Place your bets: Make your call on 2010 global average temperature

So, you think those scientists who are putting over this global warming scam should have spent some of their money putting in better thermometers? Brilliant suggestion! Do you wonder why nobody ever thought of that before? It's because they did. When I mentioned the climate reference network in my earlier post, didn't you even wonder what that might be?

"The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) consists of 114 stations developed, deployed, managed, and maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the continental United States for the express purpose of detecting the national signal of climate change. "

U.S. Surface Climate Observing Reference Networks

OK, hold that though. Gosh, these guys may not be quite as stupid as you seem to think they are.

Now, as to the data, and the quality of the data, and the number of thermometers, all I can do is is repeat the correct explanations that I've given here on PriusChat many times before. Hasn't helped before, unlikely to help now.

I'll give you a starting point. In the link above, they only put in a little over 100 stations. Why? Why did these scientists, who seem to know what they are doing, put in so few stations? Why don't they need 6000 or 1200?

Finally, I'll emphasize again that we don't have 6000 stations reporting in the historical climate network, we have 1200 now. That's it. Nobody "dropped" them from the available data. They ceased to report. They are not there. They don't exist any more. There is no current information from them.

But if you can answer the question above, you'll understand why that's not a big deal.

 

Ah, I'll at least provide the picture.

Here's the level of sulfates from Greenland ice cores:



But I'm with you, Drees. At some point, either these guys educate themselves or not.

 

See my response to drees above. It's not like this is some big mystery that hasn't been addressed. Google, I don't know, "global dimming" and you'll stumble across the aerosol explanation of the post-WWII lack of temperature rise. Can't be proven, but is of the right magnitude to explain it.

And it's not like I haven't said that ten times before on these boards. Yet, you continue to present it de novo, as if nobody has ever bothered to explain it.

So, explain that, please. Why do you continue to present the post-WWII pre-Clean-Air-Act era as some big mystery that's never been examined, when in fact the accepted explanation has been repeatedly pointed out to you.

I mean, we could discuss the conventional aerosol-based explanation to see whether or not it appears adequate. That would be moving ahead. But to continue to present that as if the explanation had never been offered, that's just odd. And repetitive.

It's also odd in the context of commonly available graphs of 20th century temperature change, comparing actual versus modeled (predicted) temperatures. As here:



So, the oceans were a tad warmer than the models could account for, around WWII. That's it. (And, given the age of this, that may reflect calibration errors in the ocean temperature data that have since been corrected.)

Particularly on point, note how all the modeled temperatures (the uncertainty bands) all slope up, right from the start of the century? That means those temperature increases are not some unexplained mystery. The temperature increases within those colored bands are directly related to what climatologists (think they) know about the conditions of the earth in that period. Was the actual observed rate of warming faster or slower than predicted, at points over the century? Yes, of course it was.

But again, there's no gain in saying "lets pretend scientists say temperatures should not have risen in the early 20th century." I think it's far better to start with what climatologists actually have to say on the subject, then move on.

 

Knowing this isn't going to change anything, I'll make one more attempt to explain. Again, not like I haven't posted this explanation before on these threads.

Why do they only need 100 thermometers? Actually, they only need about 50, or so I'm told. The rest add only modestly to the results you'd get with 50 or so.

Why? Because temperature trends from nearby thermometers are very strongly correlated. The effects go out to about 1200 KM if I remember right.

That means there's a huge amount of redundancy in the historical climate network. That is, there are far more observations than there are actual true "degrees of freedom" in temperature trends.

I think I counted more than a dozen reporting stations within 50 miles of where I live. It's not like each of those 12 could correctly show vastly different temperature trends. So if one of them shows a jump in temperature, an odd trend, gets moved, gets its equipment replaced, what have you, the data analysis brings it back into line with the rest. The process for that is well described on both the NOAA and NASA GISS websites. Speaking as a person who analyzes data for a living, it's exactly what you do with data that has piecewise systematic errors but a lot of redundancy: you use the redundancy to find the crappiest of the crap, then you either toss, Windsorize, or fix it, whatever looks like the best option.


Urban areas? GISS doesn't use them. They force the trends in urban areas to match the trend of the nearest rural area. The NOAA analysts, by contrast, have a data-driven adjustment that they insert into the analysis. I think the Brits just did the analysis and said, hey, it won't matter that much. No idea what the Japanese do for homogeneity and urban adjustments. NOAA lays out their adjustments in pretty good detail, here, I think:

GHCN-Monthly Version 2


And, I'll say it again, 70% of the earth's surface is water, and there are no urban areas in space.

There are plenty of non-thermometer based indicators that the earth is warming. For example, there have been dozens of "meta-analyses" of scholarly papers that looked at changes in plant and animal habitats. Near as I can tell, they all conclude that 80% or more of the observed changes are a response to warmer (as opposed to colder) local climate.

 

I'll try it again.

You can't quite seem to grasp that the earth's temperature is the result of the interaction of many factors. So, when you say (emphasis mine):

"please explain what factor caused the warming from 1910 to 1940 and why we can conclude that it has not also been in effect in more recent years?"

Well, there's your problem in a nutshell. There isn't a factor, and it doesn't cause warming. What you see is the complex interaction of many weak factors. That's why you need general circulation models to be able to understand global temperature changes.

So let me make the world just a tiny bit more complex. Instead of just focusing on a factor, let me talk about two: C02 (which tends to warm) and S02 leading to sulfate aerosols (which tend to cool, as in the cooling seen after Pinatubo).

Now here's the cartoon version: Over the course of the 20th century, C02 increased while S02 first increased, then decreased (as shown in the graph I posted above). For the period between WWI and the clean air act, the net impact was little temperature change.

But in fact, none of this is simple or linear, and there are more factors at work. If you put all the known factors into the general circulate models, they reproduce the lack of warming in the period between WWI and the clean air act.

It's that simple. There is no mystery. The cartoon version of 20th century warming has just two factors. That's enough to sketch out why temperatures did what they did. But the compete explanation is the pattern of predicted temperatures from the ensemble of GCMs used by the IPCC. The pattern of rise-level-rise is clearly predicted by the models. It is explained by what climatologists think they know about the earth's condition at those times. Is it proven-beyond-all-doubt? No, never will be. Is it highly likely, and accepted by the people who study the climate for a living? Yes.

On the Clean Air Act, I mistakenly assumed you knew the history there. When we passed ours, pretty much the entire collection of OECD countries passed theirs. Believe it or not, the US used to lead the world in environmental policy instead of dragging its feet at every opportunity. And there was, in fact, a nearly global effort to clean up the air at that time. And it largely worked. That's why the graph I posted looks as it does. At that point, we only produced one-quarter of the world's GDP. If we'd gone it alone, you wouldn't have seen such a dramatic decline in sulfate aerosols.

Probably the interesting footnote to all that is that our highly successful strategy to reduce S02 emissions at minimum cost was -- cap and trade.

Apologies, Drees -- I've now clearly explained what you wanted these guys to take the effort to learn on their own. I'll try not to do that again.

 

Again, just a tiny bit of appreciation for the complexity of the world can help improve understanding. What's too simple about that statement is any notion of how fast they're disappearing.

Now, glaciers are particularly complex, and there is particularly poor historical data about them. All that can be said systematically is that the rate of melt sped up considerably in the last decade. There's no way to be sure that similar periods did not occur in the era prior to 1960 because there's no data (at least, not that I know of.)

But the point is, your reasoning is just too simple. You say "glaciers melted before" as if that's somehow some great argument that global warming isn't manmade. And that's just illogical. Or at least incomplete, unless you have some notion of how fast they are melting. And, in so far as we have systematic data, they appear to be melting faster now than they have in the prior half a century. Which, at least naively, seems kind of plausible, as temperatures are higher now than in the prior half-century. (It's naive, because glaciers react to both temperature and precipitation patterns, among other things.)



This, along with all the documented change in flora and fauna, and the borehole studies, the sea level rise (due mainly, at present, to the warming of the water), and so on and so on, provides good indirect evidence that the earth is warmer now than in the recent past, independent of the quality of the historical temperature data.

 

I'll try it again. Maybe repetition will help.

The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.
The NASA GISS temperature series doesn't use the urban stations.

I mean, come on, you really think that the people who put together these time series aren't aware of the urban heat island effect? The urban heat island island effect has been examined to death. NASA deals with it one way, NOAA another. It's a moot point for the satellites, more or less.

The proof is in the data. Stack up all the data from the satellite era, and see how it compares. The UAB satellite series has higher variance than the others (the blue line tends to stick out above and below more often), but other than that, by and large, to the eye at least, that's pretty decent agreement over the long haul.



Now, I am no fan of the satellite data. Historically, there were a lot of problems with it, and a lot of false claims made.

But just focus for one, tiny moment on the legend of that chart. See where it says "net change since 1979"? The top two numbers are the satellite series, the bottom three are the ground-based series.

The fact is, as of right now, the temperature series using ground-based thermometers show less total warming than the satellite data do.

Now, that's a connect-the-dots measure (I believe it's literally the last reading minus the first), and that's why there's such a spread (the unique values for those months matter). But just take the one in the middle (0.61) as a decent estimate of warming. Over the past 30 years, the trends are all about the same -- no matter how you measure it, the earth's surface warmed about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years. I wouldn't be willing to say that this is the best way to measure a trend, but I am willing to say that it's not some artifact of one particular way to measure global temperatures, or one particular way of dealing with urban heat island effects on thermometer-based temperature trend measurements.

So, to be completely clear, when you say this:

"Its a fact that you dont seem to comprehend or address."

That's wrong.

So, have I now demonstrated that I comprehend this issue, and have I now addressed it to your satisfaction? If not, tell me what I've missed.

If you just want to say, by-gosh-and-by golly, that has to create a huge problem, the science and the data be damned .... well, go ahead. But don't pretend that I've ignored this issue.

I'll say it one more time, just to bring it home.

The temperature series I'm tracking (the NASA GISS series) does not use temperature trend data from urban locations. It forces trends in urban areas to match the trends in the surrounding rural areas.