Don’t be catty. Sure, I can elaborate. Let’s take the last topic mentioned: the Urban Heat Island effect.
Perhaps it wasn’t clear: You said “Regardless of whether some of your interpretations were not altogether accurate” to kimmielittle, and I asked whether you would elaborate on her “not altogether accurate” interpretations in the hope that we could avoid going over them again in future because she actually
thanks you when you point out her “oopsies”.
There has been a great deal written about this from people on both sides of the issue but this surely is the point: there are serious arguments being made by both sides.
No, there are not. There are plenty of claims being made by one side that have all been checked and all been disproven, not only by climate scientists but even by “skeptics”, as I have repeatedly pointed out. It’s got so bad that even the “skeptical scientists” are trying to convince the less scientifically literate on their side to stop arguing things that are not in dispute (like the greenhouse effect – most recently
Spencer and
Pielke Sr.) because, as Pat Michaels said, “Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all”.
Now let’s be clear: The claim about UHI is a strawman.
The question is: Is the world actually warming?
Somehow, some people have got it into their heads that proving UHI exists is equivalent to proving that the temperature reconstructions are not reliable and that the world isn’t actually warming at all.
This is a strawman because it
assumes that the temperature reconstructions are contaminated by UHI
and that the warming trend can be completely explained by that contamination.
Allow me to quote from Hansen’s
1987 paper on the GISS temperature reconstruction, which I have
already referenced on this thread:
In addition to the limitations imposed by the spatial coverage, there are temporal inconsistencies in certain station records, which are caused, for example, by changes in instrumentation, station location, observation time, or environmental factors such as urban heat island effects, as discussed in detail by
Jones et al. [1986*a]… Later, we also test the importance of urban heat island effects by selectively eliminating city stations from the analysis, and we estimate the uncertainty in the global trends.
pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/1987/Hansen_Lebedeff.html
Clearly, those constructing the temperature reconstructions know about UHI. Are the correctly compensating for it? Well, as I showed just a few posts earlier, the
rural stations chosen by that kid and his father showed
the same trend over the 20th century as the global temperature reconstruction. But before that, I also pointed out that “skeptics” like Roman and JeffId, using their
own global anomaly reconstruction technique, got the same result. I even pointed out that using just 61
rural stations around the entire planet gives the same result.
The warming trend is robust and is
not caused by scientists overlooking the
obvious fact that putting car parks, buildings, and A/C exhaust vents near a weather station are going to
affect its readings.
And think about it for a second – when computing a trend from anomalies,
absolute temperatures don’t matter. UHI might make a city station always 1 degree warmer than a rural station, but unless the UHI is
changing over time, it won’t affect the
trend. What you need to be careful of are stations that
were rural that have slowly become increasingly urbanised. Or, just ignore urban stations – that’s effectively what GISS does anyway.
What Kimmie has been doing is ferreting out articles and comments from the AGW-is-a-crock side and the fact that she has been able to locate such a great quantity of information on any number of topics is a good indication that, unlike the theory of relativity, there is still a lot of doubt about where the truth lies on AGW.
Any kid with a computer and Internet access can find all sorts of crazy theories online. (My favourite?
The Expanding Earth Theory.) Finding a lot of them simply means that there are a lot of people motivated to dispute the science. I’m sure that if Relativity somehow lead to higher taxes, there’d be
plenty of sites on the Internet disputing it and its crazy ideas.
What’s
really important is whether there is any
merit in those claims.
Anybody can make a claim – point out Yet Another Weather Station Next To A Car Park, for example – but what matters is when that claim is analysed, does it actually stand up to scrutiny? And the inescapable
fact is that they do not. The
fact is that you
get the same results using
rural stations that are not affected by UHI – even using rural stations specifically chosen by Anthony Watts as the best of the best. The
fact is that not only can anyone download and verify that the GISS source code is accounting for UHI the way that it says it does, you can
also run it using
just the rural stations and get the same result. The
fact is that
global warming is not an artefact of UHI.
Now, I have pointed to
all the information necessary to prove this many, many times so far in this thread.
Anybody can satisfy themselves that it’s true. And yet we
still get posts here making the observation that UHI is real. Does that prove that global warming is not? No. It proves that some people are much better at writing than they are at reading.
