Category Archives: Numbers are Tricky

Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value

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“Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value“. Steven Goddard decides that since the sea ice charts aren’t illustrating his desired climate trend he’d better start deprecating them. Funny, for a few weeks there he thought they were definitive! Now, they don’t tell you anything until August. Now he admits that:

The fact that April, 2010 had the highest extent in the DMI record tells us little or nothing about the summer minimum.

As a backup, he posts a photo of Barrow, Alaska with dirty-looking snow. Therefore all increased Arctic snow or ice melt is due to dirt, not Global Warming. Got it.

Satellite Temperatures and El Niño

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“Satellite Temperatures and El Niño“. Steven Goddard has convinced himself that recent satellite temperature observations are “too warm”. He’s compared them the surface temperature records and decided that the satellite record is somehow incorrect because of unspecified El Niño effects. Maybe it’s because of aliens with investments in carbon-neutral technologies?

I thought that the surface temperature records were hopelessly contaminated by Urban Heat Island effect, human incompetence and malevolent selection and were to be ignored (because they showed a strongly significant warming trend) in favor of the purity of satellite measurements (a useful delaying tactic because they were too new to have good statistical meaning). I guess the surface temperature records are fine when they suit the denialist argument du jour.

Here’s what happens: The surface temperature record is only observed at the surface. Satellite measurements reflect a much ‘thicker’ selection of the atmosphere. The vertical transport of heat/moisture has a lag of several months and hence satellite measurements will normally trail surface measurements.

Where the !@#$% is Svalbard?

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“Where the !@#$% is Svalbard?” Willis Eschenbach posts his 2006 “paper” printed in the discredited journal Energy & Environment. Willis was trying to nit-pick the weather-station records for Svalbard Norway, and didn’t like the way he was treated (to my eye he was a simply making a pest of himself). The best he could do was gnaw a tiny bit on the probability that the post by Michael Mann & Phil Jones assigned to the Svalbard 2006 spring temperatures.

His “paper” really boils down to a rant against the climatologists at Real Climate. It’s full of unsupported speculation, irrelevant “he said, she said” passages and claims of blog comment censorship and unfair treatment. Now it’s updated with praise of Anthony Watts’ website as a shining(!) example of good scientific blogging.

Thanks for the chuckle, but what a sad example of the crap that Energy & Environment was publishing then.

Spencer on Earth’s missing energy

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“Spencer on Earth’s missing energy“. Dr. Roy Spencer draws a horizontal line through three years of satellite radiation observations and comes to the scientific conclusion that the difference between incoming and outgoing radiation means that the Earth is cooling. Take that Global Warming, you’ve been defeated by charts!

Well if you know what you want to find its easy to find it…

Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget

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“Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget“. Sometimes denialists proclaim that there is NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT, sometimes they admit that it is REAL BUT SMALL. Dr. Roy Spencer takes the latter approach here. He’s been “slicing and dicing the [Earth’s radiation budget data] different ways” trying to find a value of CO2 sensitivity that lets him claim the climate impact is small. Guess what? He found one.

Dr. Spencer's usual blob of data without chronological context.

Spencer does it “without going into the detailed justification” by:

  • Ignoring data from polar areas, where most of the climate change has occurred.
  • Comparing global radiation data to ocean temperatures.
  • Pretending that 7 years of satellite data is a sufficient time span for climate analysis (try 30 years).
  • Restricting his plot to just month-to-month variation.
  • Using only monthly temperature changes that were greater than 0.03°C.
  • Ignoring decades of independent empirical studies that conclude that climate sensitivity must be somewhere between 2.3 to 4.1°C.
  • Sweeping away the 0.6°C warming over last 100 years as natural (therefore a similar estimated rise for this century must also be natural).
  • Ignoring the reality check that ice ages are impossible if CO2 sensitivity is as low as he declares.

What does Dr. Spencer end up with? I mean besides the WUWT comments declaring him a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. He ends up with an artificial statistical correlation with no physical explanation to support it.

500,000 km2 Discrepancy Between NSIDC and NORSEX

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“500,000 km2 Discrepancy Between NSIDC and NORSEX“. More confusion from Steve Goddard. NSIDC is clearly falsifying the Arctic Sea Ice Extent data because their trend is different from the ArcticROOS one (NORSEX)! It’s lower and dropping faster. This is ‘conclusively’ proven by taking the Sea Ice Extent graphs published by the two agencies and distorting them with a graphics editor.

Um, the two agencies define Sea Ice Extent differently.

Steven seem to think he can draw meaningful conclusions from squeezing and stretching JPG files in Photoshop. That just about sums up his scientific contribution.

Is Melting Ice Warming The Arctic?

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“Is Melting Ice Warming The Arctic?” Steven Goddard has an insight to offer about today’s earlier WUWT post about Screen and Simmonds’ 2010 Letter to Nature about  the contribution of Sea Ice melting to Arctic warming. Did you know that “ice loss has occurred mainly during the summer“? This is one of those curious posts where, to attack a conclusion, the denialist argument implicitly accepts that climate change is happening. Here Steven has chosen to argue about which months the warming is happening, not whether it is happening at all…

UAH Arctic Temp vs NSIDC Ice. After "climateinsiders.wordpress.com".

Enthusiastic arm-waving follows. Steven’s confused by the fact that Arctic climate warming appears stronger in the winter months. Guess what? Ice won’t melt at either -20°C or -2°C, only at 0°C. What happens when ice melts? It absorbs energy. Perhaps the melting of sea ice is buffering rising Arctic temperatures in the summer months.

What will happen when Steven discovers that apples fall down? Stay away from high school physics textbooks Steven, you might have your world rocked.

Predictions Of Global Mean Temperatures & IPCC Projections

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“Predictions Of Global Mean Temperatures & IPCC Projections“. A guest post by Girma Orssengo “B. Tech, MASc, PhD”. He’s created a mathematical model that predicts global cooling by about 0.42 deg C by 2030. Good work! Take the rest of the day off, everyone.

Uh oh, he doesn’t even know the name of the institution whose temperature data he has used. What is the “Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the Hadley Center”? CRU is part of the University of East Anglia. The Hadley Centre is part of the Meteorological Office.

Left unmentioned is the critical mechanism behind his “mathematical model”. What drives all this? I vote for mermaids. Wait, make that pirates. Or… pirates and mermaids, working together.

Update 2010/05/13: I must have rushed this post, here’s Dr. Orssengo’s evidence in chart form:

Not a great fit or even a prediction of declining temperature. Source: WUWT.

Of Hawks and Handsaws

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“Of Hawks and Handsaws“. Willis Eschenbach, citizen-scientist, has more pretty pictures with data stuck on top of them. He’s figured out that if you slap a bunch of thick lines representing cyclic annual trends on top of each other and obscure their order, you can hide the incline pretty handily.

His expert eyeballing tells him that there’s an Urban Heat Island effect at work in Scandinavia! You betcha. And there’s nothing like a quote from Shakespeare to give an intellectual air to an empty argument. (The cheesy clip-art kind of undermines that though.)

Who needs to bother with statistical analysis when you can pull a powerful ‘intuitive’ conclusion like this from thin air? Italics mine:

At least part of the warming in the US and the NORDKLIM datasets is the result of UHI distortion of the records. An unknown but likely significant amount of this UHI heating is due to direct energy consumption in the cities.

You know what would give this claim some credibility? Credible statistics.

GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought

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“GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought“. Anthony Watts thinks this ‘alarmist’ post “might also be one of the most important” ever because it explains how people “can wreck a whole month’s worth of climate data.” His commenters, of course, agree and praise his insight.

Surprise, it’s nothing but cherry-picked examples of human error in recording negative temperatures and how such entries are handled by automated aviation weather reports. As noted at The Whiteboard, none of the 12 aviation weather report errors Anthony found made it into data-sets used by climatologists. Much more satisfying to rage about alleged errors that to actually make the effort to prove they’re significant. Standard Operating Procedure at WUWT.

Anthony prefers satellite measurements, presumably because of the automated nature of their collection. But I think his real reason is that the satellite record is still too short to conclusively represent long-term climate patterns. Can’t act on Global Warming until then, can we?

But wait, what is the satellite global temperature trend? The same as the surface stations trend. Both are… up.

Amusingly, it seems that Anthony though better of this incidental defamatory accusation (italics mine):

Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

The replacement text reads:

Around 1990, NOAA/NCDC’s GHCN dataset lost more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. It can be shown that country by country, they lost stations with a bias towards higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

This is a long debunked meme of Anthony’s. Perhaps this new fabricated controversy serves to obscure the fact that he still hasn’t proven his charge against NOAA?