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11 Responses to “Did Watts’ surfacestations.org paper show that surface temperature trends are unreliable? No.”

Peter Risdon Says:

May 16, 2011 at 2:40 pm | Reply

The paragraph you quoted from ends with this sentence:

“According to the best-sited stations, the diurnal temperature range in the lower 48 states has no century-scale trend.”

That was a surprise given the tenor of this post: “… maybe this is the end to questions as to whether surface temperature increases actually exist.”

Did you mean that we can now say the answer to that is that surface temperature increases do not exist? Or that, pace Keenan in the WSJ, the data do not contain statistically significant trends?
- andyrussell Says:
  
  May 16, 2011 at 2:58 pm | Reply
  
  I don’t think diurnal temperature range is very important. Do you?
  
  What’s more, the “century-scale” bit covers some interesting detail. Before Fall et al., it seems that the only work on diurnal temperature range showed a negative trend from the mid-century to 1980s-ish. What Fall et al. found was that this has increased again since the 1980s. So there’s no “century-scale trend”.
  
  But that tells you very little about mean surface temperature trends.
  - Mark Says:
    
    May 17, 2011 at 10:45 pm
    
    I have heard it claimed that the reduction in diurnal temperature range over the past few decades provides evidence that GHG increases are responsible for the warming. In that sense, some people think diurnal temperature range is important.
    
    Incidentally, I don’t think Fall et al. were the first to find that DTR has increased since the 1980s. I read a paper that said much the same thing a few years ago.
    
    Sorry for the lack of references to back up these statements. I’m a little too busy at the moment to chase them up.
  - andyrussell Says:
    
    May 18, 2011 at 8:43 am
    
    Ok, so I’m probably not giving DTR as much significance as it deserves.
    
    My point is that I don’t really care about DTR. I don’t think I know anyone who has a particular interest in DTR. If this paper had been published by anyone else I wouldn’t have looked at it. It’s not very interesting. It’s just another paper on climate observations that fits in with the “consensus view of climate change” or however you want to put it. That’s useful, but not to me or most people.
    
    If, however, the paper had shown what Watts has been saying it would show for quite a while now (i.e. that the postitive temperature trend in the surface station record in the US was an artefact of poor station siting) then that would have been very interesting. To me and to many other people.
    
    But it didn’t.
- Ben Says:
  
  May 16, 2011 at 4:49 pm | Reply
  
  So Peter… If the diurnal high and the diurnal low both rise by 1°C, you think this means there has been no warming? After-all, the diurnal range hasn’t changed! Others might draw a different conclusion.

Peter Risdon Says:

May 17, 2011 at 8:26 am | Reply

I understand diurnal range has significance, and the relationship between day and night time temperature ranges is important, especially with regard to the period 1950 to 1980 when the effect of man-made global warming, it has been argued, was masked by a cooling but revealed by the changes in the relationship between these ranges.

I further understand that this argument is based on the idea that human pollution caused this daytime cooling, that it affected the range of day time temperatures as well as the difference between night time temperatures which continued to show warming, and daytime ones that didn’t. This makes day time temperature range significant: if this is right it would be expected to show a variation that correlates with human activity.

But this isn’t my field; I’m just reading what I can in an attempt to understand as much as possible about an important issue and, for me at least, that means reading Watts and reading this blog. Just searching out stuff you’re already disposed to accept isn’t good enough. My comment was prompted by what struck me as a somewhat partial quotation and exasperation: I’m with Feynman when he said you should point out the problems with a theory, not just the things that support it.

[It's not really a "partial quotation" is it? That sentence you are interested in is stuck on the end of the abstract as a new paragraph and isn't really related to the 2 sentences I quote and which are related to the subject of this post. I'm not really interested in DTR and I doubt Watts was either. - AR]

At least Watts invites people with different views to post on his blog and has been at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide, not least with Judith Curry.

Ben, of course you’re right. Andy, a century is an arbitrary scale, of course.

I’d still be interested in your take on statistical significance.
- JMurphy Says:
  
  May 17, 2011 at 12:05 pm | Reply
  
  In what way has Watts atempted to cross “the ideological divide” ?
- Ben Says:
  
  May 17, 2011 at 3:16 pm | Reply
  
  Peter, I encourage a critical (i.e. thoughtful) reading of Anthony’s blog but my god do you really think he’s “at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide”? Anthony has done more to harden denialist thought than anyone, with the possible exception Marc Morano.
  
  The “different views” he solicits are unthreatening fig-leaves.
- andyrussell Says:
  
  May 17, 2011 at 3:24 pm | Reply
  
  I’ve got no problem with most of what Keenan says, although he’s not the first/only person to be saying these things. There’s a JoC paper from 2010 and it was one of the useful points to come out of the UEA email enquiries (i.e. working more with stats people). Not sure where the funding was supposed to come from for these new people though!
  
  I suppose the bigger problem comes down to climate science covering so much stuff – you can’t just look at problems from a stats/dynamics/modelling/chemistry/radiation/whatever perspective for too long before a) not getting very far or b) needing to doing something you’ve not done before.

omnologos Says:

May 19, 2011 at 7:21 am | Reply

Am surprised nobody claimed it was irrelevant as the US only covers 2% of the globe…
- andyrussell Says:
  
  May 19, 2011 at 7:43 am | Reply
  
  Maybe that’ll be Watts’ next move: if you can’t find anything in the US, let’s give Europe a go.
  
  I can’t imagine there’d be much enthusiasm left for such a project, though.

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