Talk:Satellite temperature measurements

(William M. Connolley 19:57, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)) I've moved here text from the hist t page and the gw page that were about the sat t record. Both pages were starting to accrete similar material and the sensible place to put it was here.

This page gets to have some balloon stuff on it too, since its closely linked.

Other trends

from the Mears et al version is +0.131 °C/decade, and from Vinnikov and Grody, +0.22°C to 0.26°C per decade [1] (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.1087910).

Mears has no source, and V+G link requires "authorization".

Added Mears source (#1 hit from google, you lazy chap) and V+G via (gasp) Schneider... Besides which, I've just noticed that Mears *IS REFERENCED LOWER DOWN IN THE ARTICLE ANYWAY*. Oh good grief. V+G was referenced as a Science publication (2003) anyway so you have no cause for complaint at all. Especially as you keep inserting dodgy rubbish from Singer which has no better authority that self publication and newspapers.

Also, this is the first I've heard of anyone challenging Christy's claim that the satellite record shows hardly any warming. Where'd they get 0.13 degrees?

(William M. Connolley 21:26, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)) Well, if wikipedia is restricted only to things that you've heard of, its in trouble.

And I heard somewhere that the .22 to .26 is too recent for Christy to even respond. Why is that going in an encyclopedia article?

Why should it be taken out just cos you don't like it?

If you put back Vinnikov, please do this:

• supply a working on-line link [2] (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12970572&dopt=Abstract), or at least a reference to a peer-reviewed journal that could be checked in a good university library
• mention that Christy hasn't had time to respond yet [WMC: since when did Christy get an automatic right to rebut other peoples work? What happened to Spencer? Why haven't you read the trash on techcentral?]
• explain WHY Vinnikov gets such different results. [WMC: why not explain why S+C get different results?]
  • What does this mean? "To accurately retrieve the climatic trend, we combined the satellite data with an analytic model of temperature that contains three different time scales: a linear trend and functions that define the seasonal and diurnal cycles." [WMC: it means that you read the sciencemag article that you said was hard to get :-) ]

--Uncle Ed 17:52, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

An article on the Vinnikov-Christy difference

The differing conclusions come from the different ways the information was analyzed.

In his calculations, Christy adjusts satellite readings for inaccuracies he says are introduced by the fact that the satellite instrument is heated up by the sun.

"They did not remove this effect," said Christy, who was in Washington this week to attend a National Academy of Sciences meeting on remote sensing.

Notice the casual intrusion of NAS into this sentence to make you think that maybe NAS has approved or had some connection to C's statement.

"They allowed it to remain in the data and it corrupted all of their calculations, like a computer virus."

In an interview, Grody said he and Vinnikov were not convinced that Christy's adjustments should have been made at all.

He said that even if the data should be adjusted to eliminate the effect of the sun, he is not convinced Christy's approach is correct.

Christy said the temperature readings obtained by his adjustments are borne out by temperature readings collected by weather balloons.

Grody, a research physicist at the NOAA center in Camp Springs, Md., said he and Vinnikov used information provided by the manufacturer of the heat-detecting instruments to eliminate the effect of the sun's heat from the measurements.

(Sorry, I forgot to include a web link for this... --Uncle Ed 18:55, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC))

(William M. Connolley 21:33, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)) S+C always say that only their record is validated by balloons but I have yet to meet anyone who believes this. C has sounded off in the press: when he gets a paper out, like V+G did, people will start taking him seriously. He has to fight off another recent attack too: Fu et al (http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/science/gwarming.html - see the end piece by Scott Church which I am told is mostly correct).

Church seems to conclude "it is not at all clear that the trends we're getting are even meaningful yet". Do you know where there is a cogent response to the diurnal criticism put forward at [3] (http://www.greeningearthsociety.org/wca/2003/wca_7b.html) that Singer cited at sepp.org?--Silverback 05:43, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

(William M. Connolley 09:17, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)) The article you cite is so grotesquely biased I couldn't bring myself to read it all to find the bit you mention. Could you quote it here?

There is a larger analysis there, too large to quote, but hopefully this paragraph where it begins will allow you to skip to the relevant portion. The "double peak" this notes would seem to be a red flag, at least it is portrayed as such. "Yet another flanking maneuver (this time in the pages of Science) fell apart before its weight could be added to the fracas. Konstantin Vinnikov and Norman Grody employ their own statistical scheme to recalibrate the satellite data and account for changes in the satellites’ orbital drift. It ignores the work by both UAH and RSS, and summarily dismisses the weather balloon records. Their lower atmosphere temperature trend is about 50 percent greater than the surface measurements. Within the same analysis they determine there to be a diurnal cycle of temperature in the lower atmosphere that manifests a double peak (at 11 a.m. and at 9 p.m.) with a local minimum in between the two at about 3:30 p.m. Twin peaks, maybe; a single dip lynches the concept because it is a near physical impossibility."--Silverback 11:02, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

(William M. Connolley 18:58, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)) Yep, thats part of the hopelessly biased bit. Describing V+G as another flanking manoeuvre is absurd. Asserting that V+G fell apart is also absurd. All they mean is, they dislike it. But... to return to your original point... no, I don't know about the diurnal stuff. Sorry.

--Silverback 20:37, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC) What you describe as bias, appears to be expressions of frustration at the things that they see as allowed to survive peer review. If the analysis presented is correct, then the peer review has been poor, especially for a reanalysis of data which purports to correct problems with previous analyses, the standards should be higher then, and should include strong attempts to reconcile the previous literature with the new results. I try to ignore the denigrating commentary on both sides, I find pressure for a premature consensus biased as well, and bound to inflame passions when coercive, command and control, political actions that have hundreds of billions of dollars of economic impact are being advocated. Agreement between parameterized models with quite different details in the physical processes is not confirmation which justifies a consensus.--Silverback 20:37, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)