Re: Graph Of Temperature Vs No. Of Stations

The Greenland ice *** shrank by 50 cubic miles last year. Were it to
melt completely, sea levels would rise 20 feet-which would leave large
areas of Washington, D.C., including the Mall, between the Lincoln
Memorial and the Washington Monument, underwater.

While Washington Slept
The Queen of England is afraid. International C.E.O.'s are nervous.
And the scientific establishment is loud and clear. If global warming
isn't halted, devastating sea-level rises will be inevitable by 2100.
So how did this virtual certainty get labeled a "liberal hoax" in the
U.S.? Try the same tactics Big Tobacco used to deny the dangers of
smoking.
by Mark Hertsgaard May 2006
Ten months before Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans
underwater, Queen Elizabeth II had a private conversation with Prime
Minister Tony Blair about George W. Bush. The Queen's tradition of
meeting once a week with Britain's elected head of government to
discuss matters of state-usually on Tuesday evenings in Buckingham
Palace and always alone, to ensure maximum confidentiality-goes back
to 1952, the year she ascended the throne. In all that time, the
contents of those chats rarely if ever leaked.

So it was extraordinary when London's Observer reported, on October
31, 2004, that the Queen had "made a rare intervention in world
politics" by telling Blair of "her grave concerns over the White
House's stance on global warming." The Observer did not name its
sources, but one of them subsequently spoke to Vanity Fair.

"The Queen first of all made it clear that Buckingham Palace would be
happy to help raise awareness about the climate problem," says the
source, a high-level environmental expert who was briefed about the
conversation. "[She was] definitely concerned about the American
position and hoped the prime minister could help change [it]."

Press aides for both the Queen and the prime minister declined to
comment on the meeting, as is their habit. But days after the Observer
story appeared, the Queen indeed raised awareness by presiding over
the opening of a British-German conference on climate change, in
Berlin. "I might just point out, that's a pretty unusual thing for her
to do," says Sir David King, Britain's chief scientific adviser. "She
doesn't take part in anything that would be overtly political." King,
who has briefed the Queen on climate change, would not comment on the
Observer report except to say, "If it were true, it wouldn't surprise
me."

With spring arriving in England three weeks earlier than it did 50
years ago, the Queen could now see signs of climate change with her
own eyes. Sandringham, her country estate north of London, overlooks
Britain's premier bird-watching spot: the vast North Sea wetlands
known as the Wash. A lifelong outdoorswoman, the Queen had doubtless
observed the V-shaped flocks of pink-footed geese that descend on the
Wash every winter. But in recent years, says Mark Avery, conservation
director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, she also
would have seen a species new to the area: little egrets. These shiny
white birds are native to Southern Europe, Avery says, "but in the
last 5 to 10 years they have spread very rapidly to Northern Europe.
We can't prove this is because of rising temperatures, but it sure
looks like it."

Temperatures are rising, the Queen learned from King and other
scientists, because greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the
atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of such gases, is
released whenever fossil fuels are burned or forests catch fire.
Global warming, the scientists explained, threatens to raise sea
levels as much as three feet by the end of the 21st century, thanks to
melting glaciers and swollen oceans. (Water expands when heated.)


Unless greenhouse-gas emissions are curbed, warns James Hansen of
NASA, global temperatures could climb 2 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Such a rise would leave little of Manhattan but the skyscrapers.

This would leave much of eastern England, including areas near
Sandringham, underwater. Global warming would also bring more heat
waves like the one in the summer of 2003 that killed 31,000 people
across Europe. It might even shut down the Gulf Stream, the flow of
warm water from the Gulf of Mexico that gives Europe its mild climate.
If the Gulf Stream were to halt-and it has already slowed 30 percent
since 1992-Europe's temperatures would plunge, agriculture would
collapse, London would no longer feel like New York but like
Anchorage.

The Queen, says King, "got it" on climate change, and she wasn't
alone. "Everyone in this country, from the political parties to the
scientific establishment, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to our oil
companies and the larger business community, has come to a popular
consensus about climate change-a sense of alarm and a conviction that
action is needed now, not in the future," says Tony Juniper, executive
director of the British arm of the environmental group Friends of the
Earth.

At the time of his meeting with the Queen, Blair was being attacked on
climate change from all ideological sides, with even the Conservatives
charging that he was not doing enough. Yet Blair's statements on the
issue went far beyond those of most world leaders. He had called the
Kyoto Protocol, which has been ratified by 162 countries and requires
industrial nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 5 percent below
1990 levels, "not radical enough." The world's climate scientists,
Blair pointed out, had estimated that 60 percent cuts in emissions
were needed, and he committed Britain to reaching that goal by 2050.

But it wouldn't matter how much Britain cut its greenhouse-gas
emissions if other nations didn't do the same. The U.S. was key, not
only because it was the world's largest emitter but because its
refusal to reduce emissions led China, India, Brazil, and other large
developing countries to ask why they should do so. All this Blair had
also said publicly. In 2001 he criticized the Bush administration for
withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. In 2004 he said it was essential
to bring the U.S. into the global effort against climate change,
despite its opposition to Kyoto.



"Nobama" <staying@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:481c51b0.1345187@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The temperature average in the above graph is unprocessed. Graphs of
the 'Global Temperature' from places like GISS and CRU reflect
attempts to correct for, among other things, the loss of stations
within grid cells, so they don't show the same jump at 1990.
The graph mainly serves to illustrate one of the challenges for
people
who are trying to use land-based station data to construct a
continuous index of the global average temperature over the 1990
boundary. Gridded data reflect processing to (hopefully) remove the
influence of problems such as the loss of station counts within
grids.
The point of the graph above is that a change in the raw mean
occurred
coincidental with the big loss of stations in the early 1990s. This
creates a problem of confounding. After the early 1990s the gridded
series started behaving differently, i.e. going upwards so that the
1990s becomes the warmest decade, etc. Maybe the anomaly series are
fully corrected for the problem of station closure and the shift in
the 1990s was climatic. Or maybe the anomaly series are not fully
corrected for the problem of station closure, implying not all the
shift in the 1990s data was climatic. To accept the claims that the
post-1990 anomaly index is continuous with the pre-1990 data, and
only
reflects a climatic change, requires the assumption, as a maintained
hypothesis, that any effects of the sudden sample change around 1990
have been removed. It has puzzled me why this assumption is not more
rigorously tested by people whose research depends on the optimistic
interpretation of the gridded data.
The loss in stations was not uniform around the world. Most stations
were lost in the former Soviet Union, China, Africa and South
America.
To see this visually, go to the University of Delaware global
temperature archive. Click Available Climate Data; log in; under
Global Climate Data select Time Series 1950 to 1999; then select
Station Locations (MPEG file for downloading). Then sit and watch
the
movie. The remarkable things are, first, how bad the spatial
coverage
is outside the US and Europe, and second, what happens at 1990.
As early as 1991, there was evidence that station closure beginning
in
the 1970s had added a permanent upward bias to the global average
temperature. Willmott, Robeson and Feddema ("Influence of Spatially
Variable Instrument Networks on Climatic Averages, Geophysical
Research Letters vol 18 No. 12, pp2249-2251, Dec 1991) calculated a
+0.2C bias in the global average due to pre-1990 station closures.
Researchers doing trend regressions on globally-averaged temperature
data should consider including an intercept/slope break point at
around 1990.
Pat Michaels and I published a paper that tests whether homogeneity
corrections in gridded data are adequate to remove non-climatic
influences. We find they are not, and that the nonclimatic effects
add
up to a net warm bias for the world as a whole.
I have not found any discussion of the sudden loss in stations
around
1990 in the recent IPCC report. In the TAR there was a brief mention
in the Technical Summary, to the effect that if this rate of station
closure keeps up it will make it difficult to continue detecting
global warming. In other words, the underlying assumption that the
increase in average temperature is due to global climate change is
not
itself subject to question; the problem created by station closure
is
only that it makes it hard to measure the phenomenon they know must
be
there.
Weather satellites provide complete spatial coverage from 1979 to
the
present. After seeing the Delaware video, an interesting question to
ask would be: in the regions where the most surface data were lost
(i.e. Russia) were the temperature trends measured by satellites
above
or below the global average. That might give some indication of
whether the regions that are still well-sampled tend to have
higher-than-average warming trends. This is not a study I plan to
do,
but hopefully someone will.
I am using terms like 'global temperature' and 'average temperature'
for shorthand. They are intrinsically very problematic!




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