From South Dakota: two more of NCDC’s “high quality” surface stations today

A Guest Post by: Russ Steele

As one of Anthony Watts’ Surfaces Station Survey volunteers, I visited the stations at Hot Springs, SD and New Castle, WY today and was not impressed with the quality of these stations. And one was recently upgraded by the National Weather Service in January.

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The Hot Springs station is located at the Vets Medical Center. According to Google Earth near the edge of the Administration parking lot. Here is the rain gage, but I could not find the MMTS. The police soon swooped down and wanted to know if I had come for treatment. I explained my mission and he suggest I contact the Firemen in a building nearby. The firemen showed me the temperature readout, but they did not have clue where the MTTS sensor was. One of the firemen helped we search for a sensor around the building. No joy. Maybe it is on the roof they suggested. I was climbing the hill behind the fire station to see if the MMTS was on the roof, when I stumbled across the MMTS sensor here. Do you see it in the middle/lower third of the photo, the white drum shape.

Find the MMTS in this picture:

 
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Now in the shade of the two Russian olive trees, just how accurate do you expect the temperatures to be? I will be posting the full results of the survey at Anthony Watts Station Survey in the next couple of days. I’ll post a notice when it is completed. When I left, the firemen were organizing a work party with axes and chain saws. It will be interesting to see if the temperature profile changes in the coming months.

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We moved on to New Castle and contacted Rogers family, as the station is in their back yard garden. Mrs Rogers is the station agent, and was quite helpful, noting this last winter an NWS Tech visited the site to automate the data collection. This new equipment is in the stainless steel box, on the crooked post, which is about to fall over. It does not say much for quality work.

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Here is another view. Did you spot the AC unit on the wall?  Now we have two heat sources in the garden. The stainless steel box, with a battery and solar charging control module and the AC Unit. Again, I will be posting a full report on the Surface Station Database in a few days.

California Wildfires: not global warming, but “business as usual” for nature

There has been the usual blame game tossed about in some news stories and letters to the editor about the fires in California being caused by “global warming”. To that I say, “bunk”. The main reason is a shift in the regional climate due to changes in the Pacific Ocean. Specifically the large La Nina we saw this year, and the shift in Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which last shifted from Cool to warm phase in 1977.

This year it shifted back to the cool phase, which also means less precipitation for California. So it is not surprising to see a change in California’s weather patterns. It has been this way before. There was a news story today citing research that showed the smoke pall we see this week has happened before, with even greater magnitude, and well before anybody knew to be afraid of Al Gore’s traveling slide-show.

From the article:

“The scientists estimated that an average 4.4 million acres burned annually in California before 1800, compared with an average 250,000 acres a year in the last five decades, 1950 through 2000.”

“The amounts of smoke particles emitted [then] are overwhelming by today’s standards.”

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Smoke is normal - for 1800s

By Chris Bowman, The Sacramento Bee
Tuesday, July 8, 2008

No one in Colfax or Auburn will breathe a whit easier knowing this, but the heavy wildfire smoke that gave their towns a carbon black eye on the Air Quality Index on Monday is historically the norm for the foothills, studies show.

Analysis of tree rings and oral histories of American Indians and Euro-American surveyors suggests that the cobalt blue skies typifying the Sierra today were more the exception up through the 19th century.

The skies likely were smoky much of the summer and fall in the mountains and other remote and parched regions of California, where fires were largely ignored.

The Chumash Indian name for what is now the Los Angeles area translates to “the valley of smoke,” according to Gordon J. MacDonald, a geophysicist and professor formerly with the University of California, San Diego.

The chronic pall of dense smoke frustrated mapmakers. As C.H. Merriam, chief of the federal Division of Biological Survey, noted in 1898:

Climate Change - Who is allowed to opine?

Guest post by John Goetz

A story appeared briefly yesterday on the CNN homepage titled Ruthless drought in West Timor puts children in crisis. There is no doubt that this particular drought - like so many throughout history - is causing a significant amount of human suffering, much of it being shouldered by children. Having children of my own, including one very young one presently occupying my home, I feel torn inside when I read about or see kids living and dying in such conditions.

Before I clicked on the article to read it in full, a “story highlight” saying the drought was due to climate change caught my eye. I immediately knew the article would not only be heart-wrenching, it would be controversial as well. Seeing that it was posted under the CNN Planet in Peril banner sealed the deal.

The CNN article was one that allowed readers to post comments, and as expected a number of them took CNN to task for claiming this particular drought was caused by Climate Change. A roughly equal number of commenters countered with charges of insensitivity and the turning of blind eyes. Part of me considered commenting that, assuming drought was not a normal condition in West Timor, then the drought was in fact due to a climate that had changed. But of course I am also aware that “Climate Change” is the rebranding of “Global Warming”, not unlike “Death Tax” is the rebranding of “Estate Tax”. The commenters obviously knew this as well, freely substituting global warming for climate change.

One comment in particular caught my eye. The writer was someone who went by the handle of “Marc”, and his response is typical of the type of ad-hominem attacks I’ve seen in a number of other related, but less widely read blogs:

Hmm, so it seems the less-than-stellar scholars on this board disparaging the existence of human caused climate change must also be card carrying members of the Flat Earth Society. How truly noble of you and your tiny-brained ideas.

Other than successfully proving your vast and utter ignorance of science, you’ve achieved little else. Of course you all know more than the dedicated scientists who’ve spent their entire careers studying the history of global climate and the overwhelming volumes of data that now conclusively point to humans as the root cause of impending global climate change.

I bet you also know more than the doctors treating your grandparents’ cancer, the physicists smashing atoms and the biochemists advancing gene therapies to prevent your child’s birth defects. The point is, climate scientists are EXPERTS in their chosen field, just as the experts I’ve listed in the prior sentence. To argue you know more than they, without a shred of contradictory evidence, is sheer lunacy on your part.

Now please get to back to your job and take the customer’s food order, your lunch break is about over.

The reason I fixated on this comment was because I had actually read the article. My guess is that nearly all of the commenters, regardless of opinion, did not read the article but instead read the headline, story highlights, and looked at the pictures. Marc included.

You see, no scientist that I can find has claimed a tie between human caused climate change and the drought in West Timor. Furthermore, CNN did not say a scientist made that claim either. Paragraph four starts with

Maria is fighting to live, wasting away in her remote village where aid officials say climate change has brought on a severe drought in recent years.

That’s right, aid officials made the claim, not scientists. Of course, I am assuming the aid officials are not climate scientists, but I think it is a reasonable assumption.

Marc’s smackdown is one I have seen time and time again. It is a popular tactic of certain posters who regularly bully their way around dotearth and a handful of other, minor blogs (I love dotearth, by the way, and visit it as much as I visit this blog and ClimateAudit). Unless one is a card-carrying board-certified climate scientist then one has no right to dispute the tie between Weather That Causes Suffering and Human Influence On Climate. The rule however, does not seem to work in reverse.

Go figure.