Open Mind

Reply to Lucy Skywalker

September 13, 2009 · 51 Comments

You ask if I’m being fair. I doubt that you’ve been honest — not even with yourself.

You now say:


First, I am NOT claiming the Arctic has not been warming. No real skeptic claims that.

I’ll say it bluntly. We don’t believe you. I’m not the only one.

As for “No real skeptic claims that,” didn’t you notice this post from your pal Anthony Watts? The title of his post is “DMI arctic temperature data animation doesn’t support claims of recent Arctic warming.” Didn’t you see this one from his pal Steven Goddard titled “Arctic (Non) Warming Since 1958″? Did you not notice Roger Pielke Sr. jump on the bandwagon? And please don’t retort that they’re only talking about the implications of DMI data, because none of them bothered to do any analysis of it at all; they just misinterpreted graphs. I did the analysis, and it — the DMI data — flatly contradicts them.

As for what you were claiming, stop fooling yourself ’cause you’re not fooling us. The implication of your post was crystal clear. Now you want to run away from it. Your very first sentence was:


What sudden recent warming?

Only now do you talk about


… the twentieth century as a whole does NOT show a sharp uptick in temperatures consistent with CO2 rise.

That wasn’t in the original post. It hardly matters because it’s false. It’s just a poor attempt to move the goalposts, leaving us to wonder where you draw the line between “show a sharp uptick in temperatures” and “warming.” I think you’re playing word games; your premise was demolished so you’re reinventing your own thinking rather than admit to yourself that you’re wrong.

I don’t blame John Daly for not updating his graphs posthumously. I do blame him for making really bad graphs, like the one with a y-axis that spans 55 deg.C from which we’re supposed to investigate the long-term trend in temperature time series. When it comes to being 6 to 10 years behind the times for data, I blame you. You didn’t retrieve any data, didn’t update any plots, all you did was find a page with badly made graphs that supported your preconceived notion. Up-to-date data are easy to get, so why use somebody else’s substandard work?

I’m guessing you still don’t understand why John Daly’s graphs are abysmally bad for investigating the long-term behavior of arctic stations. Let’s take an example: Barrow, Alaska. You omitted it from your post in spite of its being the northernmost Alaskan station, perhaps because Daly didn’t provide a graph of annual average temperature for Barrow. He does give a graph of seasonal temperature:

barrow

This time the y-axis covers 45 deg.C. Now look at a proper graph of annual averages:

barrow1y

Now the recent warming is visible in spite of the huge noise level in the data.

There’s a crucial point in that sentence: as I mentioned in this post, “One drawback of local records is that they tend to show much larger scatter than global/hemispheric averages.” Compared to global, hemispheric, or even regional averages, the noise level in individual station records is huge. You can’t expect to be able to “see” what the long-term behavior is just by looking at graphs of individual station data, especially with trend-squashing y-axis scales. But that’s all you did, and that’s all John Daly did. It’s very revealing that in spite of that so many arctic stations show visible warming — unless the graph is manipulated to hide it.

There’s a science to separating the signal from the noise: statistics. It can be as simple as taking averages or moving averages over longer time spans, or as complex as state-of-the-art smoothing methods. Here are some simple moving averages:

barrowmav

Now the trend isn’t just visible, it’s obvious. This, in spite of the drawback of moving averages that they don’t cover the entire time span unless one fills in missing values before the beginning and after the end. So here’s a wavelet smooth:

barrowz

Now it’s not just obvious. It’s startling.

Compare these graphs for what’s happening in Barrow to John Daly’s graph. Do you begin to understand why looking at raw data graphs of individual stations, with no analysis of any kind, misses what’s really happening? Do you begin to understand how John Daly’s graphs managed to hide even the trend that was visible?

You didn’t know why Daly’s graphs are bad. You didn’t retrieve up-to-date data. You don’t know that noise reduction is crucial for very noisy data sets. You didn’t do any analysis at all. When it comes to arctic data, neither did Watts, or Goddard, or Pielke. Yet all of you presume to tell us about what’s happening with arctic temperature. The only thing you have all succeeded in doing is showing how badly you can embarrass yourselves.

You’re certainly not as polite or reasonable as you’d like people to believe when you talk of the GISS homogeneity adjustment as “spurious UHI corrections which appear to falsely depress perfectly sound earlier temperature records and thereby produce a spurious ‘trend’.” You don’t have a clue; UHI corrections reduce the trend vastly more often than they increase it. Your comment is ignorant sniping, nothing more. And for your information, in anticipation that you would object to the GISS homogeneity adjustment, all of this analysis was done using data which does not include it.

The most bizarre statement in your reply is “I’m trying to show folk how to start to read the data with discernment. As I’ve had to learn myself.” That’s the blind leading the blind. You also have the gall to say that statistics “can also be used to ensnare the unwary and the statistically unknowledgeable, which sadly includes most scientists.” You need to acknowledge your own ignorance before you can even get in the game.

As for the “sudden recent warming” you’re so desperate to avoid, it’s right here:

gisszone

And from analysis of station records without the GISS homogeneity adjustment, it’s here:

It makes one helluva blade for a hockey stick:

I sincerely hope you’ll realize how foolish you’ve been about arctic temperature, and about global warming as well.

In closing: don’t avoid the real issue by responding to this post. Learn something instead: here’s a start. Don’t expect further replies from me until you show a willingness to learn.

Categories: Global Warming
Tagged:

51 responses so far ↓

  • barry // September 13, 2009 at 12:28 am | Reply

    Roger Pielke has taken exception to your comments, Tamino.

    http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/lack-of-balance-on-tamino-with-respect-to-his-post-arctic-sunlight/

    I like to think of Pielke as a useful critic but this was silly.

  • dhogaza // September 13, 2009 at 1:13 am | Reply

    Ah, the scales fall from Barry’s eyes, welcome to the club …

    As to this:

    You’re certainly not as polite or reasonable as you’d like people to believe when you talk of the GISS homogeneity adjustment as “spurious UHI corrections which appear to falsely depress perfectly sound earlier temperature records and thereby produce a spurious ‘trend’.” You don’t have a clue; UHI corrections reduce the trend vastly more often than they increase it. Your comment is ignorant sniping, nothing more.

    Ignorant, true. Sniping? It’s an outright accusation of scientific fraud.

    She paints with a broader brush on her site:

    Sadly, the peer-review process itself has become corrupt – difficult to prove and most unwelcome to believe.

    There goes science … we can safely ignore it, now. All of it. The keystone of the entire edifice has become corrupt, after all.

  • dhogaza // September 13, 2009 at 1:15 am | Reply

    I like to think of Pielke as a useful critic but this was silly.

    Actually, the argument in that little piece has become his standard MO.

    “There’s peer-reviewed literature in support of my claims”, then supports his claims with his own papers, ignoring rebuttals.

    It’s Pielkes all the way down …

  • george // September 13, 2009 at 1:24 am | Reply

    As Tina Turner asks

    What’s fair got ta do, got ta do with it?

    What’s fair, but an unscientific emotion?

  • Marion Delgado // September 13, 2009 at 4:13 am | Reply

    I want to make clear something that some people – not tamino, but some people – might be willing to stipulate. That Green World Trust, whatever it ultimately is, links off its web site everywhere but the two climate denialism areas to organizations that acknowledge the high probability of significant C02-driven climate change.

    The argument that comes at us is roughly this:

    If you’re advocating protecting the environment, must you be part of a standard line on climate change? Isn’t that groupthink? Isn’t it authoritarian to insist everyone speak with one voice on climate science? Aren’t there still legitimate scientists with legitimate critiques? Aren’t there still observational scientists who disagree on interpreting the observations, or on what set, interpreted how, is important?

    I have an answer that I think is very good in this case, and maybe it applies in other cases.

    In the two sections at Green World Trust’s web sited devoted to climate denialism, there is not a link to one, or two, or three, or four scientists or science work groups or branches of climate theory, a sober analysis of how they might convince people to take a different tack on climate change, etc.

    Not at all. It’s a link to every and any cilmate denialism propaganda the web page maker (and the “we” you see in the rest of the site has become an “I” who “saw the light” that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. And the links mostly contradict themselves. There are links to the sun (iron ball and non-iron ball suns alike) did it, to Al Gore is fat, to clouds do it, to the temperature records are wrong, to the statistics are wrong, to ENSO did it, etc. etc. Several dozen different reasons not to do anything about climate change and to think climate scientists are conspiratorial frauds. The majority of them are not even to research science at all.

    So what you have to say is, we won’t condemn someone for having a hypothesis or theory on the tail end of the bell curve, as long as they show their work and conduct it honestly and accurately.

    But this scattershot, emotive attack on science is political and economic, not scientific. There are very sound reasons that have nothing to do with people being coerced to fall in line why real environmental groups avoid all the links off of Green World Trust’s pages to do with climate.

    And moreover, it’s not – not at all – the behavior of a truth seeker. It’s the behavior of a lie-seeker trying different lines – someone like Frank Luntz – and testing to see which lie sticks.

  • Marion Delgado // September 13, 2009 at 4:15 am | Reply

    tamino, that should have read

    “I want to make clear that we can’t let slide something that some people – not tamino, but some people – might be willing to stipulate

  • Paul Tonita // September 13, 2009 at 4:35 am | Reply

    Besides the fact that UHI adjustments lower the final temperature product, where in the Arctic is there an urban area to contaminate any station record? I don’t know my EurAsian geography that well. Or Alaska for that matter. I know nothing in the Canadian Arctic could be called urban…

  • sod // September 13, 2009 at 6:51 am | Reply

    what John Daly did, was cherry picking stations all over the globe, that (at least in his opinion) showed little warming.

    using his choice of stations for further analysis, will guarantee denialists the result that they want.

    it is like using the stations that made headline news on the watts surface stations page. (barbecue and co) we would definitely find a warm trend among them…

  • LBB // September 13, 2009 at 10:01 am | Reply

    Piekle says “Tamino’s weblog is clearly not an Open Minded source of information on climate science.”

    This from the guy who allows no comments.

  • Deech56 // September 13, 2009 at 10:56 am | Reply

    The part from Lucy’s post that troubled me was this: “Like all good skeptics, I want the best evidence of both sides.” There are no separate collections of facts for each side. The real thing is what is happening in the natural world, and scientists use the best available tools to discern what ius happening. Scientists have to take into account the whole body of evidence.

    For Lucy or any others: Tamino has a consistent approach to trend analysis. He goes to the original records, uses as much data as possible and applies standard analysis tools. If these analyses provide a blade for the iconic “hockey stick,” that’s life. It’s interesting that denial sites resort to dismissing this site rather than try to show that show where the errors are.

    Unless anyone wants to argue that these tools are inappropriate, what other conclusion can there be?

  • Ray Ladbury // September 13, 2009 at 11:42 am | Reply

    Marion Delgado, Your point is well taken. I think that onc eould say further:

    “Now, hold on a wee minute! Isn’t it reasonable to insist that everyone acknowledge physical reality?”

    Policy should be based on the best science available. Those are the two choices: science and anti-science. Any questions?

  • mspelto // September 13, 2009 at 12:30 pm | Reply

    I added a graph of the cumulative mass balance of Devon Ice Cap since 1960 to the post noted below. It looks remarkably like the inverse of most of the smoothed temperature records in this post and the more important data rich post on Arctic Stations. http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/134/. it is the corroborating stories a detective looks for sea ice losses, glacier losses, temperature rise all operating synchronously. The locals in the area maybe fisherman and hunters not farmers, but they more than anyone feel these changes, that scientists are quantifying.

  • Gavin's Pussycat // September 13, 2009 at 3:06 pm | Reply

    Mmm, taste it on your tongue… “reality suffers from groupthink”.

  • Derecho64 // September 13, 2009 at 3:27 pm | Reply

    “Lucy” has found a home at WTFWT because it’s the kind of person they want there – ignorant, intellectually dishonest, and more than willing to smear and slur the real scientists and analysts and others who do the real work.

    Just another reason why WTFWT is a junk site.

  • Hank Roberts // September 13, 2009 at 6:07 pm | Reply

    > Green World Trust

    Wow. Three lies in three words.
    They’ve even screwed up the grammar of “Think globally, act locally”
    They show summer versus winter and claim this prove the continental icecaps are growing

    Someone’s really scraped together all the sludge from the bottom of several barrels there and then sprinkled it with rainbows and unicorns.

  • llewelly // September 13, 2009 at 7:43 pm | Reply

    If you’re advocating protecting the environment, must you be part of a standard line on climate change?

    If you’re advocating space travel, must you be part of a standard line on gravity?

  • Ray Ladbury // September 13, 2009 at 9:02 pm | Reply

    Deech56 says: “For Lucy or any others: Tamino has a consistent approach to trend analysis. He goes to the original records, uses as much data as possible and applies standard analysis tools. ”

    Well, I recently had a reviewer try to reject one of my papers because it used AIC, which he claimed was an “obscure technique”. His definition of obscure? He hadn’t heard of it–and NO, I am not making this up! Fortunately the editors are sharper.

    Sigh!

  • Matt Andrews // September 14, 2009 at 2:47 am | Reply

    Tamino, your graphs are all very fancy-looking and all. But they’re hopelessly flawed, I’m afraid, because you missed the crucial step when preparing the graphs:

    Rotation.

    ;)

    • Jim Galasyn // September 14, 2009 at 3:37 am | Reply

      Matt, it’s just impossible to tell if Denial Depot is for real. I mean look at this post from May:

      “But worse we find out these satellites are using microwaves to measure ice! As an experiment I took a glass of ice and put it in a microwave oven. This of course proves nothing, but it does raise some questions. I figured that 30 seconds in the microwave oven would be at least equivalent to 30 years of satellite microwaving. Well my microwave didn’t tell me how thick the ice was (of course immune from Team Science I never thought it would), but I did observe the microwaves melting ice.

      So is in fact arctic ice decline being caused by sustained subjection of arctic ice by microwave radiation emitted from NASA satellites? Is NASA literally cooking the books (ie ice)? Is it a coincidence that satellite “measurements” of sea ice and temperature both began in 1979, the year in which Jimmy Carter resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China?

      Nobody could be this stupid. Is this site actually a work of ironic genius?

  • Matt Andrews // September 14, 2009 at 3:44 am | Reply

    …actually a work of ironic genius?

    Affirmative.

  • Lucy Skywalker // September 14, 2009 at 8:09 am | Reply

    Well Tamino I’m honoured to have attracted such attention twice. I shall alter the title so that it’s plain that I am perfectly aware there has been some recent warming in the Arctic. What Daly’s graphs help reinforce is the reasonableness of seeing the recent warming as natural fluctuations – largely due to ocean currents. They don’t prove that it’s natural – there is still a heck of a lot to deconstruct re bad temperature records, contaminated by enough stuff to cancel any excessive warming. But loads of evidence is there that records are skewed, and that temperature changes are within natural ranges. I’m not going to spell more details out here. Thanks for all your graphs. I can use them. And I hope that with your comments, I can further modify what looked to you like a lack of courtesy on my part.

    [Response: Hmm... First you implied the arctic hasn't been warming. That contention was shredded.

    So you quickly backtracked to "No real skeptic claims that" and "the twentieth century as a whole does NOT show a sharp uptick in temperatures." BOTH of those claims are proved false. I even showed you, in detail, why John Daly's graphs are utterly useless for studying the question.

    Now you backtrack to "the reasonableness of seeing the recent warming as natural fluctuations." Transparent nonsense. It surprises nobody that you add "records are skewed."

    I tried to advance your understanding, but you insist on moving backward.]

  • Derecho64 // September 14, 2009 at 12:51 pm | Reply

    I just skimmed Lucy’s site. All the standard denialist garbage, conveniently collected in one place.

    Too bad it refers to WTFWT so often – that alone wipes out credibility the site may have had. Too bad.

  • dhogaza // September 14, 2009 at 1:13 pm | Reply

    Nobody could be this stupid. Is this site actually a work of ironic genius?

    That graph rotation post at Denial Depot’s so funny I laughed to the point where my laptop nearly flew off my lap onto the floor!

    It’s telling, though, that you have to ask if it’s real or not (don’t feel bad, several bright people were taken in at first). The author very skillfully slightly exaggerates what’s seen at places like Climate Depot, WUWT, and a site new to me, at least, Lucy Skywater’s.

    [Response: I laughed out loud at his post "How Not to Measure Temperature, Part 2." It's both a spoof site and proof of "Poe's law," as Greenfyre has adeptly noted.]

  • luminous beauty // September 14, 2009 at 1:45 pm | Reply

    What Daly’s graphs help reinforce is the reasonableness of seeing the recent warming as natural fluctuations –

    It is reasonable, based only on subjective sensate information (common sense), to believe the world is flat, too.

    But loads of evidence is there that records are skewed, and that temperature changes are within natural ranges. I’m not going to spell more details out here.

    Lessee…

    Surface thermometer recordings, satellite radiation soundings, tree ring lake sediment and ice core proxies are all skewed in the same direction.

    Lucy, you got a lot of esplainin’ to do!

  • P. Lewis // September 14, 2009 at 1:53 pm | Reply

    Lucy Skywalker’s reply seems to me much like a microcosm of the denialism tergiversation seen down the years.

  • Scott Mandia // September 14, 2009 at 3:29 pm | Reply

    Tamino,

    Over at WUWT they are criticizing the analysis because they claim, for example, that Barrow is an ASOS site so it is contaminated by the heat of an airport. Of course, they conveniently fail to mention that your analysis contained 113 stations and Barrow was just one example.

    Can you show the same trends by parsing out those sites that might be considered “urban-like” vs. “rural-like?”

    I never could quite understand the argument about station bias because it seem sobvious to me that the underlying AGW trend would be the rising tide that lifted ALL boats.

    NOAA shows this at:
    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf

    and

    Peterson et al. (1999) showed it also.

    Peterson, T.C., K.P. Gallo, J. Livermore et al. 1999. Global rural temperature trends. Geophysical Research Letters 26:329-332.

  • Jim Galasyn // September 14, 2009 at 4:41 pm | Reply

    Thanks to everybody for letting me in on the Denial Depot joke. I had to pick up my jaw from the floor when I read that microwave comment.

  • Ray Ladbury // September 14, 2009 at 5:21 pm | Reply

    Lucy Skywalker says: “I’m not going to spell more details out here. ”

    When danger reared its ugly head, she bravely turned her tail and fled.
    Yes, brave Dame Lucy turned about, and gallantly she chickened out…

  • Philippe Chantreau // September 14, 2009 at 6:15 pm | Reply

    The heat of Barrow’s airport?!! Right, with the insane aerial traffic in Barrow (!), and the whole thing covered in snow most of the year. Denial Depot has some catching up to do. Next theory: airport-covering snow is warmer than toundra-covering snow.

  • dhogaza // September 14, 2009 at 7:14 pm | Reply

    The heat of Barrow’s airport?!!

    Never underestimate the power of the UHI to affect arctic temperatures!

  • Deech56 // September 14, 2009 at 7:18 pm | Reply

    RE: Philippe Chantreau // September 14, 2009 at 6:15 pm

    The heat of Barrow’s airport?!!

    It’s those blasted air conditioners running all the time, especially in winter when……never mind.

  • sod // September 14, 2009 at 8:16 pm | Reply

    What Daly’s graphs help reinforce is the reasonableness of seeing the recent warming as natural fluctuations – largely due to ocean currents.

    But loads of evidence is there that records are skewed, and that temperature changes are within natural ranges.

    look lucy, this claim is simply false.

    what John Daly did, was collecting stations, that show little warming. he did a weekly feature on this.

    http://www.john-daly.com/stationx.htm

    he made his choice of stations clear:

    See if the `Station of the Week’ has a record like the global one claimed here.

    (also notice his hand waving analysis “Bogota showing slight warming (most likely the result of artificial urban heating)”)

    then he collected those stations in a list:

    http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm

    you now combine the stations from that list, and draw the conclusion: that records are skewed, and that temperature changes are within natural ranges

    that is complete nonsense. you are basing your “analysis” on a completely biased dataset!

    the data from the Daly site does neither show “loads of evidence” for anything, nor recent warming as natural fluctuations – largely due to ocean currents.

    those claims are simply your inventions, based on utterly garbage data. (how could his temperature graphs show anything about ocean currents???)

  • Tenney Naumer // September 14, 2009 at 8:21 pm | Reply

    Tamino, all I can say is, “THANK YOU!!!!!”

  • Tenney Naumer // September 14, 2009 at 8:22 pm | Reply

    And, just this, too: Denial Depot is awesome!

  • sod // September 14, 2009 at 8:39 pm | Reply

    there actually is a rather famous UHI paper on Barrow.

    http://www.geography.uc.edu/~kenhinke/uhi/HinkelEA-IJOC-03.pdf

    it gets a lot of mentioning among denialists, the majority of whom obviously haven t even read the title of the paper:

    THE URBAN HEAT ISLAND IN WINTER AT BARROW, ALASKA

    as a basis of denialist arguments, i would say it is better than most of the crap they link normally. (like the John Daly page, for example)

    the paper, in my opinion, is still fatally flawed, and of course misrepresented by denialists.

    for a start, they typically deny to mention the “in winter” from the title. they also prefer the maximum difference (6°C difference, a rather random result among 50 thermometers) over the winter mean (2.2 °C) and also prefer the (EXTREMELY RARE!) calm conditions data. (3.2 °C)

    they of course completely ignore the “inverse UHI effect” during summer (the urban stations are 1.4°C COLDER than the rural ones.

    the paper gives a pretty simplicistic explanation for this in the conclusion:

    The slightly cooler temperatures observed in the urban area in summer may reflect the presence of a
    ‘negative heat island’ caused indirectly by changes to the surface energy balance. However, it is more likely
    that this is simply a maritime effect that occurs in summer when winds are from the west and north.

    and it is good, that it finally mentions the sea: <B<because the warmest stations are not only all urban, but also all next to the sea! (see map on page 4 of the pdf. the coldest stations are all inland)

    i would still ask the all of you, to take a quick look at the paper. many of you just have some significantly better understanding of this stuff than i have…

  • John N-G // September 14, 2009 at 11:21 pm | Reply

    Sorry to introduce a link from Climate Audit, but McIntyre counted up the positive and negative UHI adjustments in the GISS data set and found that 2236 stations had had past temperatures adjusted upward (as would be expected for a positive UHI) and 1848 stations had had past temperatures adjusted downward (as would be expected for an urban cool island). There’s overlap; some stations had both positive and negative adjustments at different times in their records.
    I haven’t seen this refuted by anyone associated with GISS, and it seems like a straightforward calculation by CA, so maybe the GISS UHI adjustments don’t reduce the trend “vastly more often” than they increase it, only slightly more often.
    If I missed something, please tell me!

    [Response: I stand corrected.]

  • Kevin McKinney // September 15, 2009 at 3:08 am | Reply

    sod, I don’t mean to give “aid and comfort” inappropriately, however I don’t think your maritime effect can explain the winter UHI, as the Chukchi Sea adjacent to Barrow was stated to be frozen for the entire winter period as they defined it in the study. No liquid phase, no maritime effect. Sorry. . .

  • george // September 15, 2009 at 1:00 pm | Reply

    McIntyre counted** up the positive and negative UHI adjustments in the GISS data set and found that 2236 stations had had past temperatures adjusted upward (as would be expected for a positive UHI) and 1848 stations had had past temperatures adjusted downward’

    John N-G: I’d guess that you were merely correcting Tamino’s “corrections reduce the trend vastly more often than they increase it” statement above, and probably know full well that the simple count comparison does not tell the complete story (not even close).

    But there ARE some , particularly those who regularly trot out the “record is contaminated by urban heat islands”, who may not understand this — or who do understand it and purposely (and dishonestly) repeat the “bean count” specifically because they know that others will not understand that the count comparison is meaningless in and of itself when it comes to assessing impact on the overall trend.

    To tell the complete story, one also has to take into account the magnitude of each adjustment.

    And to assess whether all the adjustments taken together make any significant difference, one has to compare the before (without adjustment) and after (with adjustment) trends.

    Besides, to conclude that “records are skewed” (with the implication that they are wrong) as Lucy Skywalker has done requires one to have additional information showing that the individual adjustments for each site were simply wrong or unwarranted.

    Has Lucy Skywalker done all this? (or for that matter, has Steve McIntyre?)

    After reading some of the stuff on her site, I somehow doubt it. In fact, I doubt that she is even interested in such “minor details”.

    **I’m glad to see that McIntyre knows how to count.

  • sod // September 15, 2009 at 1:05 pm | Reply

    see, that is what i meant, when i spoke of better understanding… :)

    but i was aware of the ice cover, when i wrote my post. and i know about the sea ice being a pretty good isolation.
    i simply don t know, whether it makes a difference or not. (i actually thought there might be some cracks or they might keep some sort of semi-open harbour water, but the Barrow sea ice cam makes it look pretty solid..)

    so we are left with the observation, that the warmest places are in town and next to water, and the coldest ones are out of town and far from water.

    wind? height? anyone got any idea?

    oh and no need to be sorry. i am here to learn…

  • John N-G // September 15, 2009 at 2:41 pm | Reply

    George -
    Follow my link to CA above, and you’ll see that McIntyre does compute the adjustment magnitudes, and shows a histogram of the results. The positive adjustments are not markedly different than the negative adjustments.
    Whether the adjustments make any significant difference is a trickier question, because you need to know not just whether the adjustments made a difference, but whether the ideally correct adjustments would make a different difference, etc. Not a clear-cut problem. I personally think direct attempts to calculate the importance of UHI and microclimate adjustments are so fraught with stated and unstated assumptions that I don’t think they’re presently the best way to answer the question. To me, the best scientific evidence regarding the relative unimportance of UHI is the vast corroborating evidence: SST, glaciers, phenology, etc., combined with GCM evidence of the coupling of SSTs and land surface temperatures.

  • Hank Roberts // September 15, 2009 at 2:54 pm | Reply

    Don’t forget any urban area near water is dumping a lot of relatively warm water from its sewers and stormwater, which is going to float and extend the warm area. How much, I dunno. But you can probably look up the E. coli counts and estimate.

  • george // September 15, 2009 at 4:57 pm | Reply

    John N-G says

    Follow my link to CA above, and you’ll see that McIntyre does compute the adjustment magnitudes, and shows a histogram of the results. The positive adjustments are not markedly different than the negative adjustments.

    John. I visited that link before I commented above and I did notice the histogram.

    But what McIntyre has done (or at least shown, since he may actually have done more analysis than he shows) is not sufficient to even assess whether there is a significant difference in the overall trend with and without adjustments.

    His histogram only includes the maximum (pos or negative) adjustments (and as you said, there can also be “overlap”).

    Here is a histogram of maximum positive and maximum negative adjustments for all adjusted ROW stations, showing somewhat similar distributions, though there is a very slight balance towards positive adjustments.

    Perhaps McIntyre has done the full analysis, but one of the problems I have with his posts (and CA in general) is that in many (if not most) cases, he does not take his analysis far enough to say whether it makes any difference to the final “scientifically important” result (in this case the upward temperature trend). For whatever reason, he leaves people hanging.

    Unfortunately, his incomplete analysis all too often ends up being used as “proof” that the temperature record is contaminated (ie, essentially garbage). for example, people quote McIntyre’s comments that the majority of stations in the US have undergone ‘adjustments” (which is true) while in the world, it is a smaller percentage.

    So, therefore,NASA must be up to no good, right?

    Basically, unless ones takes the final step, the analysis is close to useless from the scientific standpoint.

    This is basically what real Climate talks about when they say that

    There is however a different way of criticizing scientific papers that is prevalent in blogs like ClimateAudit. This involves challenging, ‘by all means necessary’, any paper whose conclusions are not liked. This can be based on simple typos, basic misunderstandings of the issues and ‘guilt by association’ though there is sometimes the occasional interesting point. Since these claims are rarely assessed to see if there is any actual impact on the main result, the outcome is a series of misleading critiques, regardless of whether any of these criticisms are in fact even valid or salient, that give the impression that every one of these papers is worthless and that all their authors incompetent at best and dishonest at worst. It is the equivalent of claiming to have found spelling errors in a newspaper article. Fun for a while, but basically irrelevant for understanding any issue or judging the worth of the journalist.

    incidentally, John van Vliet did an analysis a while back of surface stations where he took the final step. he used only those station records that had been deemed “best” by Anthony Watts (admittedly a relatively small fraction of the total at the time) and found little difference between his resulting trend for the lower 48 and the trend given by NASA GISS for ALL the stations — and John V used “unhomogenized” data (ie, that had not been adjusted for UHI)

    Here’s a comment John V made on WUWT regarding what he did and found:

    I analyzed the best stations (as chosen by you) with proper geographic weighting and without homogeneity adjustments. You’ll remember that the USA48 trend from the best stations matched the trend from all stations.

    NOAA has since also analyzed more of Watts “best’ stations (further along in his futile photographic fiasco) and found a trend that was basically the same as the trend for all the stations (though perhaps NOAA is applying their own UHI adjustment. I don’t know)

  • dhogaza // September 15, 2009 at 5:50 pm | Reply

    That’s quite the summertime pissing contest george has linked to above (search for USA48 in the thread to get to John V’s comments).

    I think it’s safe to say that John V remains somewhat disillusioned with Watts and McIntyre …

  • Kevin McKinney // September 15, 2009 at 6:40 pm | Reply

    It is after all possible the Barrow study is detecting a real effect. Despite widespread denialist abuse of the meme, nobody actually disputes that UHI in general is real. (After all, that’s why GISS applies adjustments according to rural/urban location.)

    It’s a bit startling to think that UHI is detectible in such a small settlement as Barrow, to be sure. However, in some respects it makes sense: the biggest temperature differential between inside & outside temps will be during a good cold winter such as Barrow’s, hence the highest rate of heat transfer and greatest UHIM, to use the study’s terminology. And given the prices of shipping building supplies to a location like Barrow, and typical incomes, I can’t help but wonder about how well insulated many of those homes are (though what are costs for heating oil, I wonder?) And, FWIW, the dry air of the Arctic winter will have a relatively low specific heat, meaning that a given temperature rise will require a bit less heat than otherwise.

    All in all, the winter conditions at Barrow–besides the small population, that is–seem relatively favorable to generating a UHI effect. As noted (or implied) by posts above, that doesn’t mean that it’s affecting the annual mean anomaly. It’s interesting in that connection that one can discern in Daly’s graph, poor as it is, that there is considerable summer warming in the decade or so prior to the end of the record in 2001.

  • Philippe Chantreau // September 16, 2009 at 6:26 am | Reply

    That still does nothing to incriminate the ASOS unit. It is common for the WUWT crowd to confuse UHI and siting. In this case the ASOS is likely a better location, the airport being somewhat away from the “town.”

  • Kevin McKinney // September 16, 2009 at 1:46 pm | Reply

    Actually, thinking about this a bit further in response to KenM’s question on Open Thread #16, the Barrow UHI, if real, would be a distinct type of heat island.

    UHI results primarily from the heat storage and radiative properties of the urban environment–concrete and asphalt hold heat, and tall buildings slow radiative cooling by occluding large swathes of the sky–and only secondarily by direct release of anthropogenic heat.

    By contrast, the effect Hinkel et al show for Barrow is almost entirely the result of the second factor. (They discuss this in their introduction.) That means that the relevant characteristics of the built environment are quite different, and that the population levels required are quite low.

    I’d propose that a different name for the phenomenon is in order, for the sake of clarity–perhaps High-latitude Seasonal Heat Island (HSHI).

  • John N-G // September 16, 2009 at 3:44 pm | Reply

    george -

    I’m in agreement with what you’ve written, but I think you miss my point. Carrying the analysis only one step farther wouldn’t settle anything.

    No significant difference between adjusted and unadjusted in GISS? Either there’s no significant UHI effect, or the UHI isn’t being corrected properly. Significant difference between adjusted and unadjusted in GISS? Then the adjustment is important, but is it correct and sufficiently complete? It’s a messy issue that simple statistical analysis alone can’t solve.

  • george // September 16, 2009 at 5:21 pm | Reply

    John N-G

    RE “significant difference”

    We seem to be talking about two different things with regard to ’significance”.

    I was referring to “significant difference between the trends” (taken with data before adjustments and after)

    Because the adjustments can be either positive or negative, it is quite possible for the adjustments themselves to be correct and quite ’significant” for some of the individual individual records (ie, possible for there to be there a relatively large UHI effect that has been correctly adjusted for ) but for the overall impact (of all the adjustments taken together) on the trend to be relatively small — ie, “not significant” to (makes little difference in) the trend.

    It might not “settle” the issue entirely, but the only way to even have any idea whether that is the case is to take the analysis further than McIntyre has taken it (at least in that one post)

  • Miss67 // October 22, 2009 at 12:11 pm | Reply

    Transpose the above to Africa today and wonder why a whole continent was never mentioned. ,

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