2009

It’s the end of the year of course so it’s a good time to say thanks to everyone who has contributed and read here over the past 12 months.   Commuhagen failed, climategate scientists exposed for what they are, Antarctic temperature trends, sea ice understanding, and a dozen other topics covered.  Below is a collection of a small set of the posts here.  They are not my view of the best ones, but are rather a memorable set of interesting events over the past year.

NSIDC Issues Corrections to Webpage – After screwing up a timeseries plot of NSIDC data the NSIDC issued corrections to it’s main page. 12/24/08

What About Algae Biofuel Hype – a discussion of algae biofuels and the discovery that they won’t ever work to the levels claimed.

Banned Again Life is Hard Banned from Tamino permanently – how much fun is that!

Satellite Temp. Homoginization Using GISS I learned to fix the step in the satellite series using ground stations and that John Christy had done a similar correction using radiosonde data.

CRU #2 – Why we look at data and code

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I’ve spent the holiday with the family, reading books and playing with the kids. In the background I’ve been continuing the exploration of the CRU stations available from the GHCN dataset. The purpose was just to continue exploring how the global temperature series are created.

First, there are 1643 series of raw data from GHCN which have 6 digit ID’s that correspond to the 1741 stations CRU listed recently on their website. I got this number by having software search through GHCN station ID’s for a match to CRU. My number is slightly different from the station number reported at CA last week, unfortunately there should be no discrepancy. I can’t find any error in the code, but this is a post of general differences over a lot of data so if there are errors in a few stations it wont cause much trouble. This result means GHCN has data for all but 98 of the CRU stations recently published. One question is, how representative of the full GHCN dataset are these 1643 series

The R software presented below, collects data from each of the 1643 CRU stations from the GHCN rather than the “raw” data presented by CRU. In GHCN, many individual station ID’s have multiple sub-stations. The software here simply averages all the substations for a particular ID number and creates a single time series for each station number. Admittedly, this method has very little QC involved and needs improvement but it should give us some baseline understanding of the data as a whole.

The 1643 individual stations are then averaged by month to create the graph below (2 yr gauss filter). Please ignore the trend lines in the following graphs as they have little meaning and were left there for other plots.

Figure 1 CRU Stations - Data from GHCN

The monthly per year station count is important.

Globalis Warminitis

Globalis Warmanitis is a serious disease infecting hundreds of millions. The symptoms start slowly, even one or two of the early warning signs are cause for concern. If you have a family member or friend experiencing these symptoms, act quickly and get professional medical attention. They could be the result of early onset Globalis Warmanitis. Symptoms should be treated as an emergency, as the progress of the disease is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Serious end stage physical symptoms have been reported, including; dizzyness, blurred vision, urge to paint protest signs, hysteria, hot flashes, confusion, dementia, spontaneous nudity (leading to frostbite) and eventually psychosis.

If you have any of these early warning symptoms, please contact The Air Vent immediately for guidance. All inquiries are kept 100 % public, guidance will be handled in a tough love manner by Dr. Id – B.S….M.D.

End stage symptoms include:

1. Belief in the unbiased truth of government funded science.

Reexamining The Anthropogenic Global Warming Issue

A guest post from Dr. Weinstein,

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Leonard Weinstein, ScD

December 26,2009

The following is an effort to reduce the AGW issue to a minimum number of necessary claims to support or reject. When I read of “thousands of supporting papers” on the issue, I would like to hear what these papers show that refutes the following.

Warming Explained

An improved model of global warming by Glen Raphael

Merry Christmas

The snow still falls…

Merry Christmas everyone.

CRU Howto

CRU data is available from this page.

I’ve made some progress finally with Perl. It’s always a pain learning a new language and Perl is no different. I’m going to document here how to get the original version of CRU running so anyone can do it.

First, you need an interpreter for perl. This is the code which understands perl commands and runs them. After a bit of searching, I chose Strawberry Perl, it’s free so I downloaded and installed it. Perl runs from the command line interface which is far too crude for my liking. I found a couple of debuggers and settled on Perl Express. This allows a gui with breakpoints to get things running.

CRU Releases (Some) Data

My next partially completed Siberia post will have to wait.

This is the beginning of the result of climategate. We owe a big debt to those who released the emails, and an even bigger debt to Steve McIntyre for his never ending efforts to force the revelation of some of this information. Now we can begin to understand the premier temperature dataset in climatology. Does this mean it’s done — nope. This is only the beginning, CA has a post describing the release of more metadata (data about data) and actual records for CRU than ever before.

Another Brick

Roger Pielke Sr. with a very interesting post on glacier melt in the Himalayas.

Global Warming And Glacier Melt-Down Debate: A Tempest In A Teapot?” – A Guest Weblog By Madhav L Khandekar

It reminds me of Dr. Morner’s opinion of sea level rise. He happens to mention Kilimanjaro.

Hide the Decline Ringtones

Every time I hear it, it brings Christmas cheer to my heart.

http://www.brinked.com/jeffid-u-261681.html

The second ringtone is better.

Siberia

No politics here. Personally, I’m so sick of politics and climategate, you wouldn’t believe it. I like numbers, science and math, not this constant idiocy. There is more of it to come though. People don’t realize, just how much shit you can pack into several thousand emails. – A thousand by topic, several by individual.

This post is the beginning of an investigation into the Siberian temperature data. Phil Jones personally took the time to kill two Siberia papers about CRU and the discrepency between thermometers and the primary ‘temperature’ dataset in publication. The CRU data may be exactly right, but the zeal with which these papers were killed, gives us a clue that there may be a problem. I’ve looked no further ahead than demonstrated here, so be warned we may prove Dr. Jones right.

First, this is the region in quesiton.

The Siberian station locations from the GHCN network are plotted below. These stations represent a small subgroup of the continent (and the planet). The region is from 50-65 latitude and 100-120 longitude as defined by Lars Kamél in his criticism of CRUtem. The paper was apparently blocked from publication through intense efforts by Phil Climategate Jones and only now the paper is presented at CA.

Common Sense and Prosecutor’s Fallacy(s)

Guest post by John Pittman.  It was supposed to go up last Friday, but in my haste to buy everything on Earth for Christmas, I didn’t have time to do the editing and it slipped my mind this weekend when so much Copenhagen news happened (News always happens on the weekend).  Anyway, John responds to Mann’s WP article in the first link below.  Take a few moments to read the comments to Mann’s article, Mann is not terribly popular with the internet public.

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In this Washington Post Article, Dr. Mann makes a demonstrably weak effort to continue the meme that the scandal from the alleged email leak do not matter. There are several reasons why this response is weak. The first argument:

The State of Climate Science – Fox Special

Fox News Hour special on climate science. Featuring Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Pat Michaels, Bjorn Lomborg and others. Fox wasn’t able to get too many believers, but they did get Gerry North who happens to simply lie his butt off to the reporters in support of the AGW cause. I’ve used that L word pretty often lately here, but in my opinion there is no other word for it. North chaired the NAS panel which reviewed the validity of Mann’s hockey stick after Wegman reported his conclusions. The panel ended up trying to find a balance between the reality that it’s crap and the need for it to exist.

Anyway, we’re used to the advocacy angle here, Fox did a nice job of the special. Steve and Ross were particularly good – of course I’ve spent the last year reading up on their work and doing my own, so I might be biased 😀

It’s good to see the climate scientists on the hot seat for a while. We do have an opportunity to see some sanity break out in the near future but billion dollar industries don’t change easily.

Douglass and Christy on Climategate

This may be the best illustration of the conspiracy (presented to date) to block and minimize papers which don’t support the consensus on the internet. It’s written by Douglass and Christy and puts a long string of the Climategate emails into context. The papers in question are absolutely central to the climate change debate, as they call into question the validity of climate models.

I asked American Thinker for permission to repost this article here and was unfortunately told to excerpt no more than 200 words. The article cannot be summarized in that length, it is technical and requires careful reading. However, it is a must read for everyone, but in particular for the technical CA regulars who know the details in the Santer debate.

Climategate, in context by the victims of those in power, has a whole different flavor – and the revelations will be continuing for some time yet.

h/t Reader Stan

Link to American Thinker is here.

On Conspiracy and Fake Solutions

Faith, the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the human enterprise.

It’s hundred year mission, to predict new strife and constrain civilization;

To boldly hold, such that no man can expand before…..

Bah waaah da da da da daaaaaah

I (and actually we) have often been accused of promoting conspiracy theories in climate science. It’s meant to be an automatic disqualifier of tAV opinions, which from the large number of us who gather here, are shared in some part by much of the public.

First, to clear the air, conspiracies exist everywhere, so at least I’m guilty as charged. People collude though, for a common goal as part of our normal social structure. We are stronger in groups than individually – a basic fact which has led us to organize most everything we human demons do. When our views align, we work together toward our goal, often with unspoken intent to demonstrate what we believe is right. If you don’t agree with this basic point, consider that political parties are a conspiracy by definition, as are businesses, militaries, police forces, religions etc. Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong with most conspiracies.

The nice thing about businesses conspiracies is that you always know the motive- Money! You already know what the other guy wants to do before you begin negotiation. You also know that if it doesn’t work out for either one of you, the relationship won’t last. What you don’t know is, whether the other party gives a crap whether you make a dime or survive as a company at all. That’s where we get into gray areas.