In search of the perfect thermometer.

Lon Glazner, a fellow blogger and local electronics engineer made some comments about my post on the NASA/CSU study on California temperatures. Well that got me started…so below are Lon’s comments and my reply along with a fun technical challenge. For those of you that read this blog, but disagree with my views, I invite you to read this carefully.

Anthony,

You make a number of good points. Particularly in the fact that the writers may have applied changes in urban temperature measurements over large regions for graphical impact.

As someone who has designed and built electronic temperature sensors I have certain concerns about the data itself.

Unless temperature sensors are regularly calibrated I think it is unreasonable to expect accuracy of greater than a couple of degrees.

Even some that are calibrated may not have good accuracy. The LM34 which is a commonly used semiconductor for measuring temperature is +/-2 degrees F. This is pretty typical of analog or digital semconductor sensors. The temperature error for this part is also non-linear, and so it’s not a simple offset that you have to account for during data collection. Furthermore, there are lots of additional errors that can creep into a temperature measuring device beyond the sensor itself.
http://www.national.com/pf/LM/LM34.html

One could argue that numerical analysis done on data points would tease out errors. But if a scientist doesn’t know the exact accuracy of a temperature sensor then they couldn’t account for errors in their system.

Some of the temperature sensing stations may be very accurate and regularly calibrated. But maybe they’re not?

I have a hard time trusting that the data is accurate to the level of identifying 1 or 2 degree changes over decades. This is especially true since the techniques of making these measurements have changes over that time frame.

Lon

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Lon, thank you for the comments. FINALLY somebody who understands the kind of biases that creep into temperature measurements!

I’m innately familiar with National Semi’s LM34 and it’s accuracy problems. One of my early jobs at my university as a research assistant was to create remote electronic weather stations. I soon learned how inaccurate many electronic devices can be in temperature measurement.

The problem with the National Weather Service temperature data sets (and world data sets too) is that they are full of biases and errors that I’m not sure have been accurately accounted for. People such as Jim Price, from CSUC who is on the IPCC say they have been, yet nobody has shown me any hard evidence of such. I’d be a lot less skeptical if I could see how the IPCC accounted for temperature measurement biases. But they won’t share.

Polarization

I don’t know why I’m posting this other than its how I feel today.

Something new to worry about - will your flight get whacked by space junk?

An airliner traveling from Chile to New Zealand early today was in for an near miss from something you wouldn’t expect.

Flaming space debris — the remains of a Russian satellite — came hurtling
back to Earth not far from a passenger jet on its way to Auckland, New Zealand.
Here’s further proof for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space junk orbiting our planet. From the article: ‘The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340 … notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Center after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane…’

Yikes!

California Heating Up, a new NASA/CSU study finds, but data questionable

Image: Average temperatures warmed in nearly all parts of California between 1950 to 2000. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cal State L.A Click for Larger Image

Average temperatures in California rose almost one degree Celsius (nearly two degrees Fahrenheit) during the second half of the 20th century, with urban areas leading the trend to warmer conditions, according to a new study by scientists at NASA and California State University, Los Angeles. Results of the study appeared in the journal Climate Research.

But 50 years of temperature trends hardly proves anything relevant about climate change, other than its gotten warmer in the past fifty years. 50 years in terms of our planet and the suns processes is a blink. I have to think that because NASA chose to co-author this paper with researchers at California State University, that some of the statewide “global warming as man-made problem bias” crept into the thinking for the purpose of this paper, i.e. “we need another study to show that its getting hotter so action is justified”.

What is troubling about this study is that many of California’s historical climatological stations, when done on a 100 year trend, rather than a 50 year trend, show a net cooling over the period, or a reversal of trend. The northern Sacramento Valley has very few reporting stations that go back 100 years, so I only have 4 data points, but it makes me wonder just what data the NASA/CSU study used to come to the conclusion that our area has warmed 1.1 degrees F over the last 50 years.

I’ve prepared some side-by-side graphs below of Sacramento Valley stations to illustrate that point:

My data source: U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) Data Set

Yet the NASA/CSU paper claims “The only area to cool was a narrow band of the state’s mainly rural northeast interior“. None of the stations above are in that area, but are in the North Sacramento Valley.

Even odder than that, cold and snowy Mt. Shasta, where you’d expect to hear about depleted snowpack, it’s melting glacier on the side of the mountain, and other “signatures” of “global warming” shows a significant drop in temperatures over the last 50 years. yet the NASA/CSU study for that area concludes that a 2.1 degree F rise in temperature occurred.

Granted a few data points don’t equal a complete study, but the fact that I’ve been able to find and plot in a couple of hours, several places that don’t match the trends in the NASA/CSU study calls their methodology into question. Note the cities I used are all small rural cities, but the NASA/CSU study plotted major, medium, and minor cities in California to draw their conclusions. From their own paper they admit that the areas that have grown the most have shown the greatest temperature increases:

Southern California had the highest rates of warming, while the NE Interior Basins division experienced cooling. Large urban sites showed rates over twice those for the state, for the mean maximum temperatures, and over 5 times the state’s mean rate for the minimum temperatures. Average temperatures increased significantly in nearly 54 percent of the stations studied, with human-produced changes in land use seen as the most likely cause. The largest temperature increases were seen in the state’s urban areas, led by Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area, particularly for minimum temperatures.

For example, look at Pasadena, CA once a small city itself, but in the last 100 years it became a dot in the sea of the second largest American City, Los Angeles. It’s temperature trend, unsurprisingly, is sharply upward, for both the 50 and 100 year trends. Its drowning in a sea of asphalt and concrete, is it any wonder it shows a temperature increase?

The inescapable conclusion is that the NASA/CSU study is plotting the effects of urban heat islands, and applying that trend to the entire landmass of California to reach the conclusions they have mapped onto the state map of temperature trend they present.

A simple filtering based on urban growth factors would yield a temperature map with a far different result.

To their credit though, they recognize this fact: “If we assume global warming affects all regions of the state, then the small increases our study found in rural stations can be an estimate of this general warming over land. Larger increases would therefore be due to local or regional changes in land surface use due to human activities.”

For the most part, “urban warming” has dwarfed “global warming” in its magnitude, a fact that is lost on some who look at temperature data from weather stations worldwide and treat them all equally in the quest to prove a theory.

Study: Cell phones unlikely to cause brain cancer

For all those folks worried that a cell phone tower at the Elks Lodge or Hooker Oak Park is going to give rise to a legion of cancer ridden mutants, here’s another study that says “not likely”

March 26, 2007 (Reuters) –

Cell phone use does not appear to be associated with an increased risk of glioma, the most common type of brain tumor, according to a new study.

“Public concern has been expressed about the possible adverse health effects of mobile telephones, mainly related to [brain] tumors,” Dr. Anna Lahkola, a researcher at the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Helsinki, and colleagues explain in the International Journal of Cancer.

The researchers examined the relationship between mobile phone use and risk of glioma by studying 1,521 glioma patients and 3,301 controls.

Sustainability Task Force

I just completed my first meeting of the City of Chico Sustainability Task Force today and here are a few observations.

First, it seemed to be pretty well rounded, we had public and private sector, business, building industry, CSUC, and regular citizens represented by the 15 appointees.

Second, so far the focus seems to be doing things better, more efficiently, and at less cost. I’m all for that.

Third, everybody seemed to get along, no shouting matches or fistfights broke out.

While the group is still feeling their way, I expect that given the makeup of it, we’ll get some useful suggestions and ideas from it that may very well get implemented as policy someday. I was worried that we might have a group of folks who were so focused on the goal of “green” that we’d see odd policy come from it like our famously silly nuclear weapons ban in the city limits.

I’ll keep you posted. I have a few ideas of my own that I’ll discuss here.

Some folks ask me how I can be against the idea of man-made global warming but for alternate energy. Its simple really, if its more efficient, pollutes less (on any venue) has no social cost, and has a lower operating cost, I’m for it. Mostly I’m for alternate energy becuase California has essentially legislated out the ability to build any traditional forms of energy generation, such as coal, hydro, and nuclear. That leaves wind, solar, and conservation as the future of energy in California. whether you beleive in man-made global warming or not, our future energy needs have to come from some source, so we’d better get started now. If they have beneficial side effects, all the better.

One thing I’m not for is a carbon credits/trading programs. I think the whole idea is simply a cop out and designed to benefit the few that setup these programs. See why in this post.

The Missing GW Link: New images shock scientists with view of sun’s magnetic field power

Image above: Dubbed the “Swan” this X-ray image shows massive energy releases from the sun’s magnetic field, even while we are at the solar minimum in between sunspots cycles.

Last week, on the same day Al Gore was giving testimony to congress on made-made CO2 being the sole cause of Global Warming, NASA called a press conference in Washington DC to announce some spectacular new findings about the sun. Of course everybody in the press was so busy covering Gore’s big day, there was hadly any mention of what NASA announced.

What they announced was that a new X-ray imaging satellite called HINODE, launched in September 2006, has seen the first images that explain one of the biggest mysteries of the sun: why the corona is hotter than the suns surface. Magnetic reconnection seems to be the key, and these images go a long ways towards proving the theory.

But even more importantly, scientists expected to see a very quiet sun with the new x-ray imager, since we are at solar minimum right now. NASA announced we’d reached solar min on March 6th. The fact that the HINODE scientists saw huge explosive energy bursts even while the surface of the sun is nearly devoid of sunspots tells them that the suns magnetic field is still tremendously active. The suns magnetic field has been getting more active for the past hundred years, coincidentally at the same time CO2 on earth has been increasing along with the global mean temperature.

But it seems that coincidence makes CO2 a Red Herring.

The linkage between changes in the suns magnetic field and earths climate has been well documented. Global temps closely track solar cycles as measured by sunspot intensity. Sunpots are proxy indicators of changes in the suns magnetic field. The Danish Meteorological Institute first reported the correlation in a study going back centuries. Historic data reveal that whenever the sun got more active, the earth heated up, and vice versa. The best correlation was the Maunder Minimum.

But until now, we could not see energy being transported away from the sun via its magentic field, which is why many in the environmental community doubt the role of the sun in climate change. We couldn’t visualize the sun’s magnetic output. This new tool is going to open a whole new era of understanding how the sun works, and more importantly how changes on the sun link to climate changes on earth.

Of course I’m sure Mr. Gore will find a way to explain this away, since we can’t have any new science getting in the way of a “consensus” and a “debate thats over”.

Inconveniently, NASA also announced last week a new study that shows a clear sun-earth linkage in records kept by Eqyptians of the Nile river, rainfall, and auroral activity which is a direct indicator of solar activity. It seems the sun-earth climate linkage has been around way before SUV’s.

So what’s easier to believe as the cause of climate change? That a trace gas called CO2 that has increased on earth from about 280 PPM to 380 PPM in the last 100 years is the cause, or that the giant nuclear fireball a thousand times bigger than earth a mere 8 light-minutes away has been getting more active during the same period is the reason?

This week in Global Warming

Whew! It has been a busy week, with lots of things to report. So rather than
making a blog entry for each one I thought I’d condense them all into one entry
with links.

The emphasis this week seems to be on the sun, and the fact that maybe its
really the sun which has been driving climate change after all. That’s what I’ve
been saying for years, because its just unrealistic to ignore the largest and
single most important contributor to our planets energy balance and to only
focus on made-made CO2 and nothing else.

Here are some headlines and links to the reports:

Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson

comes out against Gore - cites the sun - from the National Review

Sun Blamed for Warming of Earth and Other Worlds - from LiveScience

Gore testifies on Global Warming before congress -
video from
C-SPAN - free RealPlayer required,

download here

Greenlands

Ice pack measured accurately, shown to be shrinking, but alternate cause
suspected - from NASA

NASA Finds

Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile Records - Pharoahs apparently made some
accurate records

Sun’s Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming - From a

Duke University paper and Space.com
 

Global Warming expedition to north pole called off due to extreme cold

Biggest solar storm in fify years is expected - from NASA

GWS

In the UK Channel 4 produced a new documentary titled:
The Great Global Warming Swindle This is well worth watching, especially if you’ve ever doubted the veracity of such claims, no matter which side you find yourself on.

Through interviews with prize-winning climate experts and others, this masterful documentary explains the origins of global warming alarmism; factually addresses claims of man-made global climate change; exposes the motivations of organizations, scientists and activists sounding the alarm; and explains why it’s been extremely difficult, if not downright career killing, for scientists to question global warming orthodoxy publicly.

While presenting hard facts, it is artfully done, making it watchable for the layman and scientist alike.

You can watch the video here. Its about 75 minutes. You can press the Play button and Pause button if you need a break. If the video player below doesn’t work, here is a <a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU”direct link

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Ghost Fleet

Today I had to do a round trip drive to San Jose to inspect some video transmission equipment and back to Chico all in a few hours. Coming back, I was in stop and go traffic coming across the Benicia-Martinez Bridge (which is being rebuilt)which carries I-680 across Suisun Bay and had a fair amount of time to look at the Ghost Fleet kept by the Navy there.

Officially known as the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) they have all sorts of ships there including the WWII battleship USS Iowa, merchant ships, and an aircraft carrier. There are also some WWI steam ships there too, many in a state of decay.

I was reminded of a boat trip I took down the Delta a few years ago where I got up close and personal with these ships. Some were impressive, others downright spooky. I also remeber finding the crossing of the old Sacramento Northern Electric Railway which went all the way to Chico, and up the Esplande. I’ll tell that story another time.

In the meantime here are some pictures and links of the Ghost Fleet.

Several destroyers and merchant ships, plus a tug.