Climate Skeptic

Global Warming Hits Arizona

May 13, 2008:  Here is a picture taken today by one of my company's managers near Lower Lake Mary, just south of Flagstaff, Arizona (elevation about 6700 ft).

Urban Heat Biases in Surface Temperature Measurement

One of my favorite bits of irony is that the primary defenders of using surface temperature measurement over space-based satellite measurements is ... the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA, and James Hansen (its director and friend-of-Al) in particular.  If find it amazing that people still want to use the GISS surface temperature numbers in preference to satellite figures, despite their proven biases and lack of consistent coverage.  But the GISS numbers give a higher number for warming (since they are biased upwards both by measurement biases and GISS-added adjustment factors) and that is what is important to global warming alarmists.  Its the "fake but accurate" meme brought to the realm of science.

But, since we do have to keep reminding people of the problems in surface temperature measurement, here is a study by Ren et al in 2008:

What was done
Noting that "a major divergence of views exists in the international climatological community on whether the urbanization effect still remains in the current global and regional average surface air temperature series," the authors employed a dataset obtained from 282 meteorological stations, including all of the ordinary and national basic and reference weather stations of north China, in order to determine the urbanization effect on surface air temperature trends of that part of the country over the period 1961-2000, dividing the stations into the following categories based on city size expressed in millions of people: rural (<0.05), small city (0.01-0.10), medium city (0.10-0.50), large city (0.50-1.00) and metropolis (>1.00).

What was learned
Ren et al. report that mean annual surface air temperature trends for the various station groups of north China over the 1961-2000 period -- in degrees C per decade -- were 0.18 (rural), 0.25 (small city), 0.28 (medium city), 0.34 (large city), 0.26 (metropolis), and 0.29 (national), which makes the urban-induced component of the warming trend equal to 0.07 (small city), 0.10 (medium city), 0.16 (large city), 0.08 (metropolis), and 0.11 (national), all of which results are significant at the 0.01 level.

This is a Plan?

This is from the Arizona Republic:

Two decades from now, Americans could get as much electricity from windmills as from nuclear-power plants, according to a government report that lays out a possible plan for wind-energy growth.

The report, a collaboration between Energy Department research labs and industry, concludes wind energy could generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030, about the same share now produced by nuclear reactors. Wind energy today accounts for about 1 percent of the nation's electricity.

To reach the 20 percent production level, wind turbines would have to produce 300,000 megawatts of power, compared to about 16,000 megawatts generated today. Such growth would envision more than 75,000 new wind turbines, many of them larger than those operating today. Turbines in offshore waters would produce about 54,000 megawatts.

I am sure we also could have 3 billion hamsters on little wheels hooked up to generators.  Or we could fill, as Al Gore wants, 5 million acres of Arizona desert with solar panels.  Of course I calculated the latter plan to cost about 20 trillion dollars.

Just because the megawatt numbers add up to some target, does not make it a feasible plan.  The cost per megawatt needs to be balanced against other potential sources of power, and technological deficiencies (e.g. no solar at night, no wind power when there is no wind) also need to be addressed. 

Global Warming Reduces Tornadoes

In a recent story on global warming, ABC claimed that tornado frequency this year is running nearly twice that of last year and that this can be linked to global warming.   (HT Maggies Farm) Now, I would have tended to argue that year-over-year variations are probably not related to multi-decadal climate trends, but if ABC wants to so argue, I will go with it.

The only problem is that the first five months of 2008 have been the coolest since 1993 and has run well below the average temperature for the period from 1978-1990.   This while 2007 was one of the warmer Jan-May periods in recent memory.  In fact, average US temperatures were about a degree Celsius cooler in 2008 than in 2007:

UAH MSU temperature for USA (average anomaly)

Jan-May 2007:  .668 C

Jan-Apr 2008:  -.228 C

Difference:  .896 C

So, if one wants to posit that tornado variation in 2008 is a result of a long-term climate trend rather than natural variability, then one must assume that global cooling causes tornadoes to increase, and that in fact global warming would benefit mankind by decreasing tornado frequency.

The whole history of the global warming causes tornadoes claim is one of grossly bad science, most famously including Al Gore's claim in that movie of his.  I debunked that claim here, demonstrating that the increase in measured tornadoes is a function solely of better measurement, not more tornadoes, something the NOAA has been careful to state as well.

HIstoric Cyclones

From the Weather Underground, via Planet Gore.  Please forward this to Al so he can stop embarassing himself.  The twenty deadliest cyclones (that we know about):

Rank:	Name / Areas of Largest Loss:	Year:	Ocean Area:	Deaths:
1	Great Bhola Cyclone, Bangladesh	1970	Bay of Bengal	550,000
2	Hooghly River Cyclone, India and Bangladesh	1737	Bay of Bengal	350,000
3	Haiphong Typhoon, Vietnam	1881	West Pacific	300,000
3	Coringa, India	1839	Bay of Bengal	300,000
5	Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh	1584	Bay of Bengal	200,000
6	Great Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh	1876	Bay of Bengal	200,000
7	Chittagong, Bangladesh	1897	Bay of Bengal	175,000
8	Super Typhoon Nina, China	1975	West Pacific	171,000
9	Cyclone 02B, Bangladesh	1991	Bay of Bengal	140,000
10	Great Bombay Cyclone, India	1882	Arabian Sea	100,000
11	Hakata Bay Typhoon, Japan	1281	West Pacific	65,000
12	Calcutta, India	1864	Bay of Bengal	60,000
13	Swatlow, China	1922	West Pacific	60,000
14	Barisal, Bangladesh	1822	Bay of Bengal	50,000
15	Sunderbans coast, Bangladesh	1699	Bay of Bengal	50,000
16	Bengal Cyclone, Calcutta, India	1942	Bay of Bengal	40,000
17	Canton, China	1862	West Pacific	37,000
18	Backerganj (Barisal), Bangladesh	1767	Bay of Bengal	30,000
19	Barisal, Bangladesh	1831	Bay of Bengal	22,000
20	Great Hurricane, Lesser Antilles Islands	1780	Atlantic	22,000
21	Devi Taluk, SE India	1977	Bay of Bengal	20,000
21	Great Coringa Cyclone, India	1789	Bay of Bengal	20,000

Oddly uncorrelated with atmospheric temperature or CO2, huh?  In fact, three of the four most recent occured in the seventies, a time known for its cooling.  Two of the top five occured around the period of the little ice age.

What is normal?  One other thought.  I have often asked, vis a vis climate, the question "What is Normal?"  Because of the quality of observation by sattelites, we tend to define normal by what we have observed since about 1979, when the first satellites began gathering relevent global climate data.  For example, when news stories last year said the Arctic sea ice was at "an all time low," they actually meant the lowest point since satellites began observing the ice c.1979.  "All time" meant the last 30 years.  Note that only one of these 22 storms occured in the last 30 years.  By defining "normal" as the last 30 years, we would in this case miss over 95% of the severest storms.  Even defining "noral" as the time since 1900 would cause us to miss 7 of the top 10 storms.

Spot the correlation:  Do you see a correlation in this list?  How about with poverty?  When cyclones hit US low-lying coastal areas and drive flooding up river valleys and deltas (think Katrina) we get a few hundred or at most a couple of thousand deaths, at most.   A tragedy for sure, but Katrina did not even kill 10% of the people killed by the bottom storm on this list.  What is the difference?  Poverty.  From this data table, which option makes more sense:

1. Reduce CO2 and perhaps ocean temperatures by a few tenths of a degree, in the process limiting economic growth and increasing poverty.
2. Burn all the fossil fuels we can on the path to helping people in Bangladesh and China and India become wealthier.

I am sure I know which would save more lives.

HIstoric Cyclones

From the Weather Underground, via Planet Gore.  Please forward this to Al so he can stop embarassing himself.  The twenty deadliest cyclones (that we know about):

Rank:	Name / Areas of Largest Loss:	Year:	Ocean Area:	Deaths:
1	Great Bhola Cyclone, Bangladesh	1970	Bay of Bengal	550,000
2	Hooghly River Cyclone, India and Bangladesh	1737	Bay of Bengal	350,000
3	Haiphong Typhoon, Vietnam	1881	West Pacific	300,000
3	Coringa, India	1839	Bay of Bengal	300,000
5	Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh	1584	Bay of Bengal	200,000
6	Great Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh	1876	Bay of Bengal	200,000
7	Chittagong, Bangladesh	1897	Bay of Bengal	175,000
8	Super Typhoon Nina, China	1975	West Pacific	171,000
9	Cyclone 02B, Bangladesh	1991	Bay of Bengal	140,000
10	Great Bombay Cyclone, India	1882	Arabian Sea	100,000
11	Hakata Bay Typhoon, Japan	1281	West Pacific	65,000
12	Calcutta, India	1864	Bay of Bengal	60,000
13	Swatlow, China	1922	West Pacific	60,000
14	Barisal, Bangladesh	1822	Bay of Bengal	50,000
15	Sunderbans coast, Bangladesh	1699	Bay of Bengal	50,000
16	Bengal Cyclone, Calcutta, India	1942	Bay of Bengal	40,000
17	Canton, China	1862	West Pacific	37,000
18	Backerganj (Barisal), Bangladesh	1767	Bay of Bengal	30,000
19	Barisal, Bangladesh	1831	Bay of Bengal	22,000
20	Great Hurricane, Lesser Antilles Islands	1780	Atlantic	22,000
21	Devi Taluk, SE India	1977	Bay of Bengal	20,000
21	Great Coringa Cyclone, India	1789	Bay of Bengal	20,000

Oddly uncorrelated with atmospheric temperature or CO2, huh?  In fact, three of the four most recent occured in the seventies, a time known for its cooling.  Two of the top five occured around the period of the little ice age.

One other thought.  I have often asked, vis a vis climate, the question "What is Normal?"  Because of the quality of observation by sattelites, we tend to define normal by what we have observed since about 1979, when the first satellites began gathering relevent global climate data.  For example, when news stories last year said the Arctic sea ice was at "an all time low," they actually meant the lowest point since satellites began observing the ice c.1979.  "All time" meant the last 30 years.  Note that only one of these 22 storms occured in the last 30 years.  By defining "normal" as the last 30 years, we would in this case miss over 95% of the severest storms.  Even defining "noral" as the time since 1900 would cause us to miss 7 of the top 10 storms.

Spot the correlation:  Do you see a correlation in this list?  How about with poverty?  When cyclones hit US low-lying coastal areas and drive flooding up river valleys and deltas (think Katrina) we get a few hundred or at most a couple of thousand deaths, at most.   A tragedy for sure, but Katrina did not even kill 10% of the people killed by the bottom storm on this list.  What is the difference?  Poverty.  From this data table, which option makes more sense:

1. Reduce CO2 and perhaps ocean temperatures by a few tenths of a degree, in the process limiting economic growth and increasing poverty.
2. Burn all the fossil fuels we can on the path to helping people in Bangladesh and China and India become wealthier.

I am sure I know which would save more lives.

Where did that Warming Go?

Though not particularly relevent to discussion one way or the other about long-term warming trends, world temperatures in April appear to again be relatively cool.  More intresting is the satellite-measured temperature trend for the last decade, which looks pretty flat (and this before shift of the PDO to its cool phase, probably this year).

Global warming theory as reported by the last IPCC predicted that the most warming was predicted for the middle troposphere over the tropics.  Its hard to see any warming in this region even over the last 30 years.  With no apparent warming in the sourthern hemisphere, "global" warming seems to be limited in the last 30 years to the Northen Hemisphere outside the tropics, and even this warming has stopped over the last 10 years.

The Zen and the Art of Surface Temperature Measurement

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the many problems of surface temperature measurement -  the measurement points are geographically spotty, of uneven quality, and are subject to a number of biases, the greatest of which is probably the encroachment of man-made urban environments on the measurement locations.  I have discussed these issues many places, including at the 1:00 minute mark of this video, in my book, and in posts here, here, and here.

I have not posted much of late on this topic, becuase I am not sure there is a lot of new news.  Satellites still make more sense than surface measurement, and the GISS still is working to tweak its numbers to show more and more warming, and Anthony Watts still finds a lot of bad measurement points.

In the last week, though, the story seems to be getting out further than just the online skeptic's community.  Steven Goddard has a good article in the UK Register online.  I don't think any of the issues he covers will be new to our readers, but it is a decent summary.  He focuses in particular on the GISS restatements of history:

One clue we can see is that NASA has been reworking recent temperatures upwards and older temperatures downwards - which creates a greater slope and the appearance of warming. Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre has been tracking the changes closely on his Climate Audit site, and reports that NASA is Rewriting History, Time and Time Again. The recent changes can be seen by comparing the NASA 1999 and 2007 US temperature graphs. Below is the 1999 version, and below that is the reworked 2007 version.

NASA's original data: 1999

NASA's reworked data: 2007

This restatement is particularly hard to justify as direct inspection of the temperature measurement points reveals growing urban heat biases, which should imply, if anything, adjustments up in the past and/or down in the present, exactly opposite of the GISS work.  I have written a number of letters and inquiries asking the GISS what systematic bias they are finding/assuming that biased measurements upwards in rural times but downwards in urban times, but I have never gotten a response, nor seen one anywhere online.

HT:  Anthony Watts

Update:  Similar article here

"Particularly troubling are the years from 1986-1998. In the 2007 version of the graph, the 1986 data was adjusted upwards by 0.4 degrees relative to the 1999 graph. In fact, every year except one from 1986-1998 was adjusted upwards, by an average of 0.2 degrees. If someone wanted to present a case for a lot of recent warming, adjusting data upwards would be an excellent way to do it.

Solar Panel County

Via Tom Nelson and Schlotzville, comes this from our modern day Savonarola, Al Gore:

Gore mentioned a few statistics that drove home the notion that we actually have the capability to be oil free with existing technology. If, he said, we were to build on a 90 mile x 90 mile tract of land in the Southwest a field of solar panels, we would have enough electricity to power the entire United States. So, why don't we build it? What is stopping us?

Its kind of cool to think about - I always get excited about man-made structures you can see from space.  When I think about this, my mind keeps jumping to the Sunflower fields in Larry Niven's Ringworld.

So, is this feasible?  Well, I was suspicious, since I live in one of the best solar sites in the world (Phoenix) and could not even come close to making solar pay on my house, even with 50% subsidies. 

First, is it enough power?  Well, its turns out the answer is "sortof."  I looked around at solar panels, and decided to assume a 200 watt panel that was 13 sq ft and cost $900.  Actually, you can't quite get that panel today.  You can get a 200 watt panel that is that cheap, but bigger, or you can have one that is that small and more expensive.  But you will see soon that it does not matter.  I assumed a third of the 8100 sq. miles would be dead space between the panels, roads, transformers, access paths, etc.  I assumed you put the installation in the best solar sites in the southwest, which yield on average about 6 peak-sun-hour-equivalents a day.  I assumed a 20% loss in conversions and transformers.

So 8100 sq miles  x  2/3  x  200 watt/12sq ft  x  6 hours x 365 days x 80%  (with necessary unit conversions thrown in) yields 4.08 billion Megawatt-Hours of electricity, which is about exactly our current US generating capacity.  (Way to go!  Al got a number right!)

I say sortof for the following reason:  This does not cover elimination of fossil fuels in the transportation sector.  And it does not address the problem of how you store this power at night, which of course is a catastrophic problem for the idea.

Al doesn't know what is stopping us.  Well, other than the storage problem, one thing might be the cost.  Using the assumptions above, and assuming that installation costs (with land acquisition, transformers, inverters, roads, mounting, installation, etc) is as much again as the panel costs themselves, the total installation would cost just under $21 trillion dollars.  This is orders of magnitude more than a nuclear program of the same size would cost.  And presupposes the environmentalists would let you cover 5 million acres of desert with metal and silicon. 

Postscript:  Al Gore thinks its the oil companies at fault (of course):

Well, he gave one possible answer - the oil companies. Apparently, according to Gore, the oil companies drive up prices reducing supply and then depress them in a telling pattern. As soon as the political will swells to a light boil, the companies reduce prices/increase supply. And we, really the pols that be, fall for it all the time and the political will it is vanquished

LOL.  Environmentalists have one card to play - its the oil companies fault! - and they are going to play it every chance they can.  Of course, the boom-bust patterns in oil are characteristic of nearly every other commodity out there, which therefore presupposes that if oil prices are the result of manipulation, then every other commodity must be as well since their prices demonstrate the same patterns.  We see these patterns in commodities that politicians have never even heard of and in which they have never thought to exercise their "political will."  (political will in this context defined as use of government force against a segment of the populace).

A reasonable person might suppose that the surge in prices followed by a drop a number of years later is better explained by the time delay in increasing oil production after oil prices spike. In many ways, Al's theory is simply delusional.  If your friend started trying to tell you, in all seriousness, that every action Microsoft takes is actually aimed at thwarting him personally, you would think him insane.  But this is effectively Gore's argument, showing the immensity of the politician's ego.  Oil prices move not because of supply and demand, but because of us politicians.  Every tick up and down is carefully managed to thwart us brave Congressmen!

I had a long post here on why conspiracy and manipulation can't possibly drive oil prices but for the shortest possible periods.

Update:  Here is my spreadsheet if anyone thinks I made an error in the numbs.  Download solar.xls

Multi-Decade Climate Cycles

Since I am a bit late on this, you have probably already seen the stories from NASA that apparently the Pacific Decadal Occilation, which switches from warm to cool cycles every thirty to forty years, has just switched from warm to cool.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean that spends roughly 20-30 years in the cool phase or the warm phase.

In 1905, PDO switched to a warm phase.
In 1946, PDO switched to a cool phase.
In 1977, PDO switched to a warm phase.
In 1998, PDO showed a few cool years.

In 2008, PDO seems to be switching to a cool phase. (NASA).

The warm (cool) phase is determined by above-the-average (below-the-average) temperatures along the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada.

At the same time, a longer cycle occilation in the Atlantic called the AMO may also be in the cooling part of its occilation over the next decades.

Though from what I read, the PDO mainly affects temperatures around the Pacific Rim, the Pacific is in fact  a very large part of the earth, so I wondered if its cylcling might have some correlation with world temperatures:

Well, that is kind of interesting.  Note by the way I use the GISS surface data in this chart, so one can assume the warming in the last 20 years is overstated for a variety of reasons we have discussed on this site.  Never-the-less, it is interesting.  A few thoughts:

• Catastrophists are spinning that the PDO cool cycles just delay or suppress man-made warming signals.  OK.  But if you argue this, you have to also argue for the converse -- that the PDO exaggerate what might be man-made warming signals during its warm cycles.  Catastrophists and in particular the IPCC, however, said that all of the post 1977 warming was due to man - I don't remember anyone mentioning "PDO" in these discussions (In fact, they argue that some additional warming was being masked).  Catastrophists love to point to natural cycles only when they can be claimed to mask man-made warming.
• I am constantly amazed at how much the 1905-1947 trend on this chart looks like the 1977-2005 trend.  But here is the amazing thing to me:  Catastrophists as well as the IPCC claim that these trends had different causes.  In fact, you MUST believe they had different causes to believe the AGW story (since there was little man-made CO2 in the first period).  In other words, to belive the catastrophic man-made global warming theory, you have to believe some effect, presumably natural but never identified by the IPCC, drove temperatures through 1947 and then switched off, never to return, at the exact same moment that man began producing CO2 in earnest.

Update:  It may be too early to tell if the PDO is doing a major or sort of minor shift, but the past frequency seems to indicate we will see a shift soon.