Icecap Note: The first paper using output from the Surface Station project of Anthony Watts’s is accepted for publication. Kudos to Anthony, Roger Pielke Sr. and the other authors. Here is one of the co-author’s view. John Neilson Gammon is the State climatologist for Texas. He is NOT a skeptic but a true scientist who takes fair and objective views of the data.

By John Nielsen-Gammon, Climate Abyss

As you may have heard, the long-awaited peer-reviewed analysis of the results of the SurfaceStations.org project has finally been released. I can’t wait to see the dueling headlines. Some will argue that the take-home message should be: Poor Station Siting Strongly Effects Temperature Trend Measurements, and will laugh at the idea that we can say with sufficient accuracy what has happened to our climate. Others will argue that the take-home message should be: Poor Station Siting Has No Effect on Temperature Trend Measurements, and will laugh at all the effort expended on a null result. Both sides will find solid evidence for their points of view in the paper. How can that be? How can one paper support opposing conclusions?

First off, when you see a plot of historic temperature anomalies averaged over the United States or over the globe, you’re almost certainly looking at something derived from “mean temperatures”. The daily mean temperature is simply the average of the maximum and minimum temperatures.

Siting issues will affect maximum and minimum temperatures differently. For example, a shade tree overhanging the instrument shelter will make the maximum temperatures cooler and the minimum temperatures warmer. An air conditioner near the instrument shelter will make both maximum and minimum temperatures warmer, but probably have the biggest effect on minimum temperatures.

It’s possible that such siting problems might alter the temperature trend measured at a particular station, but clearly there will be a big effect if the siting characteristics change over time. Add an air conditioning unit, and temperatures go up. Add a tree, and the diurnal temperature range (the difference between the daily maximum and minimum temperatures) goes down.

Big siting changes started in the late 1980s, as the thermometer of choice went from a standard liquid-in-glass thermometer to MMTS, a sensor that required electricity. Quite frequently, the measurement site ended up closer to buildings because that’s where the electricity was.

In an ideal world, you’ll have records of all these changes, and you’ll have observations taken simultaneously at the old and new sites so that you’ll know what difference it makes. But as you may have noticed, ours is not an ideal world.

Correcting for such changes is a job that falls to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Their techniques for making adjustments to the data to correct for such problems have become more and more sophisticated over the years. First, they make the obvious correction for time-of-observation bias (if your daily observation time is in the afternoon, you’ll double-count maxes; if it’s in the morning, you’ll double-count mins), then the rest of it is based on comparing a station to its neighbors and looking for sudden jumps or steadily diverging records. If the difference is big enough, they estimate the difference and adjust for it; “big enough” is fairly small if the jump happens to coincide with a documented change of the station characteristics, but the bar is set higher if there was no known change.

The Fall et al. 2011 paper used the SurfaceStations.org ratings of the quality of the individual USHCN stations and asked some basic questions: Does the temperature measured at a site depend on the siting quality? Does the trend measured over time depend on siting quality? Do the NCDC adjustments correct for differences in siting quality? Note that Fall et al. didn’t attempt to distinguish from effects due to siting quality itself and effects due to instrument changes, nor did they look at larger-scale effects like urbanization.

Here, in brief, are the answers: The poorest sites tend to be warmer. The minimum temperatures are warming faster at poorer sites than at better sites. The maximum temperatures are warming slower at poorer sites than at better sites. The adjustments reduce the differences by about half. The two effects are roughly equal and opposite so the mean temperature is rising at about the same rate across sites of different quality while the diurnal temperature range shows the biggest difference across sites.

On the one hand, this seems to be confirmation of the quality of the temperature record. All types of sites show the same mean temperature trend, so there’s no change necessary to our estimates of observed historical temperature trends in the United States.

On the other hand, there are several warning flags raised by this study. First, station siting is indeed important for the maximum and minimum temperature measurements. Second, the adjustments are only partly correcting the temperature record. Third, since the adjustments use data from all surrounding stations, there’s the danger that the mean trends are dominated by data from the poorer stations. (Less than ten percent of the USHCN stations are sited well enough to be considered appropriate for climate trend measurements.) Finally, and perhaps most important, are we really so lucky that the rest of the world would also have its poorly-sited stations have erroneous maximum and minimum temperature trends that just happen to be equal and opposite to each other?

So if you thought that the temperature record in the US was lousy, well for mean temperatures in particular it may not be too bad. (Note: regional conditions may vary.) And if you thought that the adjusted station data had eliminated effects due to poor siting, well for most temperature variables there’s still a ways to go. I’m glad we now have the Climate Reference Network, which should at least guarantee accurate trend measurements going forward.

By the way, if you’ve downloaded the paper you may have noticed that I’m one of the authors. My involvement was mainly in the statistical analysis, and I’ll discuss the statistics of the paper in another post. There’s also a lot more in the paper than my brief summary implies, and I’ll go into some of those issues later too.

This is an excerpt of a speech at Cambridge by Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, “The Science and Economics of Climate Change Conference”, Howard Theatre at Downing College, University of Cambridge, 10 May 2011

See his talk at the ICCC here.

By Vaclav Klaus

I will talk about the Global Warming Doctrine (GWD) because this doctrine, not global warming itself, is the issue of the day and the real danger we face. This set of beliefs is an ideology, if not a religion, which lives more or less independently on the science of climatology. Climate and temperature are used or very often misused in an ideological conflict about human society. It is frustrating that the politicians, the media and the public, misled by the very aggressive propaganda organized by the GWD exponents and all their fellow travelers, do not see this. I hope today’s conference will be a help in this respect.

I have expressed my views about this issue in a number of speeches and articles presented or published in the last couple of years all over the world. My book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” has been translated into 17 languages. I spoke about it several times also here in Great Britain, in Chatham House four years ago, and most recently in the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Some relevance had my speech at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York in September 2007.

The GWD has not yet presented its authoritative text, it has not yet found its Karl Marx who would write its “Manifesto”. This is partly because no one wants to be explicitly connected with it, and partly because it is not easy to formulate.

The GWD, this new incarnation of environmentalism, is not a monolithic concept that could be easily structured and summarized. It is a flexible, rather inconsistent, loosely connected cascade of arguments, which is why it has been so successfully escaping the scrutiny of science. It comfortably dwells in the easy and self-protecting world of false interdisciplinarity (which is nothing else than the absence of discipline). A similar approach was used by the exponents of one of the forerunners of GWD, of the Limits to Growth Doctrine. Some of its protagonists were the same.

What follows is my attempt to summarize my reading of this doctrine:

1. It starts with the claim that there is an undisputed and undisputable, empirically confirmed, statistically significant, global, not regional or local, warming;

2. It continues with the argument that the time series of global temperature exhibits a growing, non-linear, perhaps exponential trend which dominates over its cyclical and random components;

3. This development is considered dangerous for the people (in the eyes of soft environmentalists) or for the planet (among “deep” environmentalists);

4. The temperature growth is interpreted as a man-made phenomenon which is caused by the growing emissions of CO2. These are considered the consequence of industrial activity and of the use of fossil fuels. The sensitivity of global temperature to even small variations in CO2 concentration is supposed to be high and growing;

5. The GWD exponents promise us, however, that there is a hope: the ongoing temperature increase can be reversed by the reduction of CO2 emissions;

6. They also know how to do it. They want to organize the CO2 emissions reduction by means of directives (or commands) issued by the institutions of “global governance”. They forget to tell us that this is not possible without undermining democracy, independence of individual countries, human freedom, economic prosperity and a chance to eliminate poverty in the world. They pretend that the CO2 emissions reduction will bring benefits which will exceed its costs.

This simple scheme can be, undoubtedly, improved, extended, supplemented or perhaps corrected in many ways by the distinguished participants of this conference but I believe that its basic structure is correct. The missing “GWD manifesto” should be built along these lines.

There are many disagreements about this doctrine among the scientists in natural sciences, as was demonstrated here this morning, but I also know the stances of social scientists, especially economists, who do not buy into this doctrine either. These two camps usually do not seriously talk to each other. They only come into contact with the self-proclaimed interdisciplinarists from the other field. The social scientists are taken aback by the authoritative statements that “the science is settled”, the scientists in natural sciences a priori assume that there is nothing “hard” in social sciences.

The politicians - after having lost all other ideologies - welcomed the arrival of this new one. They hope that the global warming card is an easy game to play, at least in the short or medium run. The problem is that they do not take into consideration any long-term consequences of measures proposed by the GWD.

By Dr. Larry Bell, Forbes

As if deadly human CO2 emission climate endangerment of polar bears, logging displacement of spotted owls, and water diversion from delta smelt for California agriculture wasn’t bad enough, domestic oil and gas drilling now threatens yet another innocent creature.  Last December the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that a native three-inch Southwestern U.S. reptile “faces immediate and significant threats due to oil and gas activities and herbicide treatments,” and initiated the process to get it listed under the Endangered Species Act. Should this designation be granted, oil and gas production in the New Mexico and Texas Permian Basin containing an estimated 20% of our nation’s reserves and one-fourth of our active oil and gas wells may need to be shut down.

First filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in 2002, the Bush administration delayed consideration of the petition for six years. An issue of dispute is whether the dunes sagebrush lizard in question is truly a separate species, or rather, a common sagebrush lizard subspecies. The Obama administration has now put the matter back on a high priority track- along with the designation of vast areas in and off Alaska as protected areas for caribou and polar bears. (Source: “Will a Lizard Stop West Texas Oil?” Investor’s Business Daily.  April 28, 2011.)

This, of course, is the same administration whose Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ignored a judge’s order to remove oil drilling restrictions in the Gulf of Mexico, and whose EPA recently withheld permits to block Shell Oil from drilling this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska - after the company has already spent five years and nearly $4 billion on those plans. The Beaufort and Chukchi Sea leases alone cost $2.2 billion.  EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell hadn’t included carbon emissions from an ice-breaking vessel in the project’s overall greenhouse gas calculations.

If it seems curious to some why the president would then travel to Brazil and lend $2 billion we borrowed from China to enable their state-owned company to drill in the Gulf of Mexico, the answer should be quite obvious. Almost everyone knows there aren’t any caribou or polar bears in Brazil. And forget about the carbon emissions from those Brazilian tankers that we will pay to deliver the oil to us. GE plans to convert them to wind power through purchases of U.N.-approved Chinese junk technology components.

Other whiners quibble about the high costs of protecting those threatened creatures. For example, selfishly worrying that an expected 20% drop in 2011 Gulf oil production will result in the loss of 375,000 more jobs, further damage our economy, and raise gasoline prices. (Source: Anthony Martin, “Obama’s War on Oil-Shell Stopped from Drilling,” April 26, 2011.)

Some unfairly point out that the spotted owl protection effort killed logging and created ghost towns throughout the Pacific Northwest, only to later discover that the kindness campaign made little difference. Government studies later revealed that those spotted owls weren’t logging casualties at all, but were being victimized by their cousins, the barred owls, who crowded them out of habitats and attacked them.

So the government then came up with a $200 million “barred owl removal plan” to literally shoot the interlopers, a subspecies of the same Mexican owl clan. This has come to be a very familiar solution...namely to choose losing favorites and kill strong competitors. Where is PETA when you really need them? Remember, those murdered barred owls had mothers too! (Sources: Tom DeWeese, “Stupid Human Tricks: The Sad Case of the Spotted Owl,” July 2, 2007. “Blasting Some Owls to Save Others?” Nancy Grace for CBS News, April 27, 2007. CBS.com Stories.)

Still other environmental policy critics object to the California Fish and Game Commission’s listing of delta smelt as an endangered species which led to 40% unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley, turning that major food basket into an empty dust bowl. They don’t seem to appreciate that these tiny little fish have an important purpose on this Earth also. It’s called “bait.”

And those overheated polar bears? On a Sept. 9, 2007, Good Morning America broadcast, Kate Snow called them “the newest victims of global warming.” That same segment featured Dr. Steven Amstrup, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist, who stated that the bears “could be absent from almost all their range by the middle of this century.” Strangely, only five years earlier a 2002 USGS study had reported that the “[polar bear] populations may now be near historic highs.” (Sources: Nathan Burchfiel, “Polar Bear Scene Could Maul Energy Production,” May 7, 2007.  “Polar Bear Proposal Shows EPA is Broken,” speech by Sen. James Inhofe, U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, press release, Jan. 4, 2007.)

Yes fortunately, and certainly no thanks to us, they now do seem to be in somewhat better shape than we have been led to believe after all. Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager of wildlife research for the Government of the Canadian Territory of Nunavut, agreed with the USGS’s 1970 assessment, later reporting that his organization’s research showed that the Canadian polar bear population had increased about 25% during the past decade (from about twelve thousand to fifteen thousand). Even Polar Bears International, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the animals, rates only five groups as “declining,” another five as “stable,” one as “increasing,” and others as “data deficient” (impossible to measure) out of 19 total world populations. (Sources: “Biological Science Report USGS//BRD2002-0001: Section8: polar Bears,” USGS, 2002.)

Still, now that polar bears are officially listed as “threatened,” we can sleep much easier at night not having to worry about depreciating tundra habitat property values with unsightly oil and gas operations in ANWR.  And since spotted owls are being protected don’t you agree that it’s probably a good idea to add the barred owls we’re killing to save them to that endangered species list as well?

A big remaining question is what to do about those lizards. If experts on such matters determine they’re just a subspecies of the common sagebrush lizard, then to hell with them … let them just drag their scrawny tails out of the way…they’re expendable. But should they be ruled to be a separate species … then it’s imperative to halt that drilling right away!

Finally, there’s still another large question. What about our own endangerment if we won’t be able to drill for oil and gas in or near Alaska, in the Permian Basin, or anywhere else the Department of Interior and EPA disapprove?  Consider our future survival as fuel, energy and food costs continue to escalate as a result.

Shouldn’t we be eligible for listing as a threatened species too? Reprinted with author permission