Climate conspiracy theorist Anthony Watts is hot and bothered by heat in California

It's taking me a while to get back to blogging and there's a lot happening in the world to distract. I couldn't help but notice there is a lot of extreme weather around the world, the terrible floods in Japan, for example. If you're wondering how these examples of climate change are affecting climate science deniers, it's making them even loopier than normal.

Airport UHI disease breakout in Africa

Over at WUWT, Anthony Watts found another airport that had a sudden attack of airport UHI disease. You'll remember how there was an outbreak in Greenland back in 2013. This horrible disease only strikes on very hot days, apparently. Not even that. It only strikes on the very hottest of days according to Anthony's research. He said he his amazing finding was "based on hours of combing Google Earth and other sources". Yes, he really did spend "hours" trying to figure out a reason to discount a temperature reading for a weather station in Africa. He decided that on the particular day of the very high weather reading, possibly a record high reading, the weather station decided to act up.

The spectacular failure of the 2007 climate "bet" by denier J. Scott Armstrong

Today at WUWT there's a rambling, indecipherable article about some bet that a science denier called J. Scott Armstrong unsuccessfully tried to make with Al Gore way back in 2007. It's a tale of a failed denier prediction, and worse. Having failed so spectacularly, J. Scott Armstrong is doubling down and betting on a drop of up to 4.5 °C in global temperature over the next decade.

Armstrong was wanting to bet that there'd be no change in global average surface temperatures between 2008 and 2017. He figured, wrongly, that Al Gore would bet there would be warming. Al Gore didn't take the bet. Why would he deal with a nincompoop denier like J Scott Armstrong.

Armstrong's first draft of the bet was a bit weird. The essence of it was this:

Extending the climate conspiracy: Anthony Watts accuses US volunteer weather observers of fudging temperature records

Anthony Watts has written about some research that shows that when weather observers estimate wind speed, they usually overestimate it. In April this year a team, led by Paul W Miller of the University of Georgia, published a paper in the American Meteorological Society Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. The researchers reported that "As a general rule of thumb, humans overestimated nonconvective wind GFs [gust factors] by approximately one-third."

In the USA, the scientists said that automated weather stations were relatively sparse, so weather observers apparently typically estimate wind speed. By comparing estimates made by observers with instrumentally recorded wind speeds in the GHCN network, the researchers concluded that the estimates were typically too high.

That's interesting. But wait. There's more. Anthony uses this research to accuse the thousands of volunteer weather observers of fudging temperature data. That's right. This is data that is read, not estimated. This is the "raw data" that deniers usually staunchly defend.

Desperate Deniers Part 2: David Middleton fakes satellite data "Just for grins"

This is the second article in the Desperate Deniers series and is about David Middleton's deception. In the first article, I posted charts of the global mean surface temperature from four different sources: the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, GISS NASA (USA), NOAA (USA) and Berkeley Earth (USA). Below is the chart that probably explains best why climate science deniers are so desperate:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature from four datasets. The 2015 line is the average of the 2015 temperature from all four sources. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA, Berkeley Earth.

Australia's coolish (almost normal) January - where are the fake sceptics?

This January has seemed to me to be relatively cool, almost "normal" where I live in south-eastern Australia. That is, normal compared to the past few years.

I've been looking to find articles on denier blogs claiming the Bureau of Meteorology has been fudging the temperatures downwards. But not a peep or a squeak, let alone a squawk of the type during our record hot summers. On the contrary, some deniers are now taking the BoM reports as gospel and claiming that it means that an ice age cometh.

Jo Nova (who I've been told complains I don't write about her nonsense enough) hasn't written anything. Jennifer Marohasy, who likes to keep a close (closed?) eye on Australian temperatures has been quiet. (Actually, I had to check both because they are not regular haunts of mine. I discovered that Jennifer's been away since last October.)

I first commented on this a few days ago saying that at the Australian Open they were wearing jumpers this year, unlike last year when people were collapsing on the court from the heat. It felt more like last century than this one. Anecdotal isn't all that reliable so I went to the repository of Australian temperatures to see what's been happening.

Sequel to: Anthony Watts visits Greenland and finds Airport UHI disease!

Update - see below for Anthony Watts' acknowledgement.

---

Who could forget Anthony Watts finding UHI disease at Maniitsok airport in Greenland?

Greenland sets new record high temperature this year: Confirmed

Here's the sequel. From Jason Semonow, Capital Weather Gang at Washington Post:

Today, John Cappelen, senior climatologist at the Danish Meteorological Society, emailed me to let me know the record high of 25.9 C (78.6 F) set on July 30 at Maniitsoq stands.

“I have now accepted the record at Maniitsoq based on further analysis,” Cappelen said.

At issue was whether the temperature measurement, taken at an airport location, was legitimate. Artificial heat sources at airports can sometimes corrupt temperature readings.

“We were faced with two options,” Coppelen explained. “We could reject the observation, or we could approve it. If we chose to overrule it, it could be based on two things. One was a faulty sensor/station…and that was not the question – the sensor measured exactly as it should. The second was if we had suspected that extreme local conditions played their part. Here the situation is more debatable, because the station is an airport station that is not necessarily completely optimal in relation to international guidelines for climatological data measurements.”

But Coppelen said the mere fact the temperature was recorded at an airport is not a reason for it be thrown out as few existing weather observing stations in Greenland are ideally sited.

“Within the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) prescribed practices, among other things, measurements – as an example – should be taken over a short lawn,” Coppelen said. “This can be done in Denmark almost anywhere, but in Greenland almost no places.”

Coppelen concluded: “The station in Maniitsoq is within the quality frame practicable/possible for this type of meteorological measurements in Greenland, so it is approved. Alternative would be to question many observations and weather records for Greenland…it doesn’t make sense

DMI press release here.

As a reminder, I posted some suggestions for the weather station siting since Anthony Watts complained it was no good, pointing out the other suggestions were even darker, with not a lawn in sight.

Should we anticipate an article by Anthony Watts acknowledging the record temperature set at Maniitsok in Greenland this year?

Update 

Friday 13 Sept 3:39 pm: 

Anthony Watts has posted the fact that a record has been recorded in his latest WUWT Hot Sheet (archived here).  He hasn't updated his original article (archived here). H/t Thomas Murphy.

The original HotWhopper article and the follow up.

A mad, mad, mad "science-based" rebuttal by the NIPCC? Really?

Those deniers over at Anthony Watts blog WUWT are really funny sometimes.  Funny weird.  Today Anthony's put up an article (archived here) by Steve Goreham with the headline:

A Science-Based Rebuttal to Global Warming Alarmism

What a novelty for WUWT.  A science-based rebuttal to science.  Deniers won't know how to treat this.  I gather from the headline that they only know non-science-based "rebuttals".  Or nonsense rebuttals.  Maybe he wanted to distinguish it from the ad hominem "rebuttals" like Donna's.  As we'll see, the science of the science-based rebuttal is distinctly unscientific.

By the way, you may recall that Steve Goreham is the guy who wrote the "mad, mad, mad" book that was so bad the Heartland Institute couldn't give it away.

Steve Goreham writes: Earlier this summer, CCR-I was translated into Chinese and accepted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an alternative point-of-view on climate change.

Oh yes - I remember that.  Heartland Institute caused a minor diplomatic incident and China was not at all happy with them.  The Chinese Academy of Science does not "accept" of denial of global warming, writing in part:

The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false. To clarify the fact, we formally issue the following statements...

As for the "science-based" rebuttal, the headline is misleading.  If it's anything like the previous "science-based" rebuttal it's not a rebuttal at all.  The "NIPCC" mob won't bring themselves to deny the greenhouse effect although they do fudge and bluster about irrelevancies.  Here is what mad, mad, mad Steve Goreham wrote about it:

Among the key findings of CCR-II are:

1. Doubling of CO2 from its pre-industrial level would likely cause a warming of only about 1oC, hardly cause for alarm.

Fail One: The NIPCC scientists pulled a number out of thin (CO2-laden) air and said that climate sensitivity is only one degree Celsius.  Yet we are already up 0.8 degrees Celsius and CO2 has only increased by just over 40%.  So they fail on that score.  I'm not aware of any acceptable study that shows a number that low and AFAIK, none of the authors have published any papers on climate sensitivity so they aren't referring to science.

2. The global surface temperature increase since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age, modulated by natural ocean and atmosphere cycles, without need for additional forcing by greenhouse gases.

Fail Two Plus: Point 2 contradicts Point 1.  They can't have it both ways.  This time they say CO2 isn't forcing climate.  But either CO2 will cause a rise in temperature or it won't.  I wonder if Goreham got the report wrong or if the authors disagree with each other.  Maybe they are just putting together a hodge podge to please all deniers.  To let them pick and choose.  I also wonder if their report specifies what caused the "recovery from the Little Ice Age".  Fairy dust or goblins? Whatever, it's not "scientific".

3. There is nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late 20th century warming, when compared with previous natural temperature variations.

Fail Three:  That's just wrong.  There is "something unusual" about the magnitude and the rate of late 20th Century warming.  The world has warmed faster than ever and we are on track to warm ten times faster than at any period in at least the past 65 million years.  I wonder what the contrarian "scientists" compare it to?  Whatever it is, that will have been unusual as well.  That's if they bother to support their claim.  They also fail on this score because point 3 also contradicts point 1.  Either extra greenhouse gases are causing warming or they aren't.  If they are then the warming is "unusual".

4. The global climate models projected an atmospheric warming of more than 0.3oC over the last 15 years, but instead, flat or cooling temperatures have occurred.

Fail Four: This time these so-called scientists can't make up their mind.  They can't decide if temperatures of the past fifteen years have been flat or whether the earth has cooled.  Come on chaps you claim to be scientists.  Can't you even tell flat from cooling?  Let's see shall we?

We'll start with surface temperature:

Data Source: NASA

Well it certainly hasn't cooled and it's clearly warmer now than it was fifteen years ago.  Another big fail on both counts. Unless they mean the earth system as a whole.  So lets look further into the oceans.  Here is a chart showing ocean heat content.  The red vertical line marks fifteen years ago:

Data Source: NODC/NOAA

Steve Goreham's mates fail again on both counts.  The world has heated up in the last fifteen years.  So much for their so-called "science-based rebuttal".

The really odd thing is that "mad, mad, mad" Steve Goreham says they use "peer-reviewed" literature to make the above claims.  Why then does it differ so much from real science, the science that is collated for the IPCC reports? If they've set up their own thousands of buoys in the oceans then they've kept it very secret from everyone.  If they've got a parallel system of weather stations they they have kept that a deep secret too.  You'd think they'd have been shouting it from the rooftops.  Therefore I don't believe they have.  I think Steve Goreham or his "scientists" are telling fibs.

We'll have to wait and see.

There is too much "stupid" in the WUWT comments for me to choose from.  If you are interested you can read them here without having to go to WUWT.  The deniers at WUWT have been fired up by one or two informed posters, and they don't like what they read.

Anthony Watts visits Greenland and finds Airport UHI disease!

Update: There is another sequel :)

Update: See the follow up to this - it's almost as funny :)

I found this funny.  You know how Anthony Watts hates to read reports of heat records.  It's more than a pet peeve, it's an obsession.  About the only time Anthony writes a blog article himself, if it's not about a tweet from Michael Mann you can bet it's about a weather station.

Today he excelled himself (archived here).  He says he's been working on this for an entire week.  It's probably almost two weeks, because that's when the record temperature at Maniitsoq in Greenland was first reported by the Danish Meteorological Institute.

Anthony's article is inordinately long compared to the subject matter.  The long and the short of it is that Anthony decided the reported temperature has to be wrong because the weather station is at an airport.  Not that it's recently been moved to the airport.  It's been there all along.  For some reason Anthony thinks that on July 30th it suddenly caught "Airport UHI" Disease.  Why it hasn't ever been afflicted with "Airport UHI" Disease in the past is anyone's guess.  It hasn't ever reported a temperature as high as this before, but just the same Anthony diagnoses a sudden outbreak of "Airport UHI" Disease.

Anthony's hunch

This is what Anthony wrote:

Any time I read about new record temperatures in the Arctic or Antarctic, I tend to think of this simple truth: In near polar settlements, temperature is measured close to that small human island of warmth , and since most such towns are completely dependent on aviation, the measurement is often done at the airport, since weather there is a go/no go factor of primary importance.

It turns out I was correct. What was surprising was just how correct my hunch turned out to be.

He even showed a picture from Google Earth to prove just how appalling is the site of the weather station.  I took my own grab.  Here it is:

Well, it's okay as far as being a distance from buildings goes but look at all that dark asphalt.  No wonder that the weather station eventually succumbed to "Airport UHI" Disease.   But Anthony isn't happy.  I've noted some of the several points he makes, in particular:

1. The weather station is surrounded by the airport runway and tarmac, which is unnatural ground cover. Note how dark it is in the tourist video.
2. The dark albedo there is enough to melt snow in the winter, in fact they count on it to help keep the airport open. Just like I showed in Svalbard, they have to keep the runway open even after snowfall, and it becomes an albedo anomaly surrounded by snow.
3. The local siting effects likely added to the temperature record on July 30th because the easterly wind would also have picked up some of the heat from the terminal building and tarmac and transported it to the weather station.

Yep, at 25.9 degrees outside.  The "Airport UHI" demon is irrepressible.  It took a huge deep breath and blew all the hot air from the building twenty meters or more, right into the Stevenson screen and bulls eye - it hit the thermometer.  

Why it happened that day when it's never happened before in the history of the airport one can only guess.  Maybe if we ask Anthony nicely he will let us in on the secret.

My hunch

I had my own hunch as soon as I read Anthony's article.  I figured that Greenland is a mite rocky.  I had a hunch that the "natural groundcover" in the surrounding area would have even "darker albedo".  It turns out my hunch was correct as well.  But just for the sake of it and to help Anthony out, let's rally around Anthony and select a better site for the weather station.  One that is out of town in a nice meadow where the grass is kept mown and there's no chance of catching "Airport UHI".

I've put some suggestions below as an animated GIF.  Take your pick - Site A, Site B and Site C are all up for grabs.

Or maybe you can find a better spot in the broader scheme of things:

From what I can see, the asphalt at the airport is about the lightest coloured ground in the whole region!


PS Anthony says that DMI retracted the recorded record.  Here is the amended  press release, which probably won't give Anthony much comfort:

Tuesday saw the highest temperature measured by an official Greenlandic airport weather station - records dating back to 1958.

On 30 July 2013 at 16 o'clock in the afternoon measured the official Greenland airport station Maniitsoq / Sugar Loaf 25.9 ° C. Maniitsoq is located a few hundred kilometers north of Nuuk, Greenland's southwest coast....

...The same effect could occur at Sisimiut north of Maniitsoq, which measured 21.4 ° C at the same time, while the effect does not apply, for example. Kangerlussuaq 70 km inland. Here was measured 'only' 20.4 ° C, are normally measured high temperatures in a foehn situation when the air mass from the southern directions passed over the ice cap at Sugar Loaf. This phenomenon is also called a isarms-foehn. 

...The unusual temperature and the weather conditions that created it can not be regarded as 'unnatural', but on the other hand, there is an indisputable gradual increase in temperature in Greenland. Along the way, any 'warm event' thus have a higher probability of being slightly warmer than the previous one. 

 © DMI, 31 July 2013, the text adjusted 2 August.

You've got to wonder how the demon was all over Greenland that day.  As you can see from the press release, Maniitsoq wasn't the only place there that got a bit warmer than usual.

From the fake sceptics at WUWT

Everyone just takes Anthony at his word.  Who would dare question the surface station king of UHI?

hunter says (comments archived here):

August 10, 2013 at 9:13 am  Yet another AGW evidence of doom that fails to hold up under reasonable scrutiny. The list is long and seems to consist of every bit of evidence offered by the AGW promotion industry.

Andy F. doesn't notice that DMI already amended their news report (see above) and says:

August 10, 2013 at 7:54 am  You can’t find the rescinding announcement, because it isn’t there. What DMI usually do, is make a report, with an alarming headline. At the end of the report they write that it may not be so, and then nothing more. No new report, or news. on the topic. The only thing you find in their archive is the original report. If you need to know the truth, you need to dig through the data yourself. Most people don’t. That’s how DMI keeps the global warming myth alive.

LearDog is suitably impressed and says:

August 10, 2013 at 7:40 am  It is amazing and instructive to see how you marshall all of these data into an irrefutable post. You are an impressive dude, dude. :-D

RACookPE1978 seems to think the weather station is contaminated by sunshine!

August 10, 2013 at 10:54 am  Best I can tell (by interpolation) is that the airport is at 65 north latitude. The runway is going from the southeast to the northwest, right next to the sea, and Google Maps – for what that is worth – says the weather station is next to the runway, a few feet on the land side. This means that the weather station is – as noted above – completely exposed to sunlight reflecting “up” from the open water and flat runways to the south and west of the weather station box for all hours from from just before noon until the sun sets.

From the probably non-fake sceptics at WUWT 

Tom Trevor is bemused by Anthony's obsession:

August 10, 2013 at 9:45 am  When I can’t sleep, I paint or draw. You must be the only person who when he can’t sleep goes hunting for pictures of weather stations at obscure airports.

Village Idiot says (I added the hyperlink):

August 10, 2013 at 11:09 am  Great work, Tony. Brilliant. Who needs professional meteorologists? Let us hear the reply when you write to John Cappelen (the article’s author – above link)
Could you please now debunk the recent ‘record’ temps in Austria and Shanghai?

MaxL says (maybe Anthony's next job is to investigate Canadian trees for UHI Disease):

August 10, 2013 at 10:55 am  There have been a number of comments about the temperature at Kugluktuk. I do weather forecasting for the Northwest Territories in Canada. It has been extremely hot there for the past couple of weeks, and through most of the summer in fact. Many highs near 30C and above. Just a few days ago Fort MacPherson, not too far south of the Arctic coastline in the west NWT was 33C and a location just southeast of Norman Wells, (near Great Bear Lake) was also 33C. Quite a few record highs have been set in the last few days. A lot of these sites are at forestry stations well away from any airports.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach wonders about Australian temperature data

Today on WUWT, Willis Eschenbach is wondering about ACORN-SAT.  He is bemused by the fact that within the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) temperature data, there are some records in which the maximum temperature is lower than the minimum temperature.  Willis writes:

What happened was that while researching the ACORN-SAT dataset, I chanced across a website with a post from July 2012, about four months after the ACORN-SAT dataset was released. The author made the surprising claim that on a number of days in various records in the ACORN-SAT dataset, the minimum temperature for the day was HIGHER than the maximum temperature for the day … oooogh. Not pretty, no.

Well, I figured that new datasets have teething problems, and since this post was from almost a year ago and was from just after the release of the dataset, I reckoned that the issue must’ve been fixed …

… but then I came to my senses, and I remembered that this was the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), and I knew I’d be a fool not to check. Their reputation is not sterling, in fact it is pewter … so I wrote a program to search through all the stations to find all of the days with that particular error. Here’s what I found:

Out of the 112 ACORN-SAT stations, no less than 69 of them have at least one day in the record with a minimum temperature greater than the maximum temperature for the same day. In the entire dataset, there are 917 days where the min exceeds the max temperature.

How maximum and minimum temperatures are recorded by BoM

I think Willis has it all wrong.  Here is how the maxima and minima are determined, from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology:

Air Temperature:
Air temperature is measured in a shaded enclosure (most often a Stevenson Screen) at a height of approximately 1.2 m above the ground. Maximum and minimum temperatures for the previous 24 hours are nominally recorded at 9 am local clock time. Minimum temperature is recorded against the day of observation, and the maximum temperature against the previous day. If, for some reason, an observation is unable to be made, the next observation is recorded as an accumulation. Accumulated data can affect statistics such as the Date of the Highest Temperature, since the exact date of occurrence is unknown .

The chart below is how I understand it.  On day one (in blue) the maximum is greater than the minimum, which is usual.  On day two (dark red) however, a change came through and the minimum temperature as recorded on the day of observation to 9:00 am was greater than that of the maximum of the previous day (click the chart to enlarge it).

This is the span of temperature recordings for a 24 hour period,
the maximum and minimum of which are recorded as the max and min temperatures
on the date of "the previous day to the day of observation".

Say for the Day Two temperature record (dark red columns), the left part of the above chart is the 1st December and the right part after midnight is the 2nd December.  The temperature record is for the 1st December.  The observation is taken at 9:00 am on the 2nd December.  The maximum is the highest temperature reached on 1st December.  The minimum is the lowest temperature recorded to 9:00 am on the day of observation.  That is, between midnight and 9:00 am on the 2nd December and recorded as the minimum for the 1st December.

Consider a day in Kyancutta, the first day of December in 1966 when the minimum recorded to 9:00 am on the day of observation was 13.4 degrees, whereas the maximum (observed on the previous day to the day of observation) was only 13 degrees.  The maximum for the second of December was 21.1 degrees as the weather warmed up again.  From the newspaper of the day, it looked as if a cool change swept across the country around that time.

So that explains why I believe Willis is wrong (again).  Feel free to tell me if it's me that's got it wrong.  However based on the past history of Wondering Willis, I'd go with BoM any day.

How often does this happen?

Back to Willis's wonderings.  He found that there were 917 days where the recorded minimum was greater than the recorded maximum.  Each data set runs from a different start date, but let's conservatively set the average recording period at 50 years long.  There are 112 stations.  That would mean that at most, the minimum is greater than the maximum recorded on only 4.5 out of every 10,000 measurements.

That's right.  It doesn't happen very often.

Comments from Willis and others on WUWT

Wondering Willis assumes he's correct but not everyone thinks so.  Instead of doing a bit more investigation, Willis is only too willing to believe that BoM has it wrong.  He writes:

The issue is that the authors and curators of the dataset have abdicated their responsibilities. They have had a year to fix this most simple of all the possible problems, and near as I can tell, they’ve done nothing about it. They’re not paying attention, so we don’t know whether their data is valid or not. Bad Australians, no Vegemite for them …I must confess … this kind of shabby, “phone it in” climate science is getting kinda old …
w.

Finally after 25 comments, a WUWT reader, Johanna, has piped up to correct Willis:

June 29, 2013 at 2:49 am  The BOM clicks on to a new “day” at 9am (presumably when the sleepyheads roll into the office). It is quite possible, but quite misleading, for minima to exceed maxima for a 24 hour period given this. All it takes is a fast moving weather system, of which we get plenty on this vast continent.

I wonder how Willis will react.  The fact that johanna rips into BoM at the end of her comment will count in her favour as far as Willis is concerned.

Another update: After Johanna's comment correcting Willis' mistake, Nick Stokes chimes in and says the same thing.  Guess what happens?  Does anyone complain about Johanna?  No, because she rejects climate science.  Does anyone complain about Willis misleading them?  No.  What do they do? In among the stupid comments, they complain about Nick Stokes of course, because he doesn't reject 97% of climate science in the way the WUWT illiterati do.

Update 3: No, Willis.  It's not an error it's a convention.

This is truly weird.  Quite a number of people now have pointed out that Willis made a mistake and that the above description is how daily temperatures are recorded in Australia.  Willis is having none of it.  He says it's an "error" because Australia doesn't do it the way he wants it done.  I have a suspicion that he doesn't understand the method.  He writes:

Regarding the “explanation”, I don’t care about the explanation. Whatever the circumstances and assumptions might have been, it’s an error.

You seem to think that they are somehow prohibited from fixing an error because they’d be “rightly criticized” … are you serious? Do you know how many times these guys have “adjusted” and otherwise changed the data, without any such obvious error?

Now, I don’t care how they fix it. They can throw out the bad data. Or they can flag it and leave it in. My point is that doing nothing to an admitted error, in a supposedly scientifically quality controlled dataset, does not give me confidence in their other actions.
w.

No, Willis, it's not an error.  You can call it a "practice" if you like or a convention.  A way of doing things here in Australia.  Whatever you call it, it beats the practice in the USA hands down, where time of observation free-for-all causes real problems that has to be corrected for a lot.  As noted in Hansen et al (2010):

Temperature records in the United States are especially prone to uncertainty, not only because of high energy use in the United States but also because of other unique problems such as the bias due to systematic change in the time at which observers read 24 h maximum‐minimum thermometers.

Victor Venema has written an excellent article describing the problem of changes in time of observation as can typically occur in the USA.

Here is how it's done in the UK:

Why are the daily temperature maxima and minima for different 24-hour periods?

Conventionally, maximum and minimum temperatures are recorded for 24-hour periods ending at 0900 GMT each day. Maximum temperatures tend to occur during mid-afternoon, so the relevant maximum for a given calendar day is the one recorded between 0900 on the day in question and 0900 on the following day. However, minimum temperatures generally occur around dawn, so the relevant minimum temperature for a given calendar day is the one recorded between 0900 on the previous day and 0900 on the day in question.

The way I read it is that in Australia, the minimum temperature is assigned to the day prior to the day of observation.  In the UK the minimum temperature is assigned to the day of observation.  In both cases there will be some (rare) days on which the readings can appear anomalous.

Shhh - there's too much noise and I can't hear the signal - or Ben Santer's 17 years

There's an eccentric English chap called Christopher Monckton of Brenchley who has Anthony Watts of WUWT in thrall. Barry Bickmore can fill you in on this vexatious Viscount.

Monckton is claiming that there 'hasn't been any significant warming for seventeen years and four months'.

That's right.  I kid you not!  He has done his sums and it's seventeen years and four months. Oh and I guess its seventeen years, four months, one day, 13 hours and 25 seconds by now.

It's good to know that he's finally settled on a number.  His previous lucky dips were for 16, 17, 18, 19 and 23 years (all in the one letter); then he went for "approaching two decades"; then just last month it was 18 years.

Apparently Monckton is trying to put one over the 8% Dismissives over at WUWT, an anti-science blog.  I don't know why he bothers.  The clowns over there already have their heads stuffed full of insects, underwater volcanoes, exploding vegetation, ice ages peeping around corners, lack of ENSOs, leaping El Ninos and scientific dogs.  I doubt there is room in their heads for another denier meme.  Still, I suppose Anthony has to fill up that white space with nonsense several times a day to keep his crowd entertained.

The way I see it, Anthony Watts had a whole heap more than usual of Friday Funnies on WUWT this week.  This article by Monckton was just one of many.  Anthony chose to make Monckton's article a "sticky".  When you're down on your luck you take what you can get.  And Anthony hasn't been having much luck at all lately.

The basis of Monckton's article was ostensibly Santer et al (2011), so I thought I'd write some of what that research found.

Ben Santer and colleagues, the signal and seventeen years of noise and counting

The Santer paper is titled: Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale.

First up they let us know that they are comparing satellite estimates of lower troposphere with CMIP3 model simulations.  What they find, unsurprisingly, is that the signal to noise ratio increases the longer the time period.  From the abstract:

...Because of the pronounced effect of interannual noise on decadal trends, a multi-model ensemble of anthropogenically-forced simulations displays many 10-year periods with little warming. A single decade of observational TLT data (temperature of the lower troposphere) is therefore inadequate for identifying a slowly evolving anthropogenic warming signal. Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.

In the Discussion and Conclusions section, the authors elaborate further.  Here are some excerpts (my bold):

Efforts to apply rigorous statistical methods to the problem of identifying human effects on climate commenced over 30 years ago [Hasselmann, 1979]. At the inception of this endeavor, it was recognized that any human-caused climate change signal is embedded in the noise of natural climate variability, and that separation of human and natural influences requires information on signal and noise properties over a range of timescales....

...Our estimated signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios for global-scale TLT changes were less than 1.0 on the 10-year timescale (Figure 6c). On the 32-year timescale, however, S/N exceeded 3.9 in all three observational TLT data sets. The latter result shows that natural internal variability, as simulated by current climate models, is a highly unlikely explanation for the observed lower tropospheric warming over the satellite era (Figure 6d). Comparisons between simulated and observed low-frequency TLT variability suggest that our estimates of S/N ratios on 5–20 year timescales are conservative (Figures 9 and 10). The strong timescale dependence of S/N ratios arises primarily because of the large decrease in noise amplitude as the period used for trend fitting increases (Figure 6b)....

... In summary, because of the effects of natural internal climate variability, we do not expect each year to be inexorably warmer than the preceding year, or each decade to be warmer than the last decade, even in the presence of strong anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

What I understand from that research is that:

• the longer the time period the more the signal emerges from the noise
• multi-decadal records are needed, the more the better
• it's important to not introduce noise unnecessarily.

How did Monckton fare against these findings?  First, Monckton misrepresented what Santer said.  Santer et al wrote that at least seventeen years and the longer the better to extract the signal from the noise:

Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature....

...The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

"At least seventeen years are required", and "multi-decadal records are required". Compare that to this, from Monckton:

However, as Anthony explained yesterday, the stasis goes back farther than that. He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there is no warming for 17 years, the models are wrong.

No, Christopher, that's not what Dr Santer and his colleagues found.  Santer didn't write about 'models being wrong'.  He was pointing out that the longer the better.  Even in the press reports this is what was written:

In order to separate human-caused global warming from the "noise" of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists.

Look we're used to Monckton making up stuff.  We don't have to just lay down and take it though.  

Let's move along.  What else did he do wrong?  

For one thing, he plotted temperature by month, not annually.  What he hoped to achieve I don't know.  Nor do I know if his "results" would have been any different.  But what I do know is that a monthly plot exaggerates the noise and hides the multi-decadal signal.  Why do you think Spencer always provides monthly plots?  It's so that every so often he can gig up the crowd by claiming a drop in temperature.  Yes, from the previous month! Even though it's well above the temperatures of the eighties and nineties.

What else did Monckton do wrong?  For another thing, Monckton misrepresented his chart as an IPCC chart, which it most certainly isn't.  Heck, he even put the name of his foundation on the chart.  And the IPCC doesn't do sloppy, not like Monckton.  Here's one of his charts.  I've animated his "brand" and added an arrow:

As if you couldn't tell anyway.  He's presenting the chart as a monthly chart, stuck some lines on it that he claims are IPCC "backcasted projections", added some dodgy numbers in the left hand corner and put a reference to an IPCC AR5 figure, when AR5 hasn't even been released yet.

Monckton describes it as follows - see if you can understand what he writes. It's not easy:

The IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report backcasts the interval of 34 models’ global warming projections to 2005, since when the world should have been warming at a rate equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century. Instead, it has been cooling at a rate equivalent to a statistically-insignificant 0.87 Cº/century:

I suppose he was right about one thing.  Any "cooling" he might have been able to fiddle is not going to be statistically significant.

On the other matters, since the IPCC's "forthcoming" Fifth Assessment Report is still "forthcoming", neither Monckton nor I would be in a position to say whether it will include any charts that hindcast or backcast or project.  He may have access to the previous draft, but that's a long way from a final version.

What is obvious is that Monckton hasn't the slightest clue about models or climate.  I mean in his second chart as shown above, he's looking at only eight years for heavens sake.  Eight years isn't multi-decadal.  Does he expect surface temperature to go in a straight line somewhere?

Let's do multi-decadal using the same temperature series, HadCRUT4.  It doesn't look anything like what Monckton drew.  You can check for yourself here.

Source: HadCRUT4

I've marked both 1995 (seventeen years of data) and 1996 (sixteen years of data) for what it's worth.  But you don't have to stop at 1995 or 1996.  You can see the trend goes back a lot further than that.  The world is getting hotter.

It's not just the land and sea surface that's warming

I didn't see anyone ask Monckton to explain all the other signs that the earth is warming, but there were a lot of comments so I might have missed it.

Recommended reading

For a different takes on global temperature trends, here are some papers and blogs to check out:

• James Hansen, Makiko Satoa and Reto Ruedy: 2012: Perception of climate change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 109, 14726-14727, E2415-E2423, doi:10.1073/pnas.1205276109.
• Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf (2011): Global temperature evolution 1979–2010, Environ. Res. Lett. 6 (October-December 2011) 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022
• Nick Stokes at Moyhu has some pretty charts as well as some interactive charts for you to play with.
• Tamino's blog - with lots of articles and statistical analysis of trends
• and more in the scientific literature.

The comments at WUWT had a lot of the usual bowing and scraping to the potty peer.  There was some fun to be had though.  There was one guy called rgbatduke (yes, I read ratbag too, then came to realise it's his initials and he teaches at Duke - which leads us to another play on words).  People were calling him Professor Brown but he isn't a climate researcher.  (I don't think he does much research at all.  He teaches physics I believe.)

Anyway the rgbatduke got stuck right into the analysis, with a very strongly worded missive on how you can't do this, that and the other thing and it's all a mess and so on and so forth.  It took up a few screens so I'll only post one bit from somewhere around the middle of his rant.  rgbatduke says:

June 13, 2013 at 7:20 am  ...Note the implicit swindle in this graph — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.

Say what?

Monckton didn't seem to object to being called a swindler and we'll see why shortly.  Nick popped in quite some time later and recognised rgbatduke had made an erroneous assumption.  Nick figured out that rgbatduke had the wrong end of the stick and thought the graph was one of the IPCC's.  rgbatduke is obviously not au fait with IPCC reports or he would have twigged at once that the charts were inventions of the potty peer himself.

The thread continued with mostly mindless denialist stuff, occasionally interspersed with Nick's astute comments and some general stirring by Mosher.  As usual, Nick was unflappable, remaining calm and polite and sticking to the facts.  Not like Monckton, who was apoplectic flinging wild accusations left, right and centre.  He called Nick a liar (and a Mr instead of Dr, while calling rgbatduke Professor - unsubtle!).  Monckton even wanted Nick to be banned from WUWT.  Then Anthony chimed in to tell Nick, the only cool head in the place, to keep it cool; to behave himself, he was upsetting the potty peer and denier rgbatduke as well as everyone else.  (On WUWT the unwritten policy is that as long as you deny science you can say what you like.  If you write sensible stuff you're under tight watch and banned if enough people flame you.)

It's a madhouse at WUWT.

As a reward for reading through to the end, here's a little bit of CO2 for your exploding plants.

About PDO, lags, kettles, cycles and hysteria...

...sorry, meant to write "About PDO, Lags, Cycles and Hysteresis"

In another article here, a certain WUWT commenter, Professor JP, took me to task for quoting him.  Quite right too.  But that one line of mine resulted in something of real value.  The Professor obviously forgave me because he was kind enough to give me a lengthy lesson on climate sciency stuff.  For free.  I didn't have to pay a cent.  I was a bit nervous at first because I've heard awful stories about gravy trains and the billions of dollars climate sciency people charge everyone.  For a minute I wondered if I'd end up roast meat under a pile of brown sauce.  But no.  Not a penny did he charge.

Now I wouldn't have written this up as an article, but the Professor was so insistent that I learn and he was so gracious in imparting his years of climate sciency knowledge that I just have to share.  (Don't you just love it when people say "share".  Makes you feel all gooey and warm and fuzzy in your mouth.)

Now I'm always willing to learn new things and I read his comments over and over to make sure I didn't miss a thing.  It's not often I get offered personal tuition.  RealClimate is one place but there are always such a lot of other people in the classes there.  (I've been honoured by other renowned scientists here as well, but none who have written so much detail as Professor JP.)

From kettles and ice blocks to the PDO

After some wonderful lessons on the basics of kettles and ice blocks (I learnt some really good stuff - like ice blocks melt if you take them out of the fridge and water in a kettle won't boil unless you heat it, while seawater doesn't need heat, it expands by magic - did you know that?), the topic shifted to the PDO.  This lesson was so informative I just have to share.  (There's that word again.)  

Here is how it started.  Professor JP was explaining why it took so long for the warmer sun in the 1950s to heat up the earth in the 1970s.  It's called "waiting for homeostasis" and has something to do with boiling kettles.  But then it turns out it wasn't the sun after all that heated up the earth.  It was the PDO.  (I looked that up.  PDO stands for Pacific Decadel Oscillation.  See I'm not as dumb as I look!)  Anyway, Professor JP wrote:

As for why the Earth started heating up in 1978, that is pretty obviously due to the PDO going into its positive phase (the previous 30 year cooling period was coincidentally during the PDO's negative phase).

And this is where lags come in again:

The PDO is clearly one of the long-term lags in climate that I was speaking of.

I got curious about these 'lags' and asked:

Just how long is that "lag" supposed to be? 

To which the Professor replied:

A reasonable guess would be the length of a half-cycle or two - 30-60 years.  

That's wonderful news.  The scientists have narrowed the uncertainty right down to half a cycle or two or 30 years or sixty years. Still, not being at all knowledgeable like the Professor, I had another couple of questions:

And when is the earth going to get back to temperatures of the 1960s? Maybe the PDO only heats the earth but doesn't cool it? Is that what you are arguing?

Unfortunately Professor JP only had time to answer the second question, so there's still a big gap in my knowledge.  Not that I'm complaining, you understand.  Heavens above, it was so generous of him to tutor me at all.  Anyway he scolded me and told me to pay attention (justifiably - I was starting to race ahead a bit) and wrote: 

Not at all, it cooled during the 30 years of the last negative cycle, which I believe I already said. Are you even bothering to read my posts?

The instantaneous laggy PDO

So there you have it.  The PDO warms and cools the earth with either a 30 year lag or a 60 year lag, which I'm told is a half-cycle or two, and instantaneously too like in the previous negative phase.  If you do the sums you'll see the Professor means that the PDO has a 60 year cycle.  In other words the PDO is a 30 or 60 year laggy sciency thing that acts instantaneously. He then generously added more words of wisdom:

I wonder since you haven't mentioned hysteresis, but I assumed someone quietly told you that you were ridiculously wrong on it or you finally realized it yourself.

Oh and please, if you can't see what is wrong with the skeptical science page on it then there is no hope for you. Their graph is so blatantly stupid the way it applies linear trend lines to a cyclical phenomena that a grade school kid could see the error.

Well, I did try to read his posts and I did make a reference to hysteresis, but I can't really blame him for missing that bit.  Professors are very busy at doing PDO climate sciency stuff, and boiling kettles and so forth, I'm sure.

Given Professor JP's insistence that it's now the PDO that is causing global warming, I sat up and took notice.  The way he writes with such certainty, he's obviously a highly qualified expert in the field of hysteresis, PDOs, lags and kettles.  It was with some trepidation that I ventured forth, however.  If a renowned climate expert like JP can't figure out if this PDO lag is 30 years or 60 years, I thought to myself, then what hope does a humble blogger have.  And I couldn't figure out if the lag only applied to the warming phase, because I thought he said the cooling phase brought instant cooling but the warming phase takes 30 or sixty years.  In any case, I put aside my fears and decided to give it a go.

Here's the result.  You can click the animation to enlarge it:

Sources: JISAO and NASA

What do you think?  I reckon Professor JP is incredible.  It sure looks like the negative phase cooled the earth instantly.  Well okay, it didn't cool it exactly but at least it looks like it stopped it getting hotter for a while. Fine, whatever you say.  It didn't completely stop it from getting hotter but you've got to admit it didn't warm quite as much. And 'not warming as much' is pretty close to being the same thing as 'cooling', sort of, if you squint a bit.  Okay, if you squint a lot and shut your eyes and imagine.  Anyway the warming phase really gave such a jolt to the earth that it's still getting hot, even though the PDO has turned negative.  That's pretty powerful stuff.

I figure I'm still much dumber than the Professor though because I can't see the lags working very well. Nor can I see the PDO's 30 year half cycle or the 60 year full cycle.  It goes up and down for sure, but I must have forgotten how to do sums because I just can make them all add up to either 30 or 60, no matter what I do. It's just me I'm sure.  He probably knows as much about climate science as his fellow Professor David Archibald, or even more.  I don't know that he knows as much as Ronald A. "it's the insects" Voisin.  But that's doubtless a matter of opinion.  Whatever, I know I'll never get to the level of any of them.

On "blatant stupidity"

BTW here is the SkepticalScience chart.  As the good professor said, how "blatantly stupid" of them to compare linear trends instead of cycles.

Source: SkepticalScience

I'll send an email to Mr John Cook Esq (proprietor of SkepticalScience) and tell him to change the chart.  Of course he wouldn't listen to a humble blogger.  I'd better tell him Professor JP, the expert in half cycle or two PDO's, hysterical lags and kettles, is personally tutoring me.  That should impress him no end.

As the Professor suggested, all you have to do is show cycles.  I couldn't draw the spokes but I did manage to draw the shape of the wheels.  You can see how bigger and bigger wheels can be made to fit between the lines and are pushing up the temperature.  It's a tri-cycle.  It all makes sense now.  You just wait and see.  I'll bet in no time at all, SkepticalScience will replace their "blatantly stupid" chart with this one below.  It's prettier for one thing.  Don't you like pink?

You had the Marcott wheelchair, now here's the HotWhopper tricycle

I hope every reader has learnt as much as I did from this wonderful lesson.

Gotta go now, the kettle's boiling at last.  (I've only been waiting forty years.  It was only after the tip from the Professor that I figured out you have to apply a source of heat before the water boils.  After I did that, it took no time at all. Nary a lag to be seen.)

Anyone for a nice hot cuppa?

PS While you're sipping your tea (milk and sugar?), you might enjoy reading another version of the PDO, this time with clouds and magic fairy dust.

Flashback to 1922 - World Growing Warmer

From The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957) Saturday 23 September 1922

WORLD GROWING WARMER.

 | 

Whilst many people have been bemoaning the cold weather of June and July it is rather questionable comfort to be told by a weather optimist in the London "Daily Mail" that the world, and particularly the Northern Hemisphere, is growing warmer. The process, he says, is rather a slow one but it is none the less steady, and of late it seems to have accelerated to some extent. If we possessed records of the weather since the beginning of the Christian era it is certain that the temperature over the whole of Europe and North America would show a startling rise. Unfortunately the thermometer is a comparatively modern invention while weather recording is a still more recent innovation. Yet for all that we can find plenty of proof, both in history and in other ways. For instance in Cesar's account of the Gallic Wars we find frequent mention of frosts so intense that whole armies were able to cross broad rivers on the ice. We know, too, that in those days Germany's winter was almost Arctic in its severity. These are conditions which have long since passed away, and it is not more than twice or thrice in a century that a river like the Seine freezes up. We are also aware that no farther back than the sixteenth century the winters in England were, on an average, much more than they are nowadays. Another interesting proof is obtained from the records of the Hudson Bay Company. We learn from them that within the last two centuries the average interval between the setting in of the winter frost and the coming of the spring thaw has decreased by no fewer than ten days. Again, European glaciers are everywhere receding. The ice fringes of both Poles are retreating. Even during the comparatively short space of time that the Antarctic has been visited by man the ice has retired some 40 miles. So let us cheer up. In process of time this country of ours will once more be growing palms and orange trees!

---

The Weather Optimist from London's Daily Mail

I'll let you be the judge of whether the Daily Mail weather optimist was prescient, whether he knew the eventual impact of the inventions of Somerset, Savery, Newcomen and Watt, or whether he was merely another Daily Mail weather optimist.  It does seem as if he was basing his speculation about past climates on very limited geographic locations and limited historical sources.  (Does that ring a bell?)  I was unable to find out who he was.  If anyone knows I'd be grateful if you'd tell me.

No-one in 1922 would have had access to a comprehensive set of instrumental temperature data for the northern hemisphere, but if they had, this is what they would have seen:

Source: HadCRUT4

Had they a record of global surface temperatures, this is what they would have seen:

Source: HadCRUT4

And if they'd only had access to land surface temperatures, this is what they would have seen:

Source: Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures

Whereas had they access to a comprehensive set of proxy data, they would have been able to see much farther back in time, even back to the Gallic Wars they mentioned:

Source: Marcott et al (2013)

TGIF on WUWT and what fake skeptics see...

Deniers are truly weird...

Reading through the comments to Anthony Watts' Friday Funny (discussed here), which nobody on WUWT seemed to find very funny, here is what some fake skeptics see:

Gary Pearse is in deep denial and says:

May 31, 2013 at 7:41 am  Interesting that 1936 was hotter than 1998 and yet it hardly lifts off the abscissa of the IPCC graph. 

Maybe Gary hasn't looked at a temperature chart since 1936.  (As usual, you can click the image to enlarge it.)

Source: NASA GISTemp

Edohiguma hasn't a clue about temperatures of the past two millenia.  Referring to the SkepticalScience Escalator he says:

May 31, 2013 at 6:47 am  If you put this escalator over the past 2,000 years, you’ll see a very pretty up and down wave. With two times even warmer than today.

Source: Marcott et al (2013)

Anthony's having a bad week

Deniers don't find this Friday's Funny very funny.  Tommoriarty says (excerpts only):

May 31, 2013 at 8:01 am  I am a global warming skeptic, and as such I believe it is important to “play fair.”...It is possible that there is some alarmist claim that the temperature rose by 1.2 degrees C from 1970 to 2000 from some source unknown to me. If that claim is common among alarmists, and a reference can be provided, them I will retract my assertion that the red line in the second graph is a strawman that misrepresents the views of the alarmists....

C’mon – Lets play fair.

To which poor old Anthony replied, trying to get his readers in the hilarity mood:

REPLY: Dude, its humor/satire. Note the headline. Just laugh, its funny. – Anthony

Hardly anybody bought it.  As Tommoriarty later said:

May 31, 2013 at 9:30 am  re: “Dude, its humor/satire. Note the headline. Just laugh, its funny.”

The best humor comes from pointing out the irony in the truth. Where is the truth? Where is the humor?

REPLY: if you can do better, by all means, go for it – Anthony

TGIF

Anthony's probably saying to himself "TGIF and oh well, there's always next week".