Denier Weirdness, Begorrah, from WUWT

WUWT gets sillier by the day

See updates here and here below and see this post about Darko's follow up article.

This is not just a silly comment from one of the WUWT rabble. It's from an article in WUWT - at the express invitation of Anthony Watts.

In the article the author, Darko Butina, claims that the global warming isn't real, based on his analysis of the temperature record at a single location, the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. The dataset used goes from 1844 to 2004.

Darko Butina writes (I've just realised this is the actual title he's given to his twenty page 'paper'. What a laugh!):

Should We Worry About the Earth’s Calculated Warming at 0.7OC Over Last the Last 100 Years When the Observed Daily Variations Over the Last 161 Years Can Be as High as 24 (degrees) C?

Good grief - I guess he's not experienced the Chinook:

In Pincher Creek, the temperature rose by 41°C (74°F), from -19 to 22°C (-2 to 72°F), in one hour in 1962.

And there's more:

So if one wants, for some bizarre reason, to compare two annual patterns then one year can be unequivocally declared as warmer only if each daily reading of that year is larger than each corresponding daily reading of another year:

Really? Here is an example to illustrate what Butina would have you think.  Butina's thesis would be that Week 1 below was not hotter than Week 2 because not every day of Week 1 was hotter than the same day in Week 2.

As more astute WUWT commenters observe:

lsvalgaard says:
April 15, 2013 at 2:22 pm Troed Sångberg says: April 15, 2013 at 1:56 pm

but claiming that every single day over the year would need to be warmer than every single day another seems to stretch things a bit. If “day”, then why not “hour”, “millisecond” or “three week period”? It becomes quite arbitrary.

More than arbitrary: nonsense. Why not “century”, or “decade” as well? There is no doubt that Houston, TX is hotter than San Diego, CHA, but there are every year days with temperatures below 25F in Houston, but never in San Diego.

How not to determine temperature trends

Let's leave aside the fact that Darko Butina bases his dismissal of global warming on a single location in Northern Ireland. We'll look at how he determines the temperature trend despite having more than 150 years of detailed temperature observations at his disposal:

Can we detect unambiguous warming trend over 161 years at Armagh (UK) in thermometer data? All we need to do is to take difference between the youngest (2004) and the oldest (1844) annual fingerprints and display it as a histogram:

No, that is not "all we need to do".  Taking the difference between same day readings (ie 1st January compared with 1st January through to 31 December compared with 31 December) over two different years will not yield nearly as much information as would a series. In fact, it probably wouldn't tell you anything at all.

By contrast, here is the chart of the mean annual temperature at the Armagh Observatory, plotted with a ten year moving average (red line).  The chart is based on these data:

The data for the above chart were compiled by the same people who compiled the daily set used by the author of the WUWT article.

Does it prove or disprove global warming? Of course not.  It shows the temperature trends at Armagh in Northern Ireland.  It indicates that at Armagh Observatory there was a cooling trend to the 1870s, then a warming trend, then a slight cooling in the sixties and seventies followed by a more rapid warming since the late 1970s.

There's more...

There is a lot of other silliness in the article, such as:

Thermometer reading of 15.1 has several links attached to it that cannot be broken: it is linked to a unique grid point, unique date and time stamp, unique instrument – thermometer and that thermometer to unique symbol (OC). So if someone wants to analyse any temperature trends those trends have to come from thermometer readings; it follows that if thermometer to be used is calibrated using Celsius scale, no datapoint can be older than 1743, follow link to Anders Celsius.

Surely he is not saying that the entire history of Armagh observations were recorded in degrees Celsius? (They weren't.)  Or that degrees Fahrenheit cannot be converted to degrees Celsius?

Put on a head vice if you decide to read the article.

Anthony Watts seems to be getting sillier by the day inviting nonsense like this to his blog.  At least some of the commenters are a bit more discerning than he is.

Update:

Just for fun I subtracted the daily maximum temperatures in 1844 from those in 2004 and took an average of the daily difference for each month.  The result is shown as a chart below. The chart doesn't actually tell us anything much more than that 2004 was hotter in seven months out of twelve in 2004, and by a fairly large margin in February, August and December.

All the chart above suggests is that no two years are ever the same (more precisely, these two years were not the same). To see the trend over time you'd need to look at a time series (as above), not just compare two years of data.

Update 2:

Richard Telford has done some different calculations on his blog.  Worth a look see.