“Measure UHI in your town with this easy to use temperature datalogger kit“. There’s nothing more satisfying for an obsessive-compulsive than measuring things. Keeping detailed notes about uncontrolled anecdotal observations is a great way to fill time. Anthony Watts needs money. With these three things in mind, Anthony wants to sell you an low-accuracy USB temperature sensor to stick on the roof of your car so you can restlessly cross and recross your town at night and then spend the next day whipping up a high-school science project about it.

But where will we display our bristle-board poster, and who will judge it?

I loved this quote:

The window mount holds the USB datalogger up and away from the vehicle in the clear airstream.

and the even funnier:

I didn’t want to pass a semi truck (speed limit 55mph for trucks through town) and pick up any waste heat.

Why does Anthony think we need to “prove” the Urban Heat Island effect? It’s widely discussed in the scientific literature and adjustments for it are made at many temperature recording stations.

Ocean acidification: the “evil twin of global warming”. Anthony Watts copies-and-pastes a report by marine biologists from James Cook University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies about ocean acidification due to CO₂ emissions and its impact on marine life.

“Ocean conditions are already more extreme than those experienced by marine organisms and ecosystems for millions of years,” the researchers say in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE).

“This emphasises the urgent need to adopt policies that drastically reduce CO₂ emissions.”

This is extrapolation to predict biological impact, not climate research. This needs proper supporting evidence before we consider it an issue or discard it (as Anthony’s commenters are enthusiastically doing).

“Another Look at Climate Sensitivity“. Willis Eschenbach, citizen-scientist, thinks that the “equilibrium value of the climate sensitivity [of CO₂] (as defined by the IPCC) is certain to be smaller” than that agreed upon by experts in atmosphere physics.

Willis starts his pondering with a figure from an out-dated 1997 paper by Kiehl & Trenberth. Trenberth ‘famously’ said recently that “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” (actually referring to the Earth’s energy inputs), but Willis thinks its good enough for noodling around and conclusively proving everyone wrong.

Willis' variation on Kiehl & Trenberth's figure.

Based on his imagining the Earth as a “blackbody” (aka “black body” in scientific literature), Willis calculates a natural warming effect of our atmosphere as 8°C. Wait, make that 20°C! Wait, make it 18°C! (There’s always a lot of revision based on comments in anything Willis posts.) Wikipedia tells us that the Earth’s average temperature of 14°C would be about -19°C without our atmosphere, a 35°C difference, but Willis knows better.

His conclusion? Somehow much less than 0.5°C, not to 2°C to 4.5°C for a CO₂ doubling used by conventional scientists. Go to the post and let me know if you can figure out his reasoning.

Late in the comments, Willis lets this slip (italics mine):

CO2 is the only thing in the models that provides a mechanism for gradual modeled warming. Since the models are tuned to the past, if the temperature rise is overestimated, the effect of CO2 needs to be larger to mimic the temperature rise. This is true no matter the size of the UHI effect.

So I guess his theory is that climatologists are intentionally (and secretly) over-estimating the climate sensitivity of CO₂ to make their evil climate models look scary. Good luck with that.