Most of you reading the Environmental Threads here on PO may be familiar with Anthony Watts, author of the climate change denial blog Watt's Up With That. He is somewhat well known, especially in the denialist community, for developing a theory that the network of NOAA surface stations were over reporting higher temperatures, also related to the myth called the Urban Heat Island Effect. He set out with a gang of volunteer rank amateur sleuths to prove to the world that outdated stations were skewing the data as a result of their placement. This team took pictures of hundreds of stations, and classified them (based on location) as "best", "good", "fair", on little more than their subjective guess. All of this information was linked together by the participants and reported on his web site surfacestations.org.

However, Watts and team never seemed to get around to showing stations that were possibly under reporting temperatures?

So, NOAA finally seems like they had enough of this distraction and decided to take the time to respond and run some calculations. The first line (red) shows the officially recorded temperatures which average data from all substations.

They then took data from the 70 stations as reported by surfacestations.org in June and declared by Watts and sleuths as being suitable for the accurate reporting of temperatures. This is represented by the blue line and as you can see they are essentially the same as that of the red. Bottom line, poor current siting is not imparting a temperature bias in the U.S



The complete PDF: Talking Points related to: Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf

Watt’s response was to carp about NOAA’s non-peer-reviewed analysis, typos and they should have waited for him to publish his report first, which by the way is long overdue. He also claims the study should have been done with the latest data from 90 stations, although how this would change the results he doesn’t say.

For all the snipe hunters on Watt’s Team out there that set out to prove global warming wasn’t happening; at least you got plenty of fresh air and a chance to enjoy it while you still can.

Maybe you should have considered other evidence as NOAA puts it in the report.

Arctic ice is in the crapper again this year, near as bad as 2007.

Superb website, thanks for the heads up,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
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Warmism, like the fascism and communism that preceeded it, will have its brief day in the sun.

Last edited by essex on Tue Jun 30, 2009 9:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have to admit I read WUWT regularly, most especialy the comments. Its hysterical fun. A bit like the young earth creationists or intelligent designers. Nutty as squirrel sh*t.

They have been pumping the galactic cosmic rays cause climate change thing over there pretty damned hard, and have been reaching states of exultation and ecstasy with the lack of recent sunspots. Predictions of new little ice ages, new maunder minimums and even new full blown ice ages have been pretty regular with there contributers.

Steve Goddard is one of there most regular contributers..... and this is what was up with that.... pwng at the hands of real scientists...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15 ... e_mystery/


He sat on his desktop and counted pixels (I sh*t you not) and worked out that the NSIDC was lying about sea ice volumes. He never even took the journalism 101 step of taking his results to the scientists resposible for comment before publishing..... the result was a humiliating climb down as the real scientists pointed out basic errors in his work.

There is a reason he and his mate are bloggers not regularly publishing in journals.

He found it out the hard way.

I think Gavin over at RealClimate.org expressed it pretty well, when this was suggested by a poster:

"They have been pumping the galactic cosmic rays cause climate change thing over there"

Yeah, this was pretty hilarious (or would be if so many people, including my brother in law, weren't taken in by such dreck.)

I like to think of all the situations that I could pull out galactic cosmic rays to blame.

Wife: "You've been out drinking late with boys again, I see."

Me: "No, no. It wath those darned cothmic rayth. They keep making me thlur my thpeach and thee double."
--------

Teacher: "You don't have your homework? I will have to give you an F."

Student: "But Teach, it was those galactic cosmic rays. They burnt up my notebook where I did all my work!"

There is just no end to the usefulness of that little wingnut excuse. If only wives and teachers were as gullible as the typical dittoheads over at WUWT.

I have a simple question for the GCR self-appointed climate "experts". Why is it that I can sometimes see contrails from in the wake of aircraft and subsequently grow into cirrus clouds (i.e. during the right relative humidity conditions) but there is no hint of cloud growth from the background noise of GCR ionization? The ionization is always there, maximizing around 12 km above the ground with values of about 30 ion pairs per cc in middle latitudes, so why is it not enough to seed clouds?

Since I will never get the answer from these liars, I will answer myself: it is because the ionization is not effective in creating condensation nuclei large enough and persistent enough to grow cloud droplets/crystals. If there is a chance for GCR to affect cloud formation it is through proton hydrate formation. Proton hydrates can grow quite large under the right conditions but these conditions are not ubiquitous in the upper troposphere and neutralization is quite rapid.

The solar cycle does have an effect on tropospheric cloudiness, but it is not through modulation of the GCR transmission by solar magnetic levels. The direct impact on the ozone in the stratosphere changes the propagation and reflection behaviour of planetary scale Rossby waves leading to surface pressure changes (some interesting papers on this theme: http://www.mri-jma.go.jp/Dep/cl/kuroda/kuroda_publications_e.html )

hold on....how would you be able to tell one way or the other what caused clouds to form? Without some means of visibly monitoring the process I don't see how this is possible.

You really mislead here that the idea of cosmic ray influence on climate is some notion by "kooks". It is, in fact, something that has been published and argued in refereed scientific journals since 1999. The arguments are still on-going with people like Lockwood arguing Svensmark's analysis is incorrect and Svensmark rebutting those arguments. Ramsdorf arguing Shaviv's analysis is incorrect and Shaviv rebutting those arguments....and it continues to be debated as good scientific analysis should. Dismissing this work with your offhand remarks is a disservice to the thoughtful research that is being done in this area. A short list of some of some of the publications that are most recent:

Courtillot, V., Gallet, Y., Le Mouel, J.-L., Fluteau, F. and Genevey, A. 2007. Are there connections between the Earth's magnetic field and climate? Earth and Planetary Science Letters 253: 328-339

Dergachev, V.A., Dmitriev, P.B., Raspopov, O.M. and Jungner, H. 2006. Cosmic ray flux variations, modulated by the solar and earth's magnetic fields, and climate changes. 1. Time interval from the present to 10-12 ka ago (the Holocene Epoch). Geomagnetizm i Aeronomiya 46: 123-134

Harrison, R.G. and Stephenson, D.B. 2005. Empirical evidence for a nonlinear effect of galactic cosmic rays on clouds. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: 10.1098/rspa.2005.1628

Kirkby, J. 2008. Cosmic rays and climate. Surveys in Geophysics 28: 333-375

Shaviv, N. 2002. Cosmic ray diffusion from the galactic spiral arms, iron meteorites, and a possible climatic connection. Physics Review Letters 89: 051102

Shaviv, N.J. 2005. On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget. Journal of Geophysical Research 110: 10.1029/2004JA010866

Shaviv, N. and Veizer, J. 2003. Celestial driver of Phanerozoic climate? GSA Today 13 (7): 4-10

Svensmark, H. 2007. Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges. Astronomy & Geophysics 48: 1.18-1.24

A comment from the Kirkby 2008 paper which is a good review of all the research and arguments states:



Also a comment on the NOAA talking points paper and the views of Anthony Watts. Watt's arguement is not about "peer review" but rather that in their paper NOAA do not specify the source of their data nor whether it is corrected data or raw data. Steve McIntyre weighed in on the subject and points out that without the data being made available it is impossible to properly ascertain whether NOAA comments are valid. Watt's analysis, on the other hand, specifies exactly his data source and makes it avialable for analysis. This is a key point simply because if they are comparing corrected/adjusted data from NOAA then the comparison becomes somewhat of a circular arguement. The adjustments involve a bit of averaging and as a consequence sites which are registering higher temperatures due to their placement near parking lots, buildings etc. are averaged in with sites that are in the country (so-called good sites). Because there are many more sites that are "bad" sites the averaging biases towards the higher temperatures. Note that comparing corrected "bad" sites and corrected "good" sites is a meaningless exercise if it involves averaging in some manner. The important issue is to look at the uncorrected values and their differences, not the corrected values. The NOAA needs to be a bit more forthcoming with their analysis before a proper understanding can be achieved.
Of secondary importance is the point that Steve McIntrye has made which is that the NOAA data is distinctly different from the GISS data with the NOAA data biased to higher temperatures by about 0.7 degrees C increase from 1950 through 2008. No one seems to understand why this is the case.

If the cirrus can grow on particulates emitted by jet aircraft then, under the same RH conditions, they should be growing on the alleged GCR induced CCNs. But they do not. Grasping at the subvisible cirrus straw just highlights that the GCR cloud "experts" have never established any real link between the two. Subvisible cirrus will become visible through particle growth under these high RH conditions. Gee, we'll ignore the monster in the middle of the room called CO2 and proceed to obsess with the microscopic flake of dust floating in the corner.

BTW, the infrared trapping cirrus trend in the lowermost stratosphere/tropopause region is increasing due to ventilation of moisture through the subtropical tropopause thanks to the increasing water vapour content of the troposphere. Another boulder in comparison to the dust flake that is the 11 year GCR modulation of cloud formation. I've been to bleeding edge GCR induced CCN and cloud formation talks at various conferences. They try desperately to find observational evidence of impact on clouds but simply cannot cannot extract it from the background noise. In addition the solar cycle variability in the last 50 years is nothing to write home about, so once again nothing to explain the OBSERVED trends.

so what you are saying is.....yes, we can't see cosmic rays......but because I can't seem them making clouds I know that it isn't possible? If you can't see them how can you expect to see them forming clouds??

Is there some manner in which you can prove that cloud cover at any given time is not a product in some manner of cosmic rays? Experimentally it has been shown by Svensmark that it is possible for cosmic rays to have an impact on cloud formation. To the contrary I haven't seen any experimental work to refute that claim (notwithstanding the ongoing debate by Svensmark and other scientists like Lockwood).

You do realize that the arguement "you can't observe it directly therefore it isn't happening" applies equally to the thought that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for most of the heating in the twentieth century.....can you actually observe that happening or is it based on experiments and models?

Cosmic rays could influence climate, are they? is another question. Obviously CERN thought it was an interesting enough to fund this experiment, even if it turns out they have a weak influence it would be worth it. However to say that research that has not been done yet overturns everything we know, which seems to be impression you would get from the denialst biosphere, is false.

Well its crunch time for the GCR theory this year. The sun has had the least (sunspot) magnetic activity for nearly 100 years. There is an armada of science satalites measuring the earth. The GCR signal (and change in temperatures) should ring out like a bell.

TV meteorologist Anthony Watts is in a tail spin over Peter Sinclair’s video off YouTube about Watt's research project and study.

The Video Climate Deniers Tried to Ban - Climate Denial Crock of the Week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk

Monboit wrote an article about this in the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/g ... rs-monbiot

Funnily enough I tried to post the video on Watts site a couple of times and my posts were not approved by the moderating team.

But Watts eventualy responded.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/30/o ... atography/

And a response to Watts post.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/02/a ... air-video/

And it does highlight the bizzare and somewhat creepy point of Watts dragging Sinclairs family into this.


He also bitches about ad hominems but is pretty keen on them himself.


Youtube initialy withdrew the video and went to its lawyers, they determined that no copyright violation happened (fair use) and the video is up on youtube again.



And on hypocracy
A day after writing this.....


Watts blogs this.....
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/01/p ... te-center/

Without asking the institution why it had done it or giving them a chance to reply.