Does GISS treat the Arctic ocean as “not land”? If so, why do they give us coverage by extrapolation from land?
I don’t pretend to know the answer to what Berkely is doing. That is why I’m asking. So thanks Nick, but I don’t need the guesses. I can do guessing for myself.
Thanks Zeke, I didn’t notice that, is it a simple moving average or exponential? And do you know why they use 10 years and not 5 or 8 or 20? My first experience with moving averages was in the stock market. The problem with moving averages is that all points are usually weighted equally but the last points are actually the more important as you probably know. Also it adds another factor that the average time could have been cherry picked to suit a trader’s message. For example for the stock, if choose a bigger number you flatten the line out. Traders often used both exponential in combination with simple along with the real numbers because both have criticisms. Also in the stock market people that use technical analysis like that are usually no better off than other types of traders. The trend is your friend (but all trends must end).
Devil is in the details.
1. Modis500 was calibrated on a training dataset that used cities in excess of 100K.
2. Modis picks out “built” not urban. A golf course or city park will register as Rural, however their .1 degree slop factor should get that.
3. .1 degrees is roughly 10km at the equator but less as you go toward the poles. They need to fix that in the final paper and use a constant radius.
That work is a bitch,
4. Station location errors average over 2km, last I looked. This BEYOND reporting precision. So they often report the Wrong location to .1 degrees
5. The urban/rural differential depends upon the actual character of the rural land before it was urbanized. see Imhoff and Oke.
6. They didnt control for de urbanization. Some rural sites used to be urban, so you need historical population to eliminate that.
That’s off the top of my head
Okay, let me repeat what I just said to Omnologos:
No effect for UHI simply doesn’t pass the smell test. But let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s say that in 1900 you have a thermometer that is surrounded by 5 miles of concrete and asphalt in all directions. By 2000 it has 10 miles of concrete and asphalt in all directions. We’ll call this the Urban thermometer.
Then, let’s take a thermometer that is sitting in the middle of a cow pasture in 1900 and then in 2000 it is surrounded by concrete and asphalt for 500 yards. We’ll call this the rural thermometer.
Which of the two thermometers will have increased the most in temperature?
Seems to me that using the 16,000 least urban out of the 39,000 and then comparing them against the 39,000 doesn’t prove a thing. Better to use 100 thermometers that are known to have no change at all in site conditions than 16,000 that could still be effected by construction. Their method seems to suffer from the old brain dead mechanical approach combined with unverifiable assumptions that all the other sources suffer from.
And to simply conclude that UHI makes no difference? Come on – get out of my face.
OTOH there was no obligation to stick to all that “noisy data”. And given what is known about the well-known places (such as Tokyo) one would have expected a little more humility and questioning of their own methodology, in the discussion. If they could speculate about asphalt, why couldn’t they speculate about the apparent counterintuitiveness of their results?
Urban areas comprise more than a quarter of the measurement sites. Don’t forget that. As far as uncertainties go, a great deal of the measured warming could still be due to UHI.
. I read the BEST Station Quality tentative paper from the link over at Watts site. I suppose I was unclear as to my doubts so let me rephrase my concern on station readings.
lets say I take data from Kennedy Airport in 1970 and again in 2011 it shows a warming trend. I take data from John Browns farm in 1970 and again in 2011 and it shows the same warming trend. That I can buy and acknowledge as good data.
If I took data from a station in 1970 when it was in the middle of bean fields then took data form the same or nearby station 40 years later and it was now a urban shopping area and residential neighborhoods and it shows a warming trend how much is natural and how much is from the UHI ? A question totaly unrelated to this thread would be how models take into consideration the sheer amount of roofs that have been built, Air conditioners that have been installed and asphalt that has been poured int he last 40 years.
I do not doubt the Earth is warming, UHI data shows me that. It is the land and ocean data I have a issue with.
Apologies to Dr Curry and all the rest of the posters for the slightly off topic questions but this is a fascinating and complex field.
What year did the International Panel on Global Warming change its name to the International Panel on Climate Change?
Buzz:
I looked through the paper. I don’t see how it answers any of the questions. Comparing the 16000 least urban against the entire 39000 doesn’t answer the questions that I asked above. If you think it does, tell me how.
If I’m going to second-guess the experts, I have to use my own intuitions based on their data, methods, intermediates, and conclusions. I’ll admit it isn’t “pound on the table” proven, but when, for instance, MOD500 is replaced with something more detailed, the whole thing can be re-run. If they did it right, it probably wouldn’t take more than a day or two.
You know more about this than I do, why don’t you go right to the paper and see what (if anything) they’ve done about the issues you see? That’s part of why they made it available now, rather than at publication.
Steve, I have always thought that places that have been known to have had changes in the period of interest should be used as a positive control. USAAF/USAF bases that swelled in WWII, then had runway extensions in the 50′s, then were run down, increased in 80′s and then closed post-Berlin War would be a good start.
On the other hand, I am sure there mus be land grant agricultural universities, like MSU, that have farming research stations that have records of crop changes in different areas would also be useful.
The lack of positive/negative controls sickens me.
As for scouting out locations, hell the Boy Scouts of America have 4.5 million youth members, they all want badges.
You could do a deal with the BSA and get every location scouted, along with precision GPS coordinates and photographs inside a year.
No Mosher, that is not their definition. I thought you read the paper. Their definition is that urban environments are those that are “dominated” by a built environment. Nothing says that you couldn’t have buildings and parking lots right next to the instrument. In fact, later discussion would indicate that any place smaller than 100,000 would be rural. Check page 5 under “Data”. And the 10,000 meters is relative to places that are classified by a map to be urban. It has nothing to do with there being structures present near the instrument. ROFL. Did you actually think that one third of their instruments were in completely unbuilt environments?
Fred, Thanks for your comments. In fact, I have contacted several climate scientists privately and given them some references. They have promised to read them with “great interest.” We’ll see what happens. I won’t name names, because I discovered on RC that public discussions about specific scientists can be counterproductive. Unfortunately, the intrepid Dr. Schmidt has not responded, perhaps because he is too busy “communicating” the latest political spin of RC. Please forgive my sarcasm!
My perspective is colored by my recent discovery that the literature in a lot of fields is corrupted by the tendency to report only positive results, and incidently to keep the funding rolling in. My brother says this is true of the medical literature and has numerous examples some of which have resulted in billions of dollars wasted on worthless procedures. In CFD, over the past 5 years I ahve started verifying some of the literature and found that the actual situation was exactly the opposite of the impression one got from the literature, in short all the respected people in the field had been using an assumption about modeling that was just wrong. I can’t go into this here because its far too technical. It will play out over the next few years. Influential people are already starting to pay attention. You know, I’m not particularly influential or not all that brilliant as a scientist, but I do tend to argue effectively when I have the facts and data. Trust me on this, CFD as a field for fundamental research has been defunded and its all due to the overselling of the science itself.
You must forgive me, but the level of rigor I see in the climate literature is actually lower than that found in CFD or medicine. I also see a level of blatant involvement of the scientists in politics that is unprecedented in any other field. Quite frankly, I have been angered by these things because the issue is so important. I view it as a moral and professional obligation for climate science to clean up its act. If I can contribute to that in some measure, I will be pleased.
Same comment I just left over at Lucia’s:
Based solely on a quick glance, (all I have time for), the paper “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures” appears to be a statistical analysis, and fails to consider the processes. It also seems to fail to acknowledge that:
1. the PDO does not represent the detrended SST anomalies of the North Pacific north of 20N,
2. the AMO does represent the detrended SST anomalies of the North Atlantic,
3. and that ENSO is represented by NINO3.4 SST anomalies (not detrended)
4. that their analyses are comparing apples to oranges to pineapples.
It just occurred to me, Steven…
You’re looking for built-up areas encroaching on the station, but isn’t the Urban Heat Island effect dependent on lots of buildings? We’re not talking about the station being next to a sun-warmed building, we’re talking about a bubble of warm air a kilometer or so high, and several times that in diameter. Putting a parking lot on a farm isn’t going to create an UHI.
Since they were just trying to construct the evolution of LST’s why would they try to do attribution?
Why pay $5 bucks for Laframboise’s book when I can get her opinion of the IPCC at her site for free:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/
Laframboise’s site says the IPCC’s authors can’t be trusted on global warming, but presumably she believes we can trust WUW, Jo Nova and other blogs she characterizes as Moderate Middle-Ground. I wouldn’t trust anyone who says those two are middle-ground.
I think Martha was commenting on Donna Laframboise. Given http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/, I agree with Martha.
“…warming from 1910 to 1942 with an increase in emissions from … cooling from 1942 to 1975 … disproving any possible correlation between CO2 emissions and global warming…”
It doesn’t disprove anything of the sort. Do you *really* need this explained to you?
Retract that last comment, I had just looked at the press releases and comments from Rohde about attribution w/o looking at the decadal variation paper yet.
Brian Angliss,
I don’t think you are in any position to be accusing others of hypocrisy. Judith’s original comment seems quite consistent with the evidence. Do you honestly believe given the content of Peter Gleick’s review, his apparent fundamental misunderstanding of what the book is about and his clear errors of fact, that he actually read the book? Answer honestly. Judith would have have been perfectly justified to leave the original wording as is but changed it as an accommodation to Gleick. This is hardly unethical conduct and to compare it to Cook’s actions is a comment only on your own credibility and your apparent desire to find fault with Judith,
Now, lets look at at Gleick. He wrote: ““This book is a stunning compilation of lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods about the fundamental science of climate change.” These are very strong charges. Gleick has been challenged numerous times to substantiate these serious allegations. Every time he has refused. And not a peep from Brian Angliss about Gleick’s irresponsible behavior here. Why not?
