All we need now is 3D glasses...

Related:

http://tinyurl.com/2udet9

"13) Numerous U.S. temperature collection data errors exposed by team of researchers led by Meteorologist Anthony Watts in 2007

“The (U.S.) National Climate Data Center (NCDC) is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster. Urbanization has placed many sites in unsuitable locations — on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills! The data and approach taken by many global warming alarmists is seriously flawed. If the global data were properly adjusted for urbanization and station siting, and land use change issues were addressed, what would emerge is a cyclical pattern of rises and falls with much less of any background trend,” Meteorologist Joseph Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007""

Before anyone comes along to discredit the photo, saying that it is not calibrated, doesn't cover all the angles, etc, etc... The intent of the photo was simply to point out the potential for biasing the reading depending on the local environment.

Thus, while the sensors attempts to measure air temp, one can clearly see that there are several larges objects that at warmer than the air near the sensor.

This WILL cause a bias in the reading. No-one is attempting to say exactly how much that bias is or how it stacks over over a minute, hour, day, month or year. Just that it is there at yet another poorly chosen site.

Calibration is irrelevant - these stations have location criteria that are supposed to be met; height from the ground, distance from dwellings or roadways, etc. This particular temperature sensor is positioned over a swimming pool!

While they must be feeling awfully important in Bali this week, I think the ground has started to shift on global warming. The recent study in Climatalogy has put a large hole in the IPCC's theory that CO2-triggered warming will heat the troposphere.

And, now, with the only demonstrated warming occurring on the planet's surface in the northern hemisphere we have a study showing that 87% of the US temperature stations studied so far are failing their own standards because of encroaching urbanization. McKitrick at the U of Guelph has said urbanization has accounted for half of the warming seen since 1980.

There are an increasing number of studies now testing -- empirically -- the climate models put out by the IPCC. They will be harder and harder to ignore.

I know David Suzuki may not be the most popular guy on this board, but you may want to take a couple of minutes to read his recent column:

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/Suzuki/2007/12/12/4720684-ca.html

Although he's firmly on the AGW side, the tone of this article is that we need to get the science right, and it's far from being 'settled'.

GreenNeck, that is not David Suzuki asking for common sense and rational thought to get the science right. That is David Suzuki asking for more government money to be shoveled out to his global warming alarmists.

Harper has been quietly cutting funding to all scientists who are on the IPCC bandwagon citing Al Gore et al that the science is in and debate is closed. Great! No need for further funding then right? Not so fast. We only said those things cause we thought we'd keep getting access to big bails of money. This is Suzuki's attempt at getting the government money rolling in to all the "scientists" that sing his song.

GreenNeck: The problem with Suzuki is that he has been 'over the top' on this issue for years. Did you see him on his cross country tour? This guy ended interviews if anybody dared question him on his facts. He just came off as a grumpy old man with a huge chip on his shoulder.
I think he has lost credibility with the scientific community and with this article he attempting to recover.

Wait, wait - Suzuki is saying the science isn't settled -well, not really. He does start out with "We all know...." but I agree there is more uncertainty expressed in his article than is the norm for the AGW crowd.

Still, he and the rest of the AGW crowd don't seem to get that simple point through their heads - THE SCIENCE ISN'T SETTLED.

I have to partly disagree with Kate about calibration though. If the placement of stations DID follows all the rules then they would all be measuring "more or less" the same. It is these rules that provide the de facto calibration.

You can make accurate measurements in poorly located spots IF, and this is a big IF, you have fully characterised the local conditions and you sensor is sensitive enough to remain above the noise floor. Thus, you could calibrate based on an accurate characterisation.

However, this is NOT being done. These sites are NOT being properly calibrated. Thus, there is a bias.

Since most of these sites are not fully characterised (if any), no-one can be sure exactly what that bias is (but seeing some of these pictures I am reasonably sure it isn't lowering the temp).

By the way, I would like to see the set-up that COULD accurately characerise some of these sites. It would be much, much cheaper just to move the sensor to a better location

Green neck:

If anything Suzuki is a political activist and we must judge him accordingly...this recent softening of "the science is settled" is just an attempt to salvage any credibility he has left as the legitimate science community continues to debunk theories he placed a lot of political currency in.

Back peddaling to save credibility...a wasye of time as far as I'm concerned, SooZook has blown his credibility wad...he's a partisan political flack.

The so-called global surface temperature is a lot of nonsense -- not only because temperature station data was never meant for global temperature determination, but also because basic principals of statistics are not used. For some validity, data must be radomly chosen and the number of points used should reflect the variability. The vast majority of weather stations are located near or in cities -- a very small unrepresentative portion of the Earth's surface. I believe somewhere around 3000 temperature readings are used to afford the estimate. The Earth's surface area is somewhere around 200 million sq. miles -- one temperature reading per 67,000 sq. mi. The data is not only contaminated by the urban heat island effect but by inconsistencies in recording and maintaining temperature stations. In the former soviet union there was an incentive to report colder winter temperatures in order to receive greater fuel allocations -- interestingly, much of the supposed warming of the past 30 - 40 years comes from that region.

Bali: Shut up, they argued

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTk4OTEzMDU1YjdiMmVlYWJjYTE4MzY2ZGU5ZmNkZDQ=

The point I wanted to make is if a guy like Suzuki is now packpedalling (agreed this may be an attempt to get more funding in AGW research) then there is really some kind of shift taking place in the climate change debate.

The fearmongers like Al Gore & co. will be more and more irrelevant. We have more serious and immediate issues to deal with than climate change: energy security, conservation of arable land, drug-resistant viruses, access to clean water, protection of fish stocks, to name a few. The AGW debate is a needless distraction.

GreenNeck, clam up will ya?

Just kidding--couldn't resist.

David Suzuki; "But critical questions remain. Half of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere gets soaked up again. Where it goes is the subject of much debate. Some say the oceans; others say soils or plants. The reality is, we don't know for sure."

Backpedaling, for sure.

Sounds like what Tim Ball has been saying --- all along. The science is NOT settled !!

I, also would not trust DS --- may just be trying another tact.

Or maybe DSF lawyers have advised him on being vulnerable to liable suits ---- disinformation, yelling fire in a theatre, slander, fear-mongering, ....

Well, look on the bright side: buddy at least had the sense not to install it beside the hot tub.

Surface stations are for measuring the 'typical' temperature of the area. (among other parameters) If typical is shady trees, fine. If typical is asphalt, fine.

They can also show a trend of any temp change -- IF THE THERMOMETER IS LEFT IN EXACTUALY THE SAME SURROUNDINGS OVER THE DECADES !!

James Hansen porposely allowed asphalt parking lots to grow up around the stations.

If MMGW was not happening fast enough for the climate alarmist, they would, and did, in addition, MOVE the stations to a warmer location.

In THAT respect, Man IS causing global warming.

Were Hansen and Gore not Buds from way back ?? Is Gore not making obscene amounts of money from the MMGW scam ?? Could some of it convince Hansen to "adjust" the temp data ?

I love it that somebody cared enough to use a FLIR camera to document this site.

Global warming scam remains on glide path to crash and burn in '09.

To: Ron in Kelowna. There was a specific method of measuring average air temperature that had been standardized by Environment Canada and NOAA.
The use of a standard size wooden stevenson screen painted in a standard white semi-gloss enamel was emphacized. Height of the thermometers was 4 ft. off a grassed in and neatly mowed surface.
If there was a building nearby, the stevenson screen was to be installed at least 50 ft. away from the building, PLUS the vertical height of the blg. or object.
When Enviro-Canada and NOAA gathered the data, they were more or less certain that the recorded air temp had been obtained by standard methods across N.America..
Snowfall, barometric press, wind etc. was recorded much the same using the same standards. Weather stations were kept outside of the city not to be influenced by asphalt, concrete etc.
Where did the sytem go wrong?? That's another topic for another time.

Yawn.

Wake me up when we can farm Greenland like our Viking ancestor Eric the Red.

The Vikings didn't name it Greenland as a joke. It used to be green - as in warmer.

Oh, and in the mean time, I'm hoping on a cold, snowy winter - and not just cause I ski.

Yes, JJ, I agree.

(I did not explain myself well)

The standards of the Steve Screen have been violated, by Hansen et al.

I was just making the point that, yes, temp data can be recorded for ANY location (if one wants). The alarmist keep fudging the issue by saying this. So they claim asphalt is ok.

BUT, the point is, has 'new' asphalt been skewing the data to the upside during the last few years ? Absolutely yes. It has been occuring on the same time-line as MMGW itself.

That is the criminal part, IMO, and should be addressed.

In a sense, it's a wonderful time to be a conservative. On two crucial issues - the Afgahnistan/Iraq war effort and AGW - the libs are being revealed to have been flying blind, to the point where it can be seriously claimed that they're living on a bluff. The only historical parallel that comes to my mind is the old school homily of the laissez-faireists flying blind in the 1920s.

If you don't mind me returning to a related side issue, Earth First Canada opened for trading on Tuesday and sunk like a stone from its IPO price of $2.20/share. It bottomed at $1.65/share just before the end of its first day's trading and climbed back up to about the $1.90-1.95 level, where it is's been for the last day or so.

The morals:

a) IPOs don't always go up;
b) In some situations, it's ain't easy being green.

Kate, the problem with this far fetched theory is that while a lot of your examples show weather stations in poorly placed areas, in most cases it would just make rises or decreases in temperature relative to the influence of the surrounding objects, in essence the sensors would still show actual variations against an incorrect actual temperature. This picture is an example.

Beyond that, for every picture you post of a poorly placed weather station, I'm guessing there are 10 that are up to code. I built sites for a few of these in Saskatchewan one summer awhile back. We used guidelines that were probably 3 decades old and they called for a large clearing of surrounding area, among other things. I'm guessing that most of your examples of poorly located urban stations. The point is made that there is likely some bad data out there, but I'm far from convinced these states are anything more than the exception.

There 'IS' a direct correlation between man's activities and global warming !

It will be interesting to see Steve McIntyre's reaction to this:

Through the first eleven months, 2007 is so far the second warmest year in the period of instrumental data, second to 2005, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global temperature analysis, which is led by Dr. James Hansen, who will be featured in an interview next week with our own Katie Fehlinger.

What is noteworthy, according to Hansen, is the fact that the unusual warmth in 2007 occurred when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the Pacific has entered the cool phase, La Nina cycle.

In the analysis from Hansen's website, Hansen believes 2007 will remain in second place after the full year is taken into account, but there is also the slight chance that it could slip to third if December is unusally cold.

http://global-warming.accuweather.com/

@steve:

Your loyalty to your trade is commendable, but I'm afraid that a survey has already been done and your estimated ratio doesn't give with the actual one found. This thread will give you the details:

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/007588.html

A quote from the header: "...results clearly show that the majority of USHCN stations surveyed so far have compromised measurement environments."

And by the way, Steve, Kate has posted dozens of times on this subject. You are making not-well-thought-out points that have already been dealt with a hundred times over. Please try to keep up.

You are correct that IF THE SITE HAS STAYED THE SAME FOR THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS, whether it is surrounded by asphalt or not, then the site would likely read the temperature VARIATIONS correctly. But look at the photo a bit closer...would you say that the building and the pool have been there for 100 years? So, when they were built, the heat island effect would have changed the average temperature reading.

D'uh!

Actually Eeyore, i was referring to the variations from when the pool was built. If you were to all of a sudden surround the station in asphalt, the data would show an instant spike that should be easily weened out, but if its gradual and consistent with rises at other stations, then you have a broader based trend. Its not likely that all stations effected by surrounding growth are going to exhibit the same types of inaccuracy, so the fact that scientists can draw trends out of what is available shows that there is good data out there.

Anyway, my argument beyond all this has been that there are a ton of other indicators that can definitively show that temperatures on the earth have been changing. This argument that we've somehow never truly known what the actual temperatures of the past have been strikes me as the weakest of all. I obviously believe that climate change is occurring and its, in part, due to humans, but there are a million better ways to challenge that theory than to repeatedly post pictures of poorly set up weather stations. It's not an "AHA!" moment at all. It's more like, "oh god, there goes this ridiculous anecdotal picture of weather stations theory again". Its not a scientific challenge at all. If you wanted it to have any merit you would have to accompany each picture with its historical weather records and then compare those to the surrounding building history and then assess whether or not a correlation exists when new elements were added to the area vs the station's readings.

I should add, I will acknowledge the role of heat island effect in altering these stations. Obviously, as a city grows, this becomes more pronounced. But I don't discount that the world's temperatures are also changing in both rural and urban areas. There are too many other indicators that show this. Whether that is AGW or just GW is another debate.

Steve, don't you think the presence of -warm, artificially heated water- would have a strong bias to the warm side?

And maybe would tend to damp variations? Because the thermometer isn't measuring the actual air temperature, its measuring the POOL, which is kept the same all the time.

So Steve, if little old me can think of that in like five seconds, is there even the faintest chance this site is accidental?

It ain't science, its enemy action. How many sites were set up by the enemies of science, Steve?

I don't know either. Check 'em all, and assume the worst until proven otherwise. Note this is exactly backward to the way science is usually done.

SOP for Lefties, I'm afraid.

Posted by: steve at December 14, 2007 2:56 PM

"The point is made that there is likely some bad data out there, but I'm far from convinced these states are anything more than the exception."

Steve,

In a model exactly how many *exceptions* are acceptable, to you, before the result becomes exceptional errors?

Actually, this whole episode reminds me of resource exploration. There's been the same latching upon an exciting conclusion based upon a relative paucity of data, because no-one bothered to look at all beforehand. The skeptics have been treated brusquely. Critiques of the original data have been long in coming, in large part because of the crowd effect. There's been a certain truculence regarding systematic rechecks of the original hypothesis, springing from the refusal to take seriously any history-based data that contradicts the original "exciting" model.

To amplify a point I've made before, skeptics have been called bad names.

We're now at the point where one of the original promoters (David Suzuki) is beginning to back down a little. We're not quite at the point where the Adam Smith tie is pulled out of the hat - i.e., "Waal, a few mistakes were made and bad things were said, but Science is Better Off as a Result!" - but we're sliding that way. A recent commentator here made a disguised reference to the good times of yesteryear for the AGW crowd (characteristically, in the form of a criticism of us.)

Perhaps the best analogy to this all is Dome Pete's Tuktoyatuk venture more than twenty-five years ago. Jack Gallagher wasn't a con man like the Bre-X gang, but he did have this tendancy to go overboard once the gummit was on his side and standing behind him.