Category Archives: Numbers are Tricky

Spencer: Global Urban Heat Island Effect Study – An Update

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“Spencer: Global Urban Heat Island Effect Study – An Update“. More tortured charts and explanations from Dr. Roy Spencer, merely producing a deeper hole. When he said “I don’t know the reason for this, but I suspect that a little thought from Anthony Watts, Joe D’Aleo & others will help figure it out.“, well… I realized that even by Anthony’s standards I’d wasted five minutes of my life.

Yes, Dr. Spencer’s charts have lines on them. What is lacking is an objective basis for the station pairings he has settled on. Or a cogent theory explaining them.

Dr. Spencer, you have jumped the shark.

Himalayan Hijinks

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“Himalayan Hijinks“. Hijinks is right. Willis Eschenbach grabs some numbers from the rural Mukteshwar Ku surface station in the Himalayas and launches into the kind of rant about “data quality” that Anthony Watts loves. Naturally he manages to select some temperature readings that prove that there has been no warming.

Although Willis demonstrates that he is ignorant of the station history, he’s quite willing to charge that the Mukteshwar Ku temperature records have been badly adjusted. This kind of ill-defined random nit-picking accusation seems to serve as a comfort mechanism for denialists who feel their adrenaline levels are dropping too low.

The grudging money quote? “Does this invalidate the GISS global temperature record? No.”

Wrong way econometricians

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“Wrong way econometricians“. Anthony Watts is happy to draw attention to a Dutch denialist “science writer” finding fault with a report from last Fall by two Dutch econometricians predicting 4°C warming by 2050. They conclude that aerosols have masked some of the warming produced by greenhouse gases and that this blocking effect will decline. But they used a CRU data set that isn’t optimized for detecting man-made climate change! What noobs! Even Ross McKitrick can take them down! Climatologists are such liars.

Wait a minute, they’re not climatologists, they’re econometricians. Anthony loves economists (as long as they bring the proper right-wing bias like Indur M. Golkany).

Wait a minute, their prediction of 4°C warming by 2050 is in line with other published predictions. Here’s a Washington Post article from last year for instance.

Wait a minute, they’re not trying to detect man-made climate change, they’re extrapolating from existing trends.

Quiet day, huh Anthony?

On the “march of the thermometers”

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On the “march of the thermometers”. Missed this one. Anthony Watts pointing to “the hard work of E. M. Smith” on ‘dropped’ weather station records. The accusation is always that stations that are warming faster are being kept, those that are cooling are being maliciously discarded.

Funny, they never seem to mention two things about this:

  1. The ‘dropped’ stations are stations that aren’t automatically uploaded to the weather databases. They are in fact added intermittently by infrequent manual processes. This means that a station will be in the database, seem to be dropped, and then at a later date reappear with all the intervening years of data.
  2. The trends for the “dropped” stations and the “kept” stations are the same. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that “colder” stations are more likely to need intermittent manual incorporation into the data set because they are more likely to be remote.

For more on this foolishness, go over to the “Dropouts” post on Open Mind and give your head a shake.

The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide

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“The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide“. Geologist (and amateur climate and cancer researcher) David Archibald tries to show that CO2‘s greenhouse effect impact is negligible at current levels and that rising levels will have even less impact. The only supporting references he mentions are an old blog post on the paragon of atmospheric physics, Climate Audit.

In fact, David’s ill-conceived idea was shot down all the way back in 2007. His conclusion is a product of deliberately selecting a very low climate sensitivity value for CO2. Low sensitivity means low amplification. Kind of obvious if you think about it for a minute, but David clearly prefers to pick his question based on the answer he wants.

I have to mention his strange claim that ‘conventional climatology’ denies a logarithmic relationship to CO2 forcing. This is contradicted by Arrhenius’ work in 1896 and the climate physics actually described in every IPCC Report to date. Even some of the denialist regulars are distancing themselves in the post comments, saying that while they resist the IPCC’s estimate of CO2 forcing as too aggressive they accept that there is some degree of forcing.

Methane, The Panic Du Jour

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“Methane, The Panic Du Jour“. Steven Goddard prefaces his misrepresentation of reactions to a report about Arctic Ocean methane emissions with a dumb denialist cartoon. Nice to have the quality of thought displayed right off the bat. He finishes with a repeat of his foolish obsession with Arctic sea ice extent by showing a chart of this year’s sea ice extent against the long-term pattern. (It still shows that recent years are visibly lower in comparison to the long-term trend. Shouldn’t you keep quiet about that Steven?)

What is Steven’s main point? Recent research in Science about the amount of methane being released by permafrost underlying the East Siberian Arctic Shelf indicates that the quantities are significantly higher than previously known. Actual scientists at RealClimate think it’s not likely to be a particularly serious matter, but there has been some tempered concern in the first newspaper reports (see this NYT article).

Steven takes this as a cue to pretend that this is invoking a new climate disaster. Somehow in his mind the battle over CO² has been won, and the “warmists” are regrouping to claim that methane is the real terror.

He accuses the newspapers of exaggerating for effect but the NYT article places the estimated Arctic methane emissions of  7 million tonnes in the context of annual emissions of 500 tonnes and describes the resulting local methane concentrations as being elevated by only 2 ppm. It’s funny when Steven ponders the evil cherry-picking motivation of the scientists reporting on the years 2003-2008. In fact, that’s the years that the scientists were actually working in the study area. His understanding of chemistry is no better, as his naïve analogy for “parts per million” shows. Molecules aren’t people Steven, although Soylent Green apparently is.

Climatologists aren’t particularly concerned, newspapers are speculating but staying in context. So much for that accusation.

February UAH global temperature anomaly – little change

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“February UAH global temperature anomaly – little change“. Dr. Roy Spencer admits that the globally averaged satellite record of lower atmosphere temperature is still going up. But he invokes Dr. John Christy’s rambling discussion of pending possible “corrections” to conclude that we should continue to ignore the trend.

Still going up, but there's no El Niño to excuse it...

Spencer’s UHI -vs- population project – an update

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“Spencer’s UHI -vs- population project – an update“. Dr. Roy Spencer is already trying to re-explain yesterday’s proposed paper “proving” the nefarious Urban Heat Island effect. Anthony Watts characterizes it as “a unique and valuable analysis”, but I wouldn’t go further than “unique” myself.

Right off the bat he admits that, because it’s a too “difficult influence to correct for”, he hasn’t considered any of the local factors that are actually relevant to UHI. Details, details! His analysis is merely goofing around in Excel.

Dr. Spencer also says that he’s among those that “believe that much as 50% (or more) of the ‘global warming’ signal in the thermometer data” is a product of UHI. That’s a seriously fuzzy claim that leaves him lots of wiggle room. Too bad there have been objective statistical analyses trying to quantify just this idea and they’ve concluded that the bias is actually toward slightly under-reporting the warming. See Open Mind, Clear Climate Code, The Blackboard and Menne, 2010 (described at Skeptical Science).

How did he select his urban/rural station pairings? It seems to boil down to simple proximity, with no attempt to match geographical settings. This ignores an important environmental factor… Unless it is used behind the scenes to cherry-pick pairings for a particular result.

NSIDC Confirms WUWT Ice Forecast

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“NSIDC Confirms WUWT Ice Forecast” Anthony Watts teams up with the numerically challenged Steven Goddard to claim vindication for their “everything will be fine” prediction for Arctic sea ice extend in 2010. Why do these two keep pushing idiotically short, statistically meaningless trends? Maybe it’s because they’re unqualified partisans hunting for something to justify their biases.

2010 doesn't look like a "recovery" to me, Anthony!

Spencer: Using hourly surface data to gauge UHI by population density

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“Spencer: Using hourly surface data to gauge UHI by population density“. Dr. Roy Spencer has realised that “forsaking blindingly technical statistics” isn’t a practical position and has come up with an analysis, using one(!) year of data, that correlates “warming bias” of  station temperature records with population density (Urban Heat Island!). Population density is “presumed to be related to how much the environment around the thermometer site has been modified over time” (emphasis mine). That’s a rather big presumption. There are plenty of other simplistic adjustments in Dr. Spencer’s data, such as a blanket 5.4°C per 1000m increase in station elevation adjustment. Dr. Spencer has shown before that he has problems using statistics correctly, so it will be interesting to see if this stands up, but given Dr. Spencer’s track record I’m going to bet on “confirmation bias“.

Dr. Spencer makes a dangerous statement though: “Note that the philosophy here is not to provide the best adjustments for each station individually, but to do adjustments for spurious effects which, when averaged over all stations, will remove the effect…” (emphasis mine). He’s setting himself up as a target for exactly the same weather station correction nitpicking that Anthony has played with the USHNC’s weather station data. Will Anthony hold him to the fire?

Anthony inadvertently answers this question with “I believe this is a truly important piece of work” in spite of all dodgy assumptions Dr. Spencer admits to. Also, his blogging about Spencer’s draft should be considered as an “early peer review.” I will support Anthony’s hope that “Dr. Spencer will submit it to a journal” though. I think I’ll enjoy watching what is effectively another “sciency” attempt at Anthony’s failed surfacestations.org project be subjected to legitimate scientific scrutiny.