Betting

Bet: UAH 2010 ANNUAL Average

26 Comments

Zeke recommended we bet on the Annual Average temperature. As usual, I’m having us bet on the annual average temperature UAH Temperature of the Lower Troposphere as reported by Roy Spencer. This is selected because it’s always the first to report; for purposes of betting we will use the value reported by Roy Spencer at his blog or at UAH itself whichever appears first.

Later this week, I’ll post a bet for HadCrut which is usually the last monthly report by an official agency that is easily accessible on the web.

You may enter your bet for the annual average tempeature anomaly for the lower troposphere as reported for UAH below:


[sockulator(../musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/UAHBets2.php?Metric=UAH TTL?Units=C?cutOffMonth=2?cutOffDay=20?cutOffYear=2010?DateMetric=Full Year, 2010? )sockulator]
Bets close midnight 2/19/2010. Europeans, remember to use “.” not “,”.

Different people have different ways of making predictions. I often show people the monthly anomalies for from the channel 5 AMSU graphed below:

Those betting should be aware that January hit a record high for UAH, and the indications from the Channel 5 AMSU suggest the tropical troposphere anomaly remains very hot.

Also, the Channel 5 AMSU hit 0.861 on Feb. 6, which is only 0.024C shy of an all time high daily anomaly in the record; the reading then dropped to 0.852C. (Bear in mind, this instrument is mounted on a satellite whose location that drifts. Daily temperature anomalies are also very noisy, moreover readings from this instrument are affected by both the temperature or the troposphere and the location of the satellite. Still, it does provide some information and the daily anomalies are near all time high values.)

With El Nino still present in the Pacific and some high temperatures already recorded, plus on going underlying warming due to GHG’s tending to push the average temperature up, I think there is a fairly decent chance this year will be a record for UAH. I’ll be betting high.

Of course, you can bet otherwise. So, go ahead and bet some Quatloos. Come January 2011, we’ll see who won!

26 thoughts on “Bet: UAH 2010 ANNUAL Average”

  1. Sorry to start OT but somebody’s done a calculation, given you’ve reduced your electricity consumption by X Watts then you will have reduced the GAT in 2100 by Y degrees. Anyone know who and where?

  2. Rich: any such calculation would be extremely uncertain (and small). But…

    – Given an electricity consumption of watts: x
    – A CO2 intensity of kg CO2_eq per watt: p
    – An airborne fraction of emitted CO2: a
    – The kg CO2 per atmospheric ppm: m
    – The climate sensitivity of doubling CO2: k
    – An expectation of a certain future scenario in the absence of your personal emissions (e.g. 2x CO2 for simplicity)

    You could very very roughly approximate it as x * p * a * m * (k / 350)

    Bear in mind the effects of CO2 on radiative forcing are logarithmic rather than linear, so the marginal impact of your reduction will, in reality, strongly depend on the total emissions in the future.

  4. “Bear in mind the effects of CO2 on radiative forcing are logarithmic rather than linear”

    Wow. The Hockey stick has C02 concentrations going up since 1850 in LOCK STEP with temperature!

  5. Thanks Zeke. The analysis I recall looked very much like that. (Well I suppose it would …)

    Do you have an estimate for p or an idea where I’d find it?
    Why isn’t a = 1?

  6. Rich:

    p = 0.5 per kWh (0.5 / 1000 per watt) is around the U.S. average, though you could find the specific number for your sub-grid here: http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/egrid/index.html

    a != 1 because about half of anthropogenic CO2 emissions are absorbed by natural sinks (primarily vegetative and ocean sinks) and do not contribute to the atmospheric stock. There is a fun debate about how a. will change in the future, but there doesn’t seem to be firm evidence yet that it will necessarily decrease (though I imagine at some point the effects of temp on CO2 solubility in water will be significant, but that might be far away).

  8. Are we supposed to bet on the temperature fluctuation itself or also on the assumed man-made component of that fluctuation? Which all questions, bets, insults and jokes aside, remains the overarching and unproven question of all [hand waving to various degrees from various quarters and all other professions to that effect notwithstanding, including this blog].

    Ref: Salomon et.al. crawling to the cross last week on the role of water vapour in modulating temperatures; something the models have been downplaying to the point of probably allowing a + instead of a – to affect the algorithms, and something the IPCC has been steadfastly denying for the past 20 years.

    So Lucia, what is it we are betting on?

  10. Zeek,

    “although you could find the specific number for your sub-grid here: http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy…..index.html”

    I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in those regional CO2 footprint numbers. It’s based on place of Generation rather then consumption. California imports a lot of power.

  11. Re: Rich (Feb 9 09:05),

    I have not seen a figure per watt but there is an approximation from Patrick Michaels that says that it takes a reduction of 1,767,250 million metric tons of CO2 to lower the temp by one degree C using IPCC models.

    So if you can come up with a CO2 per watt figure and you have enough to make a calculation that will generate a really small meaningless number.

  13. Harrywr2,

    Use NERC regions if subregions are too small, but its my understanding that the subregions are the least worst level of aggregation to balance the geography of generation with the uncertainty inherent in grid mixes.

  14. Will the HadCRUT annual temp be based on HadCRUT monthly data or after Met O puts it through their washing machine?

  15. David L Hagin re #32712,

    looking through that map, it is bogus. not only does it not match ground records as in australias anomalies, but where Spencer says China and russia showed cooling, well no. the map shows lower russia and some of mogolia in the blue (which it should)-

    http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33645&Cr=fao&Cr1=

    in fact it would turn into the new arctic if it was any colder. but the map shows NO cooling in china, yet they have increasing levels of sea ice and some of the coldest and most snow since before satellites were deployed, so how it can say it was warmer for the majority of china over january than a previous base period?

  16. Re: mobihci (Feb 10 00:10), if you had taken the trouble to read what Roy Spencer wrote below the map, you would have found

    “It should also be remembered that lower tropospheric temperature anomalies for one month over a small region are not necessarily going to look like surface temperature anomalies.”

    Given this caveat I hardly think you have grounds for calling the map “bogus”.

  17. Lucia [32700]
    I’m not a betting man. I prefer investing my quatloos in the stock market.
    🙂

  18. HadCRUT reports significant increases in temperature very fast, but drops in temperature very late. Could that possibly be due to a bias?

  20. I have an uncomfortable feeling that this is severely off-topic but still …

    I used the data from the epa link above and chose a value from the high end, assuming the dirtiest electricity production.

    Here’s my analysis and a bit of R to implement it:

    # Estimate of the impact interms of temerature of a given change
    # in electricity use.
    #
    # Variables:
    #
    # kg of CO2 per kWh = co2rate = 2000 lb/MWh = 888kg/MWh
    # concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere = co2con = 380/1e6
    # molar mass of CO2 = mmco2 = 44 gm/mol
    # Moles of CO2 in atmosphere = molco2 = molatmos*co2con
    # avg molar mass of atmosphere = mmatmos = 29 gm/mol
    # kg of Atmosphere = massatmos = 5.3e18 kg
    # Moles of atmosphere = molatmos = massatmos/mmatmos
    # Atmospheric sensitivity = sensitivity = 3 deg

    # change (degrees) per concentration = delta = 380/3

    # Increase in moles of CO2 per MWh = co2rate/mmco2
    # Change of CO2 concentration per MWh = (co2rate/mmco2)/molatmos
    # Change of temperature per MWh = delta*(co2rate/mmco2)/molatmos
    # = delta*(e*co2rate/mmco2)/(massatmos/mmatmos)

    zeke = 0.5
    delta = 380/3
    co2rate = 888
    mmco2 = 44/1000
    massatmos = 5.3e18
    mmatmos = 29/1000

    # e is in MWh
    tdelta = function(e)
    {
    delta*(e*zeke*co2rate/mmco2)/(massatmos/mmatmos)
    }

    I’ve converted all to mks units. I can give references for all the constants if anyone can’t find them. Criticisms not merely welcomed but actively encouraged.

    So if I turn off a 100W lightbulb for a year then the impact on global temperature is tdelta(0.876) = 6.126591e-15 degrees. If a billion people follow my example: 6.126591e-06 degrees. So, in the words of the immortal Darell Huff, “a difference is only a difference if it makes a difference”.

  21. Rich [32804]
    As I said to our host earlier on, I would rather invest my quatloos in the stock market…

  23. Re: magicjava (Feb 10 15:00),
    I don’t know enough to help you craft the requests, but good luck! It would be nice to get all the codes.

    Have you tried asking Christy or Spencer how a proper request might be crafted? They might have insight (or not); depends on how the data propagates out!

  24. Re: lucia

    I sent Dr. Spencer an e-mail request a few weeks ago regarding the operation of one of the pieces of equipment on the AMSU. He never responded.

    I also asked Dr. Spencer, via a comment on a Watts Up With That article he wrote, if the source code was available. He didn’t respond.

    I haven’t tried directly asking him or Dr. Christy for source code. I’ll give that a try and see what happens.

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