Uben! Uben! Uben!
(Calibrate, Calibrate, Calibrate)

Well, not really a good translation. In Germany, screw ups on the football field are greeted by a heartfelt shout: Uben! Uben! Uben! or practice, practice practice. Eli is much in favor of this, but common sense is also needed. Tim Curtin springs to the defense of inanity over at Deltoid and criticizes Eli's take on the good Diplom Beck. Yves decks him by pointing to "Oxygen Deficiency in Antarctic Air" by Ernest Lockhart and Arnold Court that appeared in Monthly Weather Review. Starting from the conclusion of sod. . .

"they got CO2 concentration wrong by 200ppm at the worst! (and we don t really know what the real CO2 concentration was at the place they were measuring!"

They, IMO, are mostly Beck and ZJ when making global conclusions from local measurements from primary authors whose first purpose were not always CO2 levels, even local (see for instance Lockhart and Court 1942 available in docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/070/mwr-070-05-0093.pdf, about ... oxygen depletion in Antarctica).

which Eli had mentioned about a year ago.

Eli is having the kind of week that Ms. Rabett goes revenge shopping during, possibly this will be a mite too strong, but it is exactly this sort of thing that differentiates the telephone book that Beck published, a critical review such as the IPCC report, or a decent scientific paper, like Machata and Hughes' "Atmospheric Oxygen in 1967 to 1970" Science, 158 (1970) 1582.

We see the same sort of ingrained nonsense from the engineering types who insist that data analysis consists of simply writing numbers down without worrying what they mean and never, no never, evaluating if they make sense and what sort of corrections need to be made. Thus the recent spate of the world is cooling since 1998 naivety, be it put on or real, and bunny labs can make a pretty good guess at that choice too.

Machta and Hughes measured atmospheric oxygen mixing ratios from 49 North to 60 South latitude and found no variation within the accuracy of their measurements settling on an average value of 20.946 percent. They looked at previous measurments and evaluated them. Some were ok, some were dodgy. They comment on the measurements of Lockhart and Court:

In 1942 Lockhart and Court reported oxygen abundances in Antarctica averaging 20.92 percent by volume and suggested that the low values might be unique to the location. Glueckauf pointed out that they performed no analysis of normal non-Antarctic air to confirm their procedures. To further cast suspicion, their carbon dioxide abundances were many times higher than that found in recent times. Table 1 does not suggest lower values approaching the Antarctica (sic).

The method that Lockhart and Court used had a resolution of 300 pppm for CO2 and 400 for oxygen. They found CO2 mixing ratios as high as 1700 ppm. For example between January 2 and January 4th they recorded values of 1700, 1500 (1/2), 1100, 900 (1/4) and 400, 200, 600, (1/55) 600, 700 (1/5 sample 2), 1600, 1400 (1/6). Think about what it would mean, if rather than a change in local conditions, or bad measurment methods or techniques, if this had really been a change in the background level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Thus, another Beckie GOGI, garbage out tells you that what went in was also garbage, or that someone made garbage in the measuring process. (End of post)