Category Archives: Numbers are Tricky

Spencer: Spurious warming demonstrated in CRU surface data

Posted on by
1

“Spencer: Spurious warming demonstrated in CRU surface data“. Dr. Roy Spencer again chooses un-scrutinized blogging over scientific publication. He’s selected some weather station records that let him make the conclusions he wants, and when he plots the differences between his selected stations and those used by the GHCN network of ‘climate-approved’ stations, there is a slight trend! Is it significant? Dr. Spencer chooses not to discuss that.

Instead he bravely asserts that his analysis “almost seem to suggest” a problem with the CRUTem3 dataset. Oh. Maybe that’s why Dr. Spencer didn’t submit this to a scientific journal.

How does he arrive at his conclusions? Well he waves his hands around invoking, but not quantifying, the Urban Heat Island effect. He praises the reboot of Anthony Watts’ discredited Surface Temperatures rant. He says that trying to clean up data-sets is hard, so don’t do it. He admits that researchers should be “doing their own global temperature analysis.” (But don’t the denialists prefer to ignorantly nitpick the work of others?)

Finally he reaches the point of the exercise; “We are back to square one” so let’s delay doing anything even if there is pretty good evidence that we should. Thus ending global warming forever.

Contribution of USHNC and GISS bias in long-term temperature records for a well-sited rural weather station

Posted on by
2

“Contribution of USHNC and GISS bias in long-term temperature records for a well-sited rural weather station“. Anthony Watts’ associate “Charles the Moderator” finds a cherry-picked weather station that someone important (Ph.D. and Esquire!) has slapped up some charts for.

David W. Schnare (Esq. Ph.D.) is an environmental lawyer from a renowned scientific institution the “Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy”. He’s also a Heartland Institute associate. He nods approvingly over both Anthony Watt’s discredited Science and Public Policy pamphlet and yesterday’s new “sciency” version by Dr. Anthony Long. “Dr.” Schnare shares their fixation with the denialist meme of adjustments = cheating and notes that “NCDC adjusts the original data in every year!”

The temperature trends at one station clearly prove that all the other stations are wrong.

Now it could be true that Schnare’s nit-picking about the station adjustments made in this particular place are justified. There are certainly plenty of qualitatively poor temperature stations and we can count on the denialists to trot them out one by one at carefully staged intervals. However his amusing references to “hard partying, college kids” and sweeping generalizations about the terrain away from the station’s actual micro-climate suggest that he’s trying to distract from the poverty of his evidence.

A new paper comparing NCDC rural and urban US surface temperature data

Posted on by
1

“A new paper comparing NCDC rural and urban US surface temperature data“. Anthony Watts reports that the denialist “think tank” Science and Public Policy has “published a paper” by retired NASA “advanced materials” physicist and self-described extremely conservative blogger Dr. Edward Long. “Published” in the sense of printed, just like Anthony’s own discredited Science and Public Policy pamphlet “Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?” (tellingly admired by Dr. Long). Actually, this feels like a do-over of Anthony’s idea with a Ph.D. stuck on top and the really dumb bits left out.

“Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets“ concludes that the NCDC (National Climatic Data Center) has “taken liberty to alter the actual rural measured values.” Why? Because two 48 station subsets (“rural” and “urban”) have the same trend after the NCDC’s adjustments have been made. Which means that some nefarious trick has forced them to match. Dr. Long selected his stations “on the assumption that within a certain latitude band stations along an East-West line experience the same climate and that within a grid unit the set of stations are somehow related“. That’s a rather off-hand justification for what I suspect is a pretty careful cherry-picking operation. There have been objective re-examinations of the US surface temperature data (Menne et al, 2010), but no significant errors have been uncovered.

Dr. Long also tries to wave away the temperature trend by suggesting that it reflects population growth around the weather stations. Somehow population growth intensifies the UHI effect. I’m not a climate scientist but I would expect the same UHI effect to occur more widely with population growth, not show up as ever “hotter” readings. After all, UHI is effectively a landscape factor, something Anthony himself has been fixated on for sometime on his surfacestations.org project. Should someone whisper “maybe it’s global warming?“

CRUTEM3 error getting attention by Met Office

Posted on by
Reply

“CRUTEM3 error getting attention by Met Office“. Anthony Watts reports an error in temperature corrections has been found by a denialist nit-picker (John Graham-Cumming)!!! Thus ending global warming forever and also proving that scientists are stupid and evil. Naturally he expects his readers to scan the headline but ignore the details, because the details aren’t so helpful…

Anthony has to admit that “the error he found may lead to slightly less uncertainty” (emphasis naturally mine) but he immediately tries to counter this by claiming that “the magnitude of the uncertainty (especially in homogenization) is quite large”. This has a few unfortunate consequences for his argument.

  • The presumed deceitful “consensus” temperature trend is strengthened and not undermined by this nit.
  • Anthony allusion to the “magnitude of the uncertainty” again proves that he knows nothing about objective statistical analysis.

Here’s the trend in question: