Category Archives: I'm not a Climatologist

A UHI Tale of Two Cities

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“A UHI Tale of Two Cities“. Anthony Watts, the “old faithful” of thermometer-haters, spouts again. We get a lovely tour of Anthony’s weather station photo album and a few wiggly charts, such as this one:

Temperatures (apparently) from two different places!

Anthony (and fellow obsessive Steven Goddard) talk about what’s happened in Fort Collins but they have nothing to say about their “comparable” station in Boulder. Still, they’re comfortable concluding:

We have two weather stations in similarly sited urban environments. Until 1965 they tracked each other very closely.  Since then, Fort Collins has seen a relative increase in temperature which tracks the relative increase in population. UHI is clearly not dead.

Real conclusion: Temperatures from two different places will be different. So what? UHI is not the only explanation of that variation unless it is the only one you allow yourself to consider. Regardless, the effect of UHI in the temperature records used for climatological research has been proven to be completely irrelevant.

NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing

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“NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing“. The always entertaining Steven Goddard pastes up a few maps and tries to use them to claim that they “seem to point” to modest cooling in the Antarctic. Thus proving that there is no global warming. Even though there has been some sea ice loss. And ignoring the impact of the “ozone hole“.

We dealt with this stuff just a few hours ago. Regional, not global. Known to be sensitive to non-temperature driven factors. Ignores other relevant contributing factors.

Remember when the global warming denialists were all fighting against the evidence that ozone emissions were damaging the atmosphere?

CRUTEM3 “…code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering”

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CRUTEM3 “…code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering”. John Graham-Cumming, a British computer programmer, says that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit global temperature analysis programming code isn’t professional. Anthony Watts concludes that this is damning expert opinion.

Sorry John but CRUTEM3, just one of several tools for analyzing global temperature, is scientific code. Done on a tight academic budget, it was basically a one-off effort. Could it be improved? Sure. Is the programming “quality” relevant? Not fundamentally. Does it give a correct result? Apparently. Good work spotting minor errors, but we’re not debating the elegance or efficiency of internet routing protocols here.

Corrections resulting from John's error-spotting in green.

Just as an aside, the fuss over the quote-mined code fragments that were found in the stolen CRU e-mails was about code that wasn’t actually used.