Does anyone think that the following examples are an accurate way to measure surface temperatures?

Question

And there is probably no way to detrend any of these urbanization artifacts from the surface temperature record?

http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations/

.
.

EDIT:

Patrick:

Thats what you guys do, if don't like the satellite data fix it(RSS). If you don't like TSI fix it. (PMOD). You did not answer the question, does compressor cooling fans, asphalt and concrete bias temperature measurements?

Enraged Parrot:

As far as I am concerned every station Steve used had the same problem, so it settles nothing with me.

Dana:

The realclimate link is complete crap and mindless conjecture, do you think the wind coming off of a city on a sunny day is cold? If you do you need to get out of the city more often.

Patrick:

That is bull, look at the one about the tennis court, built around 1980, and how the temperature shows a marked step.

Answer 1

I do think it has been getting warmer in the last couple decades but sloppy readings does tend to exaggerate the warming and that fits the agenda of the alarmists. Warming has been going on for thousands of years with some minor ups and downs along the way. Being a geologist, this little fact is extremely obvious to me and it is also obvious to me that some people chose to ignore it so I will keep repeating it. The alarmists are never satisfied. They always have to bump up their scare tactics. Exaggerated temperature readings will lead to some money grubbing researcher to suddenly claim that "Oh my Gaea, I mean Oh my God , the earth is warming more than we previously thought so we must force more greenhouse reductions on those peons, I mean people." What am I saying, they do it every day without shame.

Answer 2

Actually, it seems the surface temperature record has been vindicated (by Steven McIntyre's Blog, no less). It appears the "bad" station data being collected by SurfaceStations ( where the dude in your Blog was getting his information) didn't affect the trend at all. Check it out here:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/09/and-so-it-goes.html

So, I guess that's settled then.

----------------------
Well, I guess we're at an impasse. Neither one of us is up and on the issue well enough to make an informed decision. So any position we take on it now would be taken on a purely ideological basis. With that in mind, I suspend my judgment until I know more about it. Although I still say that snapping of a few photographs of the station is a p*ss poor way of scientifically analyzing it.

Answer 3

You can ignore all the studies that show the data is good, if you like. There's been a good sample of them listed here, and you simply deny (excellent word in this context) them. Why are you so smart?

I'll trust the judgment of thousands of Ph.D. climatologists instead. They know far more than you do about how to evaluate data.

Answer 4

So what are you getting at? Are temperatures increasing due to the sun or not increasing at all? you can't have it both ways tomcat. Why can't skeptics seem to stick with a theory? Because their theories suck?

"with virtual certainty"
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/stateofknowledge.html#known

I guess this is part of fixing the temperature trend to fit the solar gw theory right?

edit

i'll even throw in a link to your favorite web page:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-island/langswitch_lang/sk

you see a lot of provacative pictures, what you don't see is a lot of evidence, why didn't they bother collecting temperature data nearby these stations themselves and make a comparison? or did they? maybe they left that part out.

Answer 5

Common now, you're just trying to cause trouble. How do you think they made the man made warming? It's easier to make warming if you place the recorders on the other side of an A/C unit or on a blacktop road!

If the believers detrend these numbers, they will no doubt get values even warmer than the raw data! I just wonder if it will look like a hockey stick or baseball bat?

Answer 6

I haven't looked at this site for a while, but when it first appeared I did the following analysis using his first example (at the very bottom of the page, Marysville, California):

"I did a little digging, and as with all climate contrarians, when
you shine a spotlight of common sense on their "data" you find it scurries under the nearest rock.

His data for Marysville California are interesting so I went a little deeper into it. In particular, he compares the Marysville temperature record to Orland California, "only" 50 miles away. Admittedly, it looks bad for the temperature network until you see what this clown has done with the data. It ain't pretty.

Ok, here is the complete temperature record from Marysville, a site he says is completely contaminated by heat island effects:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=045385&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=TAVE&minyear=1857&maxyear=2002

If you compare the full data from CDIAC from above with what he gives in his website, he's truncated the Marysville data at 1900, so that you don't see the decrease in mean temperature from earlier years. Now here's Orland over the same period:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=046506&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=TAVE&minyear=1883&maxyear=2002

Notice that they're starting to look similar, that what was really going on was a cooling observed by both stations in the last half of the 19th century. Ok, for the last half of the 20th century, when we know warming was observed globally, Orland looks like this:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=046506&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=UTAVE&minyear=1950&maxyear=2002

where I have now taken the liberty of plotting the temperature adjusted for the urban heat island effect as discussed on the CDIAC website. Over the last half of the 20th century, Orland rose by about 2F, or 1C, not out of line with the mean global temperature increase. The same information taken from the Marysville location, gives this:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=045385&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=UTAVE&minyear=1950&maxyear=2002

which translates to maybe 1.5 C to 2C of temperature increase over the same period and while being larger than Orland, is also not out of line with the global mean rise.

There are two other stations near Orland, which is to the north of Marysville. They are Willows:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=049699&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=UTAVE&minyear=1950&maxyear=2002

and Chico Univ. Farm:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=041715&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=UTAVE&minyear=1950&maxyear=2002

Both of which show warming trends for the last half of the twentieth century that are in line with Marysville and Orland. In other words, there is no real discrepency between Marysville and the surrounding locations.

On an interesting note, Colfax, California, approx. 50 miles to the east of Marysville, shows no warming trend:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=041912&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=UTAVE&minyear=1950&maxyear=2002

However, Colfax is in the Sierra foothills and all of these other sites are on the valley floor."

The bottom line TC, is that this guy is massaging his data and playing you like a cheap fiddle.

Answer 7

Come on dude, how many times do we have to go over this? Can't you come up with something new?

Patrick's Real Climate link covers it.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-island/langswitch_lang/sk

There are so many reasons why the criticisms of the stations are unfounded, and we've been over them all before.