The picture below is from Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor. You may have heard of him, the Governor of Oregon tried to get him fired for not jumping on to the global warming bandwagon because he doesn't see enough supporting evidence.

The picture is of Forest Grove, Oregon, and the temperature plot below shows how it is warming. But George says:

"Yes, it’s a window air conditioning unit to the east and the edge of a large asphalt parking lot to the north, northwest, and west. The pic is shot looking northeast. For those of you that may not immediately realize this, air conditions exhaust hot air to the outside.

Not only that, but Forest Grove is located in Washington County, Oregon’s fastest-growing county (in terms of population growth, not percentage) for the last 40 years. No wonder it’s seeing unprecedented high temperatures…"

It looks like the air conditioner may have been installed around 1985, notice the sustained 1 degree jump that started about then and sustained a plateau.

And this is a station of record, a US Historic Climatology Network station that is used in global climate models by NASA, in fact the plot is from that database.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today I visited my friend Jim Goodridge, former California State Climatologist and the man with a garage full of data going back to before the Gold Rush.

He’s been quietly toiling away in his retirement on his computer for the last 15 years or so making all sort of data comparisons. He gave me two CD ROMS full of data that I’m just now wading through. One plot which he shared with me today is a 104 year plot map of California showing station trends after painstakingly hand entering data into an Excel spreadsheet and plotting slopes of the data to produce trend dots.

He used every good continuous piece of data he could get his hands on, no adjusted data like the climate miodelers use, only raw from Coopertive Observing Stations, CDF stations, Weather Service Offices’s and Municipal stations.

The results are quite interesting. Here it is:

Squint hard and you can see a pattern emerge.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 07:52 PM | Permalink

Tuesday on page 7A of the Enterprise Record there was a full page ad for the Oriental Buffet at the corner of East Avenue and Esplande that touted a copy of the most recent Butte County Health Department inspection with the words in bold "Compliance Achieved" on the newspaper ad.

You may remember the previous restaurant left an indelible mark in the minds of many Chicoans when it was closed down over a year ago due to massive health violations. Here is the ER Article.

Everybody deserves a chance to succeed, but I have to wonder about the wisdom of opening a door like this by putting your health report in a newspaper ad because it invites people to take a further look. It was the topic of my morning discussion group on Tuesday, so I decided to look for myself.

You can see Food Facility Inspection Reports for the Chico Area online here

And the inspection reports starting 5/07/07 for the Oriental Buffet are here:
( you'll need Adobe Acrobat PDF reader to view these - its free here )

Oriental Buffet, 2539 Esplanade, Chico 05/07/07 Inspection

Oriental Buffet, 2539 Esplanade, Chico 05/08/07 Re-Inspection

Oriental Buffet, 2539 Esplanade, Chico 05/09/07 Re-Inspection

Oriental Buffet, 2539 Esplanade, Chico 05/11/07 Re-Inspection

On the first inspection on 5/07/07 there were 7 major violations and 14 minor ones, for a total of 21 violations. The inspector made 22 notations on the issues filling two pages. The next day on 5/08/07 they were down to 4 major violations and no minor ones. On 5/09/07 they were down to 3 major violations. On 5/11/07 they finally achieved "compliance". The restaurant has been open since April 8th.

But I have to wonder, compliance for how long? You have to wonder that when a restaurant runs a full page ad touting "compliance" given the visually dramatic stigma the building has attached to it maybe the owners don't fully understand what they are up against. Like I said, everybody deserves a chance to succeed, but perhaps a different theme would be the way to do it in this case.

To be fair though, I'll point out that the inspection reports show that Egg Roll King on Palmetto needed 4 attempts to reach compliance this year , as did Gen Kai on Pillsbury, and Big Al's needed 4 last year and so did Rice Bowl this year, and so did Sin of Cortez. Thai House on Broadway needed 5 inspections this year.

The all time high was Happy Garden on Cohasset with six consecutive inspections required last year before compliance was acheieved.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I decided I’d drop some more fun with entropy your way. Here is the USHCN station of climate record in Redding, CA GISS number # 425725920010 and used in the climate modeling database

It is now operated by the US Forest Service at their HQ located at the Redding Airport. It used to be operated by the National Weather Service, but that WSFO closed in the mid 90’s.

Like Marysville, the site is surrounded by asphalt, and the surface is unnatural - its wood chips over weedmat, and I’ll have to say it was hot as heck to walk on during mid-day..

But the kicker is the “accessories” they’ve added for convenience of running the hygrometer and for night observations. Yes it is another fine high-quality USHCN climate recording site. I wonder how many times they forgot to turn off the light? It looks like there might be room for a hot plate to keep your coffee warm while making observations.

The blower is used to run air past the wet bulb hygrometer...its not the correct way
to do it (manual aeration by rotation is specified).

Posted by Anthony Watts at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This morning, I took my children out front, and we placed three flags in our front yard. Each child got one little flag on a wooden stick to plant in the front garden, while mommy and daddy got the big flag to hang from the porch.

After a little discussion on why we did this on Memorial Day," to remember those who keep us free", my son William remarked, "ok...can we wash the car now?" (that was our next project).

Well maybe it's a little early at nearly 4, to install some patriotism. But later when William and I drove to the hardware store together he said "Daddy, how come those houses don't have flags? We have flags". It was then I realized we were the only house on our entire street displaying flags today.

Good question son, good question.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's an interesting thorn in the side of the recent planning commission approval of Meriam Park that nobody seems to have brought up or discussed. Maybe there are plans I'm not aware of, but given the issues being raised with a cell phone tower elsewhere in the city, it seems the issue would have been vocalized by now.

There's a giant cell phone tower jutting into the Meriam Park property. Most people think its a standard radio station. It was, but not anymore. It's purely a cell phone site. It's at the intersection of Bruce and Picholine Way, as seen at left.

I've also provided an aerial view from Google Earth.

The former KHSL-AM radio towers on Bruce Road no longer broadcast on AM 1290 as they did for 50 plus years. That transmitter was removed a few years ago but the towers remained. The FCC license was and property was sold to McCoy broadcasting and KPAY 1050 was converted to 1290.

In the early 1990's, one of Chico's first cell phone services was placed on the East tower and it remains in service today. The West tower is not transmitting anything at all. A few years ago, the Bruce road property was sold to one of the cell phone companies when Clearchannel bought KPAY from McCoy.

The old KHSL Radio tower cell site is probably the best in Chico due to its location and height. I don't think they'll be easily persuaded to give it up.

So now, some city councilors that may want to vote against a cell phone tower at the Elks Lodge for "health and safety" issues raised by enlightened citizens may find themselves in a pickle when it comes to approving Meriam Park homes that will be less than 500 feet from those "dangerous cell phone emissions".

In the graphic below from the Meriam Park planning website, I've added the pointer showing where the cell phone tower is in relation to the rest of the plan.

The neighbors right across the street on Picholine fit in that zone already.

I wonder if the neighbors on Picholine Way were ever told of the nature of that tower? I wonder if they even care? Since the cell phone transmitters have been there about 15 years now, I wonder how many of the neighbors are suffering from debilitating health issues as is claimed by some detractors of the Elks Lodge cell tower?

'Tis a quandary for sure.

UPDATE- It turns out New Urban Builders has purhcased the tower property, see comments.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm surveying climate stations of record around California and documenting their condition as part of a larger project I'm doing. You'll see more about it here in the near future.

Today I visited Marysville's Fire Station, just off Hwy 70 at 9th and B Street, where they have the station of record for the city using the MMTS electronic sensor installed by the National Weather Service. The data from this station is part of the USHCN (US Historical Climatological Network) and is used in the computer modeling used to predict climate change.

The Marysville station is located behind the fire department building on a patio and is probably the worst site visited so far. In addition to the sensor being surrounded by asphalt and concrete, its also within 10 feet of buildings, and within 8 feet of a large metal cell tower that could be felt reflecting sunlight/heat. And worst of all, air conditioning units on the cell tower electronics buildings vent warm air within 10 feet of the sensor. Oh and lets not forget the portable BBQ the firefighters use a "couple times a week." The area has been constantly added to, what was once a grass rear yard was turned to a parking lot, then more buildings added, then a cell tower with one, then two electronics buildings and the air conditioners...no report on how long the firefighters were BBQ'ing back there, when they figured out why I was asking all the questions they clammed up.

I can tell you with certainty, the temperature data from this station is useless. Look at the pictures to see why, and is it any wonder the trend for temperature is upward?

Above: Vehicles with hot radiators park within 6 feet of the temperature sensor!

Now compare Marysville to Orland, just 50 miles away, where there's not been any significant change in the last 100 years at the measuring location. Its obvious that Marysville is measuring UHI (Urban Heat Island) effects.

So the question is, how does bad data like this slip into the NASA GISS model database?

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It appears that in the quest to save our planet from dangerous chemicals, people will blindly sign anything. Read more about this dangerous chemical here: http://www.dhmo.org/ It's "an odorless, tasteless chemical" that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.

This chemical is so dangerous that a local city council in Aliso Viejo, CA put it on the agenda to ban foam containers made with it. I expect our liberal city council may soon address this danger like we've already done for nuclear weapons in the city limits.

Penn and Teller provide an entertaining look into mindless activism.

with a hat tip to Mark...

Posted by Anthony Watts at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My friends at coffee this morning got a huge laugh out of Chico Peace and Justice Center member Sherri Quammen's claim in a vitriol filled letter to the editor that I'm the "real WMD".

For somebody who professes "peace and justice", she sure seems to have a lot of anger to vent. She's sent letters to all three newspapers, the ER, Chico Beat, and you'll see the same letter come Thursday at the Chico News and Review I'm sure. Lately, the message of "peace on earth" seems to have lost the accessory clause of "goodwill towards men". Though its hard to tell through her rant just what she dislikes about me most, it appears that my views and research into climate change must be the main factor.

I sent her a nice note last week, offering to meet and get aquainted over coffee or tea someday, (since we've never met) after the letter appeared in the Chico Beat, so far no response.

But that's OK, being a public person, criticism comes with the territory. It's an occupational hazard. I guess I should be honored that my threat level has been elevated. Poor Al Gore takes all sorts of flak daily.

Sooo....since I've been labeled a WMD, I think that I'll have to look over my shoulder a lot to make sure I'm not being followed by police officers intent on giving me a ticket in case I go off in the Chico city limits. That's a $500 fine you know.

To make it easier for people to spot me, I think I'll get a T-shirt that says simply "BOOM".

Posted by Anthony Watts at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I found the full page color advertisement on page 5E of the Sunday Enterprise Record quite interesting.

It lists a number of environmental reasons why the M&T Baldwin Gravel mine would be a good thing, not the least of which is the reduction of the number of truck miles traveled in Butte County due to trucking in building gravel from outside the county, and the reduction in gasoline burned and GHG's avoided helping "Global Warming".

And then there's the angle that this mine pit will fill with water, and create an animal habitat just like the Teichert Ponds have done when it was used as a borrow pit to construct Highway 99 overpasses. There we have a clear example of how a lowly gravel mine got turned into a nature habitat, and there was no help or "kickstart" to nature as the M&T operators are proposing for their pits destined to be ponds.

It will be interesting to see how opponents argue against the project with these environmental assets it offers.

Here's how Chico Creek Nature Center described the Teichert Ponds for a walking tour they sponsored of them:

April 8, Sunday - Teichert Pond/Birding By Ear - Trip co-leaders: Scott Huber and Dawn Garcia. Time: TBD. Chico’s Hidden Wetland - the view from Rte 99 is enticing; a large pond surrounded by tules and ringed with willows and oaks. Trip leader, Scott Huber, will direct you through the maze of streets that lead to the heart of Teichert Pond(s). Once in, you\'ll delight in the diversity of avian life found in this \'secret wetland\' just blocks from downtown Chico. Co-leader Dawn Garcia, an expert at identifying local bird species by ear, will point out audio clues for ID\'ing species seen and perhaps some that are only heard! Expect at least three woodpecker species, a number of flycatchers, numerous sparrow species, a few raptors (possibly a Great Horned Owl), at least three warbler species, some ducks, geese and shorebirds and with any luck, some surprise migrants! Consider picking up one of the great “birding by ear” CD sets to prepare you for this trip: Bird Songs of California (Keller - Cornell Lab of Ornithology) or Western Birding by Ear (Peterson Field Guides).

So what's all the fuss about over this gravel mine?

Posted by Anthony Watts at 09:11 AM | Permalink

I don't know what they are watching in Tunisia as shown above, but if places like that can be going to net TV it begs the question; Will 2008 be the year we can finally drop our expensive cable bills? It's sure looking like it.

Joost is constantly adding content, ABC and CBS announced they will stream shows in HD, and media boxes such as the Apple TV becoming popular. Television networks finally seem willing and ready to distribute their TV shows on the web, and hardware manufacturers are finally making easy-to-use media boxes that will bring the web to the living room. There's also TV sets emerging like the Sylvania combo TV that has a built in Linux based streaming video player along with regular, HDTV, TV, CATV and video inputs.

Do you think we're finally there, the Internet-based TV-on-demand? If so, local TV stations like KHSL, KNVN, and KRCR had better get with the program soon or miss the boat. Maybe they can show Dave Vanore's pig, Winnie, 24/7 as some porcine reality TV.

I'm proud to have made the very first live Internet TV system in Chico, which has been used now for over a year to broadcast City Council, School Board, and Planning commission meetings via the web. Its free, try it out sometime at this link If you have DSL or a Cable modem it will work well for you. It may not be as interesting as Tunisia TV, but maybe some city councilors could be convinced to liven up the show a bit.

BTW if you want to watch the Tunisia TV channel as shown above, here is the free Internet TV player you can download.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I swung by the new offices of Computers for Classrooms today to get a quick tour of what they are doing with their brand new facility. Pat Furr, the director, was kind enough to show me around. I must say I was impressed. I've always been a fan of this organization, as they supply schools and low income families with thousands of computers each year. What is even more impressive - they do it by recycling old computers.

One of the problems with the process is making sure any donated or scrapped computer hard drives don't retain any personal data. To do that, they have a nifty NSA rated disk wiping program that will do 20 drives at once to ensure that whatever they send back out could not possible have anybody's data.

But what about the hard disks that fail? They can still be taken apart, repaired and data recovered. To solve that problem, CFC now has a hard disk degausser, seen at left. Basically its a device that stores up electrical energy, then releases it in a huge magnetic pulse onto the hard drive inserted into it. The pulse not only destroys the data on the drive, but is strong enough to warp the magnetic platters and the drive heads, making it completely unusable ever again.

And they'll do it for a $5 donation for anyone that has a hard drive they want destroyed. They'll even give you a certificate of destruction. It also works on magnetic video and audio tape, Zip disks, portable hard drives, floppies, and anything else that uses magnetic media to store data.

So if you have some incriminating, embarrassing, or sensitive data files, or maybe some old Nixon tapes, take them on down to Computers for Classrooms and tell Pat Furr I sent you. They are located at 315 Huss Dr., Chico, CA 95928 (see map) phone 895-4175 or email cfc@digitalpath.net

While you are there, you may want to help a needy family get a computer. They have complete systems available to the public for around $100 preloaded with Windows XP and Microsoft Office.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A test of wood surface temperatures related to paint

NOTE: This is not research quality experiment, but a simple test to point me towards others tests and experiments. IR thermometers have limited resolution and are subject to calibration errors. The real experiment is being conducted on 3 identical Stevenson Screens with an NIST calibrated data logger and the results will be published in a couple of months.

You may recall a blog entry where I talked about Bad Paint Job = Rising Surface Temperatures? The premise is that the early weather station temperature shelters called Stevenson Screens originally have been specified to be painted with whitewash when the were designed and comissioned in the 1890's

Stevenson Screen at the NWS office in Monterey - good paint but right next to asphalt parking lot and concrete walk - a definite no-no!

Curious to follow where the evidence leads, I decided to do a test today.

Preliminary spot test of the temperatures of bare wood, latex paint, and lime based whitewash (CACO3)

5/17/06 by Anthony Watts, Chico, CA

Click thumbnail pictures for larger ones

Test setup in full sun. Three slats of 1x4 pine, 2 feet long each, bare wood in the center as a control, latex on the left, whitewash on the right.

Methodology: Whitewash was mixed after conferring with Chemist Richard Godbey of the Chemical Lime Company in Henderson NV and after reading a paper he authored on the history and home creation of whitewash which you can read here http://www.lime.org/BLG/Mold.pdf (PDF)

Pictures: Materials, Mixing Whitewash, applying whitewash coat 1, coat 4 after 24 hour curing

Slats were all cut from same plank, chosen to be as knot free as possible, cut to exact same size, 2 ' long, and spaced equidistant on the frame.

Measurements were taken 3 times with IR thermometer shown below, at1:50 PM, 2:10PM, and 2:20 PM PST to be sure results were repeatable. What you see below is the 2:20PM spot test.
 

Device used to measure surface Temperature, A Fluke model 561 HVAC Pro IR thermometer, handheld with laser dot sighting of measurement target

Temperature of bare wood, this represented average of several scans. The temperature was 102.6 degrees F

Temperature of Latex Painted wood, the leftmost slat temperature 88.2F

Temperature of Whitewashed wood, the rightmost slat temperature 82.5F

Summary:

Temperature difference between bare wood and Latex painted wood was about 14 degrees F

Temperature difference between bare wood and whitewash painted wood was 20 degrees F

Temperature difference between latex painted wood and whitewash painted wood was 5 degrees F

Next Test: time series temperature over several days measured by NIST calibrated data logging thermometers compared to ambient aspirated air temperature.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Here's something that took me completely by surprise. In the most recent edition of The Nation, columnist Alexander Cockburn did a left wing smack down of Gore and the entire Global Warming solutions and carbon business model.

The article, titled "Who Are the Merchants of Fear?" Lobs some heavy artillery in the direction of the Goreacle. Here's a few excerpts:

"These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there's no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business."

And about Gore:

"The world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. […] As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters."

And this quote:
"...Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable."

For those of you that don't know this journal, The Nation is quite to the left. For example, on their main page today, you can find a web poll on "Who most deserves to be impeached?" (Bush Cheney, or Gonzales)

When such a clearly left and prominent journal starts taking shots at Gore, the IPCC, and climate modelers like James Hansen as the article written by Cockburn does, you have to wonder if the whole house of cards isn't about to start falling down.

Wow.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I covered global warming on Mars previously, but many climate change proponents shrug that off as being a "regional effect" that only affects Mars south pole as they say its related to changes in the orbit of Mars.

Ok fair enough.

But recently, a new paper was published in Geophysical Research Letters titled Suggestive correlations between the brightness of the planet Neptune, solar variability, and Earth’s temperature by Hammel, H. B., and G. W. Lockwood.

In a nutshell, they say they have found clear evidence of "global warming" on Neptune, and they have measurements and models to support it.

While they don't claim a "smoking gun" for solar driven climate change, they do say in their abstract that " If changing brightnesses and temperatures of two different planets are correlated, then some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment"

So we have three planets now with a warming trend; Earth, Mars, and Neptune. That's not an insignificant coincidence.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I drove through Grass Valley today, the cell phone tower disguised as a pine tree reminded me that Tuesday night, the City Council will consider once again the cell phone tower proposal for the Chico Elks Lodge property.

I expect the usual suspects will be there, telling us all how "dangerous" the "radiation" from the proposed cell tower will be. Given the intenisty with which some will argue health issues, I expect some councilors will cave to the overly concerned. I don't have a stake in this fight, except to say improved cell phone coverage in Upper Park will benefit everyone.

We'll hear the old tired arguments about "dangerous radiation" emanating from cell towers, which I don't see dangerous at all, I'd like to point out things around town that give off equal or greater amounts of "dangerous electromagnetic radiation" and the approximate relative field strengths to the proposed cell tower given its distance from the road.:

- Cell phones next to your head - 1000x greater
- Cell phone in the car you are riding in, - 100x greater
- Cell phones carried by people walking at the farmers market - 10x greater
- STL microwave link from radio station KZFR above city plaza to their transmitter - about the same
- WiFi router in your house 10x
- WiFi public hotspot in Has Beans 10x
- Channel 12/24 Live van around town, live at city plaza concert 100x
- Microwaving popcorn 1x
- Police radar traffic gun 10x (concentrated narrow beam)

So you see, "dangerous electromagnetic radiation" is everywhere. The fact is, its not dangerous at all, and I'd suggest those city councilors that don't know their science, bone up. There really isn't a leg for them to stand on when you look at the many other accepted electromagnetic radiation sources around town that emit equal or greater radio signal strengths.

Radio signal strength follows the inverse square law

That means that doubling the distance from a transmitter means that the power density of the radiated wave at that new location is reduced to one-quarter of its previous value.

Given the location of the proposed tower at the Elks Lodge is well set back from the road and building, and the park, I see no realistic issues of concern.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sung to the famous Italian song Funicili Funicila.

For a real hoot, see Rodney Dangerfield sing it here on Youtube

Posted by Anthony Watts at 10:16 AM | Permalink

The Chico News and Review has gotten quite a number of letters on their 911 Truth article which gave a platform to the people whom prefer to believe that a gigantic government conspiracy was the reason behind the 911 WTC collapse, and that the towers were brought down with explosives, rather than by fire.

I wrote a short blog essay on the subject, and a letter to the editor, pointing out that the recent collapse of the I580-880 freeway interchange had a lot of similarities, illustrating that fire can indeed take town steel and concrete structures.

Predictably, the 911Truthers lobbed a couple of ticked off letters back at me, even going so far as to say I'm "spreading distortions".

While I don't intend to argue their points, since you can't usually come out winning when you argue with people whom believe conspiracy theories, I will present another view.

For those of you that prefer rational science and engineering, I present this item, a paper published in 2003 by The Journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, presents a balanced view that shows that the collapse didn't need steel melting temperatures to occur. It was written by Thomas W. Eagar, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Engineering and Engineering Systems, and Christopher Musso, graduate research student, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You can read the report in its entirety here: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/Eagar-0112.html

Or just skip to this conclusion:
While it was impossible for the fuel-rich, diffuse-flame fire to burn at a temperature high enough to melt the steel, its quick ignition and intense heat caused the steel to lose at least half its strength and to deform, causing buckling or crippling. This weakening and deformation caused a few floors to fall, while the weight of the stories above them crushed the floors below, initiating a domino collapse.

There's a maxim called Occam's Razor; "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and hypothetical entities tends to be correct. Conspiracy theories require many more assumptions, some unprovable, than a fire and materials failure does.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

The LA Times reports that California is seeing a big drop off in rebate applications for solar power systems. It seems that to get a rebate you have to also switch to a time of use rate with your utility.

The math of economics is not working out for many, especially for smaller systems that don't fully cover use during peak hours. The result: homeowners are reluctant to go with solar energy because its starting to become economically unfeasible.

The difference between peak and off-peak rates is particularly large in the 11 counties of Central, coastal and Southern California, where CalEdison provides electricity service to 13 million customers. CalEdison charges summer time-of-use rates that range from 29.7 to 35.9 cents per kilowatt-hour between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. It drops to a range of 16.3 to 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. weekdays and all weekend days and holidays, according to documents filed with the PUC.' There is likely an optimal system size for the smaller consumer of electricity that reduces consumer costs, but with so much in flux in today's solar power market its hard to pin down the numbers, as it becomes a moving target.

Another factor is the strong worldwide demand for solar panels, almost to the point of shortages. In such a market driven economy, when a product is in high demand, there is little flexibility on price and often contracts take a long time to fill to completion just waiting for panels.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Site Survey

Chico State University Farm, Hegan Lane, Chico, CA  95926 (530) 898-6343

Date: 5/09/07

Survey By: Anthony Watts

USHCN Reported Coordinates of site: CHICO (39.71°N, 121.82°W; 56 m)

Measured GPS Coordinates of site:

Lat/Lon 39.69194˚  N  121.82127˚  W

Elevation 54.5592 m (179 feet)

Site description and known history:

California State University, Chico has been in operation since a land grant made the college a reality in 1887. The CSUC Farm has been in operation since 1963, and it is believed the current site has been at the same location since then. The prior source and location for data in the climate record for Chico is unknown as of this writing.

Curator notes:

1. There has been encroachment by Oleander bushes onto the site in recent times, about 2 years ago, a prominent Oleander bush that was blocking the pyranometer view was removed, see before (sketch) and after photos below.
2. The curator notes that there was a complaint from a meteorologist from WeatherNews about a change in temperature data that coincided with a repainting of the CRS's a few years ago, but cannot recall the date exactly.

Site surveyor notes:

1. There are missing louvers on the north side of the CRS containing the automated data logger and temp/dp sensor
2. There is clear evidence that both shelters have been repainted with latex paint, including brush marks and drip marks.
3. There is an asphalt road that curves around the site, from the southwest to the southeast
4. The surface at the site is  mixture of gravel, soil, and debris. There is no grass.
5. There is a water filled evapo-transpiration pan within  10 feet of each CRS, its lineage seems to indicate it goes back to the establishment of the site in 1963
6. The fiberglass composite NEMA electronics enclosure containing the data logger, radio modem, and solar battery charger are placed inside the CRS within 6-8 inches of the temperature/dp sensor. The 12 volt gel cel battery is also inside the CRS. These items may introduce a heat bias from the operating electronics.

Images of the site: (click for larger images)

		North
West				East
		South

Other Images: (click for larger images)

Interior of west most CRS with data logger, temp/dp sensor

Before (sketch) and after of vegetation encroachment

Various details of disrepair on both CRS's

Ground cover

Interior of east most, manual mercury thermometer CRS

Evidence of repainting, brush-marks, drips

Posted by Anthony Watts at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stevenson Screen at the NWS office in Monterey - good paint but right next to asphalt parking lot and concrete walk - a definite no-no!

After reading an excellent paper about the biases that have crept in to temperature measurements world wide titled: Unresolved Issues with the Assessment of Multi-Decadal Global Land-Surface Temperature Trends I decided to contact the main researcher.

Today I had an extraordinary exchange with the senior climate research scientist, Roger Pielke Sr. from the University of Colorado. In this exchange, he expressed interest in some observations I've made about the state of temperature measurements used to create the climatic record set used in climate modeling. You can see the exchange here.

In a nutshell, nobody seems to have experimentally investigated this issue I raised. Last year I posted an essay on the subject of paint and weather stations shelters at www.globalwarmingindex.com but the idea I've had goes back to the early 1990's, and I haven't experimentally investigated it either. It seems that weather stations shelters known as Stevenson Screens (the white chicken coop like boxes on stilts housing thermometers outdoors) were originally painted with whitewash, which is a lime based paint, and reflective of infra-red radiation, but its no longer available, and newer paints have been used that much different IR characteristics.

Why is this important? Well, paints that appear "white" and reflective in visible light have different properties in infrared. Some paints can even appear nearly "black" and absorb a LOT of infrared, and thus biases the thermometer. So the repainting of thousands of Stevenson screens worldwide with paints of uncertain infrared characteristics was another bias that has crept into the instrumental temperature records. Read here a report from the Arizona State University department of Physics and Astronomy of the response of paint pigments to infrared:

Almost all the paint pigments have the same properties as Si and Gallium Arsenide. They are transparent to infrared light. This transparency to IR occurs because the paint pigments are nearly all oxides (such as titanium white, titanium oxide) or sulfides (such as the red vermilion, mercury sulfide). In pure form, they are insulators or semiconductors with almost no electrons available for light absorption in the IR. - Arizona State University read more
Infrared spectral analysis of CaCO3, Calcium Carbonate, the main component of whitewash paint

This means that the infrared radiated from the sun, ground, and nearby objects goes straight to the wood, heating it, and likley biases the thermometer inside the shelter. Whitewash was specifically chosen to paint the Stevenson Screens because it it had some reflective infra-red properties (note graph above). Yet you don't read anything about this on repainting of weather shelters worldwide because there's no maintenance record to correlate the painting, its been done "ad hoc" by local operators of the stations. So some researchers just shrug their shoulders and use the data anyway. And when those same researchers are looking for "warming signatures", often measured in tenths of degrees, I have reason to doubt the findings knowing the possibility that significant measurement bias that has crept in.

Coupled with other documented biases, it is becoming clearer that the data collection methods used to get surface temperatures may be riddled with biases and errors.

Well. its go time. I'm going to conduct an experiment, of all things, on paints, wood, and thermometer bias. I'll be setting up controls, measurement practices, calibrations, and real-time data recording. It will be live on the Internet too as we watch different combinations of materials and how they react. And, I'm going to be visiting every weather station I can in California. My foray into climate modeling practice will have to wait, because if the data is biased or faulty, climate modeling then becomes nothing more than garbage in, garbage out.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Its Sunday Morning, 8:04 AM... No newspaper delivery and even more amazing, no online edition of the Enterprise Record is available. The only thing that is available is the image of the typeset front page of Sunday's paper, as shown above. I knew something was up at 12:20 last night when I finished a blog entry and the online edition text wasn't updated, but the front page image was.

I'm not being critical, just concerned for them. A newspaper is a synchronized dance of a variety of dissimilar elements, all of which must come together in scheduled precision. If one of the critical elements fails, boom, no newspaper. The Sunday edition is even more complex, with extra sections and scads of insertions.

Even so, its times like that when heroic efforts are made. I remember when the U2 plane crash hit the Mercury Register in Oroville. Yet they got the paper back up and running.

Given the reliance on computers for typesetting and control of printing presses, I'm guessing a network or server failure occurred at the ER last night. Because if it were the press, we'd have an online edition. For both to be missing says it has to be a common element, like the network or server. Though if it were the press, maybe they are all too busy scrambling for repair to get the online edition updated. Good luck to them in fixing it. And folks please cut them some slack when the paper finally does get published.

Or, maybe publisher Wolf Rosenberg simply decided to let us bloggers do the heavy lifting from now on. I'll ask him at coffee Monday.

UPDATE: The print edition just arrived at 8:43 AM, so it appears the problem is with the online edition

UPDATE2: As of about 4PM, the online edition has been updated

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tonight I was watching a Science Channel TV show on the New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto, which just completed its Jupiter flyby in February of this year.
Its a spectacular mission, and it's got a one day window of opportunity when it does its encounter with Pluto, and its moons Charon, plus the two new ones recently discovered.

What struck me was the fact that when the spacecraft makes it's flyby of Pluto, it will take four and a half hours for the radio signal from earth to reach Pluto, and another four and a half hours for a response to come back again. Can you imagine having a conversation like this?

So, my previous entry talked about the Galactic perspective of size for Earth, our planets, our sun and solar system in comparison to other stars, such as the Red Giant known as Betelgeuse. Its about the size of the orbit of Mars in our solar system. It's huge. Yet there are even larger supergiant stars, such as Antares.

If light takes a little over 4.5 hours to reach from the surface of the sun to Pluto, think about the relative slowness of lightspeed, even at the speed of 185000 miles per second, which is incredibly fast by our experiences, its molasses slow in terms of the size of the universe. Consider, our closest star, Alpha Centauri, 4.5 light years away. It takes light 4.5 years to reach us. And there are things seen by the Hubble telescope that are billions of light years away.

The conclusion that this brings me to is that there must be something faster than light. For example, our galaxy, the milky way spins around like a whirlpool, but doesn't fly apart. Gravity keeps it together. Yet for gravity to be able to act over such long distances, it stands to reason that it has to be faster than light.

Yet experimental measurements in 2002 indicate the speed of gravity be between between .8 and 1.2 times the speed of light. Hmmm.

It would seem to me more likely that the speed of gravity is either static or nearly infinite, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps we'll find out that gravity is actually a quantum effect, which has been shown to act at tremendous speed. Gravity acts at tremendous distances as well as close distances, but for subatomic distances it appears to be so weak as to be suspended.

Some theories say we'll find a partcle someday called the gravitron.

There's a lot we don't know yet about our universe.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:22 AM | Permalink

Often we lose sight of our place in the universe, some never knew at all just how miniscule we humans are compared to everything else. There's a tendency to view ourselves, our endeavors, and our accomplishments as the pinnacle. Yet, compared to what's in our solar system, whats in our galaxy, and whats in our universe, we are but a mere speck in the vastness of time, space, mass, and energy.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 09:29 PM | Permalink

It's nice to see social equality kick in from time to time. For example, not everyone can afford to buy carbon offsets like Al Gore to assuage our guilt for driving a car or flying around the country in an airplane, or having a heated pool.

But thanks to the good folks at Free Carbon Offsets, you too can join the ranks of the carbon purified.

just visit: http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com

And you can print your own Carbon Offset Certificate suitable for framing or for sale on Ebay.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have a new toy. Its one of the Global Climate Models that is being used to predict the future of Earth's climate and the effects of global warming.

Originally developed by NASA Goddard in New York its simply called "model E" Its the same GCM used to prepare the IPCC report. You can learn more about it yourself here.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/

By today's computer standards, this program is rather crude, as it has a lineage that goes back almost 30 years. It was written in FORTRAN. But, despite the old school mainframe programming language, it does represent a mountain of work and knowledge.

My intent here is to learn as much as I can about it, so that I can more intelligently comment on climate change predictions. I also plan to try some baseline tests with it to see if it models true when known parameters are kept static. By doing this, I'll be able to see if the climate system calculations are bias free for a variety of parameters.

I've already done my first global climate change model run, and it took almost two days for the calculations to complete from years 1958 to 2058. So it will be slow going since I don't have a Cray supercomputer at my disposal.

I can tell you that I've already found one big surprise, the CO2 and solar insolation datasets inlcuded only go to 1998, but much has been made of the last 9 years of "record high" global temperature observations by global warming proponents. I am in contact with the authors to see if I can get the datasets updated.

I'll keep you updated on what I learn.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Lund University in Sweden has just released a very interesting research summary titled: “The Earth’s climate is seesawing”.

Here is the short opening summary:

“During the last 10,000 years climate has been seesawing between the North and South Atlantic Oceans. As revealed by findings presented by Quaternary scientists at Lund University, Sweden, cold periods in the north have corresponded to warmth in the south and vice verse. These results imply that Europe may face a slightly cooler future than predicted by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

"...during the last 9000 years we can identify a persistent "seesaw" pattern. When the South Atlantic was warm it was cold in the North Atlantic and vice verse."

As many know, the "great conveyor belt" of the Atlantic is major factor in Northern Hemisphere Climate. It seems to be driven by ocean salinity changes, which are the result of periodic ice freeze/melt cycles.

"This is known to have happened repeatedly during the present Interglacial (the warm period since the last Ice Age). Minor disturbances have taken place in recent time, such as the Great Salt Anomaly in the 1970s, which seriously affected the cod population around the Faroe Islands."

This lines up well with the cooling trend seen in surface temperature data from about 1940 to the late 1970's, when "global cooling" was a big concern for scientists. Now it appears that we are in the flip side of the salinity cycle, and ice is melting again.

This is a good illustration that scientists don't fully understand Earth's complex climate system and its myriad of interactions and cycles, and that there are things yet to be discovered about what drives climate.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 11:39 PM | Permalink

I'm very distressed to read this. Newspapers are the life blood of a community. Television news has also been in decline, but television doesn't become the record for the community, as TV is more transient, and not considered a searchable news resource. People can't go to a TV station and search archives, for example. The Enterprise Record recently had to lay off staff, not so much for circulation decline, which has been flat, but for declining advertising revenue.

From the American Thinker:

Newspaper industry collapse intensifying
Thomas Lifson
The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has released the latest circulation numbers for big city dailies, and the news is almost uniformly bad for big newspaper publishers. The sole bright spot continues to be the New York Post, whose weekday circulation is up an impressive 7.6% to 724,748 in the six month period. The Post has a winning combination of a low cover prices and lively non-liberal writing. Oddly enough, no other papers seem to copying the successful tactics, something which ought to concern shareholders of the collapsing businesses.

Some key newspapers are in real trouble:

The Dallas Morning News hemorrhaged 14.2% of daily circ to 411,919.

The San Diego Union-Tribune slipped 6.5% to 296,331

The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, daily circ declined 4.9% to 230,870

The Los Angeles Times lost 4.2% of its weekday circ to 815,723

The Chicago Tribune slipped 2.1% to 566,827

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported daily circ dropped 4.8% to 345,252.

Small circulation gains were reported by the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Daily News.

The New York Times, which has reported small overall circulation gains in recent years, thanks to the roll-out of new regional printing plants for its national edition, compensating for the loss of metropolitan circulation in New York, reported a loss of circulation this term, down 1.9% to 1,120,420.

Posted by Anthony Watts at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In my last entry I raised three questions about Compact Flourescent Light bulbs aka CFL's

1) What about regular fluorescent tubes? They have mercury too, and sometimes in greater quantity.

2) How do you dispose of these bulbs in they have mercury in them. If you put them in regular trash are you guilty of a crime?

3) Has the hazmat materials response to mercury gotten out of hand?

An astute reader pointed out that for questions 1 and 2, there indeed is a problem. Apparently CFL's are categorized "universal waste" and shouldn't be thrown away in the
regular trash under a 2004 state law.

Here's a list of things that the state doesn't want you to throw away in your regular trash:
http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/HHW/Info/default.htm

But there is some ahem, "good" news, and that is that you can take your CFL's and flourescent tubes out to the hazwaste disposal site at the airport. Like many "household hazardous waste" materials (now including
batteries), Butte County takes bulbs at its recycling facility at the
airport, details here: http://www.recyclebutte.net/hhw.html

Given that disposing of CFL's requires special handling, I think high efficiency LED bulbs are the answer, I don't want to put my family in the position of breaking a law for accidental disposal in regular household trash

Posted by Anthony Watts at 08:47 PM | Permalink |