[Vision2020] Please Cite From Peer Reviewed Science Journal Re: The Great Thermometer Die Off

Ron Force rforce2003 at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 16 19:48:16 PST 2010


Discussion of "disappearing" weather stations here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/06/weather-stations-disappearing-worldwide/
Many countries have been cutting back on land-based stations for economic reasons, instead relying on satellite data.

Problems with land-based data even from the well-funded US network:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/temperature-monitoring.html




________________________________
From: Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>
To: Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>
Cc: Moscow Vision 2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Sat, January 16, 2010 10:15:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Please Cite From Peer Reviewed Science Journal Re: The Great Thermometer Die Off

He's just a guy with a blog.  He's looking at public data and is 
interpreting the results himself.

I would bring up the possible "gaming" of the peer review system as 
implied by some of the Climategate emails, but since I can't find any 
peer reviewed references making this claim I guess it can't be true.

I know the numbers of temperature stations drop off precipitously, I've 
verified that personally. 

Here are some links I've found to the temperature station drop off 
phenomenon:

An interesting mpeg of station counts by month from the University of 
Delaware (pay close attention to 1990 - present): 
http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/html_pages/air_ts2.html

A graphic showing station record length, station counts, and coverage: 
http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/html_pages/air_ts2.html 

Note that by "coverage", they mean "is within 1200km of a temperature 
station", which is about the distance from here to Provo, Utah.

Here is a link to a paper published in Climate Research that calls into 
question the claim that non-climatic effects such as economic activity 
and socio-political concerns have been removed from the gridded surface 
temperature data.  The authors find a warming bias in the data based on 
such things as the lack of surface station data because of political 
unrest in countries such as the old Soviet Union and China, as well as 
other concerns such as the ability for countries with economic troubles 
to purchase and keep up temperature recording equipment.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/gdptemp.html

I'm sure there are others out there.

Paul

Ted Moffett wrote:
> Please cite a credible peer reviewed science journal publication where 
> the E. M. Smith (or is this name false?) in question has published 
> this work on temperature data that you reference.
>  
> If the information on temperature data you provide is not sourced from 
> a peer reviewed credible science journal, I'm not going to spend time 
> contemplating it in detail.
>  
> Junk science on climate issues on the Internet is so rampant, someone 
> could spend all their waking hours separating the wheat from the 
> chaff.  The peer review process in science publishing greatly reduces 
> the garbage science that a person would otherwise have to sort through.
>  
> Can you offer information on the professional qualifications of E. M. 
> Smith that render his climate science work credible?  I 
> found information on E. M  Smith's qualifications on the "Musings from 
> the Chiefio" blog, but they offer no reason to take his work on 
> climate science seriously ( http://chiefio.wordpress.com/about/ ). 
>  
> With admitted limited effort, I found no references to */any/* "E. M. 
> Smith" peer reviewed climate science publications. 
>  
> He misspells "Bachelors" when he informs he has a "Bachlors in Economics."
>  
> Of course, sometimes peer reviewed science journals make mistakes, and 
> junk science slips past the peer review process. And there are no 
> doubt worthwhile ideas that are not published in peer reviewed journals.
>  
> But I don't find credible the allegation that there is a vast 
> international conspiracy among scientists (or widespread incompetence) 
> to fabricate a hoax or manufacture faulty science that is deceiving 
> the world about human impacts on climate.  Given the consensus on this 
> issue, this is what would need to be occurring for the professional 
> science from nations around the world to be in error while also in 
> such compelling agreement that human impacts on climate are profound.
>  
> E. M. Smith's (or whoever he or she is) professional background, from 
> his blog:
>  
> http://chiefio.wordpress.com/about/
>
>
>       Paper Trails
>
> I have an Bachlors in Economics from the U.C. system. I also have a 
> pot load of credits from some various Community Colleges in everything 
> from “Transistor and Semiconductor Theory” to “American Sign 
> Language”. Oh, and a load of graduate level Education Theory units 
> needed to get a teaching credential from the California State 
> University system. And dozens and dozens of “industrial” classes that 
> various employers sent me off to over the years. Everything from the 
> RAMIS II database system on IBM mainframes (All of it. Every class for 
> the 13 or 14 volumes of the manual set. I was a consultant on it for 
> the maker and they had us “do it all”.) to “online automated” 
> certification “classes” in Sun’s flavor of Unix so that a vendor I 
> worked for could keep their sales certificate. And about 9 units 
> toward an MBA (but that’s another long story…) that I may finish some 
> day, or maybe not.
>
> I did pick up a Lifetime Teaching Credential at the Community College 
> Level from the State of California (they don’t make those any more, 
> but I’m “grandfathered”) in Data Processing and Related Technologies 
> and have taught for a few years at a local community college. Fun gig.
>
> Wouldn’t mind doing it again. But lots of places now want a Microsoft 
> Certification and, well, I’m just not interested in that, and never 
> will be. (I can “do” MS stuff, and have; but see no reason to send MS 
> even more money. Gates has enough.) The idea that a manufacturers 
> certificate (for which you must pay a bundle every couple of years) 
> would trump a formal Credential (and all the mandated training 
> including graduate level education theory) is, IMHO, broken; but such 
> is life. Why one needs Microsoft (or Red Hat) to tell you (for a large 
> fee) “what you know”; is beyond me. That’s what the C.V. and 
> Credential are for…
>
> Oh, and the Institute For The Certification of Computing Professionals 
> (ICCP) has what they called their “capstone” certification, the CDP, 
> that I also hold. Why? Don’t ask why… it seemed like a good idea at 
> the time…
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>  
> On 1/16/10, *Paul Rumelhart* <godshatter at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:godshatter at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     I'm replying to myself because I got to wondering if Windows
>     and/or most people's email clients natively handle png files,
>     since it is an open source format.  So I'm attaching the same
>     files after converting them to ..jpgs.
>
>     Paul
>
>     Paul Rumelhart wrote:
>
>         Some of you know that I was at one time playing around with
>         graphing global temperature data in order to satisfy my
>         curiosity on a number of points related to global warming.  I
>         wish I'd stuck with it.  It turns out that someone else
>         (probably many others) has been doing the same thing.  A
>         programmer named E. M. Smith has done some work with the GISS
>         dataset (I've been using the NCDC one).  He has found that
>         many of the measuring stations which are used for temperature
>         reconstructions across the globe have been removed from the
>         global temperature data sets for recent years.  In fact, the
>         data drops off quickly starting in the 80's (at least in the
>         dataset I've been working with).
>
>         He has done some research into which stations have been
>         removed, and has apparently found that lots of higher altitude
>         stations have been removed, which would have shown cooler
>         temperatures - leading to a corresponding rise in the average
>         temperatures over the years.  He has a blog which covers this
>         (he goes by the alias "chiefio").  Here is an entry in the
>         blog giving an overview of this topic:
>        http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/gistemp-a-human-view/
>
>         I have not tried to analyze the stations that drop off of the
>         NCDC data set yet, perhaps I can get a little work done on
>         that soon.
>
>         I'm also attaching a couple of graphs that I created from the
>         NCDC data which graph the station counts by years.  These are
>         from the global minimums data sets, both normal and adjusted.
>          I hadn't yet gotten to graphing station counts for the global
>         means and global maximums data sets.  All uniques stations and
>         sub-stations are counted, which will mean that some
>         sub-stations are counted twice if the thermometer is moved or
>         something in that year.  I was at one point trying to find out
>         why these counts dropped off so quickly.  It makes sense that
>         the number of stations would increase over the years, but why
>         the dramatic decrease in station counts?  I had originally
>         thought that perhaps there are delays in collecting data
>         together, but 20-30 year delays?  That doesn't seem plausible.
>
>         By the way, I learned of this work that E. M. Smith has been
>         doing by watching John Coleman's hour long news special titled
>         "Global Warming - The Other Side".  You can find links to the
>         various parts of this here:
>        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/14/john-colemans-hourlong-news-special-global-warming-the-other-side-now-online-all-five-parts-here/
>
>
>         Even I thought this video was a bit high in the sensationalist
>         and propagandist categories, but it did cover many of the
>         standard skeptical viewpoints that I've run into.  It might be
>         worth watching, even if you're completely convinced we're
>         cooking ourselves with carbon dioxide.
>
>         Paul
>


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