Chris Knight
-
Posts
889 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
1
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Gallery
Events
Learn About Weather and Meteorology
Community guides
Posts posted by Chris Knight
-
-
How do you know?
How do I know what?
-
The point I am trying to make is that, if you use anomalies to calculate the trend, it does not matter if you remove a sub-sample which has a different mean absolute temperature than the whole sample.
Even if the discontinued stations had a mean absolute temperature of -100 degrees it would not have any impact on the anomaly trend.
It's misguiding to look at absolute temperatures to analyse trends.
The real question is (and I have only briefly alluded to it) if the discontinued stations have a different trend. If their trend is much lower than the global trend, than removing them will make the global trend larger than it actually is and vice versa. The graph and spreadsheet you linked make no attempt to look at that aspect.
edit:
Actually, I just realised that my example is not really well chosen. I should have used data where the cold station has the same trend as the warm stations. The point is still valid though.
Looking at anomalies alone makes any discontinuity between prior and post-change values invisible, as you neatly showed. The new trend can only follow that of the post-change stations, and any prior trend is not only eliminated, but lost back in time depending on the period of smoothing used to distinguish the trend-line from the noise. At the end of a time series we cannot know the actual trend, until the time series has been further extended.
Out of interest: do you trust what you see on this site? Do you agree with his conclusions? Do you regard his method as scientific?
D.
Terry Pratchett puts my view of "science" much better than I can in this excerpt from "The Hogfather" where Death (who always speaks in Capitalised text) is explaining the concept of "Lies told to children" to his granddaughter, Susan.
"Ah," said Susan dully. "Trickery with words. I would have thought you'd have been more literal-minded than that."
I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED. TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying that humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little ---"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET --- Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME ... RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point ---"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Science is also a large lie. It cannot be done by data mining, model building, or controlled by schools of thought. Laws of nature are manmade, and subject to revision, and in the main are special cases restricted to our limited experience of the cosmos. The atom is belied by sub-atomic particles.
Concepts such as "mean global temperature", "sea level", "ocean heat content" can not be measured, any more than the "human genome" can be absolutely sequenced. They are nonetheless useful and probably necessary in aiding our understanding, as are imaginary numbers in mathematics.
Without the discipline of mathematics, concepts can be misrepresented and used to show almost any desired result. I may differ in my genome from the standard human model by perhaps 25468 single nucleotide polymorphisms, you have maybe 37208. You could say that you are more highly evolved, I could say I am more human...
Climate science is pretty much at the stage where folks are arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's good fun, but if it is to be science, the ground rules need to be defined. It's difficult to see where to start for a young science, where many different disciplines come together, with a basis of incomplete, uncertain, and possibly manipulated (however honestly done) data, much of which was never originally collected to be used for this purpose. Give it another fifty years of consistent data collection, and we may be able to judge if climatology is a valid scientific pursuit, or just a political tool that failed to generate consistent future predictions.
Merry Hogwatch D.
-
Maybe. How simple does it have to be? I was expecting to be chided for being overly simplistic.
Say you are looking at three stations to calculate your trend. A cold one (e.g. Moscow) and two warm ones, say Melbourne and Jakarta.
For all (except Moscow) you have four years of measurements: in 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1990. For Moscow you only have 1987 to 1989.
Melbourne: T = 10, 11, 12, 11
Jakarta: T = 11, 9, 10, 10
Moscow: T = 5, 6, 4, --
For each year you calculate the global average and get the following temperature series:
Tglob = (10+11+5) / 3 , (11+9+6) / 3, (12+10+4) / 3, (11 + 10)/2 = 8.66, 8.66, 8.66, 10.5
And voila, your temperature surges upwards just because Moscow stopped reporting in 1990.
But if you use anomlies this is no longer a problem.
We use 1988-1989 as a reference period and get the following reference values for each station:
Melbourne: (11+12)/2 = 11.5
Jakarta: (9+10)/2 = 9.5
Moscow: (6+ 4)/2 = 5
With this you get the temperature anomalies for each stations:
Melbourne: 10 - 11.5, 11 - 11.5, 12 - 11.5, 11-11.5 = -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, -0.5
Jakarta: 11 - 9.5, 9 -9.5, 10-9.5, 10-9.5 = 1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 0.5
Moscow 5-5, 6-5, 4-5 = 0, 1, -1
And now you build your global average:
Tano = (-1.5 + 1.5 + 0)/3, ..., (-0.5 + 0.5) / 2 = 0,0,0,0
So the fact that the cold station dropped out in 1990 has no effect on your global temperature trend. Nada.
What might become an issue is that your global average does not make sense any more if the coverage is not good enough. But this is dealt with using other techniques.
If the temperature trend was based on absolute temperatures instead of anomalies, then yes it would look like the global average temperature jumped upwards around 1990; simply because the stations that stopped reporting where colder than the average. I am not saying that records where deleted. The world "lost" a lot of stations - why I don't know, but it's not hard to imagine and probably easy to find out. Further, a lot of these stations where in the former UDSSR and presumeably colder than average, as you can see on your chart (note that I take this chart at face value, even though I consider the source (i.e. Joe D'Aleo) untrustworthy . But it's a well known fact that the number of stations decreased significantly in the 90's and the temperature increase is not implausible).
My point it that precisely for this reason people look at anomalies to do trend analysis.
D.
Many thanks to Diessoli for an extremely clear explanation of why a single missing continuous record should not affect the anomaly trend.
The original idea for the graph was D'Aleo, but In this case, it was taken from McKitrick, as the links I posted above show.
The GHCN data show that pre and post 1990 temperature data are not comparing like for like, as about two thirds of the pre-1990 stations were discontinued in the network, probably for extremely good reasons.
However the effect is for the more recent station sample to show a globally sampled land surface mean of a degree and a half more than the pre-1990 mean of 10 degrees C for up to 15,000 stations.
The lost stations (a majority) therefore had a mean of around 8.6 degrees. (This varies depending how the means were calculated.)
A subset of 5,000 stations with mean temperatures of 11.5 degrees generally must come from different climate regions than a subset of 10,000 whose mean was three degrees lower.
The usual cited global mean temperature for 1951-80 is 14.0 +/- 0.7 deg C, so assuming some degree of global warming in the last 30 years, the land-based stations may still be oversampling cold regions, or is the mean sea surface temperature higher than mean land surface temperatures?
It is difficult to find separate definitive global land and sea estimates. Roy Spencer's AMSU-A site says 21deg C or thereabouts for sea surface temperatures - is that so?
The supposed problem due to Siberian station loss was that an already an area of sparse coverage was made even sparser, and that to continue the record for that region, interpolation is used to fill in missing data from surrounding gridded data, apparently for the CRU record and an IPCC AR4 report. If the stations now used to supply that data are interpolated from the remaining sites that show the increased warming (with a possible +1 degree or more in the D'Aleo/McKitric GHCN graph), because use of cooler stations have been discontinued, the gridded homogenised adjusted data now has a considerable recent warm bias since the number of stations has been reduced.
In Siberia, the recent warming occurs in the winter, rather than the summer, either due to human observation bias (readings missed, or misreported due to extremely unfavourable weather!), or urban heating effects, or both.
As the station data from the MetO become available, sites like appinsys.com are presenting plots of CRU and GHNC data, with their own commentary, such as this on coverage and this on the Siberian data.
As one would expect from the subject matter, the site does not lean to the warm side.
-
I don't know. But if I would care enough, I would just ask them.
You've got a nice way of putting things.
The step change did not happen because suddenly the remaining stations reported higher temperatures, but because predominantly cold stations where removed from the sample.
The anomaly is calculated for each grid point individually, thus the station temperatures are normalized before the global mean anomaly series is calculated. This removes the step change.
The only problem you might have is that certain areas are no longer properly represented (but that is a different matter).
Take a simple example: 3 stations (one cold two warm) with 4 measurements, the cold one dropping out at the end; the reference period is t = 2 - 3:
1) 5, 6, 4, - => 5 (ref. val.)
2) 10, 11, 12, 11 => 11.5
3) 11, 9, 10, 10 => 9.5
--------------------
if you simply take the absolute temperatures and average them, you get (believe it or not, I did not choose the values such that the averages are constant):
8.66, 8.66, 8.66, 10.5
A significant step up.
But if you use the anomalies you get:
1) 0, 1, -1, -
2) -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, -0.5
3) 1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 0.5
--------------------------
0, 0, 0, 0
That's of course not the exact method used, but it's the same principle.
Basically what happens in the case of the anomalies is that at each point time you subtract the mean of the reference temperatures for the stations available at that time.
D.
"nice": Yes, I try to say things simply. Could you simplify the stuff above?
Does it mean things seem warmer because people deleted some of the colder records?
-
Only caught the last half but was very interested to hear about the thriving Norse community on Greenland. So many tales have been told about how it was a subsistence lifestyle, how the Norse were sold a story far from the truth to get them there, Greenland wasn't really green etc. Well, not according to this program, Greenland was green, hospitable and warm until The Little Ice Age kicked in.
The Norse lifestyle required firewood. Like the Easter Islanders. Lack of firewood doomed them both after a few centuries.
-
Where they are allowed to, they make the raw data available for download.
If you say so, but where do they indicate which is "raw data" and which is tampered with "adjusted"? If you are in the know, can you help?
BTW. that the data was not available for download for everybody before, does not mean that is was not available for "independent researchers".
Sure it was available, I downloaded cruwrlda2.zip and reported it here
That's why trend analysis is done with the temperature anomaly. Changes like these will then have no impact.
BS! If the adjustments are added to the record since the anomaly reference period, the anomalies are inflated by the degree of adjustment. Also works backwards in time on the trendline.
Oh come on. Some Russian Economic Think-Tank writes a report which gets translated and echoed around blogs is the "Russian side of the story"?
D.
The Russians are not the only ones annoyed by the misrepresentations - Australians, New Zealanders, and pretty soon the rest of the English-speaking world when the US lawyers get their teeth into the climate exaggeration money machine. Boy, do they suck dry!
-
I take the Met Office seriously, I take NSIDC seriously. The two blogs were written by named scientists, you can (as you have done so far) just dismiss them but they simply report what is going on. They are serious reports of the science, please read them. Dr Masters is widely respected, the other proff is a messenger, he's reporting on the AGU and I though that interesting. Neither is (if you've read them you'll know this) advocating a position but reporting. beside, what have you posted that we might discuss? Not a thing...
Are you a school teacher? You have the gall to say that having not posted an iota of evidence yourself???
No need to play games with my word, Chris.
There is plenty in the literature, the IPCC, NSIDC, The Met Office that is science and not speculation. Continually dismissing everything in the way you have doesn't help, it just looks like a refusal to engage in debate.
That's all you are doing Dev, word games. Come on, lets have a sensible discussion.
There is nothing in the scientific literature that makes a strong case for future Arctic summer conditions. Not by Mark Serreze or David Barber, or any other Cryosphere experts. Many isolated sound bites, which have been exaggerated from "may" to "will" with regard to open water at the pole, were made in the summer of 2008, before the ice failed to match the record loss of 2007.
All that can be said by such experts is that if the models are right, then it will happen, but the question I asked several posts back was:
"If an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean ever were to happen in the next 30 years, what exactly would that mean?"
and then I suggested:
"A few days around the autumn equinox with next to no ice floating around the north pole."
What would you expect?
Hang on I know the answer, Dev: A knock-down argument, no discussion.
We know your views on the various climate agencies that can do no wrong. That is not the point.
The point is that an "ice-free Arctic" would be a very brief phenomenon, not much different to the September of 2 years ago, and of no real lasting consequence. The Arctic winter radiation balance makes that clear.
Any evidence to the contrary?
Sorry, Dev, I missed this on first reading of your links.
I know how you feel
-
Used to be at the bottom of each page on the forum, you could see who was likely to be reading what you were about to diss them with. Will that sneak preview up the kilt (as it were) of the membership be available in the future or has it gone the way of the CRU historic station data?
-
Chris, that's you second (or is it third) dismissive reply to science I've posted. I obviously disagree with you, as would most scientists in the field. But, beyond suggesting you read the literature I don't think this is going anywhere...
Dev, I have just re-read this post from the beginning. You link to two blogs only - where's the science in that? Had I linked to the Air Vent, or Junk Science - would you have taken that as serious evidence?
Now argue your point properly, or admit that there is no point in speculating about a mythological concept like an "Ice-free Arctic", at least in the near future. I said "move along" previously - you now state that this is not "going anywhere...". We agree!
-
No objections from me; a friendly, chatty thread would be a grand addition.
I like Ice. It is a distraction from the soft, warm fluffy things that we often think of as comfortable. It is hard enough to tear through reinforced steel hulls of ocean-bound passenger liners and to remodel river valleys into dramatic fjords and create emphasised vertiginal faces on mountain peaks, with otherwise impossibly high waterfalls. Good old Slartibartfast, eh?
Strong drinks that otherwise would have you red-faced and coughing on the first sip become smooth and friendly under its influence.
My 3-y-old Siberian Husky, Tikaani (that's his picture up on the left) loves ice and snow, and this morning was doing his own version of "Snow Angels" - sadly I didn't take my camera. He lies on his side, uses his legs to rotate his body in about a 270 degree arc and bites and swallows the snow as he goes round. Does not look much like an "Angel" when he gets up, but he is only three. At least the snow does not stick to him. On the other hand, he loves children, and because there were many who had the day off today, he didn't go hungry today - no, seriously, he only ate enough to satisfy his appetite, and no children. They were lining up to make him "sit", "give me a paw", "give me your other paw" - I never taught him any of these things - he was a rescue.
Anyway, I have to go. The fridge is empty and the off-licence beckons. Nice to have the opportunity to chat tho!
-
No, it hasn't happened. However, if you read the links I posted earlier (along with the digested science via the IPCC - no jibes please) you'll know there is good evidence it might happen. To say 'move along nothing to see' is rather dismissive of that vast body of evidence.
Sorry there is no "good evidence" that any things "might happen" - it is just plain idle (digested or otherwise) speculation - unless there is scientific, or even historical evidence that says otherwise.
-
The MetO have released part of the data as I mentioned here, and it is adjusted, homogenised data, and not the raw data that would meaningfully allow independent researchers to discover whether any adjustments or homogenizations have coloured the CRU temperature record that agrees with the other major long-term global temperature records (this is the reason given by CRU and UEA apologists that we should trust the data that has been generated by the CRU - that it agrees with NASA GISS and NOAA temperature records - so it should, they use essentially the same raw data, just slightly different adjustment and homogenisation algorithms, the American agencies are literally keeping up with the Joneses
). Here is an interesting graph:
It shows how the unadjusted temperature rocketed in 1990 and beyond when loads of stations worldwide were discontinued from the network, many from the former Soviet bloc countries.
The data sources and implications are discussed here, with other links
This whole "Global warming" thing is a matter of trust, and the agencies that control the data are not trustworthy IMO.
If the GHCN had up to 15,000 stations in 1970, why did the UK's premier climate research centre only hold data from about 5,000 historical stations. I see yet another smokescreen.
-
Chris, I find that a really amazing thing to say. It's like say if we had a winter with a week of lying snow 2 ft deep in London and snow on the ground for 90 days (something in other words unprecedented in thousands of years) we should be unmoved by that and not discuss it? Seriously, you really think something like either of those events isn't worth discussing in a climate forum?
It hasn't happened. It won't. Move along, nothing to see here.
Unless there is scientific evidence to support a different view, of course?
-
If an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean ever were to happen in the next 30 years, what exactly would that mean?
A few days around the autumn equinox with next to no ice floating around the north pole.
Then the usual rapid freeze to roughly the same winter ice extent as recent historical extents.
Not weeks of cruise liners, oil tankers, and heavily laden container ships emitting dieselly exhausts on their dash from Atlantic to Pacific ports and back. Not even September ski breaks on the slopes of Northern Greenland.
Why should this be? We need only to look at what happens every October, as the sun sinks below the horizon at the north pole. It gets very cold.
I would suggest we move along: there is very little of interest in this area of discussion.
-
This debate will be over once the oil runs out
And yes.....it will happen in most peoples' lifetimes.
sorry, snowball fight calls!
-
Not belief but science. The ones with the belief are those who think science can be wished away.
The science says that according to this theory this ... should happen. This ... has not happened. The science may be correct - the theory has not been fully vindicated. Perhaps other factors have not been taken into account? The belief has certainly been shattered!
-
If this thread is not to go OT, then fanciful speculation about warming due to atmospheric changes should be avoided. The causes for the reduction in (summertime, Arctic) sea ice are not known, expected, predictable or quantifiable (so far), and any link to atmospheric carbon dioxide changes are not demonstrable. We do know how the atmospheric carbon dioxide trends have been changing in a regular fashion for the last half century, but the response of the global or local temperatures have neither been dependent on those figures, predictable nor regular. Those with beliefs that properties of increased quantities of carbon dioxide have definite real-world effects, should at least wait until those effects can be reliably demonstrated in the real world, before casting their self-ordained superior prescience on the rest of humanity.
-
I'm amazed at the level of dislike people show for both TB and GB. The only way I can understand it is that I, um, didn't have a awful lot of time for Mrs T....
Still, just goes to show, I suppose, that once we change govt AGW will simply disappear (no, not really, science isn't like that).
My daughter has just got me to re-read Orwell's "Nineteen-Eighty-Four". With my refreshed understanding of Newspeak and DOUBLETHINK, I can easily understand all the viewpoints in Para 1.
In Para 2, science, as much as, if not more than history, is open to revisionism (and of course it is this current revisionism that the "Deniers" attack and deplore, and the "Warmists" defend so fervently). How much could our government save if they just rolled several departments into a "Ministry of Truth"?
Yes, Dev, AGW may simply disappear, both in fact, and out of the public imagination, as soon as there are new political and economic windmills to joust at. It's an easy thing to do - officially rewrite the climate record for the past 1000 years, and blame the alarmism of the early 21st century on some misguided academic zealots. The basic tools are already in the public domain.
If it proves impossible (for Governments) to make money out of carbon credits, without criminals creaming off the money before any real benefits have been traded (as seems to have already happened), there is no point in actually pretending to control emissions any more.
Better to use the tried and tested mix of aerosols and black carbon to counteract the increasing greenhouse effect and cool us down - at least that's what we may be told.
-
Perhaps everyone was so fascinated by the happenings in Copenhagen they missed the release of the data here
There is a list of questions and answers on the page, some of which I have copied below:
Questions and answers about the data setsPlease select a question to open or close the answer.
1. Are the data that you are providing the “value-added” or the “underlying” data?
The data that we are providing is the database used to produce the global temperature series. Some of these data are the original underlying observations and some are observations adjusted to account for non climatic influences, for example changes in observations methods.
Back to top
2. What about the underlying data?
Underlying data are held by the national meterological services and other data providers and such data have in many cases been released for research purposes under specific licences that govern their usage and distribution.
Back to top
3. Why is there no comprehensive copy of the underlying data?
The data set of temperatures back to 1850 was largely compiled in the 1980s when it was technically difficult and expensive to keep multiple copies of the database.
Back to top
4. How can you be sure that the global temperature record is accurate?
The methodology is peer reviewed. There are three independent sets of global temperature that all clearly show the rise in global temperatures over the last 150 years. Also we can observe today that other aspects of climate are changing including reductions in Arctic seaice and glacier volume, and changes in phenological records, for example the dates on which leaves, flowers and migratory birds appear.
Back to top
5. Why have you not previously shared the HadCRUT data?
We have always provided the gridded HadCRUT product freely and without restriction for research usage.
Back to top
6. What about the underpinning observations on which the gridbox averages are based ?
The Met Office is not in a position to release that portion of the underpinning land station data for which we have yet to gain permission from the ultimate rights holders.
The data are owned by other countries and institutions and any such release would need to be agreed with these data providers. We are in the process of seeking this agreement from the owners of the underpinning data, so that we will be hopefully in a position to release more of the data in the future. The underpinning ocean data component of HadCRUT is available publicly at icoads.noaa.gov.
Back to top
7. Why are you releasing a subset of the data now?
We can only release data from NMSs when we have permission from them to do so. In the meantime we are releasing data from a network of stations designated by the World Meteorological Organization for climate monitoring together with any additional data for which we have permission to release.
We plan to release as much of the remaining data as possible in stages following issuance of letters to other NMSs requesting permission to publish.
Back to top
8. Why these stations?
The choice of network is designated by the World Meteorological Organization for monitoring global, hemispheric and regional climate and variability.
To compile the list of stations we have released we have taken the WMO list of GCOS Surface Network stations and Baseline Climate Reference Network stations, cross-matched it and released the unambiguous matches.
Back to top
9. Will releasing a subset skew the principal findings?
10. Does this subset constitute a new data set?
This is not a new data set. Data sets are only released when they have gone through the proper process of scientific review.
It is important that due scientific process is followed if we are to have confidence in our findings. If we were proposing this as a new data set then we would have submitted it for peer review and only released it once accepted. The three principal data sets have all undergone this process and therefore retain primacy.
Back to top
11. Why aren’t all the underpinning land station records available for free?
Making observations costs substantial amounts of money and requires a degree of technical expertise and training to meet internationally agreed standards prescribed by the World Meteorological Organization. Furthermore, these data, even at a monthly mean resolution, can have significant economic value to the rights holders. In many parts of the world, including the UK, national meteorological services (NMSs) are expected to act as commercial entities, returning at least to the taxpayer. Removing potential revenue streams could substantially harm many such organisations. We therefore cannot guarantee that all NMSs will permit release of station-level data.
Back to top
12. When will you release more?
As soon as we have all permissions in place we will release the remaining station records — around 5,000 in total — that make up the full land temperature record. We are dependent on international approvals to enable this final step and cannot guarantee that we will get permission from all data owners.
Back to top
13. How have you dealt with the FOI requests regarding releasing the underpinning global temperature data?
We take our responsibilities under the Freedom of Information Act very seriously and have, in all cases, handled and responded to requests in accordance with its obligations under the legislation.
We have been consistent in our responses in stating that the Met Office is not in a position to release the underpinning land station data as we do not have the authority to do so as the data are owned by other countries and any such release would need to be agreed with data providers. We are in the process of seeking this agreement from the owners of the underpinning data, so that we will be hopefully in a position to release the data in the future.
Back to top
14. What have you done to gain permissions?
We have facilitated a letter from the Climatic Research Unit to all rights holders requesting permission to publish the underlying station data. We are monitoring responses and actively pursuing the rights holders for a decision through our international relations team.
Back to top
15. Who is ultimately responsible for the land data record?
The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has the responsibility for the land climate data portion of HadCRUT.
Back to top
16. Why is this responsibility with the UEA/CRU and not the Met Office Hadley Centre?
During the 1980s the UEA/CRU was funded, primarily by the United States ‘Department of Energy’, to collate a global land temperature record. Since then they have undertaken several major updates to the record increasing station density and time series completeness. This is why the UEA/CRU owns the primary IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) for the land climate records.
Back to top
17. So does the Met Office Hadley Centre have any involvement with the land climate data?
Since 2002 the Met Office Hadley Centre has formally assisted UEA/CRU by providing quality control and real-time updates for the land climate data set. The Met Office Hadley Centre is entirely responsible for the global sea-surface temperature component of the global mean temperature and also responsible for merging these series to create the HadCRUT product.
...
This clearly was not what some had hoped for - the raw station records - but a value-added, adjusted, and selected subset of the CRUTEM record.
It does beg the question, if it is the CRU's adjusted dataset, and not raw station data, what is the problem about releasing it in it's entirety?
Julia Slingo needs support: This email was circulating the UK universities earlier this week:
From: Gilbert, Pip On Behalf Of Slingo, Julia (Chief Scientist)Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 10:33 AM
To: Climate_Research; Met R&D all staff
Subject: URGENT: Supporting the science
Importance: High
Dear All,
As you are very aware, the science of climate change is under an
unprecedented attack and I know that many of you feel that we, as the
science community in the UK, should try to make our voice heard too. We
are therefore seeking a groundswell of support for a simple statement
that we, the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the
science base that underpins the evidence for global warming. That
evidence has been arrived at through decades of painstaking and
meticulous research by many scientists across the world, who adhere to
the highest levels of integrity and honesty, the hallmarks of true
scientific endeavour. We come together now to defend our profession
against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of
climate change.
I know this is very short notice but we would like to gather a list of
names from you and your scientific colleagues who support this move. We
would like to collect these names over the weekend and on Monday so that
a short letter, basically saying the above, can be released to the press
on your behalf on Tuesday, at the latest. If we can reach 100 signatures
or more from the UK academic community that would be a fantastic
response. Please can I request your help by asking you to not only
respond yourself, but also to send this on to scientific colleagues as a
matter of urgency.
The Met Office is able to provide help to pull these names together and
if you wish to support this statement then please send an email to:
julia.slingo@metoffice.gov.uk with ‘Yes’ in the Subject.
Many thanks,
Julia Slingo and John Hirst
Julia Slingo Chief Scientist
Met Office FitzRoy Road Exeter EX1 3PB United Kingdom
Why doesn't everyone here email her with ‘Yes’ in the Subject?
-
I think the aviators figured this out some time ago. At Heathrow, for instance, if the wind is easterly, the normal landing and take-off flight paths are reversed, so planes take off into the wind (increasing their effective airspeed and lift at take off, saving considerable amounts of fuel).
-
-
Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.
Professor Jones said: "What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible. After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director's role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support."
Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton said: "I have accepted Professor Jones's offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations.
“We will announce details of the Independent Review, including its terms of reference, timescale and the chair, within days. I am delighted that Professor Peter Liss, FRS, CBE, will become acting director.”
-
Now I've got the song going through my mind again.......hide the decline, hide the decline, hide the decline, hide the decline......
Harry Plotter and the Sunny Spells
Synopsis
Harry Plotter's new girlfriend - Heidi De Klein - is in trouble having been captured by the Demented Dendrochronologists, and is being tortured on the rack* in the Ministry of Meteorology "to set the record straight"!
Having joined an underground group led by Mad-Mouth Monkton, Harry and his pals plot to hack their way into the Ministry to return De Klein to HadCruts.
Unfortunately, not only Heidi is released, and the Sunny Spells get out and wreak havoc with the climate, causing severe global warming. All of the professors have to travel to the ends of the earth, but mostly Hawaii, Bali and the Maldives, in order to recapture the spells and restore the balance to the energy budget. The Measley twins, Steve and Ross, audit the whole fiasco, but it doesn't make them any richer than their previous schemes.
*A server rack shared by the "Metly CRU" for email, spells and tricks. Sunny Spells are rare, but very popular.
-
I'm sure that's what Singer meant, Chris. Next time I'm unable to move on a sweltering day, I must remember that my high perspiration levels indicate I am, in fact, rapidly cooling. :lol:
I am not sure that it's what Singer meant, Osm, but it is a valid point that our evolved biology uses the evaporation of water (sweat) on our skin surface as an effective means of removing bodily heat, rather than emitting greenhouse gases from our pores to radiate away excess heat. After all, our biochemistry could (and possibly does) create extremely effective greenhouse molecules, orders of magnitude better than methane, for example.
It would seem strange if our planet did not use the same physical process to lose the majority of heat from our moist land surfaces and oceans.
). 
Noctilucent Clouds
in Space, Science & nature
Posted
Just taken the Missus out to see them. The best since last year, but sadly no charged battery in camera :lol:
Wait a minute, I could charge it before dawn begins to break in an hour or so... hold this thread, and be prepared for disappointment, and bags under the eyes.