Climate change - anthropogenic or not?

I would bet that you are getting your information from American main stream media. I wish I could find the link, but there's a great article that shows how the media repeats the same story about a huge ice shelf breaking off each year, including the same picture, headline, etc.

Check this out:

Let me google that for you

and

Antarctic sea water shows 'no sign' of warming | The Australian

and

Arctic sea ice was melting severely in 1922: This WUWT article from 2008 was on Fox News tonight Watts Up With That? --- These things are cyclical

According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic (link) summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007.

We can compare arctic sea ice from 1980 to today.



(Note: 30 years ago, the technology didn’t exist to display snow cover on the left image.)

Things aren't as bad as you have been led to believe.

 

Great article by Dr. Roy Spencer:

Spencer: A Demonstration that Global Warming Predictions are Based More On Faith than On Science Watts Up With That?

"
I’m always searching for better and simpler ways to explain the reason why I believe climate researchers have overestimated the sensitivity of our climate system to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

What follows is a somewhat different take than I’ve used in the past. In the following cartoon, I’ve illustrated 2 different ways to interpret a hypothetical (but realistic) set of satellite observations that indicate (1) warming of 1 degree C in global average temperature, accompanied by (2) an increase of 1 Watt per sq. meter of extra radiant energy lost by the Earth to space.



The ‘consensus’ IPCC view, on the left, would be that the 1 deg. C increase in temperature was the cause of the 1 Watt increase in the Earth’s cooling rate. If true, that would mean that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide by late in this century (a 4 Watt decrease in the Earth’s ability to cool) would eventually lead to 4 deg. C of global warming. Not good news.

But those who interpret satellite data in this way are being sloppy. For instance, they never bother to investigate exactly WHY the warming occurred in the first place. As shown on the right, natural cloud variations can do the job quite nicely. To get a net 1 Watt of extra loss you can (for instance) have a gain of 2 Watts of forcing from the cloud change causing the 1 deg. C of warming, and then a resulting feedback response to that warming of an extra 3 Watts.

The net result still ends up being a loss of 1 extra Watt, but in this scenario, a doubling of CO2 would cause little more than 1 deg. C of warming since the Earth is so much more efficient at cooling itself in response to a temperature increase.

Of course, you can choose other combinations of forcing and feedback, and end up deducing just about any amount of future warming you want. Note that the major uncertainty here is what caused the warming in the first place. Without knowing that, there is no way to know how sensitive the climate system is.

And that lack of knowledge has a very interesting consequence. If there is some forcing you are not aware of, you WILL end up overestimating climate sensitivity. In this business, the less you know about how the climate system works, the more fragile the climate system looks to you. This is why I spend so much time trying to separately identify cause (forcing) and effect (feedback) in our satellite measurements of natural climate variability.

As a result of this inherent uncertainty regarding causation, climate modelers are free to tune their models to produce just about any amount of global warming they want to. It will be difficult to prove them wrong, since there is as yet no unambiguous interpretation of the satellite data in this regard. They can simply assert that there are no natural causes of climate change, and as a result they will conclude that our climate system is precariously balanced on a knife edge. The two go hand-in-hand.

Their science thus enters the realm of faith. Of course, there is always an element of faith in scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, in the arena of climate research the level of faith is unusually high, and I get the impression most researchers are not even aware of its existence.
"

I think he makes a fantastic point about the less we know about the climate system the easier it is to make it seem very sensitive to input.

 

Antarctic Sea Ice

 

A 30 year average is absolutely ridiculous.

Unfortunately you are dead wrong. In fact, 90% of the surface stations are sited so poorly that they give an error greater than or equal to 1.0'C (greater than the global warming that is supposed to have occurred over the last century.)



Here's another surface station in Colorado:



Here, the weather station was placed 2 feet off of a building, but conveniently next to a large air conditioning unit. Any thoughts on the localized ambient temperature when that baby kicks on?

Some more:









(^^ Nice BBQ pit!!)












Since I'm going on and on, here is a graphic showing the overall quality of surface stations in the USA:





And the key to read them:



As you can see, yellow, orange, and red are all bad. These sites are rated by the NOAA's Climate Reference Network site handbook.



Let's see you refute that

Ah, I agree with you

Actually, I encourage everyone to go out and look at the evidence themselves. Don't take my or anyone's word. Arrive at your own conclusions.

--

It makes me wonder, your post was completely full of demonstrable lies. Did you really believe what you were posting when you posted it? Or were you purposefully stirring the pot? I mean, did you *really* believe that all the surface stations are sited properly? Or did you know that 90% of the stations in the USA are sited poorly, ACCORDING TO THE NOAA CRN GUIDELINES?

In fact, there is an entire website dedicated to analyzing these stations:

http://surfacestations.org/

 

Your #10 is the only one that has to do with the science. See this link for lots of graphs and information:

The IPCC and Recent Cooling The Climate Conspiracy

If you will be a gentleman, please read back through this thread and see the ClimateGate emails that I've posted regarding recent cooling. Even the ClimateGate scientists admit (privately) that we've been in a cooling trend for a long time.

I don't think any scientifically inclined person really denies that we have been experiencing cooling for nearly a decade now.

Edit: here are a couple of the emails:

(note, the above was written in 2005. The trend has continued, so according to Phil Jones we would now have 11 year cooling trend.)

Etc, etc. Who do you believe? The scientists or the "deniers"? Oops, we are both saying the same thing!

​

 

Yikes, drees, a lot fail in that post. I'll reply when I have a lot of free time, probably tomm morning.

Edit: Quickly, I agree - let's see what the experts say about recent cooling - just have a look at the emails I posted to priushippie

 

Well, it sucks that I have to go through this, again, and show you that you are incorrect.

I said:

You said:

I said:

You said:

I then responded with a tortuously long post, available here, that demonstrated the natural events that coincided with the industrial revolution.

Please explain how I am misquoting you. I think it's very obvious that you thought we would still be experiencing cooling had it not been for the industrial revolution.

I think our production of CO2 may have played a very very small role in the warming from 1975-1998. Avoiding calling me a name would be fine, I may be incorrect in considering myself a lukewarmer. I'd use whatever term that got the point across that I can objectively look at all the data and not be blinded by an ideology.

Arctic sea ice is down from 1979-2000. But it's up from 2007. Alarmists quote when sea ice is going away, but never when it's forming. I guess it doesn't appeal to your emotions when I write that sea ice was forming at the rate of 26,000 square miles per day in December 2009.





And on an unrelated note (not pictured here), Antarctic ice is growing.

Sadly, the authors you love are not experts in either climate or statistics. That is why Michael Mann's original hockey stick was debunked. In fact, that was one of the big complaints of the Wegman report about the hockey stick:

I'm sorry if you feel that statistics or parts of climate science are beyond you. I don't feel the same.

I have actually written an entire blog post on this topic. You can see it here:

Quality of U.S. Temperature Data The Climate Conspiracy

But let's look at what you said:

Incorrect. The NOAA CRN (Climate Reference Network) has never gone to all of the sites and rated them according to their guidelines themselves. The only person who has ever done such a comprehensive analysis is Anthony Watts of Home . Therefore, it is impossible for them to account for the problems with the surface stations since they have never rated the stations.

Edit: Hypothetically, if the CRN ever reviewed all of the sites, the only proper thing would be to make sure each site is setup so that it has no potential for error.

There are 1,221 active climate-monitoring surface stations in the USA. Of those 1,221 stations, 948 have been evaluated by Watt's Surface Stations project. Of these 948, 90% have been found to be very poorly sited. Poorly sited means that they are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures. This means the overwhelming majority of stations in the USA have been reporting bad data. (Please note that the USA data is generally considered the best data in the world. Yikes!)

As shown in that pie graph posted earlier, 90% of the surveyed surface stations have an error greater than or equal to 1.0 'C. This amount of error is greater than the amount of global warming we are supposed to have experienced from 1900-2000. Let me say that again: the amount of error is greater than the amount of warming we are supposed to have undergone in the last 100 years. The other 10% of the stations have been surveyed to show that they are capable of giving good data.

So, now we know that according to the NOAA CRN's guidelines, 90% of the surface stations in the USA are not capable of giving good data. They have errors greater than the amount of global warming we have supposedly experienced in the last one hundred years. It would be easy to assume that the other 10% give good data all the time.

Unfortunately that is not the case. Let's see why.

To collect surface station data site observers are given a card on which they are supposed to fill out the maximum and minimum temperatures each day. At the end of the month they are supposed to submit their card to National Climatic Data Center so that they can be compiled into the national database.

Well, what happens when the site observer doesn't work on a particular day? No readings occur. What happens when that observer is off because of a holiday? No readings occur. In fact, in Marysville, California, at Chico University Mr. Watts found that the temperature form for July 2007 had only 14 of 31 days completed. That is less than half a month's worth of data.

Missing data is not a rare phenomenon. Many sites have missing data. So even if a site is rated as capable of providing good data by the NOAA CRN, the data still must be read by someone. If that person is missing half the month, then you're not getting a significant quantity of good data.

So what happens when stations have missing data? From Watts' report: "[There exists] a data algorithm used by NCDC called FILNET, short for Fill Missing Original Data in the Network, that is used to “infill” missing data using interpolations of data from surrounding stations. After reading about it, I came to the conclusion that NCDC uses FILNET to create “missing” data where none was ever actually. measured."

From a government report on the matter:

Basically, if data is missing from a certain site then data is taken from near-by sites and adjusted to fit the missing data site. Wow.

So, we see that 90% of our stations are not capable of providing quality data, and then we see that sites which have missing data have data filled in from surrounding sites by the FILNET program. So even a site that is capable of producing good data, if data is not read for a day, could have bad data filled in for it by this FILNET program. This means that even the 10% of sites that are capable of providing good data are contaminated by the 90% of sites that have bad data.

So now that we see the quality of data from the stations is overwhelmingly poor, let's look a little more at the numbers and types of stations.

In April 1978 there were over 6,000 surface stations, and now we have dropped down to around 1,200. Of these stations, there are two main types. There are stations that are found in urban areas, which are more likely to be contaminated by local heat sources (see the photos above), and then there are stations in rural areas, which are less likely to be contaminated by local heat sources.

So, we know somewhere around 4,800 surface stations dropped out of monitoring temperatures. The vast majority of the stations that dropped out were rural stations. This is unfortunate because the rural stations are the ones that tend to give the most accurate data (because of less urban heat contamination.)

Since the majority of stations that dropped out were rural ones, we can deduce that when the FILNET program is applied to stations that are missing data, data is more likely to come from urban (contaminated) locations than rural ones.

By now, I'm sure you're thinking "holy poop, can it get any worse?" Unfortunately it does.

After all the data is collected from the stations, and after missing station data is created by the FILNET program, adjustments are applied to “homogenize” the data (that is, data is compared to surrounding stations and adjusted accordingly) that impart an even larger false warming trend.

Below is an example of the "homogenized" data. The blue line is the "raw" (unaltered) data. The red line is the "homogenized" (altered) data. You can clearly see the data from 1880 has been altered to appear cooler in the beginning, and less cooler as time travels toward the present. This does two things: 1. it makes it appear the past was cooler, which makes our current warming look unique, and 2. it gives the data a steeper warming trend, which makes our current warming look more severe.



And lastly we can look at this graph released by the NOAA that demonstrates the differences between the raw and homogenized data sets. Note that this is a graph of differences, it shows the difference between the raw and homogenized data sets. Since this graph trends upwards, it means that the homogenized data sets have been reading (much) warmer than the raw data sets. It's funny how this curve is very similar to the curve we see showing a warming trend.



We see that NOAA’s adjustments to raw temperature data have generally been to increase, not decrease, recent temperatures. The net effect of NOAA’s adjustments is to increase the rise in temperature since 1900 by 0.5 'F.

So, after we consider all of these facts, let's answer our question of "how good is the quality of U.S. temperature data? The evidence overwhelmingly supports that is of poor quality. Do you think the U.S. temperature data should be used to write legislation?


How dare I forget this ClimateGate email:

You gotta love that they know they are feeding us poop.

 

Oh, big news. FOIA'ed emails from Hansen and GISS show differences on the 1934 vs 1998 temperatures:

FOIA’d emails from Hansen and GISS staffers show disagreement over 1998-1934 U.S. temperature ranking Watts Up With That?



So in 1999 Hansen claims:
1934 – 1. 459
1998 – 0.918

but by 2007 he has “adjusted” the data to:
1934 – 1.227
1998 – 1.242

So he magically managed to adjust 1934 down 16% and 1998 up 35% … gee I think we’ve seen that game before …