[ExI] Living temperature dataset

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 5:42 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki <
rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/12/12 Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>:
>
> >
> > If one suspect that adjustments are systematically biased in one
> direction,
> > the correct thing to do is to take all of them and look at their
> > distribution. This is the result for the entire GHCN dataset, on which
> GISS
> > is based:
> >
> >
> http://www.gilestro.tk/2009/lots-of-smoke-hardly-any-gun-do-climatologists-falsify-data/
> >
> > You get a nice gaussian distribution with an average of 0 degrees. That
> is,
> > there are as many negative adjustments as there are positive ones
>
> ### See here:
>
>
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/picking-out-the-uhi-in-global-temperature-records-so-easy-a-6th-grader-can-do-it/
>
> - please watch it and read the article before commenting.
>

Wow. A video with a 6th grader and his dad, who say that UHI exists. And I
have to watch it, otherwise I'm not qualified to comment! You think I'm
going to take you seriously after this?

I can play this game too: the following article:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/the-surface-temperature-record-and-the-urban-heat-island/

references two papers: one in Journal of Climate and one in Nature. Please
read them before commenting. If you prefer, you can have a 6th grader read
them and make a video.


> Let me explain on a hypothetical scenario:
>
> Imagine that you take all rural site temperatures and adjust them
> upward by 1 degree. Then you take an equal number of urban sites and
> adjust them downward by 1 degree. Obviously, the net adjustment per
> site will be zero, just as described in Alfio's link. However, note
> that adjusting rural sites up doesn't make physical sense, since there
> is no "rural cooling island effect" you would need to adjust for -
> these data should be consumed raw. Adjusting urban sites down makes
> sense, since their temperatures are the result of the UHI - but in
> this hypothetical this physically correct adjustment is negated by a
> physically improper adjustment of the rural data. The overall effect
> is that the UHI is fully transferred into the homogenized temperature
> record, and a spurious warming trend is seen.
>

This is a valid concern, but observations show the opposite: the warming is
higher where there is no UHI effect to correct for, like in the Arctic. See
for example
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/warming-due-to-urban-heat-island.php

 Alfio
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