.
Here is the monthly report for October from the US National Climate Data Center. (Note that they use the SR05 analysis, processed differently (and independently) from GISS.)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/oct/global.html#temp
To summarize, they have this as the *warmest October on record* for global land temperatures; it is 6th globally for sea temps and 2nd for combined land and sea. HadCRUT also had October as very warm; here’s that info, courtesy of Ben Lankamp (#321 above): “Last month gets a #6 position in the top 10 of warmest October months, according to HadCRU. GISS puts October 2008 at #5.”
Of course, variability being what it is, some places have still been cooler than usual; I think most of the UK was, for instance. I didn’t check on Sweden, which conceivably might have been the basis for your columnist’s claim. But if he was talking about global temps, he was just wrong.
Eli Rabbet I enjoy reading your blog and recommended readings, big fan.