The Blackboard

I have to admit I initially missed the whole “march of the thermometers results in overwhelming bias” and now I’m trying to put together a time-line. Mind you, I knew this meme was out there, but since there has never been any convincing evidence the march of the thermometers actually caused any large bias in the reported surface temperatures, I never expected it to get quite as much play as it did. I guess if subscribed to cable TV, I would have noticed this meme had hit the big time sooner.

Inspired by Tamino’s recent efforts at producing a spatially-weighted analysis of temperatures from GHCN stations, I decided to make my own and “Open Source” it. While its currently written in STATA (the statistics software that I use for work), I’d be happy to work with anyone to port it to R or any other language that is a bit more accessible. I hope that folks on both sides of the debate can work together to establish a method of spatial weighting that we can use to do temperature analysis going forward, since it allows us to look at the overall effects of adjustment methods and differing data sets, rather than focusing on individual anecdotes.

My “spam” box has been filling lately, and the spam plugin has also been making lots of mistakes. To reduce spam, I’ve added a new plugin: Comment E-Mail Verification.

Zeke asked for a new thread for station drop out analyses.

The first email I read this morning announced the earthquake in Chile. It hit 8.8 on the Richtermoment magnitude scale and triggered a tsunami. The reports I read say at least 76 dead. Those of you who pray, pray it won’t be many more. For news: Times Online,hawaii247 and Reuters.

In comments, a reader asks me to comment on Tamino’s recent posts about surface temperatures. My first response is that I have been skimming them. The reason is that, while I am interested in the quality of the surface temperature records, I have never been interested in actually doing all the tedious work required to create one myself. I leave that to those motivated to do that.

In some sort of deluded attempt to do… something, a commenter here, and one at Bishop Hill have gotten it into their heads to create metaphors that go like this:

In comments, visitors have been wondered how many Australians visit the Blackboard. I answered pointing to Alexa.com (which is quite approximate.) Then someone wanted to know how many Swiss visit? I suspect many regular readers are little curious. I’ll show you my google analytics counts.