Tuesday, January 08, 2013

The Color Purple

UPDATE: Gareth has hot topic about the longer lowdown on the heatwave down under with lots of links

It is so hot in Australia that the weather bureau has had to add a new color to its forecast map

Things are tough down there, with no break in sight, but dear bunnies, that is not what this post is about.  Young Tony Watts has looked at the US Climate Reference Network (you know the one Eli pointed him to when he started taking pictures of nude surface stations as a better way of doing thing.  He averages up the readings and concluded

Therefore, from this data, the Average Annual Temperature for the Contiguous United States for 2012 is 55.25°F

Note also the value from the CRN from July 2012, 75.6°F far lower than what NCDC reported in the SOTC of 77.6°F and later in the database of 76.93°F as discussed here.
Makes you wonder why NCDC never mentions their new state of the art, well sited climate monitoring network in those press releases, doesn’t it? The CRN has been fully operational since late 2008, and we never here a peep about it in SOTC. Maybe they don’t wish to report adverse results.
Turns out that NOAA really does not like Tony.  Today the NOAA National Climate Data Center had an announcement about the surface temperature for the continental US (excludes Hawaii and Alaska)
The U.S. weather-tracking agency had said after a warmer-than-usual November that 2012 was virtually certain to be a year of record high U.S. temperatures. On Tuesday, it pegged last year's average temperature at 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above the 20th century's average and 1½ degrees above the average in 2011.
Tom Karl really did have a better trick

21 comments:

Ron Broberg said...

WSJ graphic:
http://rhinohide.org/climate/analysis/ncdc/ds9640/img/wsj-20130108.png

willard said...

Rumor has it that our beloved Bishop will claim the purple spot for the Purple state he'll finance with his new political hit job.

Go buy his book!

Anonymous said...

It's easy to see that one might equate NOAA's story with Celie's. After all, Celie was well and truly abused by her pappy, Alphonso, and by Mr Johnson, much like NOAA is by Mr aW. But I don't see a real parallel between Mr aW and Alphonso/Mr Johnson. Shame the allegory doesn't go deeper, that would have been really cool... sorry, hot.

Cymraeg llygoden

andrew adams said...

Willard,

Our beloved Bishop seems to have been remarkably prolific recently - all of the following have been released since October

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hiding-Decline-W-Montford/dp/0957313500/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357741585&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Institutional-Bias-W-Montford/dp/1481881612/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357741585&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Propaganda-Bureau-ebook/dp/B00AOLF5GY/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357741585&sr=1-3 (one of the greatest scandals in the history of the BBC!!)

If only I'd realised before Christmas I could have updated my list for Santa accordingly.

Anonymous said...

On the CRN averaging: I really wish that Watts could get a proper tutorial on anomalies. His instinct to think about absolute temperatures just keeps getting him into trouble: from way back when he leaped on the difference between GISS, NCDC, and UAH (which ended up being a baseline issue), to the what should have been highly embarrassing for him (if he engaged in self-reflection at all) accusation of deliberate manipulation by NCDC to drop out cold stations thereby making the world warmer, to the present.

Having said that: it would help if NCDC made their own methodology for reporting absolute numbers more clear. My guess is that they calculate anomalies for the entire date range, then pick some random 30 year or century period as a baseline, and add that baseline to all the anomalies. The relative temperature are then the important takeaway, the absolute an artifact of whichever baseline was used that day... but poor Watts keeps getting hung up on the absolutes, so thinks that if he can generate an absolute with CRN that is different from the NCDC absolute, that he has something interesting. Now, if he showed that the CRN CHANGE in temperature from 2010 to 2011 to 2012 was different than the same calculation using USHCN... he'd have something more interesting.

-MMM

Anonymous said...

ps. Pat Michaels seems to fall for the Watts confusion: from a comment at capital weather gang, pat says:

"Over at wattsupwiththat.com, Anthony is finding a bias betwen the HCNv2.5 and the CRN."

Unless Pat has seen something I haven't seen, Pat is following the red herring through the rose-colored gases up the garden path...

-MMM

a_ray_in_dilbert_space said...

Andrew Adams: "Our beloved Bishop seems to have been remarkably prolific recently..."

Perhaps one of his manic phases?

John Mashey said...

re: Andrew Adams
What more do you need to know of ht Bishop than demonstrated incompetence or falsification, atop quoting from my favorite dog astrology journal, discussed right here at Eli's hutch.

However, I'm pleased to report that more articles have become available at JSE, 23:1 to 23:4, including the long-awaited:

'A New Experimental Approach to Weight Change Experiments at the Moment of Death with a Review of Lewis E. Hollander’s Experiments on Sheep'

'An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails'

'A Brief History of Abduction Research'

John said...

'Abduction research???'

They conduct research into alien abductions?? LOL

A relative of mine once saw a TV talk show, hosted by some Jerry Springer type. One guest claimed to have been abducted by aliens MANY TIMES. On the TV screen the studio subtitled his name and his occupation:

UFO FREQUENT FLYER

John Mashey said...

John:
Yes, at JSE they do publish research on alien abductions, in this case by David M. Jacobs.

Give yourself a treat! Briefly peruse the list of papers, in which serious treatment is given to many interesting topics. Then, whenever you need a break from work, select one for a quick read.

Of course, the occasion of all this was Deming's "Global Warming, the Politicization of Science, and Michael Crichton's State of Fear", quoted by the Bishop in HSI, and those before him, like McIntyre and McKitrick, Singer, Lindzen.

Anonymous said...

Apologies for being a bit off-topic, but since the New Year is often a time for catching up with the goings-on among friends like ol' Bish, perhaps it's worth an update on a certain Peter Wood, with whom John Mashey and other readers are familiar, whose ignorant and defamatory anti-science essays appeared at the blog Innovations, formerly hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Wood remains president of a conservative organization that refers to itself somewhat misleadingly as the "National Association of Scholars" (NAS).

Dr. Mashey and Eli had attempted to engage in rational debates with Dr. Wood over some of his postings at the now defunct blog, Innovations. Dr. Wood's last posting at Innovations in August 2012 was a diatribe against diversity and sustainability programs at institutions of higher education. Since then, Dr. Wood's postings at CHE have been notably infrequent during the past several months, following one of several controversial pieces he wrote on the subject of climate science, in this case attempting to smear Dr. Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University by spuriously associating him with the sex abuse scandal surrounding Penn State's assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

The bunnies might be interested to know that shortly after the publication of Dr. Wood's attack on Dr. Mann, the Innovations blog was quietly discontinued and replaced by a new blog titled The Conversation, helpfully subtitled "Online opinion and ideas on higher education," presumably to clarify that CHE shouldn't be tarnished by the irresponsible rantings of authors such as Dr. Wood. This has to be acknowledged as a blow to NAS's propaganda effort, since CHE had raised NAS's profile by providing a prominent and credible platform for their right-wing opinions on education. It is to be hoped that CHE's readers won't be subjected to further ignorant essays about climate science from the likes of Dr. Wood.

Taylor B

Anonymous said...

Oh my.

Pr Mashey, you do already a terrific job, but now I have to thank you personnaly for the link to JSE. This is a pure trollgasm.

Many thanks Pr Mashey, and curses on you for the lack of work I will do today because I will skim all the articles. Especially the ones about the plate tectonics under threat.

Oh my

bratisla

a_ray_in_dilbert_space said...

John Mashey,
FWIW, I have a psychologist friend who has done some work on the psychologies of folks who believe they've been abducted by aliens and also on those who claim to remember past lives. Interesting stuff. I keep trying to get her interested in the psychology of deniers, but she says that is just too depressing a topic for her.

Anonymous said...

And your psychologist friend 'knows' aliens don't exist, right?

a_ray_in_dilbert_space said...

kT,
Oh, yeah. It wouldn't have been a very interesting psychology study if they did exist.

John Mashey said...

a_ray, kT:
Let us be more precise.
1) There are likely lots of aliens out there, we may never know, given the energy requirements.

2) What is in doubt is the presence of aliens *here* who repeatedly abduct people from their sleep, perform naughty experiments on them, and then get them back in their beds unnoticed. See Wikipedia.

Anonymous said...

And you don't think that biased the design of the experiments and the resulting data and their evaluation? If you're looking for 'interesting' then already the study is compromised.

Anonymous said...

Well, if I were an alien, which technically I am, then I would establish a long term observation and preservation program using specially trained organisms derived from the biological material of the planet under study, and set them up more or less in situ in the area.

Perhaps you need to explore this domain of study a little more before you reveal your relative ignorance of the subject.

But you guys won't be around much longer on this planet, so why should I care about you much?

Anonymous said...

Nothing to add here. Except saving this page of comments.

On a more serious note, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nDojbDaGx4M
The picture was terrible for me as a father. Even though I know they survived (and I was terribly relieved), I couldn't stop being seriously moved.

What kind of world do I let to my children ?

bratisla

Mal Adapted said...

kT: "Perhaps you need to explore this domain of study a little more before you reveal your relative ignorance of the subject." On the subject of aliens abducting humans? Or on the subject of aliens existing? If the latter, who is 'relatively' less ignorant, given the non-existence of any actual knowledge (as opposed to manufactured evidence, speculation, paranoid delusion and other forms of 'knowledge' of negligible epistemic value)?

willard said...

The first stanzas from **Tea at the Palaz of Hoon** by Wallace Stevens:

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.