Anthopogenic Global Warming Myth or Real ?

David Rodale said:
A person of even below average intelligence would notice a parking lot is much warmer than it would be if it were grass, and that leaving a city one would notice the temperature drops. Another would notice the larger the city, the more UHI.
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Yes and a person average intelligence would also realize that parking lot is warmer on a warm day then it is on a cool day. For your claims to hold up the reverse would need to be true…

David Rodale said:
Lomiller, I take and analyze dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of measurements every single day for my job. Variation and uncertainty are no strangers. If have evidence to support your POV, please post it.
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You expect me to “prove” Watt’s has not published any evidence his photographs are meaningful? I suggest that since you referenced Watts the onus is on you to find a peer reviewed papers he has published on the subject.
 
Wangler said:
Where is Piggy?

He would love this slaughter........................

Oh, wait, wrong side...

:blush:
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DR’s fundamental claim is that if you put a thermometer by a parking lot it will read warmer temperatures on cool days then it does on warm days. After all if it reads warmer temperatures on warmer days it can still tell you when it’s warmer right? If it can tell you when it’s warmer it can tell you if the things are warming up right?

So yes the slaughter is considerable…

By the way, you really should check out that link I provide you earlier. It makes it abundantly clear that Watts is both mathematically incompetent and completely dishonest.
 
David Rodale said:
Oh please, go on.

I am well aware of Parker/Peterson and have already quoted them (many times in the past as well); the IPCC cherry picking campaign saga.

A person of even below average intelligence would notice a parking lot is much warmer than it would be if it were grass, and that leaving a city one would notice the temperature drops. Another would notice the larger the city, the more UHI. Yet Parker, a "scientist", without ever taking one measurement can determine UHI is a myth.

(snip)

Oh, BTW, if you think Watts is such a dimwit, please explain why NCDC acknowledged his work and gave him a formal invitation to their facility this April?
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Look, don't get me wrong. I've nothing against being critical of methodologies; science would never advance if people weren't willing to question these things. In that way, I regard people like Watts keeping the experimentalists in check to be a good thing and I'm not about to discourage that aspect of his work. After all, climate science as a whole is now better for criticisms like that.

But seriously, the UHI argument is so 1990s.

What I do object to is how people try to refute the surface records as a whole based on specific, localised weaknesses. After all, it's not like all stations are affected by things such as UHI and it's not like their calibrations have all drifted in unison over the years. The most common problem in my job as a field scientist is the fact that once data has been collected, that's it, no going back. If, after the fact, you find a problem with it, you have to deal with it. The first step is to see if the problem adversely affected the data products and if so, whether they can be recovered. I have cited papers that say in spite of the perceived problems, you can still generate worthwhile data products. There's a wheelbarrow load more I could cite that say more or less the same thing, but apparently they all have IPCC cooties.

On the other hand, rather than cite papers that come to the opposing conclusion, all you are coming back with is work that pokes specific holes in the other papers. I'm not saying they are worthless, but they don't in themselves prove that the climate records as a whole are bunk. If you, Watts, or anyone else for that matter wants to prove that, a good place to start would be to come up with defensible corrections or to simply filter out all the bad data and show, not speculate, that it makes an appreciable difference. If someone has got a recent paper on that published, I'd be very interested to see it.

Until then, I'm not inclined to automatically throw the whole basket case out of the window, especially when they're corroborated by so much other data (marine measurements, sonde data, remote sensing, proxies, etc.).
 
David Rodale said:
It would be best if you'd change the subject before digging a hole you can't get out of. None of you have researched this, but instead raise your hands and waive furiously.

The WMO has internationally recognized standards for siting of surface stations. The pictures on Watts website document clearly differentiate those that meet the standards from those that do not.

There are numerous examples demonstrating statements such as yours is not supported by any empirical data. The "studies" your side provided are nothing but speculation or single-site evaluation. To say that wind evens out the UHI effect is ludicrous to be generous.

There are many details not addressed thus far, but one very simple reason why there are so many thermometers shown attached to roof tops, sides of buildings, parking lots, sidewalks etc., is because the cabling requirements do not allow for long distances to the data collection source.

We can go into more detail on other issues which you've likely never considered, but for now, dwell on these:

Detecting urbanization effects on surface and subsurface
thermal environment — A case study of Osaka

MICROCLIMATE EXPOSURES OF SURFACE-BASED WEATHER STATIONS

Anthropogenic heat island at Barrow, Alaska, during winter: 2001–2005

Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and
inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data

How much Estimation is too much Estimation?
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You need to show that these are the rule, not the exception.

And regardless of whether they are the rule or not, this is a non-issue if the biases are accounted for when processing the data.
 
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a_unique_person said:
Sounding a little alarmist, aren't you?

Using anomolies is one way of accounting for errors.
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And I ask again:-

Why aren't the weather station nazis besieging the various met offices and TV weather presenters about the rubbish they're foisting on us?
 
David Rodale said:
How many hundreds of examples do you need? Over half have been surveyed and the results aren't looking so good.
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A hundred would still be less than one in 10 of all USHCN sites. I'm sure Watts can find lots of bad examples, but it doesn't make the whole worthless. When he finally finishes, I'd be interested to hear how many sites he would consider good and then see what their trends are like compared to the rest.

David Rodale said:
Automated doesn't mean better. They can have several problems, as was noted as long ago as 1991. I still keep a calibrated mercury thermometer in my lab. Without a calibration frequency schedule, there is no way to know if problems crop up even today.
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I'll freely admit that the whole automation thing was just a running argument with mhaze that got out of hand. However, simply by virtue of the increased frequency of data collection, it is possible to filter AWS for influences such as UHI (as you pointed out), so in that regard they are much better. Also, while calibrations tend to drift on those things, my experience is that what drifts you get tend to be random.

David Rodale said:
Now, do you think that mess was ever accounted for?
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In short, yes. At least to the best of people's abilities and a lot of papers have been published to that effect. I'll give up pointing you to the references in appendix 3B2 in AR4WG1 because of your insistence in dismissing them offhand. Rather, I'll just point out that if older, non-aspirated weather stations suffered heating problems that weren't corrected for, that would cause a negative artefact in the temperature trends, not a positive one. I'll also point out that despite people becoming aware of localised issues such as UHI in the early 90s and taking measures to get rid of them, eliminating them at the measurement stage didn't suddenly make all the rising temperatures go back to where they were. And it still hasn't.
 
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lomiller said:
DR’s fundamental claim is that if you put a thermometer by a parking lot it will read warmer temperatures on cool days then it does on warm days.
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Does he? Are you sure?

After all if it reads warmer temperatures on warmer days it can still tell you when it’s warmer right? If it can tell you when it’s warmer it can tell you if the things are warming up right?

So yes the slaughter is considerable…

By the way, you really should check out that link I provide you earlier. It makes it abundantly clear that Watts is both mathematically incompetent and completely dishonest.
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We knew that. His website provides copious evidence.
 
TrueSceptic said:
Does he? Are you sure?
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For a weather station to be fundamentally unable to detect global warming, as DR suggests, that’s precisely what would need to happen. As long as warmer days shows read a higher temperature then cooler days there *will* be a signal in the data that represents the temperature trend. It may take some effort to extract, but it will be present
 
Spud1k said:
A hundred would still be less than one in 10 of all USHCN sites. I'm sure Watts can find lots of bad examples, but it doesn't make the whole worthless. When he finally finishes, I'd be interested to hear how many sites he would consider good and then see what their trends are like compared to the rest.
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That's the question, isn't it.

I understand the point of what Watts is doing, and understand why it appeals to the deniers. Photo evidence that sites don't meet standards looks so damning. The implicit point, the point that everyone is just supposed to get, is that therefore these sites produce bad data and the surface record is untrustworthy.

But that isn't good enough, and it shouldn't be good enough for anyone. He needs to explicitly prove this hypothesis. So yes, it will be very interesting to see how the trends from the below standard sites compare to the rest; although, from what I have seen so far, the data that they produce are comparable.

That's why showing me a picture of a below standard site will just get a big fat 'so what'? from me. I'm not going to complete the argument for Watts. He needs to prove that there really is a problem.
 
lomiller said:
For a weather station to be fundamentally unable to detect global warming, as DR suggests, that’s precisely what would need to happen. As long as warmer days shows read a higher temperature then cooler days there *will* be a signal in the data that represents the temperature trend. It may take some effort to extract, but it will be present
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I don't think he is suggesting that. He is suggesting that high-reading stations are distorting the data (and that this bias is ignored).
 
Pipirr said:
That's the question, isn't it.

I understand the point of what Watts is doing, and understand why it appeals to the deniers. Photo evidence that sites don't meet standards looks so damning. The implicit point, the point that everyone is just supposed to get, is that therefore these sites produce bad data and the surface record is untrustworthy.

But that isn't good enough, and it shouldn't be good enough for anyone. He needs to explicitly prove this hypothesis. So yes, it will be very interesting to see how the trends from the below standard sites compare to the rest; although, from what I have seen so far, the data that they produce are comparable.

That's why showing me a picture of a below standard site will just get a big fat 'so what'? from me. I'm not going to complete the argument for Watts. He needs to prove that there really is a problem.
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Exactly!
 
Pipirr said:
That's why showing me a picture of a below standard site will just get a big fat 'so what'? from me. I'm not going to complete the argument for Watts. He needs to prove that there really is a problem.
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Watts just needs to raise a serious question, but even in that he fails. A photo-album of US weather stations, compiled by people who are already of a certain mindset, and interpreted subjectively ... there's no trace of a serious question there.

Watts also has a problem with what a baseline is. His prominence in the otherworld is damning evidence of their intellectual poverty.
 
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