The Blackboard

WARNING: While adding GISS, I noticed I am not replicating my GISS results from the other computations precisely. That means there is at least 1 bug in my spreadsheet. I’m looking for the bug. In the meantime, I’m blanking out while I find the error. (It’s dinner time, and I may not find [...]

Teasing out the Urban Heat Island effect can be a fiendishly difficult task. There are enough confounding factors that it is dangerously easy to simply pick a measure that shows what you want to show (be it a negligible or huge UHI) without including the nuances necessary.

Take this graph for example. It shows the U.S. [...]

In discussions of the application of the Hansen/Lebedeff gridding method to “toy planet” data, a few people noted that the “toy” data used did not hightlight a known way bias can be introduced into a computed temperature trend as a result of dropping out a whole bunch of stations. This can give the false [...]

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is something of a charged subject on climate science blogs. Depending on who you ask, you might hear that it either accounts for the majority of modern warming or that it doesn’t exist at all. While it is undeniable (and fairly easily shown) that both the site characteristics and [...]

The “toy planet” discussion of the “basic” anomaly method in its most idealized form was such a hit, I’ve decided to discuss how the ‘bias’ method used in section (3) of Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 — the method actually used by GISTemp– might be affected by deal with “the march of the thermometers”. One [...]

Roy Spencer posted two versions of the UAH temperature of the lower troposphere! According to version 5.3, the temperature of the lower troposphere was 0.63C; according to version 5.2, it was 0.74C. Despite the fact that I my bet of 0.64 would have been closer to correct using the splendid new version 5.3, we [...]

As some of my readers know, when someone raises a criticism of a particular widely used result in climate science, I often like to try to understand the main issue and discuss it using a toy problem or “cartoon”. That is: I like to create an artificial problem that highlights the issue that someone claims [...]

This post builds on a simple spatial gridding model outlined here. As always, the latest source code can be found at http://drop.io/0yhqyon, and I welcome folks helping improve it.
If we are looking at the effect of adjustments and station quality, we should really be looking at maximum and minimum temperature data rather than mean data, [...]

Many in comments have suggested that some of the rebuttals to the claim that the march of the thermometers actually biases temperature anomalies reported by NOAA, GISSTemp and CRU may be unnecessary. How so, it’s possible no one has really made that claim. If so, the ‘rebuttals’ would be countering strawmen (i.e. arguments that [...]

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of AccuWeather. All opinions are 100% mine.
As many climate-blog addicts are aware, weather is not climate. While we are all busy arguing whether this years DC snowstorm was caused by climate change, those in DC were probably just thankful for online services like AccuWeather [...]