Category Archives: The Cherry Orchard

Himalayan Hijinks

Posted on by
Reply

“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.”

The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide

Posted on by
Reply

“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.

A tornado free February – first time ever!

Posted on by
Reply

“A tornado free February – first time ever!” Anthony Watts talks about weather again. There were no tornadoes in the USA in February. Take that, Al Gore!

To quote the NOAA article, “What does this tell us about the rest of the 2010 tornado season?  Somewhere between a little and nothing at all.” Actually, that sounds like a pretty good summary of Anthony’s blog.

BWI snow record rescinded: Another reason why airports aren’t the best place to measure climate data

Posted on by
Reply

“BWI snow record rescinded: Another reason why airports aren’t the best place to measure climate data“. Chicago’s O’Hare airport is bigger than it used to be, although its weather records aren’t used for climate analysis. A weather observer in Baltimore followed the wrong guidelines for recording snowfall.

These two irrelevant factoids apparently confirm Anthony Watts’ distrust of all gubmint weather records.

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?“