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Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by JCH


Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by Willard

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A clarification, Frank.

When I say “I must admit I spent so many time on it,” the “it” refers to the episodes on C13, not your article.

Two years already. Can you imagine?

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by Ragnaar

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Greater than 100% attribution doesn’t return much from a Google search beyond hits from here, ATTP and Real Climate. Seems to be a new idea. A related question is what about efficiencies greater than 1? That may bring some problems with some important laws.

50% represents natural factors:
<<>>

Now remove the natural negatives:
<<>>

Naturals turn positive:
>>>50%—-|100%|—-50%>>>

Seems natural factors are defining man made ones. Two partners operate an income tax preparation business. All units are in tens of thousands of dollars above. In the second case one partners gets all the money. In the third, they split it evenly. In the first case, one partner keeps all the money and the other partner gives him $50,000. A partner paid out $50,000 in refunds for errors made but otherwise billed nothing. The net income is still $100,000. The successful partner got his $150,000 but there was only $100,000 earned. How do we allocate that income to the partners? One answer is and $150,000. Say the bad partner never existed. Our answers are then $150,000 with 100%, $100,000 with 100% and $50,000 with 100%. Replace the bad partner with a good partner clone. All percentages are now 50%. In no cases does the original good partner get any more or less then he earned himself. But his percentages are defined by his partner. In my example above, the bad partner netted to zero overall. And adding up all 3 scenarios means that on average, the good partner’s percentage was 100%. So when natural variability cancels out in the long run, the long term percentage is 100%. In the last case, the partners kept no records of who did what, forgot what happened and only know there’s $100,000 in the bank account and it’s time to divide up the money. We know in theory one partner should’ve made so much as he has the plaques on the wall to prove it.

Comment on Watts et al.: Temperature station siting matters by Horst Graben (@Graben_Horst)

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Your “Gossip Girl” writing style screams physics. Note to Willard: This is another one like you and Ken whom “Do Science” apparently behind the “green” door.

Welcome to my world, guys. I will go on a bit.

The heat-sink hypothesis is an unphysical one. This was pointed out to Evan Jones over a year ago in discussion at Stoat’s. The press release makes no mention of having found a physical explanation. “Heat-sink” in this context is merely a euphemism for: We haven’t found a physical explanation.

And there I was, thinking it was a euphemism for, “Gosh, those trends sure average a heck of a lot higher when those houses and cementy things are near the sensor. Wow, look at those Tmin numbers. Well it seems pretty obvious why that is.”

As Dr. Leroy put it: the quality of observations cannot be ensured only by the use of high-quality instrumentation, but relies at least as much on the proper siting and maintenance of the instruments.

He refers to “heat sources”, writ large. We refine the observation to distinguish that which generates heat (“heat source”) from that which does not generate heat, but absorbs and re-radiates it (“heat sink”).

Well, anyway, you don’t seem to think much of the term, that’s obvious. Or we wouldn’t still be going on about it after all this time. Is it possible that what you find bothersome about all this is that the words “heat sink” sit so well on the tongue?

Dr. Leroy wasn’t looking at the trends when a station is exposed to “heat source” (which, by his definition includes sources and sinks), but offset. What we do is use his rating system and then look at the trends of the stations thus rated. In your haste to remind be to stick with the trends, I fear you have strayed into the land of offsets a bit, yourself. Besides, being colder does not mean you are not warming faster, as the Arctic guys like to say.

Anyone that reflects on what a heat-sink does

What a heat sink does is reflect.

and how they’re used

Well, in greenhouses, they’re used to take the edge off Tmin and bump up Tmax. That’s the offset effect, anyway. You wouldn’t know how that would affect trend during a warming interval until you measure it, of course. You guys remind me of the story of the dude who got tossed out of the Aristotellian tribe for the crime of instigation to commit empiricism.

quickly realizes this is bass ackwards.

I recommend realizing a little slower.

Heat-sinks reduce trends, not exaggerate them. We don’t put heat-sinks around CPUs in our computers because we want them to run hotter.

You are talking offset. You need to be be thinking trend. I could just leave it at that.

A CPU is a heat source. It is generating its own heat. It is the hottest thing in the room. A CPU is generally located in an enclosed space, and is likely not exposed to get much sun. So the heat sink is taking up energy generated from the computer — a closed and trendless system.

Placing a heat sink next to a computer when sitting outside on a sunny lawn is not going to cool it down. Both the sink and the computer are receiving radiation from both the sun and the surrounding atmosphere. The heat sink is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is from the CPU, then re-radiating some of it back towards the CPU, recorded only at at Tmax and Tmin. Not to mention the general lack of nocturnal/dinurnal variation of a room in a building. When is Tmin inside a closed, artificially controlled environment?

So if anything, the heat sink will be marginally increasing the heat of the CPU at either Tmax or Tmin, which are only times the temperatures are recorded by USHCN. Not that this is much of a practical issue outside a closed room.

I find this whole explanation – or lack of one – especially disappointing because Evan assured us this was easily figured out by their co-author physicist.

I have no doubt that you do. I think I can feel your disappointment radiating off you at Tmin. We never managed to land him, unfortunately. We’ll have to get back to it.

Please note that I was being starkly open about our process, far more than any other paper I’ve seen. Perhaps too open. But the idea is to operate as much as possible in the open. That’s what we do.

First he said, “Our physicist co-author thinks this factor is easy to nail and he does know about the Hubbard paper.”

Well, that work hasn’t been done yet. It will have to wait for followup.

Later he said, “We will, of course, be hitting it from the physics angle, as well. So it won’t be a statistics-only study. It will be backed by a mechanism that explains why and how (and to what extent) this occurs.”

The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. We can (and do) describe the mechanism, but we are going to need someone to add in the formulas. We’ll address this in followup.

OTOH, there is a known component of the measuring system that *does* exaggerate highs *and* exaggerate lows – the Dale/Vishay 1140 thermistor used in the MMTS stations. This was documented by Hubbard and Lin, Air Temperature Comparison between the MMTS and the USCRN Temperature Systems (2004).

Groovy. We already add an MMTS adjustment offset. When we publish, I will supply a tool that will allow you to drop in whatever MMTS numbers you like better than ours. Either by formula or by swapping in a new MMTS-adj dataset.
Let us know when you do. We would find the results interesting.

But in any event, it won’t be enough of a bump to change things much over what we already did. Maybe 0.01C/decade on the outside.

And speaking of gluteal direction, all you guys think about is how to horsewhip the MMTSs in line with the CRSs. It never seems to occur to you that it’s the CRS units that are the actual problem in the first place — carrying your own personal heat sink around on your shoulders wherever you go will do that. Especially as the paint fades (net).

It’s the CRS units that are giving the spurious results. And, as the MMTS units were calibrated to the CRS units, I see little real justification even for adding in the offset jumps. Either that or the calibrators have some ‘splaining to do. But, being a swell guy, I’ll go along. For now.

It is possible that the offsets should remain — and don’t think I won’t be looking at pairwise to check. But it is glaringly obvious that the CRS trends, esp. Tmax are going to have to be adjusted down. Way down. And that has implications that are going to shake the chain all the way back to 1880.

I think it’s youse guys, not me that have things reversed.

Since the Menne MMTS Bias adjustments were based on all stations, regardless of microsite, it’s easy to envisage that Menne’s MMTS adjustment isn’t entirely applicable to a subset of the stations. The Hubbard MMTS Bias adjustment is instrument specific – regardless of location or microsite – since it’s just a description of the physical response curve of the sensor itself. But Menne relies on pairwise homogenization while Hubbard & Lin did a year-long side-by-side field study comparison.

Just plug in Menne’s data. MMTS adjustment only data is available from NOAA if you care to do that. Or H&L. Besides, a little bigger or little smaller offset isn’t going to matter here. What’s going to matter is the bad CRS bias. You are the ones looking at this backwards.

While there is nothing wrong with homogenization per se, using the average result from a large group of stations and expecting it to be applicable to all subsets is a leap of faith. It is also unnecessary considering the Hubbard MMTS Bias I adjustment is available. If nothing else, obtaining the same results also using Hubbard would make the results more robust and eliminate the MMTS sensor as a potential physical explanation.

There is nothing wrong with homogenization per se, if there is no systematic error in the data. Then it is kindly Uncle H. but when a systematic error is introduced to the data series, Kindly Uncle H goes postal. This is a known thing.

Yet I see no reason you can’t sub in Hubbard’s data. You could even do it station by station. You can be provided with excel sheets that will enable this process when we publish. But even if the bump in trend is double ours, it’s not going to affect our results much.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by aaron

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Especially when you don’t see the adverse effects that should have been clearly evident over a decade ago.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by JCH

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<a href="http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1905/mean:40/mean:80/scale:0.3/detrend:-0.55/offset:-0.2/plot/gistemp/from:1905/mean:40/mean:60" rel="nofollow">try that again</a>

Comment on Watts et al.: Temperature station siting matters by evanmjones

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Oh, yes. Our external error bars are all very well. But what about all those implicit internal ones? We don’t even know all of them.

I’ll even go so far as to say that, in metaphysical terms, dropping perturbed stations is an adjustment in and of itself. The full set of raw data clearly won’t do. I presume our decisions regarding metadata will be questioned, tested, and varied. Quite possibly a better solution than our current shot will emerge. This paper is but a frozen moment in an ongoing process.

I am a great fan of your uncertainty arguments.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by franktoo

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Richard: I’m glad you are having some success. However, I’d prefer an unchallenged consensus on non-quantitative human attribution that is acknowledged to be irrelevant to policymaking to a dubious consensus being used to create polciy.


Comment on Watts et al.: Temperature station siting matters by evanmjones

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Yes, yes, yes (but the devil is in the details).

I think missing metadata is probably the biggest problem.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by aaron

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There’s such thing as good port?

Comment on Watts et al.: Temperature station siting matters by evanmjones

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That paragraph is an error.

To clarify:

There is cooling from 1999 – 2008. Poorlly sited stations cool faster.

There is an essentially flat trend from 2005 – 2014. COOP and CRN show no significant diversion (seeing as how there is no trend to exaggerate).

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by Jim D

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Greater than 100% just means there is still warming in the pipeline.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by franktoo

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Roger: Thanks for your kind comment. To avoid confusion, I want to say that I chose Cook’s list of “climate misinformers” simply to avoid any claim that the names I analyzed were cherry-picked to produce a particular outcome. My personal list of “climate misinformers” would be quite different.. It takes integrity to stand up to the consensus. FWIW, I asked my college-age son (who is interested in both technical analysis and government) to read “The Honest Broker”. (I’d like to apologize for any misunderstanding.)

It is interesting to note that your amazing publication record wasn’t picked up by Cook’s search terms. I didn’t look into this issue.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by popesclimatetheory

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The pipeline was killed by obama. There is no warming in the pipeline.

Comment on Watts et al.: Temperature station siting matters by Willard

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> This is another one like you and Ken whom “Do Science” apparently behind the “green” door.

TL;DR.

I thought it was a curtain, Kriging King. Was it a green? Hard to notice when you’re behind it.

I did not notice I “Do Science” either. That curtain is too opaque.


Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by Willard

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> In some contexts you’d be right. Not this one.

The only context in which it would not be right to “skip” AK’s comments is when it mentions my name.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by franktoo

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bobdroege wrote: “The way I see it, the PDO, AMO, ENSO and the rest are all part of the climate and you have those whether or not the climate is being forced. For those, whatever goes up must come down and are not causes of long-term warming or cooling. Those are all short term variations about the mean and different from forced changes.”

How long can “short-term variability” last? Decades? Centuries? You may want to read the post below or the Lorenz paper itself. The key section is only two pages long and it is not behind a paywall. The author was writing before most of the hype about global warming

http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/13/words-of-wisdom-from-ed-lorenz/

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by HAS

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The key policy issues are twofold:

1) is the earth cooking (and is that bad for us)
2) if yes, what can we do about it

The first requires us to forecast the best we can what is going on (and as part of that the influence of increased GHGs) and the consequences.

The second requires us to understand the relative contribution of the various levers we have at our disposal, and how hard they are to pull (eg can we push the earth a bit further from the sun:)).

In the case of 1) the important point is that it is the attribution to (say) CO2, not humans, that we need to know. GHG sensitivity is important because it helps to sort out what the drivers are, but equally we need to understand the contributions of other things (+ve or -ve), not to mention the feed backs. The thing about low CO2 sensitivity is not what it says about what we humans have done, but what is likely to happen in the future.

And in the case of 2), even if GHG from humans is the big problem, it might actually be easier to block other sources of natural variation or enhance negative feed backs (as some have suggested).

Whether humans are to blame is a bit secondary to all the above.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by rogerknights

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Typo: Should be 0.2C per decade warming.

Comment on What is there a 97% consensus about? by franktoo

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Coud the Big Lie be exposed for what it is? Suppose a Senator mentioning the 97% consensus were challenged about his use of this phrase. The witnesses for both sides could be asked to submit written testimony for the record the implications of attributing 50% or 100% of observed warming to GHGs using Otto (2013). (Or asked to explain why Otto (2013) wasn’t the appropriate framework.) Then the press is tipped off when the written testimony is published by the committee.

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