Comments on: 100 Months to the Tipping Point

By: Jody Wilson

Jody Wilson — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:53:27 +0000

OneHundredMonths.org is only about 1 year off of the Al Gore Doomsday clock on Rush Limbaugh’s website:

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/free_estack_pages/algore10yearstodoom.guest.html

By: Tony Edwards

Tony Edwards — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:10:57 +0000

http://www.real-debt-elimination.com/real_freedom/Propaganda/Global_Warming_Myth/prejudiced_authors_prejudiced_findings-2.htm

The advert at the top of this page has to be seen to be believed. The rest of the page is interesting, too.

By: kuhnkat

kuhnkat — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:40:28 +0000

Warren:

"You seem to have quoted a statement made in 2007. Please, show us the article or statement from which you derived your belief that Hansen gave us about 10 years back in the 80's."

First, please tell us which decade you think we are in. We need to establish an area of common facts before we can talk to you.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:36:03 +0000

A couple of things bother me about land temperature measurements.
Firstly, it's really the near-surface atmospheric temperature that's measured and not the actual surface temperature. Given the poor thermal conduction of air, there can be a very substantial difference between the temperature of the surface and that of the air a few feet above the surface - especially in calm conditions. And the IR radiation from the surface depends on the surface temperature. As I understand it, satellites measure the actual sea surface temperature.
Secondly, do land-based stations record the actual 24-hour average, or is the median of the minimum and maximum temps recorded?

By: Warren

Warren — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:47:52 +0000

You mean that land measurements get a weighting greater than the land fraction of the earth’s surface, in calculating the global mean? I can’t find anything in the GISS papers that says this is so. Can you point anything out?

By: B.D.

B.D. — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:34:01 +0000

Warren:

According to Hansen et al. 1996:
Satellites provide uniform sampling of SST, but their temporal coverage is limited and care is needed to
avoid biases

Land surface is 24-hour coverage and satellite is not so the land stations have a disproportionally higher impact. GISTEMP is not really 2/3 satellite data.

By: Warren

Warren — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:28:23 +0000

No value, negative or positive, can be read into the words ‘extreme event’. Winning the lottery would be an extreme event, as would getting hit by a car. The word ‘extreme’ only means far out of the ordinary. But I guess you learned English in a different place than I did. There were no “dire warnings” in the 1988 statement – none at all.

You seem to have missed the quote I already gave, showing that GISTEMP data is two-thirds satellite data. In any case, I am not the one making a claim which the data does not support. You said that NASA, via Hansen, “continually downplays that value of its own space-based sensors”. It does not appear that there is any factual basis for that claim. You have yet to provide any, anyway.

By: jnicklin

jnicklin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:14:53 +0000

Oh, BTW Warren, I asked you to provide evidence that NASA full supports the use of satelliet data in the GISS database. I’d like to press you on this if I may.

By: jnicklin

jnicklin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:09:39 +0000

You don't read very well. I said that using words like "extereme events" constituted a dire warning. I said nothing about the rest of it. You wanted an example, I gave you one. Now you want to bait and switch to make it look like I was questioning the percentages of this or that. If you think that predicting extreme events from the data he had at hand was a positive, warm and fuzzy prediction, I guess you learned English in a different place than I did.

You would be better served to stick to the point. Or does that challenge you?

By: Warren

Warren — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:39:36 +0000

You said earlier "I have no problem answering questions" but obviously you do if a couple of very simple ones cause you to describe me as a troll. That is a very lazy insult to throw.

Fine, if you think that saying the probability of a hot summer has increased from 33 per cent to 40-60 per cent is a dire warning, then you are free to think that. Most people would not see that as particularly dire. Most people would probably see that as a good thing. I see nothing at all in the 1988 statement that describes the predictions in a negative way.

As for satellites, I quote directly from the GISTEMP page:

A global temperature index, as described by Hansen et al. (1996), is obtained by combining the meteorological station measurements with sea surface temperatures based in early years on ship measurements and in recent decades on satellite measurements

So two thirds of the data which goes into the GISTEMP mean temperature is from satellites. Again I will ask, what evidence justifies your belief that "NASA, through Hansen, continually downplays the value of its own space-based sensors?"