Tuesday, December 01, 2015

UAH TLT Series Not Trustworthy

The news has been full of Lamar Smith, Chair and Poohba of the House Science Committee fulminating about NOAA and his attempts to gangplank Tom Karl.  In a recent op-ed in the Washington Times (fishrap whose time and sugar daddy has come and gone) Smith writes

NOAA often fails to consider all available data in its determinations and climate change reports to the public. A recent study by NOAA, published in the journal Science, made “adjustments” to historical temperature records and NOAA trumpeted the findings as refuting the nearly two-decade pause in global warming. The study’s authors claimed these adjustments were supposedly based on new data and new methodology. But the study failed to include satellite data.

Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most objective, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. This fact is well documented, but has been embarrassing for an administration determined to push through costly environmental regulations.
Now this is very popular on the SKS list of denial as the El Nino driven SURGE is pushing global temperatures through the roof.  Certain folk, including Congressman Smith, invoke the UAH MSU global temperature record as their gold standard.  Yet anybunny looking into the matter knows of the serial screwups and the teeth pulling needed to get any information about the majic Spencer and Christy use to transform microwave intensity to temperatures and how it is hard to figure out what and where is actually being measured.

All is not clear in Alabama.

A friend of the Rabett Run knows quite a bit about MSU units and how Roy Spencer and John Christy have danced with the data.

He wrote a letter to Lamar Smith.

Eli thought reproducing the letter would be a public service.  It is a bit long for a tweet, and, indeed some additional comments have been added at the end.

--------------------------------------------------
Rep. Lamar Smith,
Chairman House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
2321 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

RE: your Op-Ed  26 November in The Washington Times

Chairman Smith:

I read your op-ed with considerable interest.  I’m a retired engineer whose work experience included several years in satellite design.  As I read your article, my impression was that you do not understand the so-called “satellite temperature” data developed by Roy Spencer and John Christy of UAH.  Allow me to provide some information.

The MSU series of instruments and the later AMSU measure microwave intensity from orbit, that is, from the top of the atmosphere.  Theoretical work has been developed to support the claim that these measurements for each channel of the instrument correspond to a “bulk” temperature profile thru the atmosphere.  When Spencer and Christy presented their first effort in 1990 (1), they worked with data from channel 2, which they still produce, (now labeled TMT for Temperature, Middle Troposphere).

However, in 1992 (2), they presented results which showed that the channel 2 data is distorted by emissions from the stratosphere, which has exhibited a well known cooling trend.  For this reason, they proposed a modification of the channel 2 data, (now labeled TLT for Temperature, Lower Troposphere) which they claimed removed the distortion from the stratosphere in the MSU data.
The TLT computation begins with the 11 scan positions which the MSU produces for each swath across the ground track below.  There are 11 positions, labeled 1 thru 11, with #6 being straight down (nadir).  There are also 2 more positions at the ends of each swath, one viewing deep space and the other viewing a heated target which is monitored for temperature with two accurate resistance thermometers.  The TLT algorithm actually includes only 4 of the 11 positions, throwing out 5, 6, and 7 and using 1, 2, 10 and 11 as a correction for the data from 3, 4, 8 and 9. Thus, the resulting TLT data can not be said to “ provide “complete global coverage”.  Also, the data can only be provided between 82.5N and 82.5S, due to the inclination of the orbit.  Spencer and Christy calculate a gridded data product including higher latitudes, which they calculate by interpolation, artificially extending beyond the range of available data.

The TLT algorithm is based on theoretical calculations, using a model of the microwave emission and adsorption at each pressure altitude added together from the surface to satellite altitude. Spencer and Christy have never publicly revealed the method they used to create their algorithm, which is rather curious, as the assumptions used may be critical.   Some of the microwave energy in channel 2 comes from the Earth’s surface and the TLT computation adds more surface effects, thus the TLT is not a pure measure of temperature.  As the MSU instruments are retired, newer AMSU instruments are replacing them and Spencer and Christy have created a different algorithm in order to include the AMSU data into the TLT.  They claim that they are simulating the TLT from the MSU, again without specifying the method used to do so.  They have continued this lack of transparency with the latest TLT (version 6), which Spencer briefly described on his blog, but which has not been published after peer review.

The important point to remember from all of this is that the TMT is not useful for measuring climate change and the TLT is highly theoretical.   In spite of being aware of these limits, Spencer and Christy have presented the TMT in testimony to Congress, showing a comparison between the TMT and the results of computer simulations, both globally and over  the tropics.  What they don’t mention is that to produce their graphic,  they have simulated the orbital altitude TMT measurements from the GCM results (3), using CMIP5 data from the KNMI Climate Explorer website (4).  The model results from KNMI are monthly averages and include only temperatures at 3 pressure levels, the surface, 500mb and 200mb pressure height, as I understand it.  The method to translate those monthly values into simulated TMT results remains an unpublished mystery.

Spencer and Christy’s claim (which you  repeated ) that the satellite data does not exhibit as much warming as that from the surface is not surprising.  The 13 satellites’ orbits take the instruments across each latitude at the same time of day with each orbit, the equator crossing times being nearly constant.  The surface temperature record is usually an average of the temperature at a location, computed as an average of the daily low and high temperatures.  This average will not be the same as the temperature measured at a fixed times of the day, say 10AM and 10PM, which the satellite might see over mid-latitudes. And, at the highest latitudes, each pass provides measurements half way between the equatorial crossing times, 3AM at one pole and 3PM at the opposite pole.  At polar latitudes, the orbits overlap, giving multiple measurements during the day, which are summed into a grid box, while in mid latitudes, there are missed areas between the ground swaths, which exacerbates the lack of coverage in the TLT.

Twelve years ago, my curiosity led me to perform an analysis of the UAH TLT data, the results of which I published in a peer reviewed journal in 2003 (5).  I found an apparent discrepancy at high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, which I suggested might be due to the effects of sea-ice. After my report, the group at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) decided to exclude any coverage to the south of latitude 70S from their version of the TLT, their reasoning being that the high elevations over the Antarctic was distorting the measurements.  RSS also excludes data from other regions with high elevations, such as the Andes and the Himalayas.  I later performed an analysis using the TMT product, finding that these data did not exhibit the anomalous characteristic which I noticed in the TLT.  These results have not been published, but can be made available on request.  It would be of interest to see the result of a similar analysis using the latest version 6 of the TLT, though I am not likely to perform such an effort.

In conclusion, I think these facts provide very good reasons to discount the “satellite temperature” data when assessing the climate change resulting from mankind’s activities adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

Best Regards,
Richard Eric Swanson, AAAS, AGU


References:
1.  Spencer, R. W.,  J. R. Christy, Precise monitoring of global temperature trends from satellites, Science 247, 1558 (1990).

2.  Spencer, R.W.,  J. R. Christy, Precision and radiosonde  validation of satellite gridpoint temperature anomalies, Part II: A Tropospheric retrieval and trends during 1979-90., J. Climate 5, 858 (1992b).

3.  http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-observations-for-tropical-t ropospheric-temperature/

4.  http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_cmip5.cgi?id=someone@somewhere

5.  Swanson, R. E., Evidence of possible sea-ice influence on Microwave Sounding Unit tropospheric temperature trends in polar regions, Geophysical Research Let., doi:10.1029/2003GL017938, (2003)

--------------------------------------------------------
Eli asked for and received permission to publish this letter and also got some additional comments in the return Email.  The Rabett had asked about some documentation S&C had provided, housed at NOAA
-----------------------------------------------
As usual, I thought of some additions, such as a mention of the fact that the early satellites exhibited a drift in equator crossing time as well as orbital decay, both of which result in the need for corrections to the time series. And, as you know, there were several other problems found over the years as well, which further complicate the MSU/AMSU products.

I had previously seen some version of the MLT document in your link. That document deals only with the processing of the data, which is quite convoluted. However, there's no discussion of the derivation of the actual algorithm used to convert the data from individual MSU and AMSU scans into a single value for the TLT. Of course, S&C still fail to mention the impact of surface emissions, hydrometers and rain fall on their time series. I looked around and was reminded of 3 papers by Prabhakara, et al in Climatic Change from 1995 and 1996 on these issues. There were other reports as well, which raise questions regarding the validity of the TLT. I think it's rather damning that Christy used the TMT in his committee presentation on 13 May this year. He appears to be completely ignoring the contamination due to stratospheric cooling.

49 comments:

Hank Roberts said...

Tried posting just the last 2 paragraphs into xkcd.com/simplewriter, which warns you that you've probably confused the intended reader.
______________________
You Used Some Less Simple Words

Anonymous said...

Let me try,

Dear Mr. Lamar Smith,

They threw the whole John Christy Roy Spencer work out as an outlier, because the process they used was borked from one end to the other, and contained hidden unexplained components, whereas the two other more rigorously derived and open source time series disagreed with their conclusion, and agreed with each other.

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00767.1

Removing Diurnal Cycle Contamination in Satellite-Derived Tropospheric Temperatures: Understanding Tropical Tropospheric Trend Discrepancies, Stephen Po-Chedley, Tyler J. Thorsen, and Qiang Fu, J. Climate, 28, 2274–2290 (March 2015)

doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00767.1

Differences between various TMT datasets are explored further. Large differences in tropical TMT trends between this work and that of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) are attributed to differences in the treatment of the NOAA-9 target factor and the diurnal cycle correction.

Kevin O'Neill said...

Transparency!
Computer code!
Data!

I'm sure Mosher or an Auditor will be writing a book about S&C someday soon.

Dano said...

I think S&C need to give up their e-mails.

Nice post, Eli. Very nice.

Best,

D

Everett F Sargent said...

I once wrote an email to Carl Mears at RSS asking for the time series of the absolute temperatures (not the anomaly time series) that they used to derive the anomaly time series (a long time ago, so I don't have it in my current emails). Both the TMT and TLT time series.

Got a response with lots of hand waving and no absolute temperature time series were provided.

All I asking for are the absolute temperature time series to show that even Polar Bears could not survive those temperatures way up in the sky (even at the Equator) where even jets can't fly (for the TMT which is the lowest elevation of direct MSU measurements).

If the general public knew only that one fact, RSS/UAH are out of their jobs.

That the LTL time series have been misconstrued as being "the same as" the SAT surface time series is the longest climate science con evah.

Also notice in the Po-Chedley paper that the never once mention "LTL" because they are only working with the direct elevation TMT MSU proxy time series.
http://www.atmos.uw.edu/~qfu/Publications/jtech.pochedley.2015.pdf

It's time someone totally technically buried the entire TLT efforts with a thorough review paper showing those absolute temperatures at the TMT and the error bars associated with extrapolations to the 'theoretical' TLT (again as absolute temperatures prior to the anomaly calculation).

Or just tell us the 95% confidence interval for the elevations in the atmosphere of the TMT and the TLT time series then ask the public to touch the ground/water surface and then try to touch those atmospheric altitudes. When they can't do that, just tell them well it is colder up there then the top of Mount Everest. Then ask them if they trust a temperature measurement where they are standing as representing the surface temperature or if a 'theoretical' taken at an equivalent elevation of Mount Everest above their heads high up in the sky represents what they can see with their own eyes by just looking at that thermometer right next to them.

Someone who doesn't do surface temperatures (e. g. NOAA) needs to do that that job that peer reviewed technical paper for the sake of humanity or some such.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Well done ! The cooling issue was raised even before the satellite drift was detected, back when Spencer & Christy were penning Science Op-eds almost as partisan as some prevailing today.

Everett F Sargent said...

Oops, I searched for 'LTL' which was D'oh! wrong, the Po-Chedley paper mentions 'TLT' three times, 'RSS' 55 times and 'UAH' 76 times.

Boy, do I feel REALLY stoopit now.

Anonymous said...

Nice letter from Richard Swanson there, which highlights just about everything wrong with the satellite measurements.

I'm sure that Lamar Smith, with his extensive knowledge of such matters [*cough*], will appreciate all the subtleties discussed therein, and be right back to us with justification of why the satellite data is *so* much more reliable than the land-based data. Any day now.

Bernard J. said...

I can't help but wonder... are Spencer and Christy just in it for the funding?

afeman said...

This reminds me of Daniel Davies on Iraq:

http://blog.danieldavies.com/2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html

...
Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not even as a "starting point". ....


More of value there

Anonymous said...

I can't help but wonder... are Spencer and Christy just in it for the funding?

Dunno, Bernard. But as Spencer is a charter member of the Cornwall Alliance, and purportedly believes that:

http://www.cornwallalliance.org/2009/05/01/evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/

Excerpt from that:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence - are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

I'd say he has a substantial conflict of interest there. It's the elephant in the room.

David Appell said...

RSS, at least, has documented their algorithm here:

"Climate Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (C-ATBD)"
RSS Version 3.3 MSU/AMSU-A
Mean Layer Atmospheric Temperature
http://images.remss.com/papers/msu/MSU_AMSU_C-ATBD.pdf

Brian said...

So does all this cast doubt on remote sensing of Mars surface temps? We've been able to ground truth in a few places occasionally during the last 20 years, but that's hardly adequate.

Maybe the tiny Martian atmosphere is less of a problem? Or maybe being off several degrees K isn't a big deal for the current state of science about Mars.

Might be relevant to claims that Mars is or isn't warming.

Susan Anderson said...

Thanks for the info. A good resource.

E. Swanson said...

David A. pointed to "Climate Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (C-ATBD)".

I've seen that report, which does include much more information than that which I've found from S&C. RSS is constrained to use the MSU TLT algorithm from S&C, as they began their efforts as a cross check of the UAH product when several problems were found in S&C's work. The treatment from RSS regarding their AMSU algorithm gives much detail of their later effort, however, they also expose what I think to be a fundamental problem.

The various weights applied to each scan position are based on theoretical analysis. As they describe the vertical profiles in their Figure 2, they note that:

"In Figure 2a and 2b, we plot vertical weighting functions for the mean of the central 5 views of MSU2, and the mean of the central 12 views of AMSU5 for simulated land and ocean views using the 1976 U.S. Standard Atmosphere. These calculations were made using a radiative transfer model based on Rosenkranz (1998;1993) and our model of the ocean surface (Wentz and Meissner, 2000)."

The key objection I have is that, in the real world, the atmosphere doesn't always act like the U.S. Standard Atmosphere, which is a model with specific conditions, such as a surface temperature of 59F (15C). We know that the boundary between the Troposphere and the Stratosphere varies both with latitude and season. For example, the pressure height of the Tropopause drops from above 100mb in the Tropics to near 300mb over the Arctic in Winter and temperature inversions are common there in Summer, but Figure 3 shows just one curve for the TLT. So, what I would like to know is: How well does S&C's algorithm (and that for the AMSU from RSS) work to remove the Stratospheric influence under real world conditions?

I know of no published discussion of this problem (it may have already been discussed at some conference back when) and I would certainly like to be made aware of any such discussion. AnyBunny out there have an answer?

EliRabett said...

Brian,

For one thing Mars does not have a stratosphere. Sometimes Eli is hard pressed to believe it has an atmosphere.

E. Swanson said...

Get ready folks, Ted Cruz and the Republicans are at it again.
The Cruz-In will be next Tuesday, 8 Dec, in DC:

Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate

The hearing will be simulcast, so any bunny can watch from their lair...

Rattus Norvegicus said...

Nice balanced panel at that hearing. Gawd, they even get the preening queen herself!

Everett F Sargent said...

"Dr. John Christy
Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Dr. Judith Curry
Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. William Happer
Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics, Princeton University

Mr. Mark Steyn
International Bestselling Author"

The Earth just got greater than flat, it's now concave, as in con cavemen.

Effin' hey do I hate the USA! Someone deport me PLEASE!

Anonymous said...

Don't knock it. Monkey's at a monkey trial is American entertainment at its finest.

JohnMashey said...

Of course:
1) We still haven't seen Christy's code.

2) Curry is the former Chair.

3) Happer is emeritus at Princeton, retired over a year ago. His research never related to climate change, but for more relevant to this hearing is being Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, the focus of Merchants of Doubt.

4) And Mark Steyn.

Everett F Sargent said...

"Don't knock it. Monkey's at a monkey trial is American entertainment at its finest."

Yeah, it's called ... The Texas Hillbillies Show ... Starring Lamar Smith as Jethro Bodine, Ted Cruz as Ernest T. Bass and Mark Steyn as Eustace Charleston Haney (aka Mr. Haney).

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

" Spencer is a charter member of the Cornwall Alliance, "

The full title should be the Cornball Alliance for the Stewardship of Creationism --There are many coal mines beneath the broad buckle of the Bible Belt, and some few of their operators tithe the Heartland Institute and the Idso family business besides.

Lars Karlsson said...

I notice that at the hearing, they'll discuss "the ways in which political pressure can suppress opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science."

Sounds rather ominous.

Anonymous said...

How about this more relevant topic: "the ways in which political pressure can suppress even the mainstream viewpoint in the field of climate science"?

Only in freakin' America. The best politicians corporations can buy.

Unknown said...

Thanks David for that link. Christy and Spencer should do the same, of course. Whatever C&S are doing, the result is pretty close to RSS.

Fernando Leanme said...

I vote for shutting down NASA and assigning that budget to my balloon data gathering organization (BDGO). If the balloon data disagrees with the surface data I'll change the data to match whatever the computer models say. But I need a trip to Paris and a chance to give my triumphant long winded speech to the UN COP21 delegates.

By the way, the tropical pacific surface temperature anomaly is turning around. I won the bet.

Olof R said...

Hi Guys,
I agree, RSS and UAH v6 are very close and show no warming for XX years. But I have produced a rainbow chart that show a number of alternatives for the troposphere..

E. Swanson said...

To be fair to S&C, back in April, Spencer posted a long description of the new TLT, Version 6 on his web page. HERE's a link to a PDF of that post. The new TLT employs a very different approach than the previous version 5x and their description begins with a discussion of their new correction procedure for diurnal drift of the various satellites. They show the usual graphics of the channel weightings, but don't say how they are computed, so my guess is that those graphics are based on the use the U.S. Standard Atmosphere model as input to their calculations.

There's quite a bit of interesting information there. For example, they write:

Note that trends are noisy over Greenland, Antarctica, and the Tibetan Plateau, likely due to greater sensitivity of the satellite measurements to surface emission and thus to emissivity changes over high altitude terrain; trends in these high-altitude areas are much less reliable than in other areas.

So why use that data? And,

...the lower in altitude the weighting function senses, the greater the brightness temperature difference between land and ocean, mostly because land microwave emissivity is approximately 0.90-0.95, while the ocean emissivity is only about 0.50. As a result, if the AMSU channel 5 view angle chosen to match MSU channel 2 is too low in altitude, the net effect after satellite intercalibration will be a spurious warming of land areas and spurious cooling of ocean areas (at least when intercalibration is performed with land and ocean data combined). We were careful to match the MSU and AMSU weighting function altitudes based upon radiative transfer theory...

What about differences in surface emissivity between open ocean and sea-ice? Wouldn't the now obvious decline in Arctic sea-ice impact the data and thus the trend? And,

...instead of the past method of calculating LT as a weighted difference between different view angles of MSU2 (or AMSU5), we are now calculating it as a weighted difference between MSU channels 2, 3, and 4 (or AMSU channels 5, 7, and 9) at a constant Earth incidence angle. This has the very important advantage that all satellite data necessary for the LT retrieval come from the same location.

The weighting presumably relies on the models for each channel's emissions profile, thus depends on the model of the lapse rate, etc.

Another change is that they now assign the data from each swath to 2 different ground footprints, one in the middle of each half of the swath, instead of registering the entire swath combination to the footprint at nadir, as was done with the MSU data for Version 5x. This should be an improvement and is similar to what I proposed some years back and which RSS uses for their TLT grid registration.

Kevin O'Neill said...


Re:"Note that trends are noisy over Greenland, Antarctica, and the Tibetan Plateau..."

Why wouldn't the North and South American cordilleras exhibit similar behavior?

Shelama said...

Lamar Smith: "Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most objective, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades."

Who are these "many"? Or any of these "many"?

And "most objective" for what, and compared to what?

And, "no warming" of what? –– As opposed to where humans live, oceans rise, and snow & ice melt?

Seems to me that Smith loses badly even before considering the problems with satellite.

EliRabett said...

Kevin, not as high, not as broad.

E. Swanson said...

UAH posts the new version 6 the MSU/AMSU data on their web site HERE. There are some interesting differences from the older version 5.6, the TLT can be seen HERE.

A Spencer notes, they no longer provide daily data, only monthly averages, which prevents the sort of analysis I performed back in 2003. They present the data differently as well. Their files with reduced monthly data, for the TLT v5.6 and for the new TLT v6.0 appear similar, beginning with December 1978 and ending with October 2015.

However, they also present data smoothed by a 12 month trailing average, a process which they well know results in a shift in the date of about 6 months. But, looking at the v5.6 file and the v6.0 file, one sees an obvious difference. The v5.6 data begins with Dec 1978 and ends with October 2015, just as in the other, larger file and the first data point in the smoothed column of data is October 1979 and the last value is for October 2015, as one would expect from a mathematically correct application of a moving average. But, the version 6.0 smoothed data file shows a beginning date of January 1978 and ends with December 2015. The first 5 columns have been padded with values of -999.0, which indicates data not available. The first date in the smoothed data is December 1979 and the last is December 2015! It appears that they started calculating the 12 month average with those 11 months of "data not available", thus the first values for the smoothed data is the same as the data before the calculation. Not only that, but the last 2 months, November and December 2015, are probably just tacked on at the end manually, as they differ only slightly from the data for October. The same trick is also used for the v6.0 TMT and TLS smoothed data files.

I expect that we will see this manipulated data used during Christy's presentation next Tuesday. I think this is another example of S&C's intentional distortion, bordering on FRAUD, the worst offense in the scientific world...

EliRabett said...

Amusingly, it turns out that the averages for November and December are averages from the 11 months from Dec 14 - Oct 15 and 10 months from Jan 15 to Oct 15. Where are the auditors when you need them???

Oale said...

Does this now mean the grand theory of step-changes in the macroscopic climate system got additional verification by this 10* larger adjustment than in the other datasets? Does this adjustment propagate to TMT and other series too? Is the satellite still in the orbit calculated in 2003? How do they connect to it if it isn't?

There is an apparent quantum and discrete increase in the total radiation in the surface of the planet projected in 2016, so this needs to be proactively programmed in the projections?

EliRabett said...

Nick Stokes nails the v6 flim flam to the wall

http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2015/12/big-uah-adjustments.html

angech said...

angech
Skeptics decry Land and sea measurements and adjustments,complain about the problems involved in measurement and the algorithms and adjustments used, cry FRAUD at prominent scientists like M Mann.
Obviously they live in cloud cuckoo land and cannot understand science.
But now?
A man asks a scientist to explain an adjustment.
Suddenly warmists decry Satellite measurements and adjustments,complain about the problems involved in measurement and the algorithms and adjustments used, cry FRAUD at prominent scientists like Roy Spencer.
Sauce for the goose is good for the gander.
Thank you for making my day, Eli.
and Richard Eric Swanson.

meanwhile metzomagic said...
Spencer is a charter member of the Cornwall Alliance, and purportedly believes thatevangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/
Russell Seitz said... The full title should be the Cornball Alliance for the Stewardship of Creationism.

While it is nice to kick religious people you may have forgotten that most scientists up til today have been religious in their beliefs but they did not put science into their equations.
Once you resort to attacking the religious man rather than his work you have lost all credibility in your own argument
I say this despite not being religious by the way in any way.
An apology to Spencer on this would be appreciated but not expected.

Anonymous said...

Ok, the cookoo religious nuts chime in. With religious equations!

Adjust that!

Anonymous said...

angech sez:

Once you resort to attacking the religious man rather than his work you have lost all credibility in your own argument

The man has signed a religious declaration that states:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence - are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

(my emphasis added)

Those statements deny the greenhouse effect, and go further in saying that no matter what mankind does to the biosphere, the Earth/God will somehow correct it. How can a scientist hold those beliefs, and yet be expected to carry out his research in an objective way? Either the man has a power of cognitive dissonance the likes of which we have never witnessed, or there's a conflict of interest there. Which do you prefer to believe, agnech?

0^0 said...

.. "most scientists up til today have been religious in their beliefs but they did not put science into their equations"

Was that supposed to deliver a convincing statement on science or scientists? I have serious doubts about all parts of it, but not being a native speaker I may miss something subtle.. Perhaps the message could better fit a creationist / intelligent design "science" forum ?

Hank Roberts said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoRp5zPXbvY

AGU on DSCOVR science channels

what's new -- quite a bit

Hank Roberts said...

P.S., if you're watching that DSCOVR video, turn up your hearing aid -- either they all mumble or they need help with their audio. It can be followed but lean in close.

In the Questions session, some guy :-) bless him asked the question I wanted to hear -- are there plans to put a corresponding instrument over the middle of the night side.

Pratfalls ensued, lots of attempts to find a slide, lots of mumbling, and I have no expletive deleted idea whether they tried to answer that question.

Gavin told me years ago at RC that whenever Triana was in place, we'd still need a corresponding instrument on the night side to get a simple answer to the radiation balance question.

Still waiting, I guess. If there was anything useful in the panel's response, would somebunny please give us not just a transcript but an explication? If not reason to hope ...

When you buy your first mirror, you fairly soon realize that you need a second mirror to see the back of your head.

Hell, are there enough people who'd like an answer to fund a Kickstarter to get that one little instrument out there? Surely one of our rocket entrepreneurs would contribute ...

That's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoRp5zPXbvY

Hank Roberts said...

P.P.S.: a second opportunity, perhaps:

Town Hall: The Earth from a Million Miles: Advancing Earth Observations from L1

epicfirstlight_DSC_2015186Late Breaking Town Hall: The Earth from a Million Miles: Advancing Earth Observations from L1
Wednesday, 16 December
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM in Moscone West 2022-2024

EliRabett said...

Damn it Ankh, Eli was going to blog on that.

Bernard J. said...

"By the way, the tropical pacific surface temperature anomaly is turning around. I won the bet.

I can't find the otiginal post where you made the claim that 3 December would see the peak of this El Niño, but your estimate was wrong:

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/us/news/articles/extreme-weather/el-nino-update-could-it-be-gaining-a-second-wind/62770/

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