I've moved !
Please update your links and bookmarks...this blog will remain active as an archive, but all new posts as of October 3rd will appear at:
www.wattsupwiththat.com or wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com
My new blog location will allow me to provide better service to my readers, and richer content of postings.
Thanks !
Anthony
Above: Earth in comparison, size wise to common sunspots
The Christion Science Monitor had a detailed article recently that brought in a surprisng source - NASA GISS - an entity that seems firmly entrenched in the AGW- CO2 theory of climate change. Here are some excerpts from the article:
Researchers say they've found puzzling correlations between changes in the sun's output and weather and climate patterns on Earth. These links appear to rise above the level of misinterpreted data or faulty equipment.
"There are some empirical bits of evidence that show interesting relationships we don't fully understand," says Drew Shindell, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
For example, he cites a 2001 study in which scientists looked at cloud cover over the United States from 1900 to 1987 and found that average cloud cover increased and decreased in step with the sun's 11-year sunspot cycle. The most plausible cause, they said: changes in the ultraviolet (UV) light the sun delivers to the stratosphere.
Well I just finished Day1 at the conference at UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) put together by Dr. Roger Pielke, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation titled: Detecting the Atmospheric Response to the Changing Face of the Earth: A Focus on Human-Caused Regional Climate Forcings, Land-Cover/Land-Use Change, and Data Monitoring.
The day started off bright and early with the shuttle to the NCAR headquarters, shown above. It's a unique place, at over 6000 feet up right next to the "flatirons". Once there, we learned that the conference had been moved to downtown Boulder (somebody forgot to tell the shuttle driver). So we had to wait for the shuttle to return. A new one arrived, and we piled in. Then we sat there and waited because others were coming. As we waited in the sun, someone remarked, "It's getting hot in the van, open your window" to which I remarked "well, with all these windows, it's a simple greenhouse experiment". That brought a chuckle, then "no, really, open he window". So 10 minutes later, we were on our way in a van that holds 12, we had 7.
The driver informed us he had two stops to make to pickup additional people. We added three at the first stop, and at the second stop, at the invitation of the driver (I don't mind if you don't ) we added 6 more people, for a total of 16, all crammed into a van that holds 12. After that exercise I quipped: "well in addition to our earlier greenhouse experiment, now we are adding population growth in an urban setting" which drew a big laugh - inside joke for climate science, you had to be there.
At the conference we had a busy day, lots of papers on land use changes, urbanization studies, rainfall studies, and one statistical study which really caught my eye because I had lunch with the presenter and he gave me the real inside scoop on the "adjustments" process used to turn raw temperature data into "usable" data. More on that later.
I felt a bit out of place at first, because I'd been away from the scientific community for awhile, and this was the first presentation of this type (mine comes tomorrow) in about 25 years. So I was a bit nervous. That soon faded, as people whom I've never met saw my name tag, came up and introduced themselves, and said things like "I've been following your work, I'm really looking forward to seeing what you've found" "after what I've seen on your website, I'm beginning to think the surface temperature record is hopeless, and we should focus elsewhere". So I started feeling a bit more confident. I didn't see anybody packing rotten tomatoes, and everyone was very nice today, so I'm hoping for the best tomorrow.
Of course Roger Pelke Sr. was a most gracious host, as was his assistant, Dallas, and it was a comfortable and easy day thanks to their efforts.
Later I'll have a short summary of some of the papers presented today.
I'm currently attending a conference at UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) put together by Dr. Roger Pielke, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation titled: Detecting the Atmospheric Response to the Changing Face of the Earth: A Focus on Human-Caused Regional Climate Forcings, Land-Cover/Land-Use Change, and Data Monitoring. UCAR is in Boulder, tucked right up against the front range of the Colorado Rockies. It's quite an interesting place.
You can view the conference agenda here
About 50 climate science professionals are attending, Dr. Pielke invited me to make a presentation.
I'll be presenting my preliminary results of station quality analysis for the 27% of the USHCN stations surveyed thus far by surfacestations.org volunteers in my presentation tomorrow. Depending on how that s received I'll then decide whether or not to release that data publicly on this blog and other outlets, or to wait for the station surveys to be more complete. I'm really looking forward to getting feedback on this project so that I can identify weaknesses, and improve the final result. Having 50 climate scientists critique my work will be a very good test.
I have Internet connectivity in the conference room, and I'm blogging this entry from there. I'll keep you updated. So far, some very interesting papers on land use as it relates to climate have been presented.
The National Research Council (NRC 1999) recommended that the following ten climate monitoring principles, proposed by Thomas Karl et al. (NCDC, 1995), should be applied to climate monitoring systems:
National Research Council (NRC), 1999: Adequacy of Climate Observing Systems, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
There's been some discussion about specs on siting of weather stations and temperature measurement.
Coincidentally, I've been conversing with Jos de Laat of KNMI, the Dutch Meteorological Institute who offered some scans of weather station siting specifications from the World Meteorological Institute (WMO)
he writes:
OK then, you can find the first part of the report here (~ 1 Mb):
http://www.knmi.nl/~laatdej/TMP/WMO488.pdf
Especially the beginning of part 3 is relevant, I guess. Because of document size considerations for now I only scanned up to paragraph 3.1.2.1.7 (after paragraph 3.1.2.1.7 the description of requirements for measuring on other locations like sea and the free troposphere starts).
Descriptions of sensor and siting requirements are also available online (see below) …
… but they are more formal and largely based on WMO report 488, which contains some interesting quotes that are not present in later reports. The online reports also refer to the report below, which unfortunately I was not able to locate either online nor in our library.
World Meteorological Organization, 1993a: Siting and Exposure of Meteorological Instruments (J. Ehinger). Instruments and Observing Methods Report No. 55, WMO/TD-No. 589, Geneva.
These specs are worth a read, because they show that quite a lot of thought and analysis went info choosing the specs.
As for the 100 feet cited by the NWS on this page: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/standard.htm
I suspect its a round off of 30.48 m where 30 meters is the minimum distance to an artificial heat source cited for a Class 2 climate site as defined by the specs used in the Climate Reference Network (CRN) which has a French lineage, and likely traces back to WMO.
This is the climatological station of record for Odessa, Washington. It is at the residence of a COOP weather observer administered by NOAA. The photo was taken by surfacestations.org volunteer surveyor Bob Meyer.
In addition to the proximity to the house and the asphalt being less than the 100 foot published NOAA standard, we have a basketball goal nearby. This is a first as far as I know. I don't know if any studies or standards exist that describe what if any effects having the MMTS sensor whacked by errant basketballs might have.
Speaking from my own electronic design experience though, transient and numerous G forces applied to electronic sensors don't generally allow for sustained accuracy and reliability.
The complete photo album for this station is available on www.surfacestations.org
There's been some recent discussion about how only rural stations have been used in the NASA GISS analysis, and those rural stations are qualified by looking at night time DOD satellite photos, and doing a count of visible streetlights within a radius to quantify UHI potential or lack thereof. The "best" stations are labeled "lights=0"
One of those stations is Happy Camp, California, population 2182, an old gold mining and logging town located in the rugged NW corner of the state, and about 100+ miles from any major city. NOAA MMS metadata website reports data back to 1931 with 3 small distance station moves, and no changes to equipment. NASA GISS reports data back to 1914.
It looked like a good candidate to look at for a lights=0 survey. The weather station is located at the Ranger Station:
But what you can get from satellite images and databases can't really prepare you for what you may find. I "expected" to find an old classic Stevenson Screen, probably near the Ranger Station office. Check on that. But what I didn't expect to find was a "rural" station swimming in a sea of exhaust from 22 air conditioning units within 100 feet of the Stevenson Screen. Ridiculous, you are making this up you say? Well that would be my first reaction too.
But here they are, count them, I've labeled the A/C units for your convenience:
Happy Camp Ranger Station looking West from Stevenson Screen
Happy Camp Ranger Station, looking NE, Stevenson Screen visible
Happy Camp Ranger Station, looking North towards courtyard
Happy Camp Ranger Station, looking southwest inside courtyard
To help you get bearings on this walking tour, an aerial photo is available here
And the complete collection of photos is available on www.surfacestations.org
In addition to the 22 A/C units within 100 feet there are other biases too. Granted, not all 22 may be introducing a bias, but since NASA's Dr. James Hansen counts lights near stations, to asess UHI magnitude, we can count A/C's. If each A/C unit was 2000 BTU, that would be 22x2000=44,000 BTU of waste heat dumped within 100 feet of the Stevenson Screen where the thermometer is located.
Additionally. for other biases, positive and negative there's the buildings, the windows, the shade trees, the wind sheltering, and the lawn sprinkler. There's also the big parking lot to the southwest, and the Stevenson Screen is at the top of a slope and there's a parking lot downslope.
When I mentioned to the site curator about the A/C units she said "hmm, I never thought about that" but then added, "But I can tell you that when we water the lawn, my high temps are lower". I asked the curator what the prevailing wind direction was, and she said from the "south to southwest usually".
Now there doesn't appear to be much of a trend according to the NASA GISS plot, but there are some large amplitude swings and discontinuities:
Unedited NASA GISS raw data plot for Happy Camp RS
So one has to wonder, with all the observed microsite biases, what is the data really showing? One also wonders what the plot might look like if this station was better sited.
And if a lights = 0 station like this one, far removed from urbanization, has so many such micro-site biases, could others have similar problems? It looks like more hands-on site surveys will have to be done to determine the true value of lights=0 USHCN sites.
This picture, taken by www.surfacestations.org volunteer Don Kostuch is the Detroit Lakes, MN USHCN climate station of record. The Stevenson Screen is sinking into the swamp and the MMTS sensor is kept at a comfortable temperature thanks to the nearby A/C units.
The complete set of pictures is here
From NASA's GISS, the plot makes it pretty easy to see there was no discernible multi-decadal temperature trend until the A/C units were installed. And it's not hard to figure out when that was.
But hey, thy can "fix" the problem with math and adjustments to the temperature record.
Warren Meyer, one of the first surfacestations.org volunteers, delivered Tucson for us Saturday. It was discovered during an analysis of climate stations around the USA on the Climate Audit blog that Tucson had the greatest positive temperature trend for any USHCN station after the TOBS adjustment was applied. The TOBS adjustment corrects for differences in local times of observation of temperature by the observer. The picture says it all:
Yes folks, this is an official climate station of record, the temperatures it measures go into our National Climatic Database and are used in research such as the graph produced by NASA Goddard Institute for Spaceflight Studies here:
There's a British word that has been bandied about to describe the reaction to pictures like this one: "gobsmacked". The word applies even more so since this station is operated by science faculty members at the University of Arizona.
They are so proud of this station they even had a sign made for it to hang on the chain link fence enclosure:
The complete photo essay is available at the Tucson album at www.surfacestations.org The satellite and aerial photo images there are telling of the environment being measured.
Besides the obvious questions like "why is it in the middle of a parking lot?" and "why would scientists who should know better allow such a bizarre siting for a USHCN climate station of record?" Then there is this burning question: "Why did they go to the trouble of installing a precision aspirated temperature sensor and then not even bother to place it at the standard observing height?".
It appears that the Stevenson Screen serves no other purpose except as an equipment holder, as Warren Meyer reports the Stevenson Screen to be empty. Originally the inside standard mounting board for the mercury max/min thermometers were mounted about 1.5 foot higher than the air inlet of the precision aspirated temperature sensor. So the lower mounting height for the precision sensor adds a positive bias.
Is there no diligence left in basic measurement? Is this what they teach in college science departments these days?
I've been involved in meteorology in one way or another since 1976, and while I knew of the vast number of COOP stations around the USA, I never knew that a good number of them are at sewage treatment plants until I started my surfacestations.org project. It seems to me, that given the physical makeup of these facilities, they are one of the worst possible environments to measure air temperature. But like many historical stations, they weren't chosen with the environment in mind, but rather if there was a human being present 7 days a week whom could take the high/low temps and rainfall and write it down on an NCDC B44 form.
This week I visited a few stations in southern California, and Santa Barbara is one of those USHCN stations that is also a sewage treatment plant. Conicidentally, a few other USHCN stations that are also WWTP's were posted by www.surfacestations.org volunteers. So I thought I'd give you the grand tour.
Above: aerial view of Santa Barbara WWTP and USHCN climate station of record
Above: Placement of Santa Barbara's MMTS Temperature Sensor - looking NW
The recent photo submissions at surfacestations.org have demonstrated that many NOAA/NWS climate monitoring stations feature convenient close-by vehicle parking.
Not to be outdone, the Paso Robles USHCN Climate Station of Record features freeway on-ramp access to California's Highway 101. The weather station is just feet from the street, with the temperature sensor placed just high enough to catch full view of vehicles over the fence.
My thanks to surfacestations,org volunteer Ed Hahn for this photo. His complete photo essay is available here
Here is the NASA GISS plot for Paso Robles:
Curiously the GISS database still classifies this station as a "rural area".
I find it interesting that the temperature was trending down in the 70's then a huge offset occurred just about 1980. I wonder if that was when the freeway access was added? Nothing in the MMS records seem to indicate a station move or other change at that time. Or maybe that's when somebody got the bright idea to pour a concrete slab under the the station?
From NOAA's own siting specs: "The sensor should be at least 100 feet from any paved or concrete surface."
In traveling around California and Nevada to look at NOAA USHCN climate monitoring weather stations I've seen some odd things. I've seen temperature sensors near asphalt and concrete, sensors placed within feet of buildings and cars, sensors placed near air conditioner exhausts, and sensors that had barbeque grills in the vicinity.
Last Friday June 6th, I traveled to Santa Rosa, CA to the Press Democrat Newspaper, a wholly owned subsidiary of the New York Times, which according to NOAA, has the climate station of record for Santa Rosa.
I figured it would be a fairly straightforward survey, and that I'd probably find the temperature sensor near the back of the building by the parking lot, as I've found many others placed. I figured it would look a lot like our local newspaper, the Chico Enterprise Record (owned by Media News Group), weather station. It is in the rear, in a bit of disrepair, missing some slats and part of its roof assembly, but otherwise ok. It is seen below:
But nothing prepared me for what I was about to find at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
When I arrived, I couldn't locate the NOAA MMTS sensor anywhere around the building, but I did see a tower on the roof of the building, and in the rear of the building they had a Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station on a pole. I knew that wasn't the official climate temperature sensor provided by NOAA. So, after doing a perimeter search twice, I went inside to inquire within. Everything in the lobby said "go away". I guess it was the bullet proof glass, and the cameras, and the security guard. After getting a name of the person resonsible for their weather page from the front desk, I called on my cell phone, no answer.
Undeterred, I decided to try looking outside again. It was then I noticed the 5 level parking garage about a block north.
From the top of the parking garage a quick scan with my binoculars located the NOAA MMTS temperature sensor. It was there, about 8-10 feet above the roof, surrounded by a sea of air conditioners and exhaust vents!
Here is what I saw from my binoculars:
And here is a panorama of the entire rooftop of the Press Democrat. Click on the image to get a full sized view with panning functions:
A complete photo essay is available on my surfacestations.org website.
An independent check of aerial photos that I had access to confirmed the placement of the sensor in the middle of several air conditioning units.
I've seen some poorly thought out places to measure temperature, but this one takes the cake. Not only do we have the sensor above a sea of air conditioners with warm air exhausts, there are two rooftop building exhausts, plus the roof and building itself, and then lets not forget that the Press Democrat itself is in a sea of buildings in downtown Santa Rosa, all of which to contribute to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) the thermometer is exposed to.
Yes folks, this is an official USHCN Climate station of record. The data from this station goes into the national climatic database. But given the absurd and irresponsible placement of this NOAA MMTS thermometer, is it any wonder at all that the graph of temperature at Santa Rosa looks like it does?
This isn't a case of gradual encroachment by localized site changes that happened around the thermometer, like what happened in Marysville. This is a deliberate placement of an official thermometer in the worst possible measurement scenario. Somebody had to choose this location, the building and air conditioners did not grow up around it.
On Friday June 6th, I made a trip though northern California to visit four official climate monitoring stations that are part of the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) which has been the subject of study on my photographic database website www.surfacestations.org
Here is the Napa State Hospital, which has a long history of observing temperature and precipitation. The MMTS and rain gauge are located at the Fire Station that serves the hospital grounds:
Here we see what seems to be the ubiquitous close by parking which has been almost as a theme in recent station surveys. Lots of asphalt surrounding the sensor too, and a building about 10 feet away. This of course makes the station out of compliance with NOAA siting specifications.
Another view shows an even greater problem; an air conditioner unit mounted at the same height as the MMTS in a window and a mere 10 feet away:
You can see a full set of pictures, at the surfacestations.org image database.
For an independent confirmation of this finding you can see the National Weather Service's web page photo of Napa.
More pictures from my 4 station survey trip will be posted each day, tomorrow, Santa Rosa's USHCN climate station of record located on the roof of the Press Democrat building in downtown Santa Rosa.
You may recall and entry about a week ago titled: NOAA/NCDC Throws a roadblack my way.
Good news! NCDC has decided to restore the access. I think this is a wise move on NCDC's part not only because their initial argument was unsupportable as I demonstrated dozens of pages in various NOAA websites showing not only observer names, but also photos of the observers, but more importantly the timing made them look like they were actively hampering a science activity. Data sharing is a hallmark of science so that independent study and confirmation of observations and theories can occur.
I'm pleased that NCDC has changed their position. Its the right thing to do. I agree with their current position that provides the name of the observers, but keeps addresses and telephone numbers private.
For the purposes of the photographic investigation being done at www.surfacestations.org I point out that anyone in the project must agree to and follow rules of conduct, and respect the clearly spelled out privacy issues.
Here is the communication:
Dear Mr. Watts,
You made several inquiries recently regarding the availability of Cooperative observer names in the MMS system. I have received the clarification I needed in order to respond, and wanted to inform you of the results as well as to provide some background detail.
There is a war of words going on between two scientific blogs over my project at www.surfacestations.org. The RealClimate blog, operated by pro AGW global warming scientists Penn State's Dr. Michael Mann and NASA's Dr. Gavin Schmidt, and others, has posted a six point rebuttal to the effort saying that it is only marginally useful. It's called "No Man is an (Urban Heat) Island".
Dr. Roger Pielke, of the University of Colorado, runs a blog called Climate Science which looks at a wide variety of topics on climate change outside of the AGW mainstream, has posted his response to RealClimate's rebuttal in defense of the project saying its good science. The debate is intense, and some normally reserved scientists are letting the fur fly over the issue. There's sensible debate, science at high levels, diatribe, rhetoric, and even a "Tasker" like character who is a scientist for a major university that uses a doppelganger persona to attack ideas rather than risk his own credentials.
All because I want to take some pictures of weather stations and put them online in a publicly open database for the purpose of evaluating the weather station network and it's data integrity. Go figure.
I guess I should be flattered that people are fighting over my idea, but I'd really rather just get on with the project and see what comes out of it. I figure that the established science should be able to withstand the scrutiny of a former TV weatherman and some volunteers taking pictures. If not, there's something really wrong. I'm not getting involved in the bickering, I'm just keeping to the work I and the volunteers have started. We are almost up to 100 stations surveyed now.
But I did find a nugget of wisdom in this entry on Climate Science which clears the air rather nicely:
If a [weather station] site is initially chosen because it meets all the qualifications for observing temperature, there is little about the site that could change to develop a cool bias. Almost all the changes will result in a warming trend from the original, ideal setting.
Natural changes such as the growth of trees and shrubs, reduce the clear sky radiation, resulting in a warming trend. Man made changes, such as increased building and paving in and around the site, also results in a warming trend that is unrelated to any potential climate change. Finally, deterioration of the shelter housing the instruments also leads to an artificial warming.
Any correction of these potential warming factors simply returns the site to its initial, ideal state. The only way to get an artificial cooling is to start with a less than ideal setting for recording air temperature and improve it. While this may have happened in a few locations, it is obvious that the gradual degradation of recording sites is the norm.
The calculations of the temperature increase due to increasing CO2 are theory, which can only be verified with actual, accurate data. Those who claim that the accuracy of the data is not relevant are, in effect, defending a theory against reality, which is faith, not science.
I know that supporters of the AGW theory get very upset when they are accused of behaving in a religious fashion, instead of behaving like scientists. To avoid this, I suggest they start behaving like scientists and support the effort to obtain the best data possible.
Comment by Jim Clarke — July 4, 2007 @ 6:23 pm
As many readers know, the www.surfacestations.org effort has been gaining a lot of attention, and also volunteers. I'm now at over 130 volunteers nationwide.
The results of the effort attracted national attention. I never went seeking it, but when Bill Stiegerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune stumbled across it, he wrote a column about it. Little did I know his column was nationally syndicated. Last week I found myself being asked to give radio interviews. One interview, at KIRO in Seattle surprised me when I found myself being co-interviewed with Dr. Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) the keeper of weather records, including weather station records. The exchange was congenial and stuck to science. That was Thursday June 21st. I am certain NCDC is aware of the effort that is going on to document the stations. Part of the reason the effort exists is that NCDC has been pressed to do this by scientists that want to do exactly what I'm doing, studying the measurement environment, and NCDC has failed to do it. We'll come back to that.
Part of the method I and volunteers are using to do this project relies on a database of weather station information provided by NCDC. In some cases stations are at airports, fire stations, sewage treatment plants, and ranger stations. In other few cases, they are at the residences of observers that have volunteered to record weather data and submit it to NCDC. Since the latitude and longitude provided in the database is fairly coarse, volunteers have to rely on a database entry called "Managing Parties" to find the name of the location, be it a fire station of the name of the volunteer observer.
You can access the database yourself, its a public record: http://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry/login.cfm
Use the "Guest Login" button
I last used the NCDC database system this way to locate stations on Sunday evening, June 24th it went down Monday Morning June 25th and displayed a message:
"You are not authorized to view this information. Your IP address has been logged"
When it came back up Monday afternoon, the “managing parties” field identifying the location of the weather station was gone. I would note that I shared a radio interview with Dr. Thomas Peterson of NCDC last week, so I am certain NCDC is aware of the effort.
No notification was given, nor even a professional courtesy to advise of the change, nor any notice on the website. The records were simply removed from public view where they existed before. Given the timing, and because the this same data had been visible on the same system for years It seemed this was a response to the efforts to photograph and document the USHCN network.
Without this information, its is very difficult to locate the stations, and in some cases where the official climate station is in some one's backyard, completely impossible. For example, fellow blogger and surfacestations.org contributor Russ Steele had a very difficult time locating the official station for Ft. Bragg, CA. The observer did consent to having photos posted by the way. Had Russ not been able to contact the observer, the station would likely never have been found as it's surrounded by trees and garden.
One of my volunteers wrote a query to NCDC and got this back:
Your inquiry was forwarded to me by our webmaster. I’m glad you’ve found
MMS to be a useful tool in your research.
MMS is our primary source of station metadata for National Weather Service
Cooperative Observer and several other networks, and we are
actively working to provide increased detail for a larger number of stations.
It sounds as though you’ve used the system enough that once you’ve located
a station using the search, you’re clicking on the station name hyperlink
and opening a separate station details window. The managing party for a
station has always been visible by clicking on the “Other Parties” tab. In
the case of NWS Coop stations (the USHCN research network relies upon a
subset of stations in the NWS Coop program), this is usually the NWS office
that administers the site. This information was previously included at the
bottom of the Identity tab’s “form view,” but was removed from that view
early this week because in some cases it also revealed the name of the
Cooperative observer.
Cooperative observers are volunteers who donate their time in the interests
of the public good with a reasonable expectation that their personal
information will remain private. It is the NCDC’s policy to protect
observer details, based upon Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Update, Vol.
X, No. 2, 1989, which exempts the application of FOIA in certain cases and
establishes privacy protection decisions in accordance with the Privacy Act
of 1974 (2004 edition). This exemption applies when the personal privacy
interest is greater than any qualifying public interest for disclosure.
If you have other questions regarding MMS, please feel free to contact me.
I am often away from my desk, so my response may not be immediate.
I was shocked to say the least. So were others in the scientific community.
Data which was once public for years, has now been removed, and the timing is very suspect.
The claim that it was done to protect the privacy of observers doesn't stand up to certain tests:
1) COOP weather observers are gathering climate data which is published and publicly available. The program is publicly funded. Data and methods from a publicly funded program that is not classified for national security reasons should be available for public inspection. Clearly results from surefacestations.org so far show some problems with the climate measuring network.
2) That published data is used in a multitude of publicly funded research. Some of that research guides policy decisions. The effects of a public policy decision based on data gathered by a volunteer individuals can affect millions of people. The right of the individual to FOI privacy is trumped by the greater need of the general public's right to know if the data produced by that observer is accurate.
3) The data has been publicly available for years, removing it now is clearly in response to the effort to examine a public program given the timing of it having been removed four days after an NCDC official became aware of my efforts.
4) The data that has been removed also includes locations of public entities such as fire stations, police stations, sewage treatment plants, park headquarters, state run agricultural experiment farms, and many more. These locations are public entities and have no expectation of privacy whatsoever.
I can understand wanting an individual volunteer's privacy protected. But the method used so far has been to contact the observer ahead of time, tell them what the project is about, and ask for consent. If consent has not been given, no visit is made, and no photographs are taken. See the rules that each volunteer to surfacestations.org must follow
So you have to wonder this: Is NCDC asserting that the privacy interests of police and fire stations, park headquarters, waste water treatment plants, and a handful of individuals, outweighs the public interest in examining quality of data produced in NCDC records and subsequent NOAA reports and publicly funded research?
Does this waste water treatment plant measureing temperatures for the climate record really need privacy protection?
I said earlier we'd get back to something.
Dr. Roger Pielke, a senior climate researcher, of the University of Colorado, posted on his blog, his outrage at this action, calling it a "cover up". Those are strong words coming from a congenial scientist. He also posted something even more shocking:
Pictures of these weather stations already exist, but they are being held from public view. Apparently some time ago weather service offices were issued digital cameras and told to do this work. The pictures were submitted to NCDC, and an archiving process begun, then stopped again for "privacy concerns".
This is my position:
Given what has been seen so far at weather stations that have been inspected by myself and volunteers, it is clear that parts of the USHCN climate monitoring network are out of compliance with published siting standards and in disrepair. Given that the output of this network drives in part NOAA's climate assessment, the public should demand a full and open accounting of the condition and data accuracy. If volunteer observers using NOAA equipment at private residences do not wish to have their location and the data it produces scrutinized by quality control methods, they have that right. But the data [produced by these stations should be removed from the climatic dataset because it will be unverifiable.
The picture below comes to me via my website www.surfacestations.org from volunteer site surveyor Bob Meyer. It is the USHCN climate station of record for Waterville, Washington.
In addition to the now commonly seen attempts at measuring the temperature of parking lots, this station sports another new feature: volcanic cinder rock under the station to complement the tidy sidewalk. Note the convenient drive through teller window nearby so that you can cash your paycheck while on the way to the Post Office to mail in your COOP observer form to the National Climatic Data Center.
There's also a nearby building about 10 feet away, and of course, convenient close-by parking just a few feet from the MMTS temperature sensor. Note that published NOAA/NWS siting standards require a 100 foot distance from buildings.
The USHCN "high quality" set of climate monitoring stations keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
This picture comes to me via www.surfacestations.org courtesy of Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado.
It is the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) Station of Record for Hopkinsville, KY. The NOAA provided Max/Min Temperature Sensor is located at the observers home. The nearby air conditioner is just 10 feet from the temperature sensor. Then there's the chimney. The contribution of the portable BBQ grill to the temperature record is unknown.
The MMTS temperature sensor wasn't always mounted on the tower next to the house, it used to be in the yard, but the observer made some "improvements" over time. Note that published NOAA/NWS siting standards require a 100 foot distance from buildings.
The picture above is of the official USHCN climate station of record in Quitman, GA and comes to me via www.surfacestations.org volunteer Joel McDade.
It is located at a residence, the observer has consented to having this NOAA weather equipment at his home.
Besides the usual problematic close-by parking of vehicles that we've seen before, and buildings less than 100 feet from the temperature sensor, we have a new issue to contend with: inoperable vehicles and abandoned appliances near the temperature sensor. Such big chunks of metal have thermal retention, which means that heat is retained past sunset and re-radiated near the sensor. This may bias overnight lows.
I thought the old washing machine was a nice touch though. It illustrates how little quality control of the temperature measuring environment is being done with the US Historical Climatological Network.
Additional pictures of the site are available at the surfacestations.org online database.
One of the really odd discoveries that I've made while surveying climate monitoring stations around the USA is the fact that many of the official stations are located at sewage treatment plants. For example, the one in Colusa, CA is at their sewage treatment plant. I've visited it.
A couple of volunteers for www.surfacestations.org have been going around Washington and Oregon locating stations there and have also reported a number of stations at waste-water treatment facilities. I'll get to why locating a temperature monitoring station at these facilities is a really bad idea later, but first I want to tell you why many of them are located at these places.
It has to do with the fact that somebody must read the thermometer once a day, write down the max and min temperatures for the last 24 hours in a logbook, then send in the page of the logbook to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) once a month. When stations were assigned to cities, they needed to locate them at a place where there was somebody 7 days a week. Sewage is a 24/7 operation. Police and fire stations have some stations for the same reason, somebody is always there.
Ok this picture comes in today from from surfacestations.org volunteer Steve Tiemeier, who visited the climate station of record located at the Urbana, Ohio Waste Water Treatment Plant:
The small item in the center of the picture labeled "MMTS" is the temperature sensor that is used to submit monthly climate reports to NCDC.
Now in case you don't see some of the obvious problems with this location and why its a terrible place to measure temperature, I'll list them one by one:
- Sensor is attached to the building, just mere inches away from brickwork
- Sensor is near windows, which radiate heat from heated interior rooms in winter
- Sensor is directly above effluent grates for waste-water, Waste-water is often warmer than the air many months of the year
- Sensor is between three buildings, restricting wind flow
- Sensor is between three buildings, acting as a corner reflector for infrared
- Several exhaust fans near sensor, even though one is disable, there are two more on the walls (silver domes)
- Air conditioner within 35 feet of sensor, enclosed area will tend to trap the exhaust air near sensor
- Sensor is directly over concrete slab
- Refrigeration unit nearby, exhausts air into the enclosed area
- Shadows of all buildings create a valley effect related to sunlight at certain times
- There are two nearby digester pools, which release heat and humidity in the sensor vicinity
- Heat and humidity plume over the site from digesters is often tens of degrees warmer than the air in the wintertime
Here is wider view that shows the temperature sensor in relation to the digester tank:
More picture on my image database here: http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=5322
I don't know if any readers of this blog have ever driven by a sewage treatment plant in the winter, in the midwest, as I have, but I can tell you from experience it looks like a hot springs with steam rising into the air.
Talk about your urban heat island effect...not only that, sewage treatment plants effluent volume is a direct indicator of population growth. So as more water is treated, more local effects from the heat/humidity plume occur, which can affect the temperature readings.
There are dozens, possibly hundreds of USHCN climate monitoring stations sited at sewage treatment plants around the USA. I'll have more reports on this in the future.
Who knew? I've been working in meteorology 25 years and I didn't until this week.
here are some other stations at a sewage treatment plants:
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=1489
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=4658
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=4388
This is the USHCN climate station of record for Bainbridge Georgia. It comes to me by way of surfacestations.org survey volunteer Joel McDade. Joel wins the award for finding the USHCN station closest to an air conditioner, at 8.9 feet. That honor was previously held by Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor at just over 10 feet in his picture of Forest Grove Oregon.
In addition to the air conditioner, this USHCN climate monitoring station sports several other features:
- A building just 14.3 feet away
- Convenient close-by radiator forward parking for your vehicle within feet of the MMTS sensor
- An asphalt road within 10-15 feet of the sensor
- A mature shade tree that changes shade patterns with the season
- A station move of about 150 feet closer to the building to accommodate the new MMTS sensor cable length
The station is operated by the International Paper Company. The plot of temperature below illustrates some data gaps and jumps that may be related to station moves.
Full details on this site are at the surfacestations.org online image database
For those of you that want to see a detailed analysis of the data the weather stations mentioned here have produced, please take a look at Climate Audit at www.climateaudit.org
There a number of highly intelligent people are thinking through a number of the issues raised here. For example, it appears that adjustments made to the measured data by researchers may actually enhance the urban heat island effect.
But its hard to tell for sure, because key software programs and formulae used to create such types of analyses for the IPCC haven't been made fully public. There is a Freedom of Information act effort going on in that regards because some requests for data sharing and formulae used to analyse the data have been rebuked.
Whats certain is that between the inconsistencies found with some of the surface weather stations and the lack of full disclosure on the methods used it warrants further study and investigation. One of the tenets of good science is data and methods sharing and repeatability by others. It is baffling that NOAA is not allowing their methods to be tested in this way.
Russ Steele, a blogger in Nevada County at NCWatch is volunteering to do weather station site surveys as I've been doing. Yesterday Russ visited Petaluma California to see the USHCN climate station of record there. It used to be at the city fire station but has been moved to the airport, but apparently the NASA climate database hasn't yet caught up with that as it still shows "fire station" as the place.
Ok we have a temperature sensor strapped to a wooden deck, near a sea of tarmac.
And not only that, the building with the deck is only six seet away, and has air conditioners exhausting hot air on the south side. Prevailing wind direction in that are is from the south, so that means wihen wind hits that wall, it will spread out the hot a/c exhaust east and west.
Prevailing southerly winds will transfer heat from the burgeoning suburbs to the south, and when the wind reverses and comes from the north (after a frontal passage for example) it will transfer heat from the acres of tarmac to the sensor.
So its really no surprise to see this plot. But not to worry, the climate modeler Dr. James Hansen at NASA has it all mathematically accounted for, except he still doesn't know the station is at the airport. He should try visiting weather stations someday.
This station data is in fact used in climate modeling to predict our climate future.
The picture below is from Radio station KQEN in Roseburg, OR. It is the official climate observing site for Roseburg. This picture is courtesy of Oregon State University Climatologist, George Taylor, whom is collaborating with me on my www.surfacestations.org project
Note that Mr. Taylor is not responsible for the thermometer placement, the National Weather Service in Medford is in charge of the observer program. and sets up the equipment. Only a couple of problems here, like the roof itself being hotter than any surrounding area on any given day, but lets just throw in a nearby rooftop air conditioning unit for good measure. A/C units exhaust quite a bit of hot air.
Here's the temperature plot from NASA's GISS database, which is used in global climate modeling and climate forecasting. Yes, this data is part of the USHCN "high quality" dataset used to make climate change predictions.
I'm not making this up, check it out for yourself at NASA's GISTEMP database
Ok folks, just when you think I could not possibly post any worse pictures of official climate stations, I yet again have more. I’d like to point out that I’ve only surveyed about 10 stations in California so far, and what you see posted here represents samples from those.
It gives you an idea of the magnitude of the problem.
Ok here is Tahoe City California, GISS ID 425724880010 and an active station of record. I was unable to locate the observer for this station but was able to speak with the property management people for the nearby condos.
The first picture is looking south over lake Tahoe. BTW the van is not mine, but belongs to the groundskeeper, and yes that's where he parks it regularly. Note the doggie bags. There's a walking path nearby.
Next picture, looking north, whats that, a tennis court within 25 feet of the station? Horrors.
Final picture. It seems the groundskeeper likes to burn the trash and paper he picks up on the grounds, guess where he does it?
Honest folks, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
The property management person I spoke with said the tennis court and condos was built in the early 80’s.
Here is the GISS plot, showing the data trends used in NASA's Model E global Climate computer model
Note the jump and sustained plateau of temperature after 1980. Tennis anyone?
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.
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
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| 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.
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.
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.
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:
Site surveyor notes:
Images of the site: (click for larger images)
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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
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| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We had "yellow" level geomagnetic activity on the sun last night, and more may
come tonight and tomorrow night. Its coming from Sunspot 953, which is about 3 times the size of the Earth.
Sunspot 953 is crackling with mild
B-class solar flares. Credit: SOHO/MDI
Image of sunspot 953 taken today by Sebastien Kersten of Le Cocq, Belgium:
Here is the dispatch:
From: solarxactivity@bbso.njit.edu
Date: April 28, 2007 9:24:59 AM CDT
To: xxxx@rice.edu
Subject: BBSO Solar Activity Warning 28-APR-2007 14:19:18 UT
Region NOAA 10953 is currently beta-gamma magnetic class, and may increase in complexity.
The region is bright in H-alpha as well. This region has a chance of producing M-class
events.
NOAA 10953, S10 E41. Beta-gamma region. Position as of April 28, 2007 at 13:30 UT.
And this is in the middle of our solar minimum, indicating our sun still has a few belches to pass out before completely settling down.
One of the best tools we have is the ACE Spacecraft, which monitors the sun 24/7 and provides us with a plethora of real-time data, of the magnetic
field, the solar wind, and inter-galactic cosmic ray counts.
For the latest "dial" info (including our "space weather stoplight") go to
http://space.rice.edu/ISTP/dials.html
For the latest 10-minute averages of the Boyle Index from realtime ACE
spacecraft data, go to http://space.rice.edu/ISTP/wind.html
Some guides to interpret the gauges
If the hourly-average of the Boyle index exceeds 110, then Kp 4-6 storms
will likely occur within the next three hours
If the hourly average of the Boyle index exceeds 200, then major magnetic
storms will occur within the next three hours
If the hourly average of the Boyle index exceeds 250, major low-latitude
auroras will occur within the next three hours.
A magnetic storm generally occurs about an hour or two after the CME arrives at Earth, which is roughly 26-48 hours *after* a major solar flare. The Boyle Index is derived from real-time ACE spacecraft data, which gives about 45 minutes of warning before it hits the Earth.
An astute letter to the editor writer in Arkansas has found the reason for global warming:
This actually happened, as attested to on the rumor/urban legend verifcation website Snopes.com
A recent investigation by the Financial Times says that the new Carbon Credit Industry may already be rife with fraud. Hmmm...now where have we heard that before?
Among the findings:
■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.
■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.
From the article:
Some companies are benefiting by asking “green” consumers to pay them for cleaning up their own pollution. For instance, DuPont, the chemicals company, invites consumers to pay $4 to eliminate a ton of carbon dioxide from its plant in Kentucky that produces a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. But the equipment required to reduce such gases is relatively cheap. DuPont refused to comment and declined to specify its earnings from the project, saying it was at too early a stage to discuss.
The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.
Seems like the "green" here is not about Gaia...but all about Benjamins.
There's no mention of how much these companies pay gamers to have virtual trees planted in video games.
From the "you've GOT to be freaking kidding me" department:
Dell's Virtual Plant a Tree for Me program into the computer game Second Life has many tech savvy people wondering if this represents a new low in Earth Day marketing tie-ins. It looks like in the rush to pander to green-ness, some Dell executives maybe didn't think beyond the boardroom door.
You may wonder, too, after reading Dell's invitation to its Earth Day Party at Dell Island in the Second Life game where they say proudly "get your own tree sapling to plant in Second Life!".
Yes that's' right, you can plant a virtual tree in a video game for Earth Day. And, Dell is only too happy to take a couple bucks from you in the process as well for their real tree planting program designed to assuage your guilt at using a computer that uses electricity.
You have to wonder just how hypocritically lazy some people might be to take this offer seriously, though with 5.7 million "residents" in the Second Life game, I suppose its hard to deny that this offer would have an impact.
Just how much electricity is used by PC's in pursuing this pointless exploit in "green-ness"? And with Dell soliciting and online Earth Day Party, that will tie up PC's, routers, and Servers nationwide, using even more electricity. There's no mention in Dell's press release of the expected carbon footprint on this bogus promotion. Maybe Gore will fly in on his private jet to make a "virtual appearance" to preach to the faithful.
But since some people nowadays seem incapable of disconnecting themselves from the virtual world of gaming, it stands to reason that a virtual eco-delusional activity might very well appear valid to them.
Maybe next the researchers at Berkeley can tap into the seti@home background processing idea and instead of searching for intelligent life in radio-telescope signals, we could program our wasted CPU cycles to grow virtual trees on a screen-saver. It could boast onscreen counts of virtual carbon sequestered, and virtual O2 produced. I can smell the virtual fresh air already!
We're doomed.
Recently I received this email from Delta Airlines with the offer that now I could pay extra money for my airline ticket so that Delta could contribute to global warming "offsets" by planting trees. This allows frequent or not so frequent flyers to assuage their guilt over flying in an airplane propelled by earth killing petroleum based fuel.
Only one problem: Delta apparently never read the recent press release from Lawrence Livermore Labs on the link between too many trees at certain latitudes and increased global warming. Such a conundrum.
Support Delta's Force for Global Good Take part in the first-ever U.S. airline program to plant trees to help offset carbon emissions.
Hello Mr. Watts,
In a partnership with The Conservation Fund, we are the first U.S. airline to implement a voluntary carbon offset program — and we'd love to have you "onboard."
It's simple. Beginning
We'll disburse 100 percent of your donation to
The Conservation Fund program to plant trees and to support the organization's education and outreach efforts. Additionally, we'll make a donation to The Conservation Fund for every customer flying on a Delta mainline jet worldwide on Earth Day (April 22).
It's just part of our Force for Global Good initiative that strives to benefit the world we fly everyday. So go ahead and take a flight, and join us in uniting our customers and employees in support of environmental stewardship.
Picture: Get ready to Panic! Oroville, Willows, Marysville, and Sacramento will be underwater - the Sutter Buttes will be the only landmass in the very center of the valley.
"What If All the Ice Melts?" Myths and Realities is an article which features 3D computer generated images of what the globe would look like if all of the ice (both land and sea) on the planet melted, leading to a sealevel rise of around 66 meters.
The change shown in global dry land goes from about 132 million sq. kilometers to 128 million, and the analysis seems sound, making this article a sober and very useful counter to some of the more hysterical claims which has been circulated in relation to global warming.
Even if both the poles melted along with all the ice in Greenland, which is not likely to happen unless our orbit or sun changes dramatically, it would still take hundreds if not thousands of years for it to occur. That's plenty of time to adapt. Sure we'd lose Florida, parts of Californiua's Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, Seattle, Portland, and Washington along with New York and Boston, but many new areas would now be habitable due to the change.
Here's what the Sacramento Valley would look like city-wise based on elevations:
| Some Valley Cities | and their elevations | compared to 66 meter sea level rise |
| Chico | 75 meters | waterfront property on the southwest side |
| Orland | 78 meters | waterfront property just south of town |
| Oroville | 58 meters | 8 meters underwater |
| Willows | 41 meters | 25 meters underwater |
| Red Bluff | 106 meters | 40 meters to go |
| Marysville | 34 meters | 32 meters underwater |
| Sacramento | 7 meters | 59 meters underwater |
Here's more inconvenient news from solar researchers. Even though our sun is quiet at the moment while we are in between peaks in the 11 year sunspot cycles, scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.
Researchers extended the record into the past by measuring isotopes of Beryllium-10 (created by cosmic rays entering our upper atmosphere, which then drifts earthward and is trapped in the ice) in Greenland ice cores. Based on both observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years."
The number of cosmic rays entering our atmosphere is modulated by the suns magnetic and solar wind activity, which modulates earth's magnetic field, setting up conditions to either allow more or deflect more cosmic rays entering the upper atmosphere.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots. which are a proxy indicator of solar magnetic activity, rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer. According to climate scientists, the Sun’s radiance has changed little during this period. But looking back over 1,150 years, Solanki found the Sun had never been as bright as in the past 60 years.
“The change in solar brightness over the past 20 years is not enough to cause the observed changes in our climate. But the indirect effects (such as the cosmic ray to cloud connection) may be larger, and the range of their influence is unclear, so more study is needed,” he added.
Yesterday, the IPCC Climate Change Report was released. Now the hand wringing starts. I’ve made a lot of entries on climate change here, I’ve given newspaper interviews, radio interviews, written guest columns and letters to the editor. Mostly what I got from that is loads of criticism heaped on me. Some called me unqualified to comment, others said I’m caught up in a cultural bias that stems from my political views, others say I'm just flat wrong. But few have even bothered to engage me on the topic, preferring to write about me, rather than what I've said.
To those whom voiced such complaints I say: “tough noogies”, I’m pressing on. But I am going to give it a rest for awhile after this entry. There’s many more interesting things I haven’t covered yet here. And I'm sure many readers would like to see some other topics. Rest assured I’m not done with the subject though. There's a big idea brewing.
As for the IPCC report:
Here’s what we’ve got. After leaving the dark ages, and after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle beyond certain prognostication, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot climate, we now turn a blind eye to that mountain of evidence and proclaim this: The world’s climate should revert to exactly as it was on February 2nd, 1886, in Punxsutawney, PA (the first groundhog day), and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way or billions will suffer.
Of course, our ridge browed ancestors probably felt some sort of worries as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood.
I’ll bet the leader of the people then uttered some sort of similar proclamation to the IPCC report such as “grunt, grunt, ooofa, mlock” and pointed his finger to the new land up north that was exposed, inviting his throng to migrate there.
The The United Nations's IPCC Report comes out today so I thought I'd make a report too.
James Carville used to remind Clinton during the '92 campaign that “its the economy, stupid”.
I (and many others far smarter than I am) say that on the subject of Global Warming: “its the SUN, stupid”
Our earth is warmed by a gigantic nuclear fireball, millions of times the mass of earth and a mere 8.5 light-minutes away. One hundred and nine Earths would be required to fit across the Sun’s disk, and its interior could hold over 1.3 million Earths.
By the way, the sun has a total luminosity output of 386 YottaWatts thats 386,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts, but we only get a tiny portion of that.
You can’t just ignore that kind of power. Though it seems some prefer to, since it muddles the results they seek.
The total luminous energy output received by earth from the sun is 174 PETAWATTS (174,000,000,000,000,000) watts. Now lets just say the sun increases its output by 0.1% as its been measured to do. (And its gotten way more active this century.) That dumps an extra 174,000,000,000,000 watts into our atmosphere (174 trillion watts) 24/7.
Data source for graph: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt
Note: In the graph above, the low flatline from 1645-1715 is the Maunder Minimum, a period of virtually no sunspots, where the historical reports from the northern hemisphere tell a story of dramatic climate change: harsh winters, cools summers, crop failures, famine and disease.
From the abstract referenced above: "Estimated increases since 1675 are 0.7%, 0.2% and 0.07% in broad ultraviolet, visible/near infrared and infrared spectral bands, with a total irradiance increase of 0.2%. "
So its not just 0.1 %, it is 0.2% which translates to a 348 TeraWatts global irradiance increase.
Now lets put 348 trillion watts into perspective:
Hurricanes: the heat energy released by a hurricanes category 1-5 equals about 50 to 200 trillion watts or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.
Katrina, released about 200 trillion watts over its life cycle.
Now imagine double that amount of extra energy being added to earth’s atmosphere every second by small increases in the suns output that have been documented to exist. Thats what the increase in solar irradiance is doing. Since 1675, after the depths of the Maunder Minimum, we've seen an increase in solar irradiance of about 2.5 watts per square meter.
Climate modelers say that the extra CO2 equates to a forcing of about 2 watts per square meter, which totals about 1.12 Petawatt (1,120,000,000,000,000 watts). The problem is, they can't always recreate that reliably between all of the different models out there, with the positive and negative feedback mechanisms, and other variables involved. There's disagreement on the total contribution. A lot of it. Nonetheless they seem all to agree that CO2 makes some contribution, and thats likely true. But compared to the sun, I beleive it's minimal.
Now lets look at us: 13.5 TeraWatts is the average total power consumption of the human world in 2001.
Do you think we could change the planets atmospheric energy balance with that if we squeezed all the power we made that year together and shot it into our atmosphere ?
Whats very clear though, when you look at history, and the graph above, is that our earths atmosphere and resulting climate is extremely sensitive to variations in solar output. The sweet center point seems to be about 1365 watts per square meter of irradiance...what we consider as "normal" climate. Take 1.5 watts/sq. meter away, and we get significant cooling, harsh winters, cool summers, and increases in ice and glaciers. Add 1.5 watts,/sq. meter and we get hotter summers, mild winters, and melting of ice and glaciers.
Now irradiance aside, as it's only one component, there's also the suns dynamic magnetic field and solar wind, which modulates earths magnetic field, which modulates the number of cosmic rays that enter our atmosphere, which modulates the number of clouds that form, hence changing the net surface irradiance. Plots of changes in the suns magnetic field line up very well with climate change.
There's growing sentiment that CO2 theory may very well be a red herring.
Yeah, its the sun, stupid.
Lon Glazner, a fellow blogger and local electronics engineer made some comments about my post on the NASA/CSU study on California temperatures. Well that got me started...so below are Lon's comments and my reply along with a fun technical challenge. For those of you that read this blog, but disagree with my views, I invite you to read this carefully.
Anthony,
You make a number of good points. Particularly in the fact that the writers may have applied changes in urban temperature measurements over large regions for graphical impact.
As someone who has designed and built electronic temperature sensors I have certain concerns about the data itself.
Unless temperature sensors are regularly calibrated I think it is unreasonable to expect accuracy of greater than a couple of degrees.
Even some that are calibrated may not have good accuracy. The LM34 which is a commonly used semiconductor for measuring temperature is +/-2 degrees F. This is pretty typical of analog or digital semconductor sensors. The temperature error for this part is also non-linear, and so it's not a simple offset that you have to account for during data collection. Furthermore, there are lots of additional errors that can creep into a temperature measuring device beyond the sensor itself.
http://www.national.com/pf/LM/LM34.html
One could argue that numerical analysis done on data points would tease out errors. But if a scientist doesn't know the exact accuracy of a temperature sensor then they couldn't account for errors in their system.
Some of the temperature sensing stations may be very accurate and regularly calibrated. But maybe they're not?
I have a hard time trusting that the data is accurate to the level of identifying 1 or 2 degree changes over decades. This is especially true since the techniques of making these measurements have changes over that time frame.
Lon
I'm innately familiar with National Semi's LM34 and it's accuracy problems. One of my early jobs at my university as a research assistant was to create remote electronic weather stations. I soon learned how inaccurate many electronic devices can be in temperature measurement.
The problem with the National Weather Service temperature data sets (and world data sets too) is that they are full of biases and errors that I'm not sure have been accurately accounted for. People such as Jim Price, from CSUC who is on the IPCC say they have been, yet nobody has shown me any hard evidence of such. I'd be a lot less skeptical if I could see how the IPCC accounted for temperature measurement biases. But they won't share.
Image: Average temperatures warmed in nearly all parts of California between 1950 to 2000. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cal State L.A Click for Larger Image
Average temperatures in California rose almost one degree Celsius (nearly two degrees Fahrenheit) during the second half of the 20th century, with urban areas leading the trend to warmer conditions, according to a new study by scientists at NASA and California State University, Los Angeles. Results of the study appeared in the journal Climate Research.
But 50 years of temperature trends hardly proves anything relevant about climate change, other than its gotten warmer in the past fifty years. 50 years in terms of our planet and the suns processes is a blink. I have to think that because NASA chose to co-author this paper with researchers at California State University, that some of the statewide "global warming as man-made problem bias" crept into the thinking for the purpose of this paper, i.e. "we need another study to show that its getting hotter so action is justified".
What is troubling about this study is that many of California's historical climatological stations, when done on a 100 year trend, rather than a 50 year trend, show a net cooling over the period, or a reversal of trend. The northern Sacramento Valley has very few reporting stations that go back 100 years, so I only have 4 data points, but it makes me wonder just what data the NASA/CSU study used to come to the conclusion that our area has warmed 1.1 degrees F over the last 50 years.
I've prepared some side-by-side graphs below of Sacramento Valley stations to illustrate that point:
My data source: U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) Data Set
Yet the NASA/CSU paper claims "The only area to cool was a narrow band of the state's mainly rural northeast interior". None of the stations above are in that area, but are in the North Sacramento Valley.
Even odder than that, cold and snowy Mt. Shasta, where you'd expect to hear about depleted snowpack, it's melting glacier on the side of the mountain, and other "signatures" of "global warming" shows a significant drop in temperatures over the last 50 years. yet the NASA/CSU study for that area concludes that a 2.1 degree F rise in temperature occurred.
Granted a few data points don't equal a complete study, but the fact that I've been able to find and plot in a couple of hours, several places that don't match the trends in the NASA/CSU study calls their methodology into question. Note the cities I used are all small rural cities, but the NASA/CSU study plotted major, medium, and minor cities in California to draw their conclusions. From their own paper they admit that the areas that have grown the most have shown the greatest temperature increases:
Southern California had the highest rates of warming, while the NE Interior Basins division experienced cooling. Large urban sites showed rates over twice those for the state, for the mean maximum temperatures, and over 5 times the state’s mean rate for the minimum temperatures. Average temperatures increased significantly in nearly 54 percent of the stations studied, with human-produced changes in land use seen as the most likely cause. The largest temperature increases were seen in the state's urban areas, led by Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area, particularly for minimum temperatures.
For example, look at Pasadena, CA once a small city itself, but in the last 100 years it became a dot in the sea of the second largest American City, Los Angeles. It's temperature trend, unsurprisingly, is sharply upward, for both the 50 and 100 year trends. Its drowning in a sea of asphalt and concrete, is it any wonder it shows a temperature increase?
The inescapable conclusion is that the NASA/CSU study is plotting the effects of urban heat islands, and applying that trend to the entire landmass of California to reach the conclusions they have mapped onto the state map of temperature trend they present.
A simple filtering based on urban growth factors would yield a temperature map with a far different result.
To their credit though, they recognize this fact: "If we assume global warming affects all regions of the state, then the small increases our study found in rural stations can be an estimate of this general warming over land. Larger increases would therefore be due to local or regional changes in land surface use due to human activities."
For the most part, "urban warming" has dwarfed "global warming" in its magnitude, a fact that is lost on some who look at temperature data from weather stations worldwide and treat them all equally in the quest to prove a theory.
There's an article in this issue of the Chico Beat about my views on global warming. You can read it here:
http://www.chicobeat.com/?q=in_denial
I knew going into it that they'd probably be critical of my views, but that's what honest debate is all about. My tipoff was Josh Indar's comment to me that "I'm surprised that you returned my call". I learned a long time ago that even if you don't like what the press is going to write about you, you should always be available and up front.
What really surprised me though was that they felt threatened enough by what I had to say to dedicate a complete editorial to it. http://chicobeat.com/?q=watts_is_wrong
And even more surprising was this missive: " We feel the need to say that this week because we've already heard protests from a local climate expert, who we asked to counter Watts in this issue. The expert declined because, he said that printing Watts' views will only encourage him, lending him a credibility he doesn't deserve."
Hmmm. Why is it that those whom have opposing views feel the need to posture this way? I find it telling that those whom say "the debate is over" related to "man made global warming" just shut out anything or anybody that might have another view. It is disengenuous when they do that. It also makes those who like to dig deeper mistrustful of the agenda. If I'm wrong, prove it with facts and logic, don't just refuse on your own basis of superiority.
I appreciate the Chico Beat taking the time to interview me and print my views, even if they disagree with them.
On the downside, there are a number of abbreviated words and misspellings in the article along with a couple of factual errors related to Edward Teller. I'm quoted as saying he was on the Atomic Energy Commission Board in the 80's. The agency was dissolved in 1975 and merged with the Department of Energy.
I'm pretty certain I said Teller was on the AEC in the 60's. I've asked them to fix that.
On the upside they gave me some kudos for my work locally on solar power. Thanks.
I think in the interview I've given an honest, factual, and pragmatic account of why I think the way I do. But in the editorial, I'm said to be a victim of my own "cultural bias". Translation: "Since he's a conservative, he can't possibly think for himself, so he must simply be regurgitating a mantra". It will be interesting to see how many "culturally biased" letters appear in the Beat saying all sorts of things that may not be, um, nice.
Recently it was revealed that Al Gore has a large “carbon footprint” and that he setup a corporation and as CEO that allows him to assuage guilt over that large footprint by purchasing carbon credits from himself. He later invests that money in green technology companies and the profits from those stocks return to his company.
I planned to write a harsh rebuttal but as I was eating breakfast I realized something; the man is a genius. No wonder columnist Maureen Dowd calls him the “Goreacle”.
My lovely wife and I are dieting, but I realize now that we don’t need to after all. Following Gores lead, I propose a website called waste-watchers.com which will offer us the ability to purchase “dieting credits” so that we don’t actually have to change eating habits. But unlike Gore, who doesn’t allow his corporation to sell carbon credits to the public, I’ll make this website available to everyone.
Here’s a sample of “calorie credits” you can buy: Big Mac alone, 576 calories, $5. Add supersize fries and milkshake, 1720 calories, $20. Ice cream bar, 330 calories $3, Nachos with cheese, 900 calories, $9.
Simply logon the website, make your “calorie credit” purchase, and you’ll be able to eat these foods while still maintaining your calorie count guilt free.
Humorous absurdities aside, the point is that if you want to change anything, it requires real work and physical change, not accounting tricks. Honest leadership here is more incumbent on Gore than anyone, and his failure is revealing.
A few folks have mentioned to me over the years that they thought we haven't been getting as many frosts and freezes as in the past, that mosquitos were worse than in years past, and that it seems more humid than it used to be.
Of course the reaction could be to say "Global Warming". But you'd be surprised (as I was) to learn that there may be another reason. Irrigation. Rice Fields, cotton fields, nut orchards, and other agricultural enterprises have grown (pardon the pun) dramatically in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valley in the last century. A University of Alabama study found that Irrigation was likely the cause of increased overnight temperatures.
Intrigued, I decided to lookup and plot the minimum temperature data for Chico University Farm, which is the station of record for climate here to see if it showed the same trend. It did. Here is the results of data from 1900-2000:
And to be consistent, I also plotted the maximum temps too, which was surprising:
And even more surprising was the Mean Annual Temperature:
If anybody wants to check my data, I'll gladly make it available. Here's the article in its entirety:
Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming From: University of Alabama, Hunstville
http://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=293
The same irrigation that turned California's Central Valley from desert into productive farmland is probably also to blame for summer nights there getting noticeably warmer.
Irrigation has turned much of the San Joaquin Valley's dry, light-colored soil dark and damp, says Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). While the valley's light, dry desert ground couldn't absorb or hold much heat energy, the dark, damp irrigated fields "can absorb heat like a sponge in the day and then, at night, release that heat into the atmosphere."
Continue reading "Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming" »
Here's some "inconvenient" news. According to a new theory proposed by renowned astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University, Ice ages are not caused by planet Earth’s orbital variations as once thought, but by a "dimmer switch" inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years which is exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth,
Ehrlich modeled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior and showed that while the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion, slight variations are possible.
His research builds upon the work of solar physicists Attila Grandpierre and Gábor ÿgoston who calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma inducing localized oscillations in temperature.
In an article appearing in the journal New Scientist, Ehrlich describes how some of these oscillations reinforce one another and become long lasting temperature variations, with the sun's core temperature to oscillating around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years.
UPDATE: The national website www.junkscience.com has referenced this blog entry.
From the waaaayyyy over the top department:
The Weather Channel's climatologist, Dr. Heidi Cullen who hosts the program "The Climate Code", is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be denied certification (or re-certification) if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade global warming. She posted this revelation in the blog she runs on the Weather Channel website and you can read it here: http://climate.weather.com/blog/9_11396.html
She writes: "If a meteorologist has an AMS Seal of Approval, which is used to confer legitimacy to TV meteorologists, then meteorologists have a responsibility to truly educate themselves on the science of global warming." "Meteorologists are among the few people trained in the sciences who are permitted regular access to our living rooms. And in that sense, they owe it to their audience to distinguish between solid, peer-reviewed science and junk political controversy." "If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn't give them a Seal of Approval."
Them's scientific fightin' words lady.
So, apparently any free speech, scientific debate, and public dialog that doesn't agree with the peer reviewed popular scientific opinion is grounds for denying an AMS Broadcast certification?
I have that AMS Broadcast certification, and though I was once a strong believer in the CO2-global warming theory, I'm now a skeptic that global warming is man made. I don't deny that the earth has seen increases in temperature, but I see far more supporting evidence that the sun and its various mechanisms which transport heat, light, particles, and magnetism to earth is a far bigger player than humans could ever hope to be. See my essay on the subject here: http://www.globalwarmingindex.org/gwi_essay1.htm
This reminds me of Galileo and his fight with the Roman Catholic Church in 1632. Galileo wanted to publish a book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which totally revised the earth centric view of the universe favored by scientists, scholars, and clergy of the time and built on the work of the earlier astronomer Copernicus. Galilieo was tried and imprisoned for daring to speak out against the "consensus" of the time for what he saw as a scientific truth.
I think we would all do well to follow this maxim: "People who live in greenhouses shouldn't throw stones".
Continue reading "Weather Channel Issues Ultimate Professional Insult" »
I've been saying this all along...the sun is the Big Kahuna of climate change on earth. CO2 effects pale in comparison to the effects of the sun. I'll have more on this in part 3 of my series on 2006's Record setting temperature year.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The brightening and dimming of the sun may account for a 1,500-year cycle of cooling and warming on parts of the Earth, a study of ice in the North Atlantic suggests.
Researchers found that a very slight difference in the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth can have a powerful chilling effect on the climate: ice builds up in lands bordering the North Atlantic, the average temperature drops in Europe and North America.
see the full story here from USATODAY
This goes hand in hand with another study by the University of Main Climate Change Center as reported by SPACEREF
And just in case that's not enough light reading for you, here is a study from Harvard that talks about "Chaos" and the sunspot cycle.
Part of the abstract is quite telling: "...by examining 1500 years of sunspot, geomagnetic, and auroral activity cycles. Sub-harmonics were found of the fundamental solar cycle period during the years preceding the Maunder minimum and loss of phase of the subharmonic on emergence from it. These phenomena are indicative of chaos. They indicate that the solar dynamo is chaotic and is operating in a region close to the transition between period doubling and chaos."
Translation: The sun can easily tip from one state to another, with resultant changes in solar output.
Previously in Part 1 I've talked about the fact that 2006 was the hottest year on record according to the National Weather service. But what does that mean? Does a record year indicate a long term climatic trend?
Which leads me to my next point.
3) Humans tend to extrapolate their experience to their environment. Its only natural to think that when your experience tells you things are different from what you remember "the way it used to be" to go searching for answers. Search hard enough for the answers you seek, and they are often found to fit your criteria. It happens in science too. In the 1970's, the USA saw several harsh winters and the "big chill" was the focus of science. A new ice age was envisioned in our future. Even Time Magazine got in on the act, not just once or twice but three times with articles expounding on the coming ice age.
Continue reading "2006 Hottest Year on Record - So what? Part 2" »
Part 1 of 3 parts on this subject that I'll post over the next few days.
The National Atmosphereic and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration released their report on the weather records of 2006 today. In that report they state "The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record and nearly identical to the record set in 1998, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Seven months in 2006 were much warmer than average, including December, which ended as the fourth warmest December since records began in 1895."
I don't doubt that a bit, nor do I dispute it. And, I actually expected it. But (and here it comes) I don't think it has anything to do with man made greenhouse gases. Ok, now before you send a barrage of hate mail and letters to the editor saying I'm crazy consider a couple of things I'd like to point out.
Continue reading "2006 Hottest Year on Record - So what? Part 1" »
Global Warming is a hot topic here on Earth, but it may be the issue will be settled not here on Earth, but on Mars. A study of the ice caps on Mars suggests it is also experiencing a warming trend. A story about new data from NASA cites a six year study by researchers at Duke University showing that Mars may also be seeing a Global Warming trend and that both the Earth and Mars are seeing changes related to solar output.
