The Big Blast

You know, for as much as we humans think we really have control over our planet, nature tends to remind us from time to time that we are just flyspecks in the vastness of space and energy. Take for example the amount of energy we get from the sun: 174.0 PetaWatts - (10^15 watts) which is the total power received by the Earth from the Sun. Now compare that to this news item.

From Slashdot: Astronomers are still speculating as to what could have caused an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago when it completely saturated their recording equipment. From the article: ‘The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power (10^33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.

Carbon dioxide did not end the last Ice Age

A new USC study shows that Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2 rose, ruling out the greenhouse gas as driver of meltdown, says a study in Science.

Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records. “There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express. “You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.” Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found.

The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown – but was not its main cause. The study does not question the fact that CO2 plays a key role in climate. I don’t want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn’t affect climate,” Stott cautioned. “It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change.” While an increase in atmospheric CO2 and the end of the ice ages occurred at roughly the same time, scientists have debated whether CO2 caused the warming or was released later by an already warming sea.

The best estimate from other studies of when CO2 began to rise is no earlier than 18,000 years ago. Yet this study shows that the deep sea, which reflects oceanic temperature trends, started warming about 19,000 years ago. “What this means is that a lot of energy went into the ocean long before the rise in atmospheric CO2,” Stott said. But where did this energy come from” Evidence pointed southward. Water’s salinity and temperature are properties that can be used to trace its origin – and the warming deep water appeared to come from the Antarctic Ocean, the scientists wrote. This water then was transported northward over 1,000 years via well-known deep-sea currents, a conclusion supported by carbon-dating evidence. In addition, the researchers noted that deep-sea temperature increases coincided with the retreat of Antarctic sea ice, both occurring 19,000 years ago, before the northern hemisphere’s ice retreat began.

Finally, Stott and colleagues found a correlation between melting Antarctic sea ice and increased springtime solar radiation over Antarctica, suggesting this might be the energy source. As the sun pumped in heat, the warming accelerated because of sea-ice albedo feedbacks, in which retreating ice exposes ocean water that reflects less light and absorbs more heat, much like a dark T-shirt on a hot day. “The climate dynamic is much more complex than simply saying that CO2 rises and the temperature warms,” Stott said. The complexities “have to be understood in order to appreciate how the climate system has changed in the past and how it will change in the future.”

NASA GISS and “pesky sunspot correlations continue”

Above: Earth in comparison, size wise to common sunspots

The Christion Science Monitor had a detailed article recently that brought in a surprisng source - NASA GISS - an entity that seems firmly entrenched in the AGW- CO2 theory of climate change. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Researchers say they’ve found puzzling correlations between changes in the sun’s output and weather and climate patterns on Earth. These links appear to rise above the level of misinterpreted data or faulty equipment.

“There are some empirical bits of evidence that show interesting relationships we don’t fully understand,” says Drew Shindell, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

For example, he cites a 2001 study in which scientists looked at cloud cover over the United States from 1900 to 1987 and found that average cloud cover increased and decreased in step with the sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle. The most plausible cause, they said: changes in the ultraviolet (UV) light the sun delivers to the stratosphere.

Please stand by

There’s nothing wrong with your computer monitor, do not attempt to adjust the picture.

Normal blogging will resume shortly.

New Watts Up With That? blog in the works

I’m working on porting over to a new blogging platform. So there may be a delay in new content here. I’m trying out some ideas and themes, and it is looking promising.

When it’s all done, the URL will be announced. Stay tuned. Thanks to all who gave me feedback.

A question for my readers

As you may or may not know, this blog has taken off with big traffic increases as of late.

While the traffic has been an indicator of success, unfortunately, keeping that success gets to be more and more time consuming. This blog platform is hosted on Moveable Type version 3.2, which is about as close to being crippled as blog software can get. For example. it doesn’t even have a spell checker. The spam comment filter doesn’t work much anymore, and email notifications are also broken. The host has promised for months now to upgrade the platform, but so far has been unable to do so.

Working with MT in it’s current state requires a lot of extra effort compared to other software, and I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time just dealing with the limits of Moveable Type and trying to work around them. It has become quite frustrating as I want to offer better quality content and find myself unable to easily do so. I can’t even put in fully rich HTML into MT because of the way it deals with formatting. I’ve tried several add on programs to aid in blog generation, all of which have been thwarted by the MT platforms non standards compliance. Of course, some of my more snarky readers would likely suggest that standards “don’t matter” and that any problems with the content can be “adjusted”
So the question is this, should I:

1) Close this blog and give up blogging altogether on this platform

2) Move someplace else and link back to this location

3) both

I welcome any input.

How not to measure temperature, part 31

It’s been awhile since I updated this series, and its not for lack of material. But I got busy with the UCAR conference, publishing a slide show, and other things. But this morning, über volunteer Don Kostuch sent me a note on his latest survey in Titusville, FL near Cape Canaveral and KSC. I’d like to point out that Don has traveled further and surveyed more stations in the USA than anyone. He is a surveying machine. He wrote this in his email to me:

“On your scale of 1 to 5, this is an 8. Peace, Don Kostuch”

Ok in the past we have seen stations on rooftops, at sewage treatment plants, over concrete, next to air conditioners, next to diesel generators, with nearby parking, excessive nighttime humidity, and at non-standard observing heights.

Imagine a USHCN station that embraces all of that. I give you the Titusville, FL USHCN station:

Ever thorough, Don also provided photographs of the Climate Reference Network site, just 7 miles east at KSC, which demonstrates the correct environment for measurement of near surface air temperature:

Now I know there will be the usual critics who will jump in and say “This can be adjusted for!”. Ok here is your chance, show me the equations to untangle Titusville’s temperature record from microsite bias. Personally, it looks FUBAR to me.

Maybe they need a statistical analysis class

From Slashdot.org The Wall Street Journal has a sobering piece describing the research of
medical scholar John Ioannidis, who showed that in many peer-reviewed research
papers ‘most
published research findings are wrong.’ The article continues: ‘These flawed
findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from
more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data
analysis. [...] To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be
vigilant. Even so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently
replicated. Retractions, while more common, are still relatively infrequent.
Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for
years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors.’

Grilling the Data

9/29/07 UPDATE: We are still waiting on Mr. Steve Bloom to answer this question: “Why is positive bias imparted in USHCN adjustments?”

He incorrectly asserts that he has been “banned” from this blog. Not true. Once he answers this question, that answer along with whatever else he has to say after that will be posted here. Otherwise we’ll continue to wait.

What say you, Mr. Bloom?
——————————————-
Given what NASA GISS has recently done with posting a change to the data methodology on the heels of an error which was embarrasing to them, (see Raising Walhalla) I think this review of a relevant paper might bear some examination:

An Introduced Warming Bias in the USHCN Temperature Database Reference

Balling Jr., R.C. and Idso, C.D. 2002. Analysis of adjustments to the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) temperature database. Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2002GL014825.

Abstract http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2002GL014825.shtml and the full paper Download file

What was done:
The authors examined and compared trends among six different temperature databases for the coterminous United States over the period 1930-2000 and/or 1979-2000.

What was learned:
For the period 1930-2000, the RAW or unadjusted USHCN time series revealed a linear cooling of 0.05°C per decade that is statistically significant at the 0.05 level of confidence. The FILNET USHCN time series, on the other hand - which contains adjustments to the RAW dataset designed to deal with biases believed to be introduced by variations in time of observation, the changeover to the new Maximum/Minimum Temperature System (MMTS), station history (including other types of instrument adjustments) and an interpolation scheme for estimating missing data from nearby highly-correlated station records - exhibited an insignificant warming of 0.01°C per decade.

Most interestingly, the difference between the two trends (FILNET-RAW) shows “a nearly monotonic, and highly statistically significant, increase of over 0.05°C per decade.” With respect to the 1979-2000 period, the authors say that “even at this relatively short time scale, the difference between the RAW and FILNET trends is highly significant (0.0001 level of confidence).” Over both time periods, they also find that “the trends in the unadjusted temperature records [RAW] are not different from the trends of the independent satellite-based lower-tropospheric temperature record or from the trend of the balloon-based near-surface measurements.”

What it means:
In the words of the authors, the adjustments that are being made to the raw USHCN temperature data “are producing a statistically significant, but spurious, warming trend in the USHCN temperature database.” In fact, they note that “the adjustments to the RAW record result in a significant warming signal in the record that approximates the widely-publicized 0.50°C increase in global temperatures over the past century.” It would thus appear that in this particular case of “data-doctoring,” the cure is worse than the disease. In fact, it would appear that the cure IS the disease.

From the paper: Our analyses of this difference are in complete agreement with Hansen et al. [2001]
and reveal that virtually all of this difference can be traced to the adjustment for the time of observation bias. Hansen et al. [2001] and Karl et al. [1986]

The reviewer notes: “Our prescription for wellness? Withhold the host of medications being given and the patient’s fever will subside.”

Originally from CO2Science

Raising Walhalla

An odd twist has developed in the past week regarding some data sets that surfacestations.org volunteers have been using to look at individual stations. The data has changed on NASA’s GISS website with no notice whatsoever.

My first indication that something changed came from surfacestations.org volunteer Chris Dunn who wrote to me complaining that one of the sites he’d recently surveyed, Walhalla, SC had been greatly adjusted at GISS for no good reason that he could ascertain, since the site is pristine by climate monitoring standards, and has not gone through any significant changes in the past, and has been operated at the same location (by the same family) since 1916. He wondered why NASA would have to adjust the data for a “good” station. The way I view it, shouldn’t good data stand on it’s own? That was September 7th. He was using data from NASA GISS published on 8/28.

So he continued to look at the data, and the site. The on Sept 11th he noticed a change when he downloaded the data again. Something had changed, the data was different. Not only the adjusted data but the “raw” data too.

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit has a complete review at: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2077 where he traces data back to Detroit Lakes, MN the station that started this all. See my original post on this: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html

This set other people into motion looking at the NASA GISS data sets. The conclusion? NASA published new raw and adjusted data on their website with no formal or informal notice. I don’t know what to make of this, by I think perhaps this could be a breach of the Data Quality Act. At the least, it flies in the face of accepted scientific courtesy, where if you publish data sets being used by researchers worldwide, scientific courtesy would dictate that you at least place notice of such a change, otherwise there can be a domino effect for hundreds of research projects that use the data. Which would cause researchers to wonder why things don’t look the same anymore and begin searching for answers. Well that is exactly what happened here. We had a citizen trying to figure out why a climate site with good data was “adjusted”, and then the data changed right in the middle of him looking at it.

Whether this was accidental or intentional I cannot say, but it certainly does not look good coming on the heels of NASA GISS’s most recent issue of a mistake causing a revision of our temperature history on August 8th. We deserve better accounting than this when so much hinges on this data.

Let’s give NASA and Hansen the benefit of the doubt and see what they have to say about it.

UPDATE: NASA has posted today, their explanation which you can read here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ Note that this notice appears a full week after the data changed (about 9/10) and only after there was discussion of the issue on blogs such as Climate Audit over the weekend. Why would NASA GISS not announce the change at the same time the data did, particularly when the announcment of the change ammounted to one small paragraph?