Chris Knight
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Posts posted by Chris Knight
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Unfortunately you need to look at wider geographical influences as well as the immediate surroundings .
The Met Office Redhill station was, indeed, 'based on the aerodrome' - see here http://www.redhillaerodrome.com/pages/weather.asp (the MetOffice data link they give of course no longer works). But your qualified approval for its situation is inappropriate, because it was not its immediate location that was the problem.
It is the situation of much of the whole area of Reigate/Redhill/Nutfield that is problematic for representative temperature measurement. A high part (200m+) of the North Downs lies nearby to the north. The cold air flows down these high hills, and tends to pool in the vicinity because of further, lower folds of the Downs to the south. At least that's how I read the geography, and how I explain a widely-believed phenomenon. For many years I had cousins in Reigate who often spoke of how much colder it was than areas not very far away, as did my niece who lived and worked in Redhill more recently. It is quite commonly spoken of in this way, and the frequency with which it used to record the date's lowest minimum would tend to support this.
Ossie
PS This is not intended to have anything to do with any discussion about trends, and possible inconsistencies in the long-term data: it is merely an observation, possibly interesting, on the nature of the site, in the spirit of AFT's purpose in starting the thread.
And indeed, this shows the futility of attempting to produce a time-series measure such as "Global temperature anomalies" based on land based weather station temperature measurements, however individually accurate or unbiassed.
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Hi David.
I do have a fundamental problem regarding your claim, that moving the jet-stream will alter the earth's overall 'heat balance':
From what I learned of thermodynamics at Uni, a heat balance is merely energy in-energy out? So, as you can imagine, I readily accept Solar/Milankovitch Cycles as drivers of Climate Change. But, as far as the moon pulling lumps of air north-and-south is concerned, I'll need something more than a loose correlation.
Sorry to sound picky, David. It's just the way I am.
When I was young, I was taught to eat soup by taking the soup at the edge of the bowl, rather than at the centre - it was cooler, and the soup could be eaten faster, though remaining warm. If the spoon was just used to take soup from the centre of the bowl, there was a risk of burning your mouth or else blowing over the spoon, which was impolite, and having the dregs of the soup cold.
Same with a south-north position for the jet - it either takes heat from the surface where the surface is hotter, or where it is cooler, leading to different rates of cooling. QED.
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Yes indeed, I sense another BBC onslaught coming with a fresh salvo of dramatic climate change 'evidence' on news bulletins and the Gardeners World Team being primed to put tips into their presentation on how we should adapt our gardens for the warm and steamy decades ahead. Assuming you live high up enough that is to still have a garden.
I think BBC Gardening will be out of fashion soon. Not only will we have to conserve every drop of water that falls onto our measly plots of earth, we shall have to use the collected water to hold the summer heat to keep us warm during the long winter months - big black tanks in summer and white fleecy covers during the colder seasons, and at night - with everything else wrapped in spaceblanket aluminised plastic bubble wrap. Reality TV will consist of reporters with FLIR thermographic cameras calling on people whose houses are abnormally hot, and radiating like pulsars in the suburbs. Daytime TV with titles like "Insulation, Insulation, Insulation!", and "Glass(fibre) in the Attic" will be the daily fodder for the unemployed.
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Ah, so the usual nonsense I see, and for starters it is not based on the same models.
Global temperatures haven't been declining since 2001 by the way, to get any sort of decline you have to cherry-pick 1998 as your starting point.
Nah - I pick this June as starters
(sorry TWS ) -
Cranwell (Lincolnshire)
53.0311
-0.5035
Anyone want to guess what that enclosure right next to it is for?
Is it a dunny for sheilas when they have a barby?
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Redhill, at the foot of the North Downs, is a notorious frost hollow. As a result, when an official station it regularly recorded temp minima that were dramatically lower than other sites in the region/area.
In 2006 it was replaced by Charlwood, about 6 miles away, which was and is believed to be more representative. Could it just be....ready for this...that Redhill was closed not because the conspiracy demanded the removal of a station recording inconveniently low temp data, but because the Met Office is constantly trying to improve the quality and meaningfulness of its data?
Sorry if that gets your, um, coolist bum twitching as an idea. (Not my usual turn of phrase, but hey, let's both stir it a bit....as you say, much more fun than being boring and factual, eh?
)Which is fine and dandy as a representative weather station, no dispute - but when historical "weather" records for this part of Surrey are used for "climate" studies - it just creates a upwards kick in the record - which needs to be adjusted - so do past records get adjusted down, or up, and by how much, or do more recent measurements get adjusted, and by what criteria? Finally, who is to tell if the adjustments made are reliable in relation with the longterm record?
And this is for a single station - there are thousands of stations worldwide, which have been replaced for just this mode of reasoning - for weather reasons! Yet the data still gets woven into the climatological record.
There seems to be some dispute in another thread in this climate change area where weather station siting is being discussed. I wish some people could broaden their minds on occasion!! There is overlap, and the two fields of interest do not seem to sit well together.
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Hi Chris.
When you have an image open, if you click on anywhere off the image, it automatically closes it
Thanks S_B_1
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I think you did, too...Too-much vodka on my part?
B****r! My emoticons aren't working!
Dunno. Is there any prior case in which too much vodka caused emoticons to stop working? Too much G&T once stopped my keyboard working! The moral: Don't ever blame the alcohol until after it has been drunk - don't think, drink it first.
Edit: Damn, my emoticons have stopped working - Rum, in my case.
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Time to bring this back to the forefront again. A big part of GWO research that stands out is that the lunar cycle is going to shift the HP sytem belt and bring the jet back on a more southerly track. Now looking at what has happened over the UK since 07 and looking at the US too it does seem that thus far the jet is kicking south in line with GWO predictions. Early days but for me an up to now interesting [and exciting] development. Thoughts?
BFTP
Those following this thread may be interested in this link "A Case for Climate Cycles: Orbit, Sun and Moon" by W.H. Berger, J. Pätzold and G. Wefer 2002 is worth reading.
One insight which I hadn't thought about before is that any (external or cosmic) cycle of influence is affected by season (on earth, and in all latitudes, with whatever differential effect that may have), and thus of greater or lesser effect each time each cycle is at its maximum influence.
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No need to apologize, Chris.
I thought that AFT was replying to Os?? :lol: Maybe, we should all start our replies with in reply to ------? :lol:
Just an idea, mate???
Thought I did, Pete - quoting your reply to Tamara's post
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No, I didn't 'miss it', Chris. I merely lumped it together with all those 'The wheels are falling off the AGW bandwaggon' posts: mildly funny and more than a tad sarcastic, yes; but, surely not 'nasty'? :lol:
You can always use the [report] button, mate. It's there for everyone. :lol:
Sorry, my mistake Pete, I was reading this thread on its own, not in conjunction with the other thread in the General discussion area where "nasty" was mentioned. The joys of being a moderator, eh, Pete? I would not want to do it.
I assumed NSSC was replying after the entry by La Bise.
I took no offence, and there certainly was nothing here to [report]
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Who's doing that then, Tamara? Having read back through the thread, I can see no evidence for such a claim; just people who ask questions and have doubts and suspicions. That's the beauty of genuine scepticism: it cuts both ways! :o
Why shouldn't the claims of 'sceptics' be subject to exactly the same degree of scrutiny as those of others? Are 'sceptics' a protected species?
You missed this one, Pete, immediately above Tamara's
How can we be sure that climate change denier guerrilla units have not been hanging around recording stations, particularly those 70 chose ones, with a bag of ice and a fan...?
After all, right now the last line of argumentation they have which has not been shot to pieces by anyone seriously involved in climatology is that the data has been tampered with, so we co-conspirators in the great global warming swindle could be forgiven to throw similar accusations at them. It would probably be more fun than insisting with the boring factual stuff.
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Using Firefox 3.0.12 on XP pro, no problems with running the forum, but I don't like two features compared to the old style forum - the way image attachments appear in pop-up windows, greying out the main window in the background, I preferred the separate browser window, which allowed you to both read the post and look at the image, or at several images at once. It is now also likely that you have to scroll the page down to make the close (X) button visible, whereas before it was closable from the window's title bar or taskbar.
I also find the extra click on "Go" on the forum jump annoying and unnecessary.
Otherwise - great.
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Did you not read the paper that put the causes of the LIA at man's (well the Spanish mans) feet?. The Collapse of the Meso-American folk and the re-forestation of that part of the world sequestered so much CO2 as to bring about the LIA.........but then that hinges upon CO2 being able to do such things!!
Hi Chris!
I was thinking more about the folk on the northern extremities today
.If they had recent experience of melt then they would have folk tales about it and how they survived it.As it is they seem to be all at sea (must have drifted off from the pack!!) with the rapid alteration in conditions and it's impacts on their 'normal' patterns of life.I think that there are DNA tags (along with flint arrow point technology) that place NW European man in N.America as long as 16,000yrs ago?
Hi GW, I think that if the conditions at any time in the past had been as they have been over the last few years, those few who may have ventured onto the icepack during the summer melt may likely not have survived, and those hunting caribou for bone-marrow and meat for the dogs on solid land did. It would have been a salutory lesson, and such a foolhardy venture probably not repeated. I am sure there must be tales of famed hunters who never returned, for whatever reasons - there were tales of kayakers washed up on Scottish beaches weren't there?
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I'm glad you're happy today, Kip. Must be because everyone's being so nice(-ish) to each other one here!
P.S. How weird - if I write "c o s" with an apostrophe in front of it instead of "because" - in order to sound informal, yet still correct - the thingy changes it to "because" anyway, but inexplicably retains the apostrophe!
P.P.S. Aaaaaaargh, I now find it does it even without the apostrophe - I'll have to write it with spaces between the letters.....be jolly inconvenient if this was a forum about lettuce-growing or trigonometry.
Whaddaya mean "(-ish)"?
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Though we don't like to readily give credence to the collective experience of folk around the world the number of peoples around the world who have a folk myth regarding an inundation (when we know that most of the then 'Humanity' would have suffered such?) is compelling(??) The useful information held by the aboriginal folks living in the Arctic circle does not seem to include info regarding past ice retreats on such a scale. Do we dare discount the info that their folk have survived by by utilizing generation upon generation worth of accrued knowledge? how can such a racial memory be so short lived when most of the folk memories of he world seem to reach back to the last great inundation?
The inundation - would that be the Durham Grand Canyon 2009AD, GW, or maybe the tsunami in the aftermath of the Minoan collapse of the Santorini caldera ca. 1645BC? Maybe the post-glacial flooding during a rapid sea level rise that separated Australia when the Gulf of Carpentaria filled during the Dream Time. All burnt deeply into the local collective memory.
It is thought that Beringians lived on the pack ice and ice shelves of the northern Pacific rim for as much as 15000 years before the end of the glaciation. Indeed, was there a north Atlantic rim, with people travelling between the old and the new world, way back then?
Circumpolar peoples only started to inhabit the northern lands after the ice retreat at the end of the last glaciation perhaps 8-10 thousand years ago. They were nomads, like the animals they hunted, and one patch of ice resembles another, so whether far north or south their oral history does not tell.
Those who travelled too far north had a long, cold dark winter to look forward to, and no solid land beneath their feet if the ice happened to melt. Their oral history would be difficult to find, I think.
Tip of the day: One of the ways to tell if your dried fish is still frozen is how 'snappy' it is!
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ame='BLAST FROM THE PAST' date='29 July 2009 - 15:37 ' timestamp='1248878230' post='1572886']
I see a far bigger 'push' on the climate going on up north as we type. No matter how we got here the 'here' is worth a look surely? We had a post earlier today reminding us that we did not have any type of climate chaos the last time the pole was ice free. From my recollections we also had Crocodilians as far north as Ellesmere island and so would image that our view is limited as to how we went from icy pole to watery pole but it obviously was a long process to bring cold blooded species so far north. We are watching an 'instant collapse' at the pole, look over the past twenty years (and stick with perennial %'s it being the most resilient of the ice types) and tell me we are not seeing a rapid change there.
Why are we still looking at the reasons we didn't lock up when Neddy is offski?
For those who are stuck trying to dismiss the impacts of CO2 "WAKE UP............!!!!". Good , now reassure me that now the energy needed to melt out the pole has nothing else to do what are we to expect?
What Job did the arctic play on our climate and what happens if we strip away that effect?
Could it be that 76's climate shift in the arctic was the PDO letting go it's old influence? could it be that each time we go PDO-ve these days we just presenting more cold bottom waters to be warmed?
Could it really be that the inlet to the Arctic (Bering) is now shipping in ever warmer waters (pushing ever further polewards) whilst ever more of last perennial is finding its way out of the Arctic between the Archipelago and Svalbard having no more 'cold feed' when the NE Pacific goes PDO-ve.
I'd ask the Alaskan Salmon fishing Fleet how they are finding things these days as all of the PDO research I can find was to help them.
"Climate chaos" - always goes together like "infinite universe" and "pathetic excuses", they were never separated, even the ? time when the poles were last "ice-free".
By at least one of the tectonic forecasts, that which we now call the United Kingdom will be located near the North Polar axis at some time in the future, with it's fossil record showing that near tropical conditions existed here in the past, including crocodilians. Ellesmere Island was not at the latitude it was today when "Get me a fish, and make it snappy!" was the order of the day! That was naughty, GW.
However, no-one would disagree that the polar weather for the past few years has removed what once seemed to be a permanent sea ice cover in Arctic waters. It is fascinating to watch what will happen over the next few years, but so far, the results have not been devastating, and the resultant northern hemisphere climatological signals since 2007 have not got anyone wetting their pants. Maybe something will happen this year, but, so far, nothing has tipped. So far the cold has just transferred southwards a bit, if NH winter 2008/9 temperatures in inhabited regions are to be believed, but nothing extreme has been recorded.
So: No Neddy - whatever that means, no "WAKE UP!!!>>>" and no Job, miserable bugg.. that he was, and no more cold bottoms and no more cold feet, thank you very much GW!
Que Sera, Sera so far.
Alaskan salmon fishing is more at risk from farmed salmon than any climatic changes, and possibly a good thing too, a bit like UK coal mining - a dangerous and potentially damaging industry, not only for the environment, but those who worked and lost their lives and children in the industry.
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One thing I've never understood is that the daily effects of the moons are far greater than anything else, yet nobody has noticed these HP cells moving in connection to this, unlike the sea.
Secondly the sea moves by a few meters at most given the very large daily changes of the Moon pull, yet we think again that the HP cells can move 1000's of miles ?.
Thirdly can we quantify these gravitational changes. For example a quick look would seem to indicate that the moon exerts a force of 1/300000th of a bodies weight and that the position of the moon on a daily basis varies this effect by one 30th so a 10,000,000th of a bodies weight. With effects this small I am uncertain how it has the effects it's reported to have.
IMO, Ice, it isn't so much the tides, which you point out have a large daily presence. Their energy is added to by the tidal braking of the moon, about 3 terawatts,(see short article by Carl Wunsch, here), but even this is not where the climatic effect on the atmosphere and oceans is greatest.
It is the Northerly and southerly range of the variations in the moons orbit, together with the elliptical orbit of both the moon and the earth which set up complex harmonics, due to the variations in gravitational pull strength and direction, in the earth's oceans, and atmosphere. These variations each have several periodicities, which is what is being demonstrated in the poster by Claire Perigaud which Pete posted earler, certainly the 14.7 day periodicity of the lunar semi-orbit, and the 18.6 year lunar nodal cycle, and the various important sub-harmonics seen in the data and models set up by those at the JPL, which they apparently feel should be incorporated in the GCMs.
These harmonics, together with geographical features of coastlines are used to calculate tide tables, and predict with remarkable accuracy the time and height of tides for seafarers all around the world. Although in many places around the world there are two high tides and two low tides daily, this is not always the case. In the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, the circumpolar current has no obstacles in the form of continents, so at Ross Island there is usually only a single high tide and a single low tide, and sometimes the variation between high and low tide is as little as a few centimetres, whereas a week later the range may be at it's maximum of just over a metre, and this tide does not follow the phases of the moon.
The tidal harmonic interactions are likely to create standing waves, which would be slow moving, like the Rossby and Kelvin waves found in atmosphere and oceans, and subject to boundary reflections etc., as they reach coastlines, or topographical land features, but would also cover large geographical scales of distance over long periods of time. What is the cause of those gravitational waves by the way?
I would guess that it would need not only considerable processing power, imagination, topographical and cosmological datasets, and programming abilities to model all these factors, as well as a will of steel in sending off grant applications, and ignoring the rejections, and pressing ahead towards determining if these untried theoretical ideas really had a large role in affecting the climate.
One thing though, it once was important enough to calculate the tide tables. It was once important enough to accurately map the sky to determine the exact latitude and longitude from any point on the earth, and important enough to develop accurate chronometers to make this possible. If climate change is as important as some people believe, it surely is important to know as much as possible about what makes it work. I don't know that solar variation has any effect on climate beyond the obvious what energy comes in... part of the argument, but there is no doubt that the moon and the climate are intricately linked, if only by the effects of the variation in the rate of rotation of the earth.
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I'll google again and see if I can find any others. Tbh, for some reason, there don't seem to be many papers on the subject...
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V4/N11/C2.php
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/archive/previous_issues/vol3/v3n17/cutting.htm
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=18099
Found these. Not sure they'll be much help, though? :o
Some interesting links there Pete, (and the one above from Claire Perigaud, who is a NASA JPL Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction scientist, no less, but has not published anything on Lunar-ENSO connections AFAIK. She can be contacted here apparently ).
As a matter of interest, what were your Google search terms that brought up these articles?
The middle of the three articles by Dr Robert C. Balling Jr. led me to this interview on this blog - ouch! (reading part II as well)
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I've always got my collection of 'Spear and Jackson' to fall back on though
.................apart from the one with the problem handle.........And I always thought Yorkshire folk would call a spade a spade. I have a favourite broom myself, had it for years. Even after four new heads and five replacement broomhandles, it's still going strong.
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No I was being a bit unreasonable last night I think but what I was really referring to was the pictures I linked to here: http://www.panoramio.com/user/2731147 which I took in January.
Nice pics, Jonathan.
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We're pretty much downwind from you on a normal L.P. track and over the past 10yrs or so either I,m getting more Eric (Olthwaite) or the summer precipitation is becoming more condensed! I don't know the breakdown but I'd bet we have more 25mm events (over a 24hr period) than used to be the norm. Esp. true of the past 4 years.
Now I understand, GW, how this must affect your outlook - "even the white bits are black" - eh?
Rainy asked a good question earlier. I have a feeling that the cold meltwater which has pooled in central north Atlantic waters for each of the past few years has been associated with unsettled UK summer weather because the Azores high gets stabilised over the cool water to the west of the Azores. The Jetstream rides over the north of this high, and drags our weather in from Newfoundland and Greenland.
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Does no one read my posts? I posted pictures of the actual station on the first page. I think it is a great site and it would appear to be free from any changes over a very long period (aside from a suspected discrepancy in the rainfall totals during a decade in the 1800s).
Sorry fozi999, your image was so small and indistinct, I didn't realise it was the same establishment that I admire too, and I found a much prettier picture than you did! Now there is the Oxford Radcliffe observatory, which is a (possibly more) beautiful building, with a longer historical weather record. I will give you a chance to get an image and location of it up here before I do. Don't wait too long tho! :lol:
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Don't you think that, should an A/C unit be suddenly placed beside a sensor, the resultant step-change in readings would be instantly picked-up by the relevant software?
A/C is not on all the time - apparently some US citizens have had not had to turn them on at all this summer, the weather has been so pleasantly cool! I would bet that they are also thermostatted.
A/C outputs distribute heat more in the hottest weather, heating up surrounding walls and surfaces, even if shaded, and extending into the evening since the interiors of the A/C'd building still need cooling.
So no step change - just hotter hot days and nights, and of course moderated by breezes or still weather, so the hottest still days measure an even higher temperature than without the A/C contribution.
Here's Durham University observatory, with a continuous weather record going back to 1840. I wonder what AWS they used then, and if it was always on the roof?
No, that was a scurrilous fiction:
The meteorological station is located on a gently sloping south-facing lawn in front of the Observatory building, on a ridge less than one kilometre southwest from Durham Cathedral, at 54º 46’ 06” N, 1º 35’ 05” W and 102 metres above sea level; the general situation of the site has changed little over the years. At no time has there been need to move the meteorological station, as has happened in many other cities, so that Gordon Manley could be especially proud to create a temperature series based on the second longest continuous record at one site at a university in Britain, after that of the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford (where the record dates from 1766).
(sorry TWS 
I thought that AFT was replying to Os?? :lol: 
.If they had recent experience of melt then they would have folk tales about it and how they survived it.As it is they seem to be all at sea (must have drifted off from the pack!!) with the rapid alteration in conditions and it's impacts on their 'normal' patterns of life.
Locating UK Temperature Stations
in Space, Science & nature
Posted · Edited by Chris Knight
It is politely called adjustment, Dev.
If they were wildly out of whack, people would disbelieve them.