Data Comparisons

July 2012 0.28C , less sizzly than June

36 Comments

Roy report a UAH TLT July 2012 temperature of +0.28C; that a bit down from June. From a quatloo betting perspective I can’t help but notice we are also down to two significant figures. I don’t know how that will change anyone’s betting strategy.

Now, to see who won the quatloos: I see the win place and show are all in the money. GregMeurer nailed the observed temperature; Bob and redc came in hot on his heels. Oddly, I we don’t know who would have won if Roy hadn’t switched to 2 digits,but that’s the way the ball bounces when your betting qualtoos.

Here’s how the everyone did:

Winnings in Quatloos for UAH TTL July, 2012 Predictions.
Rank Name Prediction (C) Bet Won
Gross Net
— Observed +0.28 (C)
1 GregMeurer 0.28 5 86.386 81.386
2 BobKoss 0.277 5 69.109 64.109
3 redc 0.276 5 38.681 33.681
4 Ben 0.294 5 0 -5
5 JohnNorris 0.295 5 0 -5
6 SteveT 0.26 4.18 0 -4.175
7 Lance 0.301 5 0 -5
8 MDR 0.305 3 0 -3
9 Skeptikal 0.308 4 0 -4
10 pdm 0.311 5 0 -5
11 plazaeme 0.32 1 0 -1
12 Owen 0.325 4 0 -4
13 Rotondo 0.325 5 0 -5
14 PaulSk 0.33 3 0 -3
15 MichaelP 0.33 4 0 -4
16 BillC 0.23 5 0 -5
17 BenjaminG 0.333 5 0 -5
18 Pieter 0.223 5 0 -5
19 MikeP 0.338 4 0 -4
20 AMac 0.339 3 0 -3
21 EdS 0.34 5 0 -5
22 AnthonyV 0.34 5 0 -5
23 Ray 0.34 5 0 -5
24 PavelPanenka 0.218 3 0 -3
25 ivp0 0.344 5 0 -5
26 KreKristiansen 0.215 5 0 -5
27 denny 0.215 3 0 -3
28 Anteros 0.347 5 0 -5
29 BobW 0.348 4 0 -4
30 Simon 0.356 5 0 -5
31 Genghis 0.361 5 0 -5
32 lucia 0.369 2 0 -2
33 ArfurBryant 0.374 4 0 -4
34 PaulButler 0.375 5 0 -5
35 sHx 0.38 5 0 -5
36 RobB 0.401 5 0 -5
37 nzgsw 0.409 5 0 -5
38 bobdroege 0.412 5 0 -5
39 TimW. 0.42 5 0 -5
40 DenisC 0.42 5 0 -5
41 DonB 0.428 4 0 -4
42 MarcH 0.123 5 0 -5
43 RobertLeyland 0.104 4 0 -4
44 ScottBasinger 0.515 5 0 -5

The net winnings for each member of the ensemble will be added to their accounts.

36 thoughts on “July 2012 0.28C , less sizzly than June”

  1. The recently posted little droppy thingy in Ch5 pushed Aquanometer down to 0.29 (to 2 significant digits). For once, I am on the right side of the mean bet.

  2. Hey, great! Now I can bet with other people’s quatloos for the rest of the year. Sure takes the pressure off when you aren’t playing from behind. 🙂

    If Roy continues with two digits more ties are likely.

  3. At least the blog figures now tie in with those in the data files, which have always been to two digits.

  4. Hey, no fair! If I bet 4.18 and lost 4.175, who’s nicked my 0.005 quatloos?

    Or is Lucia on commission? She must be well rich by now.

  5. Oops. When Roy’s figures were announced last month I made a comment on WUWT:

    “But do we really need 3 dee-pees? Surely the satellite isn’t *that* accurate? 🙂 ”

    I doubt Roy didn’t pay any attention to me, but I sure forgot about the quatloo stackers! Sorry!

  6. From a quatloo betting perspective I can’t help but notice we are also down to two significant figures. I don’t know how that will change anyone’s betting strategy.

    When there’s a tie, isn’t it the first one who placed the bet wins?

    If it is, then I think my new strategy is to bet early.

  7. Since we know that there should be a third significant figure, the correct approach is for Lucia to use RegEM-based infilling to generate one, each month. 😉

    Hours of controversy and fun!

  8. When there’s a tie, isn’t it the first one who placed the bet wins?

    Yes. And I better get the August betting script up. Closing early spreads out the guesses!

  9. steveta_uk:

    Hey, no fair! If I bet 4.18 and lost 4.175, who’s nicked my 0.005 quatloos?

    Or is Lucia on commission? She must be well rich by now.

    What makes you think someone stole those? Clearly, you got a partial refund on your bet.

  10. Wow! Didn’t see that coming. I fully expected the tropics to warm up and hold July UAH temps higher. I’m beginning to look like a warmista. Congrats to the winners.

  11. Or is Lucia on commission? She must be well rich by now.

    Bwah ha ha!!!

    Actually, I suspect I’m rounding on field differently from the other. Sloppy that.

  12. Amac

    the correct approach is for Lucia to use RegEM-based infilling to generate one,

    Maybe an even better approach is to run a random number generator to create a digit on the day we close bets. The their digit would be noise and it would be a total crap shoot!!
    (Not going to do this btw.)

  13. This month, the actual UAH was 0.042c below the mean of all bets and 0.052c below the median, although the actual was within the mean +/- 1 SD.
    75% of the bets were higher than the actual figure and 23% below.
    My own bet was with the majority in being too high, mainly because I assumed a small rise in AQUA CH5 after the closing date, whereas it actually fell. It was reasonable to assume a rise, since the average peaks between July 28th and July 30th, but this year the peak appears to have been on July 19th, i.e. about 10 days earlier than average. That assumes there isn’t a major surge in temperatures during the next couple of months.

  16. Oh those whacky, hilarious blocking highs.

    August looks like it’ll be down from July, at this rate. I’ve lost my policlimate though. :<

  17. Arctic ice update.

    At present the extent is on track to be about the same as 2011. The area, OTOH, is headed for the cellar. The average concentration, area/extent, is at an all time low. The area as of 8/2 was 3.6458 Mm2 with about a month to go. On the same day of the year in 2011, the area was 3.9260 Mm2. The record low was last year at 2.9047 Mm2 on 9/10/2011. But who knows.

  18. At present the extent is on track to be about the same as 2011. The area, OTOH, is headed for the cellar. The average concentration, area/extent, is at an all time low.

    Neven has a graph of the area-extent ratio. Note the downstroke at the end! Looks like the ice has been broken into many fragments.

  19. Re: toto (Aug 6 07:21),

    It’s possible that the area is being underestimated. Satellite remote sensing is least accurate at this time of year because it’s hard to distinguish between open water and pools of water on the ice surface. I would expect both faster melting and faster freezing with dispersed ice.

    From the images at Cryosphere Today, it looks like the Northwest Passage is open already. The slow melting of the Chukchi Sea, which is also what’s contributing a lot to the low ice concentration, is delaying the opening of the Northeast Passage.

  21. julio, I’ll comment on his WaPo editorial. He’s crazy if he thinks that his 1988 predictions for temperature are actually consistent with the measured temperature record (even he’s revised his environmental climate sensitivity downwards since then, so rhetoric aside he doesn’t really agree with his original predictions either), and the “worse than we thought” applies more readily to the amount of inane rhetoric, including his own, on extreme weather events than on the frequency of extreme weather events.

    Here’s my try at forecasting: I predict an increase in extreme hubris and self-importance from climate scientists in the coming decade, correlating with a decline in public believe and interest in the topic. (The plot thickened while the crowd thinned.)

  22. From Hansen’s WaPo op-ed:

    These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small.

    Strong words. It will be interesting to see how he justifies them, and how he deals with potential confounds (e.g. better recording of extremes).

  23. Carrick,

    In any case, Hansen’s “solution” makes absolutely no sense:

    We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

    I had never heard this one before. Collect money from the fossil fuel companies and give all of it it directly to the people? As opposed to investing all or part of it on research or development of new technologies, or adaptation efforts, or to deal with the damages caused by future extreme weather events–or any of a dozen worthy alternatives? No, just give it all directly to the people, and that alone will magically “stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs”?

    So, yeah, maybe he is crazy!

  24. julio: given the use of the term “Rebated”, I’m interpreting this as a call for a revenue-neutral carbon tax: tax fossil fuel, reduce all other taxes in equal global amount, and make the tax cuts as broad as possible across the population (as opposed to e.g. just cut taxes for highest earners).
    .
    I don’t think is crazy at all, especially in comparison to the cap-and-trade “solution”.

  25. The wording is strange. What’s a tax on fossil fuel companies? Surely it gets passed on directly to the consumer. So I have to pay $10 a gallon for gas but my money has to go to ExxonMobil first before it gets to the government?

  26. toto: Even on your interpretation, which I admit is possible, I still don’t see how a revenue neutral tax “stimulates” or “creates” anything. The government ends up with as much money as it has now, and presumably uses (or misuses) it in exactly the same way. The consumer, if he’s lucky, sees the additional cost of, say, gas, offset by lower taxes elsewhere. The oil companies, if they are directly taxed, either pass the cost on to the consumer, or cut expenses elsewhere. How does this benefit anybody?

  28. julio 101032,
    What is with this ‘maybe’ stuff? He is unhinged.
    .
    The whole revenue-neutral approach is only inthe aggregate; the reduced taxes would not be for people/companies/organization which use a lot of energy, they would go to mostly to people who don’t use much energy. A rose by any other name still smells like a rose; it is a scheme for wealth transfer.

  29. Re: toto (Aug 6 12:49),

    A carbon tax might work if there were, in fact, alternatives with the same or lower cost, but perhaps needing some initial capital investment. If it costs more, you’ll still be out of pocket more than someone who sticks with fossil fuels. The only way you would come out ahead on revenue is if you reduce your standard of living by consuming less fossil fuel. But that simply won’t cut it for significantly reducing emissions. It just delays the curve slightly. Very slightly since there’s no way China, India and Brazil are going to do something similar. But yes, it does make slightly more sense than cap-and-charade.

    Pielke, Jr. has written about this in his columns and his book The Climate Fix. His opinion is that a relatively low carbon tax with the revenue used for R&D is the only thing that makes any sense. My problem with that is: what R&D and by whom? Solyndra? The government is notorious for cronyism and generally picking losers. Not to mention that revenues supposedly earmarked for a specific purpose are frequently diverted to other things. See for example the highway trust fund from fuel taxes.

    “Raising taxes doesn’t reduce deficits because governments spend everything they get and as much more as they can get away with.” Milton Friedman

  30. Steve:

    But there’s still a huge logical gap between “wealth redistribution” and “stimulating” or “creating” anything, let alone anything that will take the place of fossil fuels. I am left like the guy in the cartoon staring at the blackboard that says “and then a miracle happens”.

    Anyway, unhinged sounds right to me. Interesting also that tamino appears to have been somewhat critical of what looks like an early version of this paper (as per toto’s comment above).

  32. Re: DeWitt Payne (Comment #101039)

    R&D is only one of several possible uses for a hypothetical extra revenue. I listed two more above (comment #101032); I could easily think of more (re/afforestation, power grid maintenance/overhauling, mass transportation systems…)

    The problem is that there is no way to do any of that in a “revenue neutral” way. The (US, but Europe is not in a much better way) government today does not even have enough money to meet its basic obligations. Either you generate new revenue or you cut programs somewhere. What programs does Hansen want to cut?

  33. DeWitt,
    In spite of Hansens editorial and pal reviewed ‘paper’ at PNAS, there is nothing I can imagine short of nuclear war or a vast worldwide pandemic with very high mortality rates which is going to much slow the growth in CO2 emissions. Research to develop cost effective zero-carbon energy (like thousands of thorium-based reactors) will be opposed by the nutty greens, and (as you note) everything else is small potatoes compared to the growth that will be happening inChina, India, and several other large developing countries. The only meaningful effect of such schemes is political: using global warming as a camel to carry the burden of other politically (green/left) desired outcomes.

  34. Adding one other thought: if revenue were raised for research via a relatively low, uniformly applied carbon tax (a la Roger P jr), I think that might actually increase humankind’s future options. But it is never going to happen…. the greens and the left loath anything except direct government control of most everything; consider how Roger jr’s ideas are evaluated by the likes of Tamino.

  35. “We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.”

    I presume the logic of that is that the “fossil-fuel companies” will “innovate” alternatives, in order to avoid paying the tax in the first place, rather than simply putting up prices.
    I am not sure that is likely to work.
    Surely if prices rise to compensate for the taxes, and the “legal residents” use the rebate to pay the price increases, there will be no net effect.

  36. Given the extra cost of electric and hybrid vehicles, it would be interesting to see how high the price of gasoline would have to be to make a purchase economical. To do it right, you would have to remove all other subsidies for alternative vehicles and use an actual manufacturing cost plus profit margin for the vehicle. Then there are externalities like safety in a smaller, lighter vehicle…

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