The Global Warming Debate: Watts Happening?

For something that is a done deal there sure is a lot of debate in the blogosphere over global warming. Steve McIntyre is working on the newly release codes from NASA. Anthony Watts has published his preliminary data on the state of the US weather stations. James Hansen is providing links to his blog posts on the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) site. Roy Spencer has published an article on cloud impacts on long wave radiation, (which I haven't read because it costs nine bucks to download and I am not going to link to it because that sucks).

Caught up in the moment, I tried to brush up on my FORTRAN 77 programming. The six primary brain cells required for that task seem to be on vacation or were damaged in the mid eighties. In any case, Windows Vista does not play well with free version of FORTRAN I downloaded. So I will leave that task to geekier geeks.

While setting up the code, the crew at Climate Audit noted that several of the data sets have changed a couple of times in the last month. Raw data should not change. To follow calculations one has to have a solid starting point and that is the raw data. There may be a large story to come if indeed the raw data is being manipulated. That just ain't Kosher.

In Excel, I did manage to compare a few weather sites that had combined data. There is a noted flaw in the combination procedure. Using the weather year, December through November produced a first year error due to the previous year December having to be estimated from another source. I was able to verify that error, but the overall significance is not known without a much larger sample to determine if a trend exists.

Noting a few oddities I download some daily data for a site and compared the monthly data derived from the daily data to the monthly data recorded for GISS in the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). Y'all follow all that? The first year I checked was 1989 for a site named Leba. The validity of the Leba data is questionable. First there was an obvious scribal error, as in somebody wrote the wrong number down in the wrong column. Secondly, one of the weather stations being combined was obviously out to lunch. Finally, there was a minor unknown error for the winter months. That unknown is probably connected to the nonlinearity of the "out to lunch" instrumentation plus a small cumulative rounding error. Whether "finally" was due to Vodka at the site or Scotch at my house is not known.

All the preceding description indicates is that I got off my dead butt to determine independently if the Climate Audit guys have a leg to stand on. Yes is my conclusion.

The work of Anthony Watts at Surfacestations.org has proven beneficial if accuracy in temperature measurement is desired. Over half of the 33% of the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) stations inspected to date, used to determine the US average temperature, fail to meet acceptable standards. Acceptable would be accurate to +/- 0.1 degree Centigrade.

If you are a bit geeky, you may want to checkout surfacestations.org to see if you can help Anthony Watts finish the US survey. All you need is a GPS, digital camera, internet access and to be able to follow instructions.

The carbon dioxide debate is heating up a little. Steven Schwartz published a paper here indicating that the impact of doubling atmospheric CO2 may be roughly half of that estimated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This prompted a rather scathing rebuttal from James Annan on his blog at julesandjames.blogspot.com.

The confidence of the more vocal IPCC contributors in the CO2 doubling estimates amazes me. While there are many factors to consider, CO2 is a global contributor to warming that should be more evident at the polar regions, but still globally evident. Since the southern hemisphere is noticeably lagging in temperature rise, given of course the possible inaccuracy of the instrumentation, there is some question as to the impact of greenhouse gases.

This is not to say that Greenhouse gases (GHG) have no impact, but to say that an unbiased observer might conclude a lower impact in the range of 1.0 to 2.0 degrees for a doubling instead of 2.0 to 4.0 degrees. Given that James Hansen's paper on Black Carbon or soot, indicated that soot may have a near equal forcing compared to CO2, that black carbon is more common in the northern hemisphere due to industry and the rate of Arctic ice melt greatly exceeds Antarctic ice melt. Whew! Long sentence.

Something else interesting is that from 1987 to 1990, northern Europe had a pronounced 2.0 to 4.0 degree C temperature rise. Again, given questions of the instrumentation accuracy, there was a pronounced temperature rise that was local, not global. There was an intense solar cycle about that time, but the cycle lagged the rise slightly. The probability that that sudden rise was due to GHG is remote. A valid explanation of that temperature rise has not been discovered by this author. A change in the North Atlantic Oscillation, a cyclic weather pattern is obvious, but what was the driving force for the change?

Weather changes, to definitely conclude that current changes are directly attributed to increased GHG is not something I would state. Since I am not a climatologist I can only keep reading and comparing notes. In any case it is an interesting subject for the terminally geeky. Check out the links provided if you get stuck in the house on a rainy day.

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