Zeke and Steven,
Thanks for putting up these posts, explaining things, and answering our questions. Letting us peak behind the scene helps in understanding just what global temperature is and what goes into it. It may not be something of use to most byt it’s always nice to learn and pick up new information.
Steven, no. Are you willing to take personal, legal liability for the correctness of the data treatment, integrity of data? Are you willing to withstand an audit? In my world, if you are found to have tampered with data you stand a chance of the EPA showing up with badges, Glocks and no sense of humor. In my world every “adjustment” of data, every time, must have a documented reason for the adjustment or you get to pay a fine. So, if an audit of climate data adjustments are conducted you are willing to be the designated felon? I think I’d be a bit more circumspect about data quality and adjustments.
Steven – I only speed-red your reference, could not find a side-by-side comparison. All I find is a lot of reasonable assumptions, but no hard data.
Just take the ensemble mean of the sats. That solves the divergence issue. Works so well with the GCMs.
Do Cowtan and Way know about the problems with the sats?
5. Dr. Mears says: “As a data scientist, I am among the first to acknowledge that all climate datasets likely contain some errors. However, I have a hard time believing that both the satellite and the surface temperature datasets have errors large enough to account for the model/observation differences. For example, the global trend uncertainty (2-sigma) for the global TLT trend is around 0.03 K/decade (Mears et al. 2011). Even if 0.03 K/decade were added to the best-estimate trend value of 0.123 K/decade, it would still be at the extreme low end of the model trends. A similar, but stronger case can be made using surface temperature datasets, which I consider to be more reliable than satellite datasets (they certainly agree with each other better than the various satellite datasets do!). So I don’t think the problem can be explained fully by measurement errors.”
The surface temp datasets agreeing with each other is not surprising. How does that make them more reliable than the sats? The coverage of the sats and uncertainty of 0.03/K decade ain’t bad. If the sats are good enough for Cowtan and Way, they are good enough for me. And I don’t care what did or didn’t happen, before 1979.
“That’s how science works” Zeke that simple demonstration wouldn’t have gotten you past the second undergraduate analytical chemistry lab. It’s simple statistics. Are the means from each of your treatments statistically different? I believe I’ve read your references, but I’ll go back and reread them. However, you were comparing temperature means without any statistical test to show significant differences. Did your references look at that treatment? If so, why didn’t you use their errors and do even simple statistical demonstrations that the means were different? Absent that, your simple demonstration lacked scientific rigor and is less than convincing.
Zeke, I’m a chemist. Three degrees and post doc. My second graduate minor was analytical chemistry. I’ve spent 40 years in industry doing “sciency” stuff. Climate science seems to be a very different beast than any science I’ve been associated with.
There’s a couple of paper such as this one which show the necessity for a TOBs adjustment using hourly data.
Here’s one for Canada
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009JAMC2191.1
Assuming one were really skeptical you ‘could’ put together synthetic cases to prove the point.
We should ask Bill what did the Chinese government get in return for the campaign cash.
+1
Say what???
David,
I think you’re right that the intention is to be able to ratchet down certainty claims about warming. But that could work both ways if the pause continues, or worse.
Ah, yes. I, too, have dealt with the environmental rigors imposed by the government on chemical plants. Not saying it isn’t necessary, but the Fed does enforce laws at the point of and gun and prison time is a real possibility.
MRM:Monckton has never claimed that humans have no effect on climate or that CO2 is a GHG.
Oops. I meant that he has not in my reading denied either that humans affect climate or that CO2 is a GHG. His criticisms have been directed toward what I call “alarms”, exaggerated claims of the sizes of the effects or their threats.
Hi Steven, I’m Ron. I know you’ve been busy here tonight and I think you have many valid points on the good work by many on TOBS. I would like to switch topics to one I am engrossed in for one moment and ask you: Do you believe that skeptics are wrong to suspect that CMIP5 is systematically over projecting forcing/sensitivity? If one or the other is the cause of the pause does it matter? And, if not why didn’t M&F simply do a study on climate variability compared to model variability to see if there was intersection considering the current forcing/sensitivity rate? I believe they refer to it as adjusted forcing.
I value your opinion and by the way I trust you that you don’t need to sign.
Correct. Not just for the US but for governments get too much credit and blame for the economic conditions of the times they preside over.
Good news for Winnie ther Pooh fans http://bit.ly/17L7G0O
ALL governments.
Zeke Hausfather, thank you again for another good presentation.
Steven – I poked around magicjava’s site a bit. He was supplied some of what he requested:
…
NASA has responded to my FOIA request.
In a nutshell, they provided me with a link to the AMSU-A Radiative Transfer Algorithm documentation and said they had no information on the scan depths for the footprints of channel 5 on the AMSU and didn’t have the vector data they use to synthesis AMSU channel 4.
…
I’m not going to read the entire blog, but I do agree with you (if this is what you mean) that all code and data used in UAH and RSS should be publicly available. This, assuming there aren’t any national security issues.
