Professor Michael Mann on Wildfires

[donsutherland1]

From Politico:

The August Complex of wildfires surpassed the grim milestone Monday of over 1 million acres burned, the first blaze in recorded California history to reach seven figures of acreage.

The update by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection on the August Complex in the north coastal range of mountains came just after the agency announced Sunday that the state has seen over 4 million acres burned so far this year. That's more than the double the total destruction of 1.9 million acres burned in all of 2018, the previous record year.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/10/05/california-has-first-million-acre-megafire-as-devastating-season-sets-new-records-1321356

 

[skierinvermont]

4 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

From Politico:

The August Complex of wildfires surpassed the grim milestone Monday of over 1 million acres burned, the first blaze in recorded California history to reach seven figures of acreage.

The update by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection on the August Complex in the north coastal range of mountains came just after the agency announced Sunday that the state has seen over 4 million acres burned so far this year. That's more than the double the total destruction of 1.9 million acres burned in all of 2018, the previous record year.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/10/05/california-has-first-million-acre-megafire-as-devastating-season-sets-new-records-1321356

 

That's 4% of the state. Just guessing maybe half the state is burnable, which would be 8% of the burnable acreage. And then if you total up what has burned in the last 5 years, maybe 15-20% of the burnable acreage has burned.

[blizzard1024]

After watching this 60 minutes interview it's pretty clear Michael Mann has gone political. He obviously is a liberal democrat and is pushing hard now with the election less than 1 month away. This is shameful for a scientist to get into politics. Do you really believe burning of fossil fuels is now supercharging the weather? This is fantasy. Fires are normal out west. What is not normal is man's suppression of fires for many decades. Now we are paying the price. We have warm years, there is often a big ridge out west which is not unusual. We had record cold plunge down into the Rockies and western Plains which produces a large high pressure system over the Rockies leading to dry downslope winds earlier this fall into the Pacific NW.  THIS began these fires. This is hardly related to global warming. Record cold still can happen because the climate hasn't warmed enough to preclude such events. To blame this on CO2 is political and anti-humanity. I feel sorry for the folks in CA and other places out west. But if you live in areas which are prone to fires you have to accept the risk and have a plan in case a fire breaks out. The same goes for people living on the coast. Hurricanes will strike eventually. You need a plan and have to be willing to accept that a hurricane could destroy your house. That is why there is insurance. To say record hurricane season is caused by CO2 also is false. Global ACE is running 390.88 for 2020 so far, normal YTD is 597, thats 35% below normal. For the Atlantic, it is running 30% above normal but the NH is running 34% BELOW normal YTD. see http://climatlas.com/tropical/  NHC has been on a naming binge that is all. There is nothing unusual about the tropics. Its a La Nina year so we expect more in the Atlantic. Normal variations that are being hyped up by the media and scientists like Michael Mann.

The Earth has warmed around .6C since the late 70s.  UAH has .6C warming, RSS has .9C warming, HADcrut has .6C, NCDC and GISS have around .6-.7C warming looking at the graphs.  This was after a global cooling trend from the 1940s so we have rebounded out of that cool period.  The trend per decade is roughly .15C decade. That really isn't much and the Earth is not that fragile. Of course RSS has a much higher trend after its massive adjustments and it doesn't even agree with the surface records since the late 1970s. UAH is more in line with the surface records since the late 1970s. GISS/NCDC/HadCrut all use different normal periods that is why there anomalies are higher than UAH. UAH uses 1981-2010. I believe GISS uses 1951-80, HadCrut uses 1961-1990 and NCDC uses 1901-2000. My beef with the surface records begins before the 1940s. They also have adjusted up temperatures over the Oceans;  Karl et al 2015. This just happen to cause more warming after 1998 when climate scientists were puzzled by a pause in global warming. Hmmm.  If you think the climate is that fragile you know very little about paleoclimatology.   We are living in good times globally. Food production is at an all time high. There is no reason for poverty and starvation but you can't blame that on climate change. 

 

 

[bdgwx]

3 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

They also have adjusted up temperatures over the Oceans;  Karl et al 2015. This just happen to cause more warming after 1998 when climate scientists were puzzled by a pause in global warming.

Here are the relevant publications.

Karl 2015: Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

Haung 2015: Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature Version 4 (ERSST.v4). Part I: Upgrades and Intercomparisons

Haung 2015: Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature Version 4 (ERSST.v4): Part II. Parametric and Structural Uncertainty Estimations

Rennie 2014: The international surface temperature initiative global land surface databank: monthly temperature data release description and methods

Karl did not adjust temperatures upward. The upward revised estimate in the warming trend was a product of changes to the inputs and methodology used to analyze those inputs. What he did was switch from ERSSTv3 to ERSSTv4 and incorporated the International Surface Temperature Initiative into the analysis. In his own words here are the changes that he felt were most impactful.

• an increasing amount of ocean data from buoys, which are slightly different than data from ships
• an increasing amount of ship data from engine intake thermometers, which are slightly different than data from bucket seawater temperatures
• a large increase in land-station data, which enables better analysis of key regions that may be warming faster or slower than the global average

First, SSTs are increasingly being acquired from buoys (like the ARGO network) which have been shown be more accurate than ship measurements. This provides the opportunity to use the buoy data as a means of calibrating or bias correcting the ship data especially when there is adequate colocation of the two. ERSSTv4 does that.

Second, there was a dramatic shift in ship measurement technique after WWII in which the dominant method switched from bucket thermometers to engine intake thermometers. ERSSTv3 assumed that all measurements were bucket style after WWII, but it was discovered that several ships were, in fact, still performing the bucket measurements even up to 2015. ERSSTv4 fixed this discrepancy.

Third, the incorporation of the ISTI into the analysis improved spatial coverage of land temperatures especially in the Arctic where the warming is significantly higher than the global average.

As a side note...John Christy (the primary maintainer of the UAH satellite dataset) is listed as a contributor to the ISTI dataset (see Rennie 2014 above) which Karl felt represented the biggest impact to the upwardly revised warming trend. And it's important to note that despite these changes the net effect of all adjustments to the data still results in a lower warming trend than would be computed otherwise over the entire period of record.

Again...the warming is not a result of Karl's changes. Karl's changes result in a better estimate of the warming that was already there and which occurred because of the positive Earth Energy Imbalance which itself is driven by the net effect of all climate forcing agents. And besides, Karl is but one among many maintainers of the dozen or more datasets that publish a global mean temperature. His dataset is not significantly different from the other datasets.

 

[blizzard1024]

Here's another great article from Dr. Judith Curry on the wildfires....  This is common sense. 

https://judithcurry.com/2020/09/15/fire/#more-26553

[donsutherland1]

5 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

After watching this 60 minutes interview it's pretty clear Michael Mann has gone political. He obviously is a liberal democrat and is pushing hard now with the election less than 1 month away. This is shameful for a scientist to get into politics. Do you really believe burning of fossil fuels is now supercharging the weather? This is fantasy. Fires are normal out west. What is not normal is man's suppression of fires for many decades. Now we are paying the price. We have warm years, there is often a big ridge out west which is not unusual. We had record cold plunge down into the Rockies and western Plains which produces a large high pressure system over the Rockies leading to dry downslope winds earlier this fall into the Pacific NW.  THIS began these fires. This is hardly related to global warming.

 

 

 

There is credible evidence that climate change is triggering changes that promote more extreme weather. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45242

Synoptic patterns are occurring within the context of increased greenhouse gas forcing. Added warmth has an impact e.g., for every 1 degree C rise in temperature, the atmosphere holds approximately 7% more water vapor. So, if everything else were held constant, and it isn’t, one would be dealing with heavier precipitation events.

Attribution studies are linking extreme events to climate change, as would be expected based on the current scientific understanding. One very recent example is this year’s exceptional warmth in Siberia.

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/WWA-Prolonged-heat-Siberia-2020.pdf

In terms of the wildfires, there is a large body of literature that links wildfire conditions to climate change. Increased heat, dryness, water vapor deficits all exacerbate risks of fire above what would otherwise be the case.

https://news.sciencebrief.org/wildfires-sep2020-update/

Climate science has made a strong empirical case linking anthropogenic greenhouse gases to extreme weather. If the case were weak or worse, those who reject AGW and its link to extreme weather, would be publishing research showing otherwise. They are not. Empty dismissals—by empty, I mean without credible research to back those statements—are insufficient basis to contest the large and growing body of research linking climate change to extreme weather and related events.

[blizzard1024]

1 hour ago, bdgwx said:

Here are the relevant publications.

Karl 2015: Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

Haung 2015: Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature Version 4 (ERSST.v4). Part I: Upgrades and Intercomparisons

Haung 2015: Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature Version 4 (ERSST.v4): Part II. Parametric and Structural Uncertainty Estimations

Rennie 2014: The international surface temperature initiative global land surface databank: monthly temperature data release description and methods

Karl did not adjust temperatures upward. The upward revised estimate in the warming trend was a product of changes to the inputs and methodology used to analyze those inputs. What he did was switch from ERSSTv3 to ERSSTv4 and incorporated the International Surface Temperature Initiative into the analysis. In his own words here are the changes that he felt were most impactful.

• an increasing amount of ocean data from buoys, which are slightly different than data from ships
• an increasing amount of ship data from engine intake thermometers, which are slightly different than data from bucket seawater temperatures
• a large increase in land-station data, which enables better analysis of key regions that may be warming faster or slower than the global average

First, SSTs are increasingly being acquired from buoys (like the ARGO network) which have been shown be more accurate than ship measurements. This provides the opportunity to use the buoy data as a means of calibrating or bias correcting the ship data especially when there is adequate colocation of the two. ERSSTv4 does that.

Second, there was a dramatic shift in ship measurement technique after WWII in which the dominant method switched from bucket thermometers to engine intake thermometers. ERSSTv3 assumed that all measurements were bucket style after WWII, but it was discovered that several ships were, in fact, still performing the bucket measurements even up to 2015. ERSSTv4 fixed this discrepancy.

Third, the incorporation of the ISTI into the analysis improved spatial coverage of land temperatures especially in the Arctic where the warming is significantly higher than the global average.

As a side note...John Christy (the primary maintainer of the UAH satellite dataset) is listed as a contributor to the ISTI dataset (see Rennie 2014 above) which Karl felt represented the biggest impact to the upwardly revised warming trend. And it's important to note that despite these changes the net effect of all adjustments to the data still results in a lower warming trend than would be computed otherwise over the entire period of record.

Again...the warming is not a result of Karl's changes. Karl's changes result in a better estimate of the warming that was already there and which occurred because of the positive Earth Energy Imbalance which itself is driven by the net effect of all climate forcing agents. And besides, Karl is but one among many maintainers of the dozen or more datasets that publish a global mean temperature. His dataset is not significantly different from the other datasets.

 

This shows how hard it is to come up with a globally consistent temperature trend over the oceans. Too many adjustments, uncertainties, methods of measurements, coverage etc back to the 1800s.  70% or so of the planet is covered in Ocean. This uncertainty makes the extent of the warming since the 1800s uncertain too... The UAH dataset especially is good since the late 1970s but it doesn't go farther back. Its very hard to find radiosonde data from the 1950s and 60s for some reason. I would love to see this dataset. UAH temperature trends are consistent with the surface records temp trends since the late 1979s despite Karl et al 2015.  RSS is the only dataset that is showing too much warming as I stated above. since the late 1970s and is above the surface records. So it should be discounted as an outlier.  But everyone on this forum with few exceptions of course likes RSS because it verifies the narrative better that CO2 drives the climate (after feedbacks of course). 

[blizzard1024]

Just now, donsutherland1 said:

There is credible evidence that climate change is triggering changes that promote more extreme weather. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45242

Synoptic patterns are occurring within the context of increased greenhouse gas forcing. Added warmth has an impact e.g., for every 1 degree C rise in temperature, the atmosphere holds approximately 7% more water vapor. So, if everything else were held constant, and it isn’t, one would be dealing with heavier precipitation events.

Attribution studies are linking extreme events to climate change, as would be expected based on the current scientific understanding. One very recent example is this year’s exceptional warmth in Siberia.

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/uploads/WWA-Prolonged-heat-Siberia-2020.pdf

In terms of the wildfires, there is a large body of literature that links wildfire conditions to climate change. Increased heat, dryness, water vapor deficits all exacerbate risks of fire above what would otherwise be the case.

https://news.sciencebrief.org/wildfires-sep2020-update/

Climate science has made a strong empirical case linking anthropogenic greenhouse gases to extreme weather. If the case were weak or worse, those who reject AGW and its link to extreme weather, would be publishing research showing otherwise. They are not. Empty dismissals—by empty, I mean without credible research to back those statements—are insufficient basis to contest the large and growing body of research linking climate change to extreme weather and related events.

This is all BS. sorry. A small change in climate does not lead to more weather extremes.  Weather extremes always exist. So you are saying that if we cool .6C in 40 years we are going back to a perfect climate? Yes indeed warmer air can "hold" more water vapor but that doesn't mean it does. You need processes.  In the lower atmosphere evaporation off the oceans is the process, but this could lead to more cloud cover, more rainfall, more convection which reduces the water vapor content. So anytime the climate has warmed around.5C there happens to be more extreme weather regardless of the cause? Also if the temperatures warm just a little, then we get more water vapor which amplifies the process and so on. It doesn't matter the cause?  You guys just don't get real science. You are fooled by what passes as science now a days. 

What happens when it cools .5C?  my point is weather has always been extreme....its not getting worse. What IS getting worse is people's vulnerability to extreme events. I will give you that. Plus 24 hour media hype, social media insanity and you get this impression of more extreme weather.  Science is not really science anymore at least when I was actively publishing 25 years ago... I am glad I don't have to anymore. Its insanity out there.  

[tamarack]

:Small sample size - 2 stations, NYC and Farmington, Maine -  but with PORs of 152 and 128 years:

Calendar day precip, 4"+ and 3"+, percent change in frequency

NYC: 1869-1969 vs. 1970-on,  4"+   up 74%   3"+   up 95%

Farmington, same periods,   4"+   up 127%   3"+   up 44%

Not sure if UHI affects precip, though Farmington's population of 5000 probably offers little of it.

[donsutherland1]

4 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

This is all BS. sorry.

I don’t believe it’s fair to dismiss peer-reviewed research as “BS,” much less to do so without credible contrary evidence.

[bdgwx]

4 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

This shows how hard it is to come up with a globally consistent temperature trend over the oceans. Too many adjustments, uncertainties, methods of measurements, coverage etc back to the 1800s.  70% or so of the planet is covered in Ocean. This uncertainty makes the extent of the warming since the 1800s uncertain too... The UAH dataset especially is good since the late 1970s but it doesn't go farther back. Its very hard to find radiosonde data from the 1950s and 60s for some reason. I would love to see this dataset. UAH temperature trends are consistent with the surface records temp trends since the late 1979s despite Karl et al 2015.  RSS is the only dataset that is showing too much warming as I stated above. since the late 1970s and is above the surface records. So it should be discounted as an outlier.  But everyone on this forum with few exceptions of course likes RSS because it verifies the narrative better that CO2 drives the climate (after feedbacks of course). 

It is hard. No one said it was easy. That does not mean that scientists are incapable of measuring the global mean temperature and quantifying the uncertainty in that measurement. The uncertainty envelope is narrow enough that conclusions about Earth's rate of warming can be made with confidence.

FWIW...I think RSS's 0.214C/decade rate of warming is likely higher than the true surface warming rate. Taking the mean of a sampling of several satellite, balloon, surface, and reanalysis datasets suggests that the true surface warming rate is probably closer to the 0.18C/decade from 1979 to present. This means UAH and RSS probably underestimate and overestimate the true warming rate respectively. Interestingly when you equally weight UAH and RSS you get a warming rate of +0.175C/decade which is pretty close to the mean warming rate suggested by other datasets. As I've said before I do not prefer either UAH or RSS over the other. Remember...in lieu of any compelling reason to discount a line of evidence the skeptical thing to do is equally weight those lines of evidence.

 

[donsutherland1]

6 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

 

What happens when it cools .5C?  my point is weather has always been extreme....its not getting worse. 

If the weather is not getting more extreme, than few records should be set. 

But that’s not the case at all. Year-to-date, there have been 5,240 global heat records (record high maximum and record high minimum temperatures). There have been 997 global cold records (record low minimum and record low maximum records). If the climate were relatively stable, the two figures should be roughly equivalent. Instead, there have been 5.3 heat records for every cold record.

Going to all-time temperature records, there have been 528 all-time heat records and 28 all-time cold records. In this case, the ratio is even more skewed toward heat: 18.9 heat records for every cold record. 

A warming climate produces such an outcome. A stable or cooling climate does not. 

Moreover, these records are not the result of a manipulation of data. The warming climate is supported by a continuing decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent (this year was the first case of two consecutive years with a minimum extent under 4 million square kilometers on JAXA) and both Greenland’s and Antarctica’s losing mass. None of this would be occurring if temperature data were artifacts of adjustment, not real measures of a warming climate. 

Finally, a 0.5 degrees C drop in global annual temperatures would very likely require a volcanic eruption quite a bit larger than the Krakatoa eruption of 1883. 

[blizzard1024]

49 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

A warming climate produces such an outcome. A stable or cooling climate does not. 

First of all, climate is never stable. How can you say a cooling climate doesn't produce extremes also? In fact I strongly argue that if the Earth were cooling at the rate it has been warming human suffering would be much worse. Record cold, early and late frosts, crop failures. more widespread drought and lack of water. The paleo records prove that a cold earth is a drier one because the oceans cool and there is less evaporation and less precipitation. So to say a slightly warmer Earth is more dangerous than a colder Earth is crazy. More baroclinicity exists with a cold planet since the Arctic sees the widest swings in climate. The extratropical storms during the colder times were ferocious. After Pinatubo, there was a global cooling and we had the superstorm of 1993. After Krakatoa, there was cooling and the Blizzard of 1888. After Tamboria there was the year without a summer. During the Little Ice age, starvation and plague was the norm. The dark ages were dark because of the cold. The MWP brought on the Renaissance and age of enlightenment. To say a cooling climate is a better climate is insane. This is common sense that is lost in today's world. 

[blizzard1024]

 

2 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

I don’t believe it’s fair to dismiss peer-reviewed research as “BS,” much less to do so without credible contrary evidence.

peer reviewed in climate science is biased. The gate keepers of the CAGW theory are the reviewers. Just saying...

[donsutherland1]

38 minutes ago, blizzard1024 said:

First of all, climate is never stable. How can you say a cooling climate doesn't produce extremes also? In fact I strongly argue that if the Earth were cooling at the rate it has been warming human suffering would be much worse. Record cold, early and late frosts, crop failures. more widespread drought and lack of water. The paleo records prove that a cold earth is a drier one because the oceans cool and there is less evaporation and less precipitation. So to say a slightly warmer Earth is more dangerous than a colder Earth is crazy. More baroclinicity exists with a cold planet since the Arctic sees the widest swings in climate. The extratropical storms during the colder times were ferocious. After Pinatubo, there was a global cooling and we had the superstorm of 1993. After Krakatoa, there was cooling and the Blizzard of 1888. After Tamboria there was the year without a summer. During the Little Ice age, starvation and plague was the norm. The dark ages were dark because of the cold. The MWP brought on the Renaissance and age of enlightenment. To say a cooling climate is a better climate is insane. This is common sense that is lost in today's world. 

I’m not talking about extremes, but extremes skewed severely in one direction.

[blizzard1024]

 

If the Earth cooled by .6C in the last 40 years there would be way more hardship world-wide. Crop failures, food shortages, higher energy cost. How can a small amount of warming cause all these disasters?  Cooling would be far worse. Extreme cold especially for the poor kills more than extreme heat. Even if the GCM projections are correct and we indeed see another 2-3C warming in a 100 years ( I doubt this), it would be better to adapt as a species to the changes than to replace fossil fuels with alternative "green" energy sources before its cost effective. Where does the materials for all this "green" energy come from? It takes extraction and ENERGY to produce wind turbines and solar panels. Plus the waste, where does this go? Fracking has been a huge success in our energy spectrum as it has reduced our dependency on foreign oil. It keeps energy costs down. In PA the fracking has brought a boom to rural wastelands and the economies and people are doing very well. AND so is the environment. I grew up in northern PA and there are 3 fracking sites on the mountain that my childhood home is on. After they finished putting these well pads in, you don't even notice them! The wildlife is as plentiful as it was 40 years ago. The well pads are in farm fields that are fenced in and they return the land to what it was prior to the well pad being installed. So its back to fields. Water quality hasn't changed as I know people up there who have wells and get their water tested yearly. NO changes. The whole area is booming and you don't even notice the fracking going. 

This is in stark contrast to the areas that are now full of wind farms. They build roads through untouched mature forest which destroys habitat and put these ugly turbines on once scenic mountains in PA. Many birds and bats are killed by the turbines and the habitat is now fragmented. Solar farms are starting to cover farmland and fields which takes out natural habitat for field birds which are struggling already. The solar farms I fear are going to destroy so much habitat that many field bird species likely will be endangered or even go extinct if the green new deal gets passed. The GND is a disaster for natural habitats and a disaster for humanity as the cost of electricity will soar. This will hit poor people the worst.  Adapting to slow warming (if this occurs) would be the best course of action for humanity as we gradually change over to renewables when it is more cost effective and less damaging to the environment. Right now renewables are a disaster for natural habitats. It is far from "green".  

 

[chubbs]

14 hours ago, bdgwx said:

It is hard. No one said it was easy. That does not mean that scientists are incapable of measuring the global mean temperature and quantifying the uncertainty in that measurement. The uncertainty envelope is narrow enough that conclusions about Earth's rate of warming can be made with confidence.

FWIW...I think RSS's 0.214C/decade rate of warming is likely higher than the true surface warming rate. Taking the mean of a sampling of several satellite, balloon, surface, and reanalysis datasets suggests that the true surface warming rate is probably closer to the 0.18C/decade from 1979 to present. This means UAH and RSS probably underestimate and overestimate the true warming rate respectively. Interestingly when you equally weight UAH and RSS you get a warming rate of +0.175C/decade which is pretty close to the mean warming rate suggested by other datasets. As I've said before I do not prefer either UAH or RSS over the other. Remember...in lieu of any compelling reason to discount a line of evidence the skeptical thing to do is equally weight those lines of evidence.

 

I prefer RSS for the following reasons:

1) troposphere should warm faster than surface

2) RSS in much better agreement with satellite tpw

3) UAH discarded NOAA-14 uah for purely qualitative reasons - "NOAA-14 warms too much". Comparing uah and rss with surface data for the period in question, 1998-2004, shows that RSS is in much better agreement.

4) Recent satellites don't have diurnal drift which can cause a cooling bias if not fully corrected. Since the newer satellites have come on board UAH is in much better agreement with RSS and surface obs. 

5) RSS has published satellite to satellite comparisons showing good agreement among satellites with the recent upgrade. Zip from UAH

6) Satellite diurnal drift is most pronounced over land, where UAH has much lower land warming vs surface obs (see below). The surface obs network is dense and the land trends have very little uncertainty. Meanwhile RSS is in better agreement with surface land data (also below). The NOAA-14 period after 1998  an obvious problem for UAH.

7) Finally UAH has a track record and it isn't good.

https://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6-land/mean:12/plot/crutem4vgl/last:480/mean:12/offset:-0.3/plot/rss-land/mean:12

 

[bdgwx]

21 minutes ago, chubbs said:

I prefer RSS for the following reasons:

1) troposphere should warm faster than surface

2) RSS in much better agreement with satellite tpw

3) UAH discarded NOAA-14 uah for purely qualitative reasons - "NOAA-14 warms too much". Comparing uah and rss with surface data for the period in question, 1998-2004, shows that RSS is in much better agreement.

4) Recent satellites don't have diurnal drift which can cause a cooling bias if not fully corrected. Since the newer satellites have come on board UAH is in much better agreement with RSS and surface obs. 

5) RSS has published satellite to satellite comparisons showing good agreement among satellites with the recent upgrade. Zip from UAH

6) Satellite diurnal drift is most pronounced over land, where UAH has much lower land warming vs surface obs (see below). The surface obs network is dense and the land trends have very little uncertainty. Meanwhile RSS is in better agreement with surface land data (also below). The NOAA-14 period after 1998  an obvious problem for UAH.

7) Finally UAH has a track record and it isn't good.

https://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6-land/mean:12/plot/crutem4vgl/last:480/mean:12/offset:-0.3/plot/rss-land/mean:12

 

Those are fair points. Two additional ones we might add...

8) UAH TLT may be contaminated by the cooling stratosphere.

9) Concerns with their satellite merging process have raised.

[blizzard1024]

3 hours ago, bdgwx said:

I prefer RSS

How can you prefer the RSS? It shows way more way warming than the surface record. It shows about .9C since 1979 with the surface records showing around .6C or so. UAH is pegged at .6C since 1979.  Plus your graph is land only. Look at the entire planet since the late 1970s. You can see how much RSS diverges from UAH and Hadcrut4 especially after 1998. UAH has a better track record. 

[bdgwx]

Keep in mind that HadCRUT only covers 84% of the Earth. The nature of the coverage is such that the warming trend is biased low. Other datasets like those provided by NASA and Berkeley Earth address the coverage issue. And of course reanalysis datasets like that provided by ERA has homogeneous and complete coverage natively due to 3DVAR/4DVAR assimilation.

Cowtan & Way 2013: Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends

http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html 

When you apply the "kriging" technique to HadCRUT to correct for the coverage bias the warming trend is +0.191C/decade which is spot on with other datasets like ERA (+0.1910C/decade), BEST (+0.1908C/decade), GISTEMP (+0.190C/decade). Trends are valid from 1979-present.

In terms of using UAH and RSS as a proxy for the surface warming trend RSS (+0.214C/decade) is closer to the consensus than UAH (+0.137C/decade).

 

 

 

[LibertyBell]

On 10/5/2020 at 7:14 PM, donsutherland1 said:

From Politico:

The August Complex of wildfires surpassed the grim milestone Monday of over 1 million acres burned, the first blaze in recorded California history to reach seven figures of acreage.

The update by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection on the August Complex in the north coastal range of mountains came just after the agency announced Sunday that the state has seen over 4 million acres burned so far this year. That's more than the double the total destruction of 1.9 million acres burned in all of 2018, the previous record year.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/10/05/california-has-first-million-acre-megafire-as-devastating-season-sets-new-records-1321356

 

Don did you see the 60 Min piece on climate change?  Basically they said that Hansen was right all the way back in the 80s and that Mann was correct also.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-archive-climate-change-2020-10-04/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-scientists-earth-future-60-minutes-2020-10-04/

[donsutherland1]

13 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Don did you see the 60 Min piece on climate change?  Basically they said that Hansen was right all the way back in the 80s and that Mann was correct also.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-archive-climate-change-2020-10-04/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-scientists-earth-future-60-minutes-2020-10-04/

I did. The outcomes bore out what they had projected would happen.

[LibertyBell]

4 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

I did. The outcomes bore out what they had projected would happen.

and sea level rise is on par with the more extreme models

[bluewave]

https://grist.org/climate/scientists-didnt-expect-wildfires-this-terrible-for-another-30-years/

Scientists didn’t predict fires of this scale until between 2040 and 2060, said Matthew Hurteau, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico who studies fire in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

 

Climate scientists’ predictions tend to be pretty conservative, so the record-breaking fire season could force a reckoning. After all, if this is what fires look like now — thanks to the future showing up 30 years early — it’s time to rethink forecasts. The blazes are already changing some projections for California, Hurteau said.

So why were the estimates so far off? One explanation is that scientists work with data that already exists, and the evidence simply didn’t support the prospect of such gigafires, until now. That’s not to say that scientists thought it was out of the question.

“What comes out of the peer review process is reined in from what some of us think is going to happen,” Hurteau said. “Everybody I know who works on climate-related stuff has had conversations about how we think it’s worse than our research shows.”

Contrary to claims that they are “alarmist,” scientists actually tend to underestimate the effects of the climate crisis. A 2012 paper, for instance, found that scientists’ projections downplayed the risks of the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The authors suggested that this tendency to underestimate future changes comes out of pressure to appear balanced and objective.

Wildfires are hard to predict, from the conditions that fan their flames to how and where they’ll ignite. Peering into the crystal ball is already hard enough without having to account for complicated factors like rainfall, wind speed, land cover, and local topography.

Hurteau thinks there’s “a clear climate signal” in the destructive fires we’ve seen across the globe in recent years. When the atmosphere warms, he explained, it sucks moisture out of the land, drying out trees and shrubs and making them more flammable. Of course, forest management is also a factor. Before settlers took over the Western U.S. and started suppressing fires, indigenous peoples used small burns to prevent runaway fires.

When you take that buildup of fuel and then you make it more available to burn by turning up the thermostat and drying it out more, that’s the recipe for big fires,” Hurteau said.

What’s different, and what he finds especially worrying, is that some fires in California are burning through areas that just burned a couple of years ago, such as the LNU Lightning Complex, a series of fires that scorched much of Wine Country in northern California this fall. “Basically, fire having just occurred within the recent past may not be as much of an impediment to subsequent fires occurring as we thought it might,” Hurteau said.

To make fires less destructive, Hurteau suggests that local governments need to change codes to make buildings less like fuel for flames. Mandating that roofs are made with flame-resistant materials can prevent homes from combusting when embers land on them. And especially in drought-ridden places like California, Hurteau said, “we’ve got to get managed fire back into these ecosystems.”

Then, of course, there’s the matter of global greenhouse gas emissions. “I hope that people are starting to wake up to the fact that we’ve got a period of time when we need to act pretty quickly,” he said.

[LibertyBell]

These wildfire complexes are particularly alarming, as large fires are now joining together to become huge megafires.   The first million acre megafire was just recorded.