Category Archives: My Dog Ate It

The long[-]awaited surfacestations paper

Posted on by
9

“The long awaited surfacestations paper“ (May 11, 2011). Hosannah! The great day has arrive-ened! Anthony Watts’ paper, Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, is in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research. The global warming house of cards has fallen-ed!

Just look at some of these definitely-no-global-warming quotes in what Anthony has pasted in from co-author lead-author Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog (emphasis mine):

Q: So is the United States getting warmer?
A: Yes…

Q: Has the warming rate been overestimated?
A: The minimum temperature rise appears to have been overestimated, but the maximum temperature rise appears to have been underestimated.

Q: What about mean temperature trends?
A: In the United States the biases in maximum and minimum temperature trends are about the same size, so they cancel each other and the mean trends are not much different from siting class to siting class.

Yowza! Game over? Oops.

What a lame exercise in irrelevant nit-picking. After years of just you wait squawking, even Anthony and company’s best spin boils down to whining about bluntly negligible data quality issues. This isn’t even backyard fireworks level excitement. Shame on you, Anthony.

Still, you have to feel a bit sorry for him. He’s not lead author on ‘his’ paper because he doesn’t have the statistical chops for even this damp squib. Dr. Pielke tries to give him a libertarian head-pat though:

The Surface Stations project is truly an outstanding citizen scientist project under the leadership of Anthony Watts!  The project did not involve federal funding. Indeed, these citizen scientists paid for the page charges for our article.

Of course we have to remember what the big picture is here. After all this scientific-paper-of-the-century is just about US temperature data and global warming is, um, global. Dr. Pielke has to come clean (emphasis mine):

Does this uncertainty extend to the worldwide surface temperature record? In our paper… …we found that the global average surface temperature may be higher than what has been reported by NCDC and others as a result in the bias in the landscape area where the observing sites are situated. However, we were not able to look at the local siting issue that we have been able to study for the USA in our new paper.

Anthony seems quite pleased with himself, but frankly this own-goal would be embarrassing even as a high school science fair poster. Why Dr. Pielke’s name is attached to this says something about the power of conviction over that of intellect. Sad, because sometimes he has something relevant to offer.

I guess those page charges were just too juicy for the JGR to let slip away.

Update: Anthony’s wounded howls of mistreatment pepper the comment editing. Wait until the scientists respond!

Complaint issued on Amazongate reporting

Posted on by
Reply

“Complaint issued on Amazongate reporting“. Anthony Watts calls the troops to attention. Simon Lewis, a tropical forest expert, has filed a complaint about the false reporting by Jonathon Leake in The Times. The article, entitled “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim“, completely misrepresented his statement that the claim was in fact valid. The article even acknowledged contributions from denialist blogger Richard North!

Of course Anthony takes a moment to complain about his own treatment in the mainstream press. For some reason his unsubstantiated accusations and half-truths are not always being printed verbatim! That’s what your blogging buddies are for Anthony…

He finishes with another promise that his definitive analysis of surface station temperature records is “looking better and better.” Oh, I’m going to get a kick out of that fairy tale!

Rather than read Anthony’s complaints about his own perceived mistreatment, go over to Climate Progress for a full account of a real one.

2010-06-21 Update: As reported on Deltoid, the Sunday Times has now been forced to issue a retraction.

Must see: John Coleman’s Global Warming Special #2 – now online at YouTube

Posted on by
Reply

“Must see: John Coleman’s Global Warming Special #2 – now online at YouTube“. Ah YouTube, the place where science happens, and local cable programming can go global. Same old same old from Anthony Watts’ friend John Coleman, although even Anthony distances himself a little bit by saying I should note that I don’t agree with the broad statement made in the video that “CO2 has no effect”. It does, but the magnitude of the direct effect and the feedback effects is disputed. Even Anthony steps back from that whopper! Global Warming: The Other Side is in fact the same side of disproved denialist bunk as the first “special.”

The part I like best is where Anthony again claims that the dog ate his homework on the usefulness of surface weather station records. He says that the “end part where I refute NCDC didn’t make the final cut, perhaps the producer thought it too technical due to the graph of TOBS, FILNET, and RAW data that I used to show that NCDC’s claims about a cooling trend in poorly sited station doesn’t hold up.” Anthony’s surfacestations.org project has been thoroughly spanked as useless; he keeps promising proof that his belief is correct but never delivers.