Surfacestations: NOAA Has Overestimated Land Surface Temperature Trends 474
New submitter BMOC writes "Anthony Watts of Surfacestations project (crowdsourced research) has finally yielded some discussion worthy results (PDF). He uses a siting classification system developed by Michel Leroy for Meteofrance in 1999 that was improved in 2010 to quantify the effect of heat sinks and sources within the thermometer viewshed by calculation of the area- weighted and distance-weighted impact of biasing elements to calculate both raw and gridded 30 year trends for each surveyed station, using temperature data from USHCNv2. His initial claims are that station siting is impacting the surface temperature record significantly, and NOAA adjustments are exacerbating that problem, not helping. Whether you agree with his results or not, recognize that this method of research is modern and worth your participation in the review. Poke holes in publicly sourced and presented research all you can, that's what makes this method useful."
Not Published = Trash (Score:1, Informative)
Who the heck would write a whole Slashdot article about un-peer-reviewed results? Geez...
The gist of it (Score:4, Informative)
The research has classified all the surface stations into 5 classes of relevance, from "reliably close to environment" to "poorly sited" in order to evaluate whether and how much the location of the thermometer and its proximity from airports, cities and so on would skew its measures over time. The end result is that there is a warming over time, but that warming is +0.155 C / decade using the best surfacestations, and twice that (+0.309C / decade) if you use them all.
Re:The gist of it (Score:5, Informative)
No wait, I read that wrong. It says there is a +.155C warming/decade using the best (classes 1 & 2) stations, +.248C using the worse stations (classes 3, 4 and 5), and that, somehow, NOAA managed to get a +.309C / decade result out of them, by adjsuting upwards the bad stations in order to make up for their poor fidelity, and THEN adjusted upwards the good stations so they would match the poor, adjusted ones.
Re:Oh dear... (Score:5, Informative)
No, he's a well known denier (probably *the* most well known among lay people). He's not a climatologist; he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California. And this is unpublished, and will almost certainly be ripped to shreds when it gets submitted, like most of the other trash he submits. He's funded by the Heartland Institute (a conservative organization that takes industry money and uses it to push various forms of denial of interest to them, including things like global warming denial (funded by Koch Industries), denial of the links between tobacco and cancer (funded by Philip-Morris), etc.)
Actual published, peer-reviewed work analyzing his "work" has reached precisely the opposite conclusion [noaa.gov].
Who cares what it said? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not peer-reviewed. Everything else he's submitted for peer review on the matter of climate change has been ripped to shreds; why should this be any different?
Re:Oh dear... (Score:5, Informative)
he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California
A weatherman. In some countries, weather presenters are called meteorologists, but in general you need to have a graduate degree (heavy on math and physics) involving actual meteorological research to be called a meteorologist. Watts' highest completed education is high school, as far as anyone has been able to make out.
Re:Who cares what it said? (Score:0, Informative)
It's not peer-reviewed. Everything else he's submitted for peer review on the matter of climate change has been ripped to shreds; why should this be any different?
"Everything"? I think you overlooked this one:
Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2011: Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., Copyright (2011) American Geophysical Union.
Odd when you consider how much whining (Score:5, Informative)
Odd when you consider how much whining about how the data CRU et al had should be released NOW from you deniers.
Watts had said he would publish a preliminary paper when 60% complete. When 60% complete, Watts diodn't publish. NASA took the data WATTS had collected (you know, the "raw data") and did the work.
Showing that there was a slightly higher warming trend if you took Watts' "best sited" stations than if you included them all.
Which was why Watts had clammed up.
(PS Watts has had to massage the figures. He openly admits he made "corrections" which to every denier was "proof" the CRU/NASA et al were "cooking the books" on the data.)
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Comparisons demonstrate that NOAA adjustment processes fail to adjust poorly sited stations downward to match the well sited stations, but actually adjusts the well sited stations upwards to match the poorly sited stations. Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after USHCNv2 adjustments are applied.
So they are claiming that a simple mistake has been made that has the effect of overestimated warming by three times, and that everyone doing this research previously has made this same mistake, and that, despite all of the arguments surrounding climate science and the instrumental temperature record, nobody noticed it yet? It is certainly not impossible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Re:Who cares what it said? (Score:5, Informative)
To elaborate on the problem, I started reading the "paper" and he's outright misleading right on the first page. He says that siting in peer-reviewed works showed an effect on minimum temperatures but no effect on the mean. The actual papers show a small increase in minimum temperatures, but a much larger *decrease* in maximum temperatures. I'm also noticing in the paper him mixing in peer-reviewed cites with non-peer-reviewed cites without even commenting on the fact that he's doing so, which is a huge no-no.
Basically, his previous work not having shown what he claimed it showed after the peer-reviewed process got ahold of it, he simply changed his formula until it showed a different result. Which will almost certainly get likewise ripped up.
Here's the reality of the situation. The many papers published on the subject of the land record and all of their reviewers are not idiots ignorant of Watts' rogue genius. The issues that he "raises" have been discussed and analyzed for ages. Because of these issues, nobody just takes the raw data and submits it as a result. There are all sorts of calculations to detect biases and compensate for them, and all of these adjustments are analyzed with higher-precision real-world data to see how well they work, as well as cross-correlated with totally different lines of measurement. One study, to pick a random example among many, broke the data down between windy days and calm days, as the urban heat island effect dramatically diminishes on windy days. The calm results were then compared with the windy results to see if they reached the same conclusion.
Of course, it should be obvious that Watts is wrong just by even a rudimentary look at the surface warming trends [nasa.gov]. Notice where they're strongest, generally? Sparsely populated areas. We're supposed to believe that the extreme warming of Siberian or Canadian tundra is due to a "urban heat island effect" not visible in, for example, New York, Tokyo, London or Los Angeles?
Needless to say, you don't just have to judge based on your eyes; this has been statistically analyzed and published as well.
Average the measurements before you take them (Score:5, Informative)
I understand all this talk about adjusting temperature results for urban sprawl around the measuring stations, but bear in mind that those stations are weather forecast stations, never intended as climatology primary source of inputs. So why don't we simply use a better designed system, such as a thermometer a couple of feet inside the ground: depending on the depth you can average out the daily thermal cycle (a few inches) or even the yearly cycles (a few feet). And there you have your reliable long therm^Hterm trends without any supercomputers or fancy models.
Re:Oh dear... (Score:0, Informative)
I have personally sent money to the surface station project (as have many others - it's crowd funded). In no way is he "funded" by the Heartland institute because of the one off unrelated project he's done with them. Why do you post lies, knowingly?
First Problem (Score:4, Informative)
AGW wins again on the data.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. Applies to both sides. Guess which side has huge amounts of peer reviewed evidence.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of course, that only applies to one side of the debate.
Which claim is extraordinary? The claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is not extraordinary. The claim that fossil fuels contain CO2 which is released into the atmosphere when burnt is not extraordinary. The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary. These claims have been known and investigated since the industrial revolution (Fourier in 1824 and Arrhenius in 1896) and are widely accepted.
The problem was noticed (Score:5, Informative)
For a long time people have been pointing out that ground based met. stations were showing much more warming than met. balloons and satellites. The urban heat island effect has also been well known.
;-)
The problem is that some people have willfully ignored the instrument problems because it suited their agenda.
Watts noticed the specific problem with station siting and he, along with many others, has been documenting it. That part is uncontroversial. Using the methods of Leroy 2010, Watts is attempting to quantify the problem. He isn't a scientist and isn't used to publishing. That may be a problem for him. On the other hand, he had help with this paper and I expect that his co-authors will improve its quality a lot. The paper is up on his web site and many scientists have made helpful comments. By the time it is finally submitted, it may actually be a good paper.
Re:Who cares what it said? (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, he managed to get one through in 2011? Totally missed that. Probably because it actually doesn't say what he's been claiming in non-peer-reviewed research [agu.org]:
Which had already been determined. I'm amazed that Watts was willing to put his name on a paper that basically undercuts his entire premise and says the same thing as papers he's been railing against for ages. Check out the lead author's summary of the paper [wordpress.com], in particular the Q and A section. Although my favorite quote is:
Wow, Watts, you sure shot things out of the park with that one!
Re:Oh dear... (Score:3, Informative)
Not that it'd even matter anyway, as meteorologists aren't climatologists, and actually deal with very different phenomena. It's the difference between a biologist and a paleontologist.
Re:Who cares what it said? (Score:4, Informative)
Which are, of course, un-reviewed claims, and totally distort the picture (the reason for the adjustments and how they're tested was just discussed in the post right above yours - to sum up, people looking at the GISS dataset aren't idiots and know about the various ways station data can be biased, and have automated algorithms to detect and correct for bias - algorithms which have been rigorously tested by peer-reviewed research, and it should be noted, actually yield a lower warming trend than the raw data, which also shows a greater rural warming trend than urban).
Re:Oh dear... (Score:5, Informative)
Do I really need to link wikipedia or a dictionary for you? It's not a vague term; it's a very specific term. A climatologist is a person who studies climate - aka, long-term changes in averages of weather (weather being short-term fluctuations in things like temperature, precipitation, etc). Climate is the signal, weather is the noise. The difference between a climatologist and a meteorologist is the difference between a paleontologist and a biologist.
Correct, it debunks Watt's previous claims. Which is why he had to change them. And will almost certainly get debunked again. He's only ever had one paper published with his name on it, and it amusingly totally undercuts his own claims, arguing that there's no statistical difference in warming trends between good and poor sites and that if anything the global warming trend could be higher than the surface record.
Because something is not perfect, it's irrelevant? Is that what you're trying to say? If I write something on a napkin, it's just as good as if experts in a field meticulously review all of the claims of a carefully constructed and controlled study?
That claim is absolute rubbish.
Re:Average the measurements before you take them (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, that's why there is the (growing) Climate Reference Network [noaa.gov]. The USCRN is a smaller subset of stations which are carefully chosen in terms of siting and instrumentation and carefully monitored in a way that couldn't realistically be done with all stations. The results from the USCRN are then compared with the broader results in both localized and aggregate comparisons and used A) to help refine the adjustment algorithms used to detect and compensate for localization biases, and B) to determine the accuracy of the aggregate results.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
An intellectually honest person (ie: an amateur scientist), would take those sort of criticisms seriously and either rebut them or withdraw the claim. Watts' behavior is little better than a youtube troll, I suspect he gets a buzz out of the attention.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Problem there is that one side controls the "peers."
That's just stupid. Most qualified scientists agree So we can't trust them to review each other's work . If we applied that sort of thinking everywhere there would be no accepted concensus on basic arithmetic.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Not really, since the majority of global warming skeptics seem to base their belief on one of those single dimensional causes:
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record must be wrong, the instruments are faulty or the temperature data gathered incorrectly.
Belief: The temperature is not increasing. Reasoning: The temperature record shows no warming since 1998 (aka "global warming stopped in 1998").
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: the temperature on Venus (96.5% atmospheric CO2) shows little variation.
Belief: CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Reasoning: Anthony Watts did a video of an experiment with CO2 which showed no warming effect.
Belief: Increased CO2 won't contribute to the greenhouse effect. Reasoning: Other planets have atmospheric temperature variations, and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere of those planets isn't changing.
Belief: Burning fossil fuels does not release much CO2. Reasoning: volcanoes release CO2.
There are many variations of these reasons to not accept global warming, but in the end it comes down to either denying that the temperature is increasing, denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, denying that increasing amounts of a greenhouse gas will have any effect on the temperature, or denying that burning fossil fuels increases the amount of atmospheric CO2.
(There is another approach - the "we just don't know" crowd. Well, sorry, but that is not how science works, if you want to overturn the existing model then you have to propose a model that better explains the observed data. You can't just wave your hands in the air and say "your model is wrong but I have no idea why" or "your model is wrong because Obama is a socialist and I don't like the United Nations".)
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Is the reverse true? Do you blindly accept the statements from the guys in lab coats even knowing that they've been wrong time and time again?
(No, I'm not advocating religion or disbelief in science. I do advocate learning and thinking for yourself though.)
Hrm. The structure of your sentence suggests these "guys in lab coats" are wrong more often than not and this it is an accepted fact. But as modern science is founded on "guys in lab coats" doing research, and as a beneficiary of their work, I can plainly see that this is not the case. My phone works, my medical presciption works, etc. And of course, nobody blindly accepts anything in science. Peer review, and other "guys in lab coats" recreating the original experiments and publishing their results. You post as a whole seems an supportable attempt to instill doubt in science, despite your otherwise reasonable final sentence.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:4, Informative)
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
No. Extraordinary claims require the same evidence as any other claim. There isn't a branch in the scientific method that's taken only when the claim is extraordinary. If you disagree, then think about it this way: would you allow your worst enemy to decide which claims are extraordinary and which ones aren't?
~Loyal
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Re:The problem was noticed (Score:4, Informative)
Watts did nothing of the sort. Using photographic tricks Watts willfully distorted the siting of stations, when caught Watts started using Cooperative Weather Observer Program (CWOP) sites as examples of of problems, unfortunately CWOP sites aren't used for climate observations. A paper by Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams Jr. and Michael A. Palecki (JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 115, D11108, doi:10.1029/2009JD013094, 2010) used the data collected by Watts and surfacestations.org to determine the reliability of the station siting. Using Watts data Menne et. al. (2009) showed that by including badly sited stations you REDUCED THE AMOUNT OF WARMING. If you used only stations DEEMED GOOD BY WATTS the linear trend was 0.35 (±0.11), using all stations the linear trend was 0.32 (±0.11) Watts ADMITTED IN A PEER-REVIEWED paper titled "Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends" (Souleymane Fall, Anthony Watts, John Nielsen Gammon, Evan Jones, Dev Niyogi, John R. Christy,5 and Roger A. Pielke Sr., JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, D14120, doi:10.1029/2010JD015146, 2011) that Menne et. al. (2009) ANALYSIS WAS CORRECT.
On March 6, 2011 Watts posted on his web site about the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project:
"I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results."
Suddenly when the head of the BEST project says that the Earth's land has warmed by 1.5C over the past 250 years and that "humans are almost entirely the cause" on Sunday, Watts has to shutdown his site proclaiming “WUWT publishing suspended – major announcement coming” and then suddenly he has a "paper" published by the Heartland Institute that says that not only is BEST wrong so is everybody's work!
Watts denounced Muller, the head of BEST project because announced results before the work was peer-reviewed yet he is doing exactly the same thing.
Watts is just a poor pathetic attention seeker who is afraid he will lose the income from clicks on his web site.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary
This is the controversial claim in the eyes of anyone who understands thermodynamics: is the doubling of CO2 sufficient to increase atmospheric heat content to a degree that will materially affect climate?
"Mean temperature" is a thermodynamically meaningless quantity, and in a mixed material like the atmosphere, which contains a variable amount of water, increased heat content could actually be associated with a decrease in temperature. The response of the climate system is not a one-dimensional "worse/better" thing, which is the way people who don't understand thermodynamics always report it.
There is general agreement that the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the past 200 years has resulted in 1.6 W/m**2 additional power being trapped at the Earth's surface, comparable to the Sun's brightness increasing by about 0.1% or a decrease in the Earth's mean orbital radius of 0.06% (a quarter of the distance to the Moon, to give a sense of scale.)
Recent work on tree-ring density (published last week in a reputable journal) indicates orbital forcings in the past 2000 years that are up to four times the current anthropogenic forcing, and yet the polar bears somehow survived. This work could be wrong, but the anthropogenic effect is so small an input that many people find the claims that it will result in dramatic, run-away climatic instabilities implausible given it is very likely that there have been comparably-sized changes in climate forcings many times over the past ten thousand years due to centuries-long changes in ocean circulation, orbital dynamics, vegetation type and distribution, etc.
Therefore, the claim that an additional climate forcing on the order of 0.1% will be more than a somewhat costly inconvenience is controversial, and as a computational physicist I am depressingly aware of how fragile and complex climate models are. They are far, far more approximate than the financial models that produced the collapse of 2008.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:4, Informative)
Certainly it's trying to expose local effects around the sensors that have not been accounted for, yes. Clearly, even the well-sited stations have a positive trend (+0.15 C/Decade), so this paper is not arguing that temperature is going down.
There are many potential problems if you cannot trust your surface temperature record. Consider the problem of putting temperature sensors in space. You can certainly image surface infrared emission from space. However, with an atmosphere like we have that's like trying to image and accurately determine the surface temperature of a human body through blankets. In order to get the temperature accurate, you have to calibrate against something you know. The surface temperature record almost certainly provided a check/balance for the satellites since they began telling us temperature. If you note, John Christy (UAH guy) is on Watt's paper as a co-author. That man knows this study impacts his work, he was smart to get involved. Unfortunately, most of the land surface temperature records have nothing to say about 70% of the earths surface simply because water covers most of the planet. So the limits of these networks should be clear, they're devices that tell us the temperature where we live, they don't tell us about Earth so much.
If the UHI affect is real and significant, that's actually good to know. If humans can control local temperature, it's important to know this and quantify just how much we are controlling the local temperature. It could affect everything from climate to building materials used in the future. It means we can begin to lessen the heat waves that rock our urban centers, that saves lives. It also means we can try to adjust our city planning such that we lower air-conditioning energy use when by minimizing how much heat surrounds the habitable zones in cities. Also, Earth has a recent history of dropping into ice-ages for many thousands of years, so if humans can affect the local temperature with technology, our survival may depend on that ability.
However, I don't see Watt's paper as talking about UHI as much as the localized temperature around the sensors.
The politicization of the subject only favors the dirty politicians, it gives them flags to wave to get re-elected regardless of which side they are on. It's best to keep that aspect out of it.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry but the total heat released by chemical combustion (and nuclear power) is so miniscule compared to the energy coming from the Sun that it can be ignored in any first order calculations. A 2008 study by Mark Flanner [agu.org] finds the total waste heat produced by human activities amounts to 0.028 W/m^2 while the total forcing from additional greenhouse gases we've emitted is 2.9 W/m^2, over 100 times as much. Waste heat is just not an issue.
Re:Not Published = Trash (Score:2, Informative)
I recall there were some gatekeeping efforts documented in the climategate emails.
Re:Peer Reviewed != True (Score:4, Informative)
Referee's Report on the submission "Re:Peer Reviewed != True" by BMOC.
The article is to be commended for its brevity and clear layout.
However, it seems that the author makes the claim that peer-reviewed scientific papers do not contain evidence, a claim for which no reference is given and which we find to be unsubstantiated. We invite the author to consider that the "methods" and "results" section of a paper detail a set of observations. Short of performing every experiment and collecting observations personally, it is unclear to us what the author considers evidence to be.
Further, the author is clearly unfamiliar with the content of the referenced material. Indeed, with regard to the Sokal affair, the journal in question was neither a) scientific nor b) peer-reviewed. From the author's own reference:
Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies,
and further,
At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.
In light of the above issues, which we feel are fundamental to the article and could not be addressed in a rewrite, we recommend against publication.
The system (basically) works.