Do Surface Stations Located Near Airports Give Corrupt Temperature Readings?

AGW Denialists like Anthony Watts are always complaining about how the Urban Heat Island Effect screws up measurements from weather stations located near airports by injecting non-climatic sources of warming into their temperature records. For example here. Now the lads from Clear Climate Code, who have been attempting to reproduce software used by climate scientists in a more user-friendly programming language, have found a means of comparing airport to non-airport sites so as to see whether or not the concerns of people like Mr. Watts are justified. Their answer?

Nah.

Anthony Watts In Australia

This post is mostly excerpts from an email authored by Leon Ashby, head of the Australian Climate Sceptics' Party, the planet's very 1st Denialist Political Party. He's trying to raise funds to bring WUWT owner Anthony Watts Down Under. Note that while Tony always insists he's in it for the science, Ashby's gang thinks otherwise Just a few more excerpts, to show how the devil does business:

We plan to organise meetings where Anthony Watts will be the headline speaker in at least 14 cities - Most will be dinners. The cost of the tour we hope will be self funding from ticket sales, but in the event of a shortfall we would appreciated 50 supporters being prepared to nominate an amount they would guarantor (i.e $500 or $1,000 each etc)

The idea is that if we can have say close to $50,000 guarantied (or donated) then the tour will proceed. If we cannot get sufficient guarantors or donations in the next few weeks we will not proceed

One member has already nominated $1,000 as a guarantor. Thanks Roger.

Lord Monckton’s tour was a success with 7,000 people attending his meetings. The ticket sales and donations covered all the costs. If this occurs with Anthony Watts` tour we would not need to ask guarantors for a cent.

Sceptics my ass.

RealClimate On CRU Hack

...more particularly, on Phil Jones' "trick":

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Hottest August Ever?

Maybe not quite but, according to the UAH website, among the hottest on record and much hotter than last year even though, if you are going by sunspot numbers, the Sun has been dead as a doornail.

According to AGW deniers though, it isn't supposed to be that way.

Fun With Karl Popper

Popper's Falisifcationalism:

If T(Theoretical Statement) -> ~O(observational Statement)

Example:

If Solar activity drives climate change -> It is not the case that low solar activity will correlate with high temperatures.

By modus tollens, the observation that:

O
...implies:

~ T

which is to say that our theoretical statment has been falsified/refuted.

For example:

There have been no sunspots for almost 42 days and there are none in the offing and July 2009 was the second hottest July on record.

implies:

Anthony Watts is fucked up in the head.

Q.E.D

Of course, that's the "side of a cracker jack box" version of Karl Popper's Falsificationism. But WUWT is side of "side of a cracker jack box" science.

Anthony Watts Panics

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Anthony Watts Surfacestations.org

...is all you see when you try to access the "Watts Up With Watts" video ridiculing his Surface Stations project. This from a guy that's constantly bitching about how government agencies handle climate data.

No Discernable Bias

In this document, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA ) discuss the effect of poor station siting on the U.S. temperature record. Employing information gathered by Anthony Watts and Co. at Surface Stations, they conducted the following experiment:

Two national time series were made using the same gridding and area averaging technique. One analysis was for the full data set. The other used only the 70 stations that Surfacestations.org classified as good or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70 stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yet the two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar. Clearly there is no indication for this analysis that poor current siting is imparting a bias in the U.S. temperature trends.

Now, Anthony and McIntyre are bitching about Anthony's not being cited by name, but Mr. Watt's report...

Watts, A. (2009). Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? Downloadable from here,

...does not contain any of the kind of analysis performed by the NOAA. So it would have been of no use to such an analysis. It looks as though the material used was pulled directly off the SS site. Note the ref. to "70% of the 1221 stations " having been surveyed. This is from the yet to be updated homepage to the site.

In any case, you can't blame the NOAA for performing an analysis Anthony Watts has been unprepared to go forward with. At this moment, accroding to his Watts Up With That website, 80% of the U.S stations have been surveyed; he promised to start work on his own time series analysis at 75%. And yet there's still nothing been done. Why, Anthony, why?

(Hint: He knows he'll get the same answer as the NOAA.)

Anthony Watts And Surface Stations: The Wait Is Still On

AGW Denier Anthony Watts releases his report (.pdf here) on American Surface stations before attempting to analyse his own data. As one of his readers writes:

It seems there now 11% of the stations is considered “good” or “best”, and an additional 20% is considered “fair”. The question that now arises is: When you only take temperatures measured by these stations, how would the average temp graph of the twentieth century look? Does it differ, and how much? Is a warming trend still visible?

Damn good question. And one that you would think Anthony would attempt to answer in the report itself. So why not? Why wait? Because Anthony already knows the answer, and he doesn't like it.

97 Stations To Go

...before Anthony Watts starts analysing his data from Surface Stations.

He's got 819 done now (67% of network), and will begin work when he hits 916 or 75% of the total. Not that we don't know what an honest assessment of the station data will reveal. An analysis has already been done on the 1st 1/4 or so of the stations back in 2007, and it basically validated the GISSTEMP data. Its significant that Steve McIntyre seems to have given up on the project:

surfacestations.org has made a concerted effort to identify high-quality stations within the USHCN network (CRN1-2 stations) and preliminary indications are that the GISS U.S. estimate will not differ greatly from results from the "best" stations (though there will probably be a little bias.)

The Decline And Fall Of Surface Stations

When Anthony Watts launched Surface Stations back in June of 2007, his purpose was to demonstrate that some if not all of the U.S. temperature increases recorded during the 20th/early 21st Century were due to "localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment". In other words, due to poor siting of the surface stations scattered across the U.S. to record local temperature information. The idea was that a small volunteer army would fan out across the U.S., carrying notebooks and digital cameras, and rank these stations according to CRN siting guidelines. At some point, when enough stations had been assigned a rank, an analysis of the temperature record would be performed based on the data gathered only from stations that were "well sited". And then, hey presto!, no more Global Warming


While the project got off to a roaring start, with over 200 stations visited and analysed within the first couple of months

... this graph, based on the data points assembed below, shows a project that, since about the beginning of 2008, appears to be stagnant. A glimpse of the Surface Stations website confirms this, with the main page's last up date coming in April of this year.

So what is behind the slow death of Surface Stations?


Well, one issue relates to the accessibility of the stations themselves. Anthony's volunteers clearly went first for the "low hanging fruit"--surface stations closest to their own geographical location--and only later proceeded, at a slower pace obviously, to survey the more remote stations.


Additionally, something very important happened in September of 2007. By this time, 340 stations had been surveyed, a more than large enough sample (according to frequent Roger Pielke Sr. co-author John Nielsen-Gammon) upon which to test the Watts Hypothesis. And in fact John V. did just just this at the Climate Audit website. His conclusion:


...this is starting to look like a great validation of GISTEMP [Goddard Institute for Space Studies Temperature Analysis].


In other wordings, removing the poorly sited stations had no effect of the temperature record. Hey presto! Global Warming was back!


Since this time, nobody has attempted a comparable analysis on the ever-larger data-base of stations that Anthony and crew have compiled, with Anthony apparently choosing to hold off on this step until a complete record has been compiled. At the same time, the number of stations added to the record has declined precipitately.

These two facts are, I believe, linked. As long as the project is still on-going, the Watts hypothesis can still be said to be in play. As long as the hypothesis is still in play, the denialist movement can use it as a bullet in the warming wars, and the lower end of the MSM will still report it as such. Which is to say that, as a tool of anti-AGW propaganda, the Surface Stations project is only useful only insofar as it is incomplete and untested.

PS. Interestingly enough, Surface Stations Canada never even got off the ground.

DATES IN SURFACE STATIONS HISTORY

Founded in June 2007.
July 28,2007: 222 stations surveyed.
Sept 22, 2007: 340 stations surveyed.
Nov 11, 2007: 422 stations surveyed.
April 18, 2008 (Last time home-page was modified): 534 stations surveyed.
August, 2008: 600 stations surveyed.

Analyze That Data, Anthony Watts!

Anthony Watt's Surface Stations Project has analysed about 600 stations now, roughly half of the 1221 USHCN climate network.

If you remember, the goal of this project was to rank these stations according to new CRN siting guidelines, and then re-plot the historical temperature graphs with information from those stations that did not come up to snuff removed from the dataset. His hypothesis was that, once this was done, the temperature rise noted in the GISSTEMP data would largely disappear, an artifact of warming caused by microsite issues at the poorly sited stations.

Well, 50% of existing stations is a more than large enough sample to crunch numbers from. Why hasn't Anthony made an attempt, or farmed it out to his cohorts at Climate Audit?

Well, here's one hypothesis: Anthony already knows the answer that such an analysis would produce, and he doesn't like it.

And he knows the answer because such an analysis was already attempted back when about 400 stations were listed in the Surface Stations database. It was performed by one JohnV, a Climate Audit regular. His conclusion:

I think these plots speak for themselves, but here are my conclusions:- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN12 (the good stations)- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN5 (the bad stations)- On the 20yr trend, CRN12 shows a larger warming trend CRN5 in recent years.

To be honest, this is starting to look like a great validation of GISTEMP.

And here's another hypothesis: once the GISSTEMP data is analysed and, once again, validated, the jig will be up for Anthony. "Denier Confirms Global Warming!" is not a headline he is prepared to see.

Hence the endless delay, the tut-tutting over "poorly sited stations". Anthony is ragging the puck while all the time denying the existence of the hockey stick.

For Me?

Anthony Watts, whose important work at Surface Stations has confirmed the accuracy of GISSTEMP's U.S. temperature record, has got me a little Xmas present:

He has also pointed out this rather funny website, which satirizes the whole carbon offset business.

Merry Xmas, Anthony, and in my opinion your work confirming Mann's hockey stick graph is worth at least half the Nobel Prize dough McIntyre got for being an IPCC expert reviewer. If you're in New York in March, make him buy you a drink.

PS. What happened to all the kerfuffle about the code Hansen freed up? I guess that amounted to a whole lotta nothing, denial-wise.

The Trees Are Wise; They Speak To Us

Heed His Wisdom!
As his surface stations project fades, alpha denier Anthony Watts cuts loose with a Tolkien moment:

Trees are directly in touch with the sun, more so than other living things in the biosphere. Our “valiant” dendroclimatologists, like Michael Mann, point to tree rings as a proxy for earths climate. That may be true, but I think in addition to “treemometers” they also act as helioproxies too.

In a nutshell (ahem); I think it’s highly likely that trees have evolved survival strategies that are based on detecting changes in the sun’s output. It stands to reason that over the billion plus of years that plant life has been on earth and the millions of solar cycles they’ve been through, that they can detect changes in their primary energy source, the sun, and adapt accordingly. Producing abundant acorns could well be such a survival strategy.

Wonder when we'll see the peer-reviewed paper.

In general, patrolling the denyosphere has been a lot less fun in recent weeks. After inadvertently confirming GISSTEMP temperature records, Anthony has returned to conversing with trees and recycling tired old denialist arguments; Steve has been schlepping incomprehensible graphs; and this thing seems to have died on the vine (as it were).

PS Interesting to note that Anthony and others in the denial business seem to have coalesced around the theory that we are in for a bout of cooling. Are the warmocaust collusionists so desperate that they have resorted to offering a testable hypothesis? (Not one, mind you, that anyone can confirm or deny for another couple of decades, during which time presumably we can all sit on our asses and emit)

Nielson-Gammon Has Some Advice For Watts And McIntyre

Roger Pielke Sr. is no longer blogging, and has been travelling in Europe lately, so when I reached him by e-mail he was unaware of the latest twists and turns in Watts/McIntyre saga, in which they attempt to refute the AGW thesis by re-cutting GISSTEMP data in light of Watts survey of U.S. Surface Stations. Mr. Pielke declined to respond directly, explaining that this was "not his specialty", but was kind of enough to refer me to frequent co-authors Xiaomao Lin, Ken Hubbard, and John Nielsen-Gammon. Of these, Mr. Lin has promised to look at the CA work and attempt a response over the course of the next couple of weeks, and Mr. Nielson-Gammon has responded below with some concrete advice as to how Steve's squad of auditors ought to be proceeding.

Here is Mr. Nielson-Gammon's original e-mail:

I appreciate the attempt by Watts to classify stations on the basis of siting quality.

The impact of poorly-sited stations on the trends is not known ahead of time, despite people's expectations, and should be much more sensitive to changes in siting than to poor siting itself.

Given a sufficient number of stations, I would trust the trends from well-sited stations much more than from poorly-sited stations.

I am eager to see the results of screening the stations by siting quality. I do not know whether the well-sited stations will show more of a trend, or less of a trend.

Until the results are properly adjusted for variations in the geographical distribution of stations, it is not possible to draw any conclusions. I haven't seen anything posted online yet that does this.

- John

In response to this, I asked:

Well,

the first and second passes at the data after classifying about a third of the network (340 or so stations) into "good" and "bad" stations are here [links to CA].

In most cases the good and bad stations are pretty much in sync. Do you think 300 plus is still not enough?

To which Mr. Nielson Gammon responded:

The number is sufficient. At least, the error bars probably won't overwhelm any important difference in trends.

So there is no need, as McIntyre et al have done, to stop the analysis. In fact, a brief run through of CA comments here and here suggests that this work has been stopped in panic because it has not yielded the correct conclusion: the "good" and "bad" stations refuse to go out of sync. As Anthony Watts writes:

I do have the feeling though that comparing USHCN/GHCN data to GISS will yield similar curves no matter what, since the data has already been adjusted at the USHCN level, and that adjustment persists in the data through to GISS data.

Anyway, I wrote further to Mr. Nielson-Gammon:

They've been working on [adjusting for variations in the geographical distribution of stations]. Surfacestations has been slowly working its way into the U.S. Midwest. There's a map here.

And in response Mr. Nielson-Gammon suggested some concrete procedures for the CA crowd:

You don't need uniform coverage of quality estimates, you can do this with the data that's already available. You just need to bin the data by location, for example by computing the difference between good and bad stations within every 5 degree by 5 degree square over the US and average the results. Even better, if you're interested in the century-long trend impacts, compute the difference between the station trends and the smooth map of linear trends. Either approach would eliminate the confounding effect of spatial variations in the trends. Maybe someone will have this done within two weeks or so, it's not that hard, and it's fairly standard scientifically.

So get at it, lads (and you too KB the Denying Munchkin). There's no need to wait for more stations to be classified. You should be able to give a solid answer one way or another within the month.

Hopefully Mr. Lin will respond in the next little while. If so I will post his remarks. I have also e-mailed Mr. Hubbard and perhaps he shall reply as well.

Sorry for the long post, especially to my more politically inclined readers who probably don't give a shit..

Deniers Rediscover The Hockey Stick!

Ultra deniers Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre have been hard at work. Anthony Watts has ranked about one third of U.S. surface stations according to the new CRN siting guidelines. Meanwhile, Steve McIntyre and several of his commenters have graphed the resulting temperature trends from the "good" (CRN class 1 and 2) stations as well as the "bad" (CRN5) stations. It would be fair to say that both expected the warming trend apparent in the GISSTEMP (Goddard Institute For Space Studies) data set to disappear once this had been done. As Anthony has written, "you have to wonder if the whole house of cards isn't about to start falling down". It would be fair to say, however, that they have both been disappointed. Their preliminary results are given in the above graph, provided by one John V (a frequent poster on Climate Audit), who writes:

The first plot shows the 5yr average temperature for the lower 48:- red line is for stations with CRN=1 and CRN=2 (CRN12, the good stations).- green line is for stations with CRN=5 (CRN5, the bad stations).- blue line was downloaded from GISS on Sept 14, 2007 (GISS).
The agreement between the results is very good for all sets.

And concludes (emphasis mine):

I think these plots speak for themselves, but here are my conclusions:- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN12 (the good stations)- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN5 (the bad stations)- On the 20yr trend, CRN12 shows a larger warming trend CRN5 in recent years.

To be honest, this is starting to look like a great validation of GISTEMP.

If the Deniers can't deny it, then I think we're on pretty solid ground. But McIntyre's not giving up yet. He's standing on his head and looking at the data all squinty eyed, to see if he can't make the numbers go in another direction. So far, however, the resemblance is astonishing.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt! No more appearances on Rush Limbaugh for these two.

Climate Change Skeptic And Creationist Has New Paper Out

Many people have noted the similarity between some of the tactics employed by Climate Change Denialists and Intelligent Designers. Specifically, sow doubt and demand that the media "report the controversy". But before hearing about Roy Spencer, who has guest posts on both Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science and Anthony Watt's "Watts Up With That Blog" , as well as a new paper out, I had never heard of a climate change denier who was in addition an acknowledged IDer. In 2005, Mr. Spencer wrote:

And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.

Now, astrologers, water witches, La Rouchians...the ranks of the deniers is filled with their like. But a Creationist? Surely Climate Change Denialism is on the march!

And seeing this guy appear on Watt's site doesn't surprise me. What is strange is the connection with Roger Pielke Sr., who appears to have forgotten the old adage about laying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.

But since he's stooping to this level: yo Roger! I have a midget who insists its all down to C02, and a talking duck that taps out climatological equations with his beak. Can they do a guest post too?

h/t to Steve Bloom.

The State Of Surface Stations

Surface Stations is a project initiated by retired weatherman Anthony Watts. Its purpose is to refute Global Warming by snapping pictures of NOAA weather stations with siting issues and posting them to Conservative websites, where folks who, in general, wouldn't know a surface station from a hole in the ground then cry out "shame! shame!" in unison in the hopes of attracting the attention of Talk Radio.

As of today, the gang at Surface Stations are within a hair of having surveyed one quarter of the USHCN stations--281 to be precise--in the lower 48 states of the U.S.A. Their locations are given in the graphic above. What is fairly clear from this graphic is that SS's efforts have been concentrated 1) on the West Coast (Anthony Watts home state is California), and 2) wherever else their volunteers hail from. For example, surveys from Maine are (I am guessing) largely the work of Kristen Byrnes, the famous denying munchkin. There is a further clear trend towards surveying urban areas, also probably due to the demographics of the people making up Watt's volunteers.

Given that urban stations are more likely to be subject to siting compromises (fewer wide open fields, more asphalt), it is I think significant that only 10 per cent of the sites having been noted as not being in compliance with NOAA . Or at least, Mr. Watts has only felt obliged to scream outrage on 28 occasions.

Climate Audit: Climate Science Or Political Semiotics?

I've been writing about Steve McIntyre's Denialist website, Climate Audit, a lot recently, especially the discussions that have been raging over the surface station data being collected by Anthony Watts. But now the discussion has taken a detour into the bizarre, as it is has become possible to perceive shards of political ideology poking through the miasma of charts and graphs at the CA site. Specifically, McIntyre and his readers seem to be promulgating a faux scientific version of your standard "Red State/Blue State" political symbolism under the guise of arguing climatological theory.

The heart of the question is: how are weather stations located in Urban areas, which can often be subject to the heat island and other micro site problems associated with the artificial city environment, worked into the broader United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) so that the network might deliver accurate regional and national temperature figures? The answer is twofold. Firstly, the urban stations are "adjusted" via reference to the nearest rural station (ie a station presumably unaffected by these various problems). Secondly, the information from them is not used to determine the overall temperature numbers; only data from rural, "unlit"stations is used for this end.

But, McIntyre asks, is this really the case? He suspects that in at least one instance--the Grand Canyon (rural) vs. Tuscon (urban) station-- it is not just the former station that is being used to adjust the latter, but that the information from both is being "blended", so that the rural station is no longer quite as rural as it once was:

It appears to me that the total adjustment process (including USHCN adjustments incorporated by GISS) result in “adjusted” stations becoming a type of blend of urban and rural stations, so that it is not actually correct to say that the overall trend results only from rural stations.

[...]

It looks to me like the USHCN adjustment process feeds back trends from urban sites to adjust rural sites and this contradicts the claim that only rural sites are used in GISS trends.

In other words, his argument is that the purity of the data produced by the rural station is compromised by its proximity to/interaction with data from the urban site.

...the Grand Canyon values are being blended up and the Tucson values are being blended down.

[...]

The net impact of this is that, if Grand Canyon neighbors have urban trends, then the USHCN adjusted Grand Canyon version will also incorporate some amount of urban trend.

This theme, of the dirty urban stations introducing an "urban bias", and therefore corrupting the "pure" rural stations, is then taken up in Steve's comments sections. For example, Sam Urbinto comments:

I’d say that taking a rural station and adjusting it with urban adjustments rather turns it into an urban station.

My God, the stations have been "turned" by their proximity to urban data! I'm surprised they haven't gone gay. In fact, I'm surprised Steve doesn't refer to these urban stations as "too damn Liberal", insinuating that they are in some sense "black weather stations". The symbolism of rural=good, urban=bad, permeates the entire thread...

...as it does in Anthony Watts analysis of station data, incidentally. In his world, uncompromised rural stations inevitably show a downward temperature trend, whereas the lying urban stations show evidence of global warming.

Yes, it sounds a bit loopy, but in fact McIntyre has explicitly employed Red State/Blue State terminology here and here to demonstrate that the Red States provide no evidence for AGW:

But the oddest pattern is surely the degree to which red and blue states on these maps match their political counterparts. There are a few exceptions - Arizona, Montana, Utah, but it looks to me like voting patterns would be a better proxy for the existence of a 20th century temperature trend (by state) than tree rings.

As to why you can see crude Conservative symbolism percolating up through what is supposed to by a discussion of pure science, well I think this has something to do with the audience McIntyre is trying to cultivate. His "argumentation" often resembles a random data dump of charts and graphs, and the only real movement in it is therefore less logical than symbolical. I think it is also significant that Anthony Watts has considered using his appearances on Hannity and the Rush Limbaugh show to scare of volunteers for the Surface Stations project.

In both cases, they're throwing raw meat to the Bubbas.

Pielke and Surface Stations: What Is The Connection?

Anthony Watts is a retired meteorologist and climate change skeptic who maintains a blog here. He is also the man behind the Surface Stations project, an attempt to provide physical site survey data for the entire United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN). Or, to put it less sympathetically, a cheap stunt to stir up muck and provide ammo to the forces of the Climate Change Denial movement.

In any case, last week Dick Little from the Paradise Post wrote as follows re the Surface Stations project:

[Watts is] challenging allegations from NOAA that temperatures are rising. He reports a number of weather stations he checked had thermometers in places that would record higher temperatures than the actual ground temperature. He has a Web site with pictures to back up his research.

Working with Penn State climatologist Dr. Michael Mann, Watts found most of the problems were in urban areas where temperatures are allegedly on the rise. He said rural temperatures appear to be about the same as in past years.

The first thing to note here is that, while Watts cast the goals of his project in neutral terms on his website, every right-wing columnist that comes within 100 feet of him (Hannity and Limbaugh, for example) winds up reporting that Watts is "challenging" the science behind global warming, and pretty darned effectively too.

The second thing to note is the claim in the second paragraph that Watts is collaborating with Michael Mann. I alerted Mr. Watts to this clearly erroneous statement about a week ago, and today Dick Little issued a correction:

One thing more: In my article last week on climate change I wrongfully attributed Anthony Watts working with Professor Michael Mann of Ohio University. He is working with Prof. Roger Pielke of Colorado State.

I e-mailed an apology to Professor Mann who graciously accepted it.

However, the correction itself raises a couple of issues, because although Roger Pielke Sr. has expressed his support for the Surface Stations project, he is a legitimate scientist, a respected climatologist who is probably uninterested in seeing his reputation suffer by being observed in close proximity to what seems to be fast becoming a Climate Denialist tar-baby.

So lets examine the claim Mr. Watts has put forward "working" with Dr. Pielke: temperatures are only rising at problematic "urban" stations, while "rural temperatures appear to be about the same as in past years. "

I wonder if Dr. Pielke would like to through his weight behind these claims, especially in light of the criticism raised against them here and here.

PS. It occurs to me that columnist Dick Little's name will appear in the Paradise, CA phonebook as "Little, Richard" or, even worse, "Little, Dick". But I guess we all have our cross to bear.

The Surface Stations Project: Science Auditers or Enviro Vigilantes?

Anthony Watts is a climate change skeptic and member of what I would call the "Climate Audit" movement, in which citizens with some small grounding in the relevant fields attempt to bring mainstream scientists in the debate over Global Warming "to account". For example, Mr. Watts has launched Surface Stations, a website created to document deficiencies in the sites used by the United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN), which record changes in surface temperatures around the U.S. His goal is to call into question "the whole surface temperature record ", a project which would, if successful, put a good part of the foundation behind contemporary AGW science into question. To contribute to this project, you surf over Surface Stations, download the appropriate reporting forms, and traipse off to visit your local station, where you are expected to provide a photographic and written report.

Except that the NOAA/NCDC (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and National Climatic Data Center) have been "throwing up road-blocks"-- essentially banning Watts' volunteers from their stations, and pulling information on these stations from their website:

It sounds as though you’ve used the system enough that once you’ve located a station using the search, you’re clicking on the station name hyperlink and opening a separate station details window. The managing party for a station has always been visible by clicking on the “Other Parties” tab. In the case of NWS Coop stations (the USHCN research network relies upon a subset of stations in the NWS Coop program), this is usually the NWS office that administers the site. This information was previously included at the bottom of the Identity tab’s “form view,” but was removed from that view early this week because in some cases it also revealed the name of the Cooperative observer.

Cooperative observers are volunteers who donate their time in the interests of the public good with a reasonable expectation that their personal information will remain private. It is the NCDC’s policy to protect observer details, based upon Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Update, Vol.X, No. 2, 1989, which exempts the application of FOIA in certain cases and establishes privacy protection decisions in accordance with the Privacy Actof 1974 (2004 edition). This exemption applies when the personal privacy interest is greater than any qualifying public interest for disclosure.

Naturally Mr. Watts is "shocked, shocked" by this, and suspects a conspiracy.

However, if you look at past actions by the various participants in the Climate Audit movement, they have often crossed the line into the downright assholish. For instance, there's Steve Mcintyre's now famous inadvertant DOS attack on NASA, which was launched in an attempt to access GISS information that (it turns out) he could have just asked for, and which got him booted from NASA computers. Furthermore, both McIntyre and Pielke sling the term "cover-up" at pretty much any piece of research they don't like, and the wilder among their readers seem to think that Al Gore is ferried around in a black helicopter, and that the weather stations under investigation are likely to harbour a basement full of U.N. soldiers.

It is from this pool of readers that Mr. Watt's is drawing his volunteers.

So I for one take the NOAA/NCDC comments noted above at face value: they are simply attempting to protect their volunteers from harassment by the kind of fruit-loops that might come out of the woodwork to join Mr. Watt's project.


And I would make the following suggestion that might help Mr. Watts weed possible kooks from his pool of volunteers. Sir, while there is data on the various surface stations at your site, there is no information at all on your volunteers. It therefore does not seem possible for the operator of one of these stations to check names and contact information against a master list to determine (perhaps by a return call) whether or not the voice at the other end of the phone line is a member of your team or not. There also seems to be no process by which station operators can lodge complaints against your volunteers.

I don't know that making such changes will get your people onto the sites they wish to investigate. I do, however, think that will remove some of the stench of wingnuttery from your project, and will increase its credibility in the eyes of legitimate media sources (ie folks beyond Rush Limbaugh and Fox)