Hot and Moist

[pjclarke]

Already been done, read the paper. It was only announced a couple of weeks ago.

Nope, another direct hit on your foot. You cannot read the paper, it has not been released, nor has any data to support the claim. All we have is a conference poster. Posters are not generally peer-reviewed.

This is the latest attempt by Watts to demonstrate that the US Surface record is unreliable, here's a resume of the timeline:

- Watts crowd sourced a survey of US weather stations, volunteers went out with digital cameras and reported the condition of their local installations. This is not actually a bad idea, even if he announced early on what he wanted the data to show.

"I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment."

Anthony Watts, Pittsbugh Tribune., 2007.

-Watts releases his first glossy 'report' for the Heartland Institute in 2009, based on the surfacestation data it was little more than a collection of pictures of carefully chosen stations and their trends. Of course the selected badly sited stations had warming trends, while those on good microsites showed cooling or a flat trend. How odd. But no data comparisons were included.


The NOAA then published a paper showing that there was no significant trend difference between Watt's well and poorly sited stations, in fact the good stations showed a slight cooling bias.

There was no retraction or apology from Watts, the report is still available on the Heartland website.

In 2010, along with Joe D'Aleo, Watts put out another report which opened with 'Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century."

Which made it a little disingenous for him to state less than a year later, that

The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention – it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question.

Several independent parties then calculated that the main issue Watts and D'Aleo based their accusation on - a dropout of stations, made no difference to the trend.

There was no retraction or apology from Watts, the report is still available on the Heartland website.

Watts then published a peer-reviewed paper with Fall et al, which identified some interesting features in the data but showed once again that siting had no effect on the trend in mean temps.

Three and a half years ago, Watts put out a claim that 'half of the global warming in the USA is artificial', based on a new paper, however numerous people pointed out issues and it as been 'under revision' ever since.

This time round, the trigger for the study is Leroy 2010, which has a new rating scheme for weather stations and it seems our heroes are only applying one of Leroy's 5 criteria (Heat sinks) and classifying stations differently - Leroy classes 1-3 out of 5 as 'good', retaining about 90% in France for example - while Watts et al only like classes 1-2, meaning they are trying to estimate US temperature trends using just 92 stations, and they stop the analysis in 2008, with no explanation. The suspicion is that the team has spent the last 3 years or so slicing and dicing to get the numbers they want.

But we cannot check because they won't tell us which are the 'good' stations. What we do know is....

- Using his 'good' stations Watts finds a trend for the US of >2C /century. Cause for concern.

- Most of the planet is ocean, unaffected by station siting. Sea temperatures are unequivocally rising

- Applying the NOAA quality adjustments (homogenising) causes the discrepancy to evaporate. No convincing reason not to homogenise has been advanced.

We await the paper's publication and release of the data. Maybe 2016 will be their lucky year.

[DimPrawn]

- Most of the planet is ocean, unaffected by station siting. Sea temperatures are unequivocally rising

How much has the planets oceans warmed?

[AtW]

How much has the planets oceans warmed?

1 mln degrees roughly ...

[pjclarke]

How much has the planets oceans warmed?

Sea Surface Temperature | Climate Change | US EPA

You'll remember from GCSE Physics that water has a high heat capacity and so the oceans have huge thermal inertia, which is why climate scientists tend to use Ocean Heat Content (OHC) as a metric, rather than temp.

Global ocean heat and salt content

[BlasterBates]

We await the paper. Maybe 2016 will be their lucky year.

With regard to the analysis.

http://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/wa...rs/#more-20689

Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist of Texas, has done all the statistical significance analysis and his opinion is reflected in this statement from the introduction

This paper has been a long process for Anthony, but it appears to have produced a robust and important analysis.

The extension of this analysis globally is important to build confidence in the land surface temperature records.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the various groups producing global surface temperature analyses respond to the study.

Looks pretty solid.

[pjclarke]

Looks pretty solid.

We'll know when they release the data, and publish, not before. The involvement of John N-G should keep them honest; but I'd be surprised if the results match the hype, if fact I'd bet money they won't.

Seems to me that putting out a sensational press release, when the data requires > three more years analysis to support the conclusion, and stonewalling all requests for even a subset of the data is exactly the type of behaviour Watts criticises in others.

Meanwhile Victor Venema, NOAA expert on homogenisation, points out some issues they will need to address:-

Anthony Watts at AGU2015: Comparison of Temperature Trends Using an Unperturbed Subset of The U.S. Historical Climatology Network

After homogenization the trend Watts et al. (2015) computed are nearly the same for all five siting categories, just like it was for Watts et al. (2012) and the published study Fall et al. Thus for the data used by climatologists, the homogenized data, the siting quality does not matter. Just like before, they did not study homogenization algorithms and thus cannot draw any conclusions about them, but unfortunately they do

[d000hg]

The fact this winter's weather is so extreme and noteworthy basically demonstrates it's not climate change surely but merely a statistical outlier? i.e. any effects due to climate change are dwarfed by random fluctuations.

Unless you buy the "Day After Tomorrow" model of catastrophic cascade effects, of course.

[pjclarke]

The fact this winter's weather is so extreme and noteworthy basically demonstrates it's not climate change surely but merely a statistical outlier? i.e. any effects due to climate change are dwarfed by random fluctuations.
.

Quite. Nobody expects natural variability to suddenly cease, so anyone attributing the floods and heat 100% to climate change would quite rightly be shot down in flames. The proximate cause seems to be a southerly shift in the Jetstream, how much of that is due to climate change is above my pay grade.

James Hansen uses the metaphor of loaded dice, expect more double sixes, while being unable to attribute any one to the loading. Another metaphor is that it is impossible to prove that any of Lance Armstrong's victories was due to doping ...

[DimPrawn]

You'll remember from GCSE Physics that water has a high heat capacity and so the oceans have huge thermal inertia, which is why climate scientists tend to use Ocean Heat Content (OHC) as a metric, rather than temp.

Or putting it another way, the "heating oceans" amounts to such a tiny amount, you've come up with another, alternative scale, otherwise everyone would piss themselves laughing at the measured rise?

[EternalOptimist]

Are Climate Bullies Afraid to Bet Me?Â*|Â*Mark Boslough

BTW, the last year in which the climatological average did NOT increase year on year was 1976. Good luck!

I would take that bet. no problem

if he could prove the warming was due to mankind. which he can't.
the temperatures will rise because of a natural phenomenon known as el nino