I’m amused by your rapid move from one groundless presumption to another in
your uninsightful reply. Such boorish personal attacks should find no place in scientific debate.
Nothing has seriously challenged the basic first-order physics of UHI
development that I sketched. Your allusion to research du jour on
second-order effects, such as cooling by haphazard plumes of aerosols and
particulates is largely irrelevant to climate-scale urban discrepancies
with validated nonurban records, located not necessarily downwind and on
the order of ~100km away. Such plumes would cool the cities of origin even
more, due to higher concentrations. Yet, in neo-capitalistic China and
Russia, urban temperatures are rising particularly fast.
V. Ramanathan has conjectured “global dimming” due to increased atmospheric
pollution as an explanation for the deep dip in surface temperatures that
culminated in 1976. The inconvenient fact is that this dip, which had some
alarmists talking about a coming ice age, was experienced primarily at
nonurban stations. Contrarily, most urban records show little, if any,
dip. All of the published “global” surface temperature indices more
closely resemble the urban signature during that period, indicating
corruption by UHI intensification in the post-war era.
Despite the fact that I distinguished amply between Mosher’s views and
yours, you take pains to distance yourself from him in your reply.
Nevertheless, your views on BEST’s project clearly converge on its putative
value. You both tout the sheer bulk of the data base and the “mathematical
truth” of the processing algorithm. I recall hearing John Tukey at a
research symposium decades ago presciently warning about the perils of
growing mountains of unvalidated data in trying to understand physical
reality. IIRC, he said: “We don’t need more data; we need better,
concentrated information measures.” Sadly, BEST provides little of the
latter, while trumpeting the former. At best, they obtain a statistical
description of a geographically incomplete, patently biased and otherwise
mangled data base. Even the most rigorous mathematics has no compelling
power over physical reality. Trusting the results of a huge computational
effort as if they were immune to the GIGO principle is a sure sign of
scientific gullibility.
Finally, I find it richly ironic that you should bring up Socrates in a
gratuitous display of historical one-upmanship. It was he who declared that
knowing the limits of his knowledge is his greatest strength. May his
wisdom guide your career in the blogosphere.