Cancun Climate Summit on Global Warming.

I believe that!
.

That's really gonna happen!

You reveal your own ignorance on a subject you are little qualified to speak on. So three record lows in your one local area,, yep that's definitive. Oh, by the way, how many record highs world wide have there been in 2010?

World feeling the heat as 17 countries experience record temperatures | World news | The Guardian


If you wish to begin to be informed I would suggest that you read the compilation provided here by Chogan2 who is clearly much more learned on the subject than you.


http://priuschat.com/forums/environ...our-call-2010-global-average-temperature.html

PS Nice job on another inflamatory headline that has nothing to do with the subject.

 

It seems to me that some people can't grasp the subject that global warming is the whole temperature mean for the whole WORLD. While there may be record lows during some days in winter, there are far more highs around the world.

Another problem with global warming deniers, is they don't have one coherent arguement: some even regurgitate pieces that deny global warming in general. Then they'll also indiscriminately link to pieces that accept global warming, but question how much of it is from AGW. The last article I read questioning AGW stated some fairly moronic arguments: their premise was that extra CO2 output from humans is actually good for the environment because that's more air for plant life. Are they just glancing over the fact that man is also having a major impact on the devegetation of the Earth, or are they that dumb?

 

Icarus, he's just baiting us. I'd let it pass.

The record lows were in Cancun, hence the irony. Given the recent track record on facts, if it mattered, you'd want to check with some primary source. But I wouldn't be surprised by low 50's F in December. I took one spring vacation in Cancun, and I don't recall it getting much above 60. Definitely too cold to swim.

Oh, tch. Maybe those facts aren't right. USA Today says the all-time record low in Cancun is 45. So, maybe, maybe not a record. Maybe 51 is a record for that day -- that seems more likely. But not "a record low", in the sense of lowest temps recorded there. At least not if the USA Today listing is correct.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/climate/wcancun.htm

 

If I've done the arithmetic right, the US averages about 8 new record daily lows, per weather station, per year. That's backsolved from 142,000 new daily lows over a decade, for a nominal 1800 weather stations, here:

Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S. | UCAR

 

Yeah well not hard to hit a bunch of "highs" when something like 2/3rds of all US weather stations have documented upward bias of 2 degrees C or more.

 

Tim, could you share the study that showed as much. please?

 

Putting aside the fact that I was referencing the data on lows, not highs:

Of course 2/3rds of the thermometers are grossly wrong. Any fool can see that. The gross errors in the ground-based analysis explain why the satellite data and the ground-based data show almost exactly the same 40-year trend. Dr. Roy Spencer (UAH) and RSS have independently been fudging their data exactly the same to make the satellite data line up with those bad US thermometers. And have been doing so for the past 40 years, because the trends are in synch over the entire period. Talk about yer major conspiracies. And that explains why the rate of warming of the oceans (70% of the planet, for those of you who care to think about this rationally) is consistent with warming on land. You see, the evil climate scientists have a secret time machine whereby they went back and forced tens of thousands of naval personnel to fudge their records over the past century -- so that the modern readings would show warming consistent with those obviously wrong US thermometers. And, golly, since the new Climate Reference Network shows year-to-year changes that almost perfectly match the old historical climate network data, this means they climate conspiracists have even managed to fudge up our new state-of-the-art equipment in remote locations, in exactly the right way, so that it too matches those grossly incorrect thermometers. U.S. Surface Climate Observing Reference Networks And OMG let's not even get into the international conspiracy aspects of this, as the study in question refers to the US only (just a few percent of global surface area), and warming in the US is consistent with warming throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The climate cabal has forced the entire set of OECD nations into this scam.

Or, as a last resort, one could follow up on this part of the source I cited:

"The readings, collected at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, undergo a quality control process at the data center that looks for such potential problems as missing data as well as inconsistent readings caused by changes in thermometers, station locations, or other factors."

Which, I hate to say, I've explained in detail here in Prius Chat before. I would guess maybe half-a-dozen times at least. Briefly: Temperature trends have a high degree of spatial correlation. If it's gotten warmer in (say) Washington, DC over the past 40 years, it should have gotten warmer in (e.g.) Sterling, VA at very nearly the same rate. So the historical climate network, as a whole, has a huge amount of redundancy. NCDC and others use that redundancy (excess information) to impose "homegeneity" on the readings, meaning, they toss out the ones that are inconsistent with the rest. Is that perfect? Probably not. Does it seem to work pretty well, in the sense of being consistent with other independent sources of information? Yes.

I'm now off topic and ludicrously serious, for what was clearly just a snicker-worthy tidbit of an original posting. So that's the last I'll have to say on this.

 

but, but, but at least two-thirds of US weather stations have had urban heat-islands built around them since their records began. Of course they show warming. It is 5 to 10 degrees warmer in the 'city' than it is in the surrounding country, especially at night when most of the temperature warming has been recorded. This is real human-induced climate warming, but is it due to CO2? No.

 

Wow, I didn't think of it that way. Now I am a firm believer in AGW. Thanks!

 

Upward bias noted in a lot of papers -
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-321.pdf.
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/r-345.pdf
Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data
Christy has also written a few papers on it and surfacestations.org has found large errors - something like 65 or 75% of land surface stations in US with 2 degree C or greater bias.

That's just a smattering - a few other papers on it I seem to recall. One from northern Europe I think - can't remember the author. Same findings. Warm bias to land temperature measures.

 

Thanks Tim, those 3 certainly qualify as peer-reviewed scientific literature, but they do not support your assertion (as restated here). Surfacestations.org does speak in support of that, but they have yet to publish.

There was a paper publied (in 2009 or 2010) that compared US urban and rural station trends and found the rural ones to be larger. Perhaps someone here can help by posting the citation. I am still 'in the forest' and have internet (sometimes) but not all my resources. It may jog someone's memory that they did use Surfacestations' characterizations of urban-heat-island-contaminated stations to divide the data set.

 

You are correct - surfacestations is not peer reviewed. You point out a valid issue...

We rely on the land-based surface temperature data from thousands of stations, which to my knowledge have not at all been comprehensively peer reviewed with respect to station siting, station maintenance, or data collection procedures. Yet we use this data as a basis for warming claims. Then when someone actually audits the sites, the typical reaction is (and you are not alone), "it is not peer reviewed".

Hopefully you appreciate the irony. ;-)

 

Start here, for the reference to one study:

Watts not to love: New study finds the poor weather stations tend to have a slight COOL bias, not a warm one « Climate Progress

Claims that the trends are biased don't have any strong empirical support. They conflate cross-sectional difference with trends, or they don't bother actually to test the hypothesis that the subset of "bad" stations actually differentially affects trends, and so on.

NOAA did that. Actually tested the hypothesis, above.

I said it above, but since it already seems to have been forgotten, the claim that global temperature trends are strongly biased upward due to incorrect land-based thermometer readings ignores:
1) Actual test of that hypothesis, as above.
2) The fact that 70% of the globe's surface is ocean.
3) The fact that the satellite-based temp trends align very nicely with the ground-based trends.
4) The fact that the new US Climate Reference Network trends align almost perfectly with US trends from the old historical climate network.
5) All of the ancillary information demonstrating significant warming, e.g., composites of borehole studies that do not depend on current thermometer readings to infer average temperature increase over the past couple of centuries.

And so on.

Basically, the proof is in the testing. Watts alleged there was a huge problem with some stations that was not dealt with by NOAA. NOAA tested it. Watts was wrong. That's pretty much the end of the story.

What are the cites above:
Pielke, Sr.
Pielke, Sr.
McKitrick.

Pielke Sr.'s only hard conclusion that I can see is that this-and-that might be wrong (including, yep, pictures from Watt's project), and that ocean heat content is the preferred metric for assessing warming. That's great if you can measure it. Near as I can tell, that's shown significant warming over the past half-century, so I'm not sure that's exactly a stunning criticism.

The conclusions of the McKitrick paper have already been shown to be unjustified, in what appears to me to be a convincing way, by showing that you get his results when you apply is method to model-predicted temperatures, instead of actual temperatures. The model-predicted temps don't have (e.g.) urban heat island effects in them. In other words, his method gave a positive results even when there was, by construction, no such result to be found. The obvious conclusion is that he was just picking up spurious correlation and misinterpreting it. I think that's here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...Sunday,+19th+Dec+'10+between+10:00-12:00+GMT.

I have no doubt that McKitrick admits no error, and may even take another swing at it. But basically, that's just another correlation study showing an implausibly large effect. Given that the highest rate of warming is in the Arctic -- not an area known for its urbanization -- and that warming on land is consistent with warming in the oceans -- again, not known for their urbanization -- I'd have a hard time asserting that more than half the land temperature trend is due to urbanization. Just on the face of it. The fact that McKitrick's method often get the same size effect from data with no urban heat islands just puts the nails in the coffin, I think.

Edit: And it's always worth putting up the latest comparison across data sources:



Now if you read one paper cited above (Citation: Klotzbach, P. J., R. A. Pielke Sr., R. A. Pielke Jr., J. R. Christy, and R. T. McNider (2009), An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102,doi:10.1029/2009JD011841.),

you'll see the whole point of it is that the divergence between the satellite and ground series shows that the ground series have an upward bias.

Huh? The little numbers in the corner of the graph change every month, but ... if the divergence of the series is the evidence for bias, all I have to say is, the bias must be pretty darned small. Right now, just by chance, GISS (ground) and UAH (satellite) match, the other two grounds series (NCDC, Hadley) show less temperature change than the satellites (RSS, UAH). Yeah, that bounces from month to month (mostly because of the high variance in the satellite data), but still ..

In the immortal words of Grouch Marx, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

I mean, yeah, if these series actually visually diverged -- if the satellite data were level, but the ground data rose, generating two distinct sets of lines -- sure, then you've got something to talk about. Else, you're talking about something pretty esoteric, as in, once you've read the papers cited above, it's not clear what you mean by the temperature of the earth's surface. Because the data that get published as average surface temp trends seem to line up pretty well.

My eyes tell me that the trends look pretty similar across sources. If detailed statistical analysis can determine otherwise, OK. May be true. But the series themselves suggest that any bias in the trend, if it exists, appears small enough to be immaterial.

 

From my understanding, the Menne study does not really get at the affect on the temperature data of long term UHI encroachment. And I agree with Pielke - Ocean Heat Content would be the preferred measurement. To be precise, we don't have a reliable measure of that going back a half century (that would be sea surface temperature - a different thing). The Argo float project is getting at ocean heat content but the record is short and I'm not sure the device calibration problems have yet been resolved. The satellite record I suspect is pretty reliable. It does show a warming trend though it is odd that the trend is very small 1979-1997 then does a step change and basically levels out again for the past 10 years. I have a problem understanding how CO2 drives that sort of pattern. Some degree of background warming I can understand and is very likely attributable to CO2. Though even there, one must separate from background warming that has been going on since the end of the LIA.

 

Great points! In fact, 2008 had the same global temperature as 1980, despite large increases in CO2 during that period. Hmmm. A previous post referred to deforestation of the planet, which surely has a impact on climate. But does CO2? CO2 is now at 380 ppm, compared to the most important GHG, water vapor, which ranges up to 50,000 ppm. And the heat trapping ability of CO2 and H20 are the same per molecule. Hmmm.

Relative to your comment about the LIA (Little Ice Age that ended in about 1850), Thomas Jefferson was the first person to publish the term 'Climate Warming'. Was it because of CO2? No. It was the end of the LIA, from which glaciers are probably still melting, naturally.

 

Mainer,,, you may be an professor but I question your information. I ask you, how did you come to that conclusion?

How did you come to that conclusion with the huge amount of evidence to the contrary?

Data.GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: Analysis Graphs and Plots

to start

 

Yeah - I wouldn't really put too much stock in single year metrics in any case...but still stand by my concerns about the surface temperature record, natural factors affecting temps since the LIA, etc.

 

Just look at the graph 3 posts up in this thread. Look at 1980 and 2008, same average temperature for each year, maybe 2008 was even a bit cooler. There isn't much warming in the data record anyway, despite the rise in CO2. Look at the small text in the lower right hard corner of the graph, the increase in temperature is less than 1/2 of a degree. In fact, if 1997 hadn't been MUCH warmer than any other year on record, there might not be a statistical increase in temperature at all. The data are right there, no other 'evidence' needed.

 

Thanks Chogan2 for providing that Menne I could not recall. I doubt that Pielke(either Sr. or Jr.) would disagree with the idea that ocean heat absorption could explain the few-years up and down in air temperatures (see Mainer's above). The real question is what we ought to anticipate over coming decades? The PDO and AMO taketh, but they also giveth away.

The problem with ocean heat content monitoring is that it will take a long time to know. By that time, we might be past the point of "conviently' reducing CO2 emissions. Not saying it should not be done, rather, that it cannot play a 'policy' role.

Look, for my money, current climate models are far from perfect. Improving them is a high goal. Say they are simply wrong, and you cause me (and many others) to ask what agenda you might have.

Mainer has also asked about atmospheric water vapor; a large infrared 'forcing' included in all current climate models. What we need to appreciate is that H2O has an extremely short (about 10 days) life in the troposphere. Its concentration there is entirely controlled by the Clasius-Capeyron equation on temperature. To make things too brief, water vapor amplifies the temperature effects of CO2 and CH4, etc.

It gets worse. When there is a lot of H20 in the atmosphere, clouds form. Depending on the altitude of those clouds, they can either cool or warm. Now, one group suggests that there will be more more clouds in the future and that this will limit global warming. Another group suggests less future clouds will do the same. Please forgive me for not having those studies available here but both projections have also been disputed in the literature.

So, in terms of climate models, we have a mess and I will be the first to say so. In terms of ice cores and similar paleo-records, we have 3oC warming per CO2 doubling. The current models models agree with that, but they have their 'shortcomings'.

So, who are you going to believe? Not for me to say. I don't doubt that on the curent path we will reach 600 ppm CO2 (and an unpredictable increase in CH4) in this century. Will this result in temperature distributions very similar to those we benefit from now? and rainfall???

I have yet to see a model, from any source, that says so.