Anthony Watts, the scientifically-illiterate host of Watts Up With That, has been running a silly initiative called the Surface Stations Project through which he is trying to invalidate recent historical temperature records in the US to prove that global warming is a HOAX. His belief is that these surface stations are too often located close to airport runways, city parking lots, air condioners, and other manmade constructions that raise localized temperatures a degree or two. On a larger scale, a similar phenomenon makes cities much warmer than the surrounding countryside in the Urban Heat Island Effect, and Watts believes that this siting of surface stations invalidates the entire temperature record compiled by the pinko socialists at NOAA.

Watts is a former weatherman and an ideologue, and in any other sphere of comment, he would be considered a buffoon. He should have no more credibility than a conspiracy buff who thinks the moon landing was faked. An old math teacher often used to say that you don’t know enough to know that you don’t know.

If the issue wasn’t so serious, I would take no pleasure in belittling his lack of education. Anthony Watts doesn’t have a science degree, but that doesn’t stop him — and his loyal minions — from libeling better men and women of climate science at every opportunty. It’s preposterous, really. He doesn’t even understand the science he’s attempting to refute. (See here, and here, for instance).

It’s true that many weather stations were established before global warming became an issue, so some of them might not have been ideally situated. But Anthony Watts parades around like he’s got something over on the scientists, like he’s thought of a very important detail that they hadn’t considered with all their fancy PhDs and Ivy League educations. But the simple truth is that anything he could think of as a layman has already been considered and accounted for a very long time ago. And thats why temperature records are accurate, and why we know the planet is warming dangerously. We also have the thousands of empirical studies which support the temperature record.

Watts doesn’t even understand how ridiculous he sounds. He‘s a con man, a snake oil salesman.

Peter Sinclair, the incisive mind behind the Crock of the Week series, published this analysis of Watts’ surface station project last week, but Watts claimed copyright infringement, and it was removed until his claims could be examined and, of course, rejected. It’s 8 minutes long, and worth every minute.

In a similar vein, NOAA recently eviscerated Watts’ — and his misinformed minions — hard work at Surface Stations in an excellent Q&A.

Q. How has the poor exposure biased local temperatures trends?

A. At the present time (June 2009), to the best of our knowledge, there has only been one published peer-reviewed study that specifically quantified the potential bias in trends caused by poor station exposure (Peterson, 2006). The analysis examined only a small subset of stations –- all that had their exposure checked at that time -– and found no bias in long-term trends.

Q. Does a station with good exposure read warmer than a station with poor exposure?

A. Not necessarily. Many local factors influence the observed temperature: whether a station is in a valley with cold air drainage, whether the station is a liquid-in-glass thermometer in a standard wooden shelter or an electronic thermometer in the new smaller and more open plastic shelters, whether the station reads and resets its maximum and minimum thermometers in the coolest time of the day in early morning or in the warmest time of the day in the afternoon, etc. But for detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature -– whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station over grass -– but how that temperature changes over time.

Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?

A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. Coastal temperatures are rising. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in mountainous areas, upward as well.

And here’s the killer graphic. Watts has assayed 71 percent of the 1,218 weather stations used by NOAA to compile their historical temperature record, and found that only 70 stations could be classified as good or better.

But this graph highlights what happens when you compare the difference between the Watts-approved stations and NOAA’s entire 1218.

Can you see the difference? Apparently, only conspiracy buffs can.

Just six days into office, Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson has signed an agreement that will let Sunflower Electric Power Corp build one 895-MW coal-fired power plant near Holcomb. The company had originally wanted to build two 700-MW coal plants, but this compromise will overcome a two-year stalemate that saw former governor Kathleen Sibelius veto the projects four times.

“We have been at an energy impasse for the past couple of years,” says Parkinson, a Democrat. “I thought it was time to bring an end to that impasse.”

The new project is expected to produce 6.67 million tons of CO2 emissions per year, as well as becoming a major source of airborne mercury, uranium, and sulfur dioxide. As part of the agreement, Sunflower will bolster its investment in wind energy, close two old oil-fired plants in Garden City, increase its use of biofuels, build two transmission lines to carry power west, and dedicate 1% of gross sales to energy efficiency programs.

Parkinson’s back room deal elated Sunflower executives and plant supporters, surprised most lawmakers and disappointed environmental groups. “Today, Kansas took a big step backwards,” said Sierra Club spokeswoman Stephanie Cole. “We cannot build new coal plants and claim to want to slow global warming at the same time.”

Kansas Governor, still wet behind the ears, is nevertheless this week’s Climate Change Double Dumb Ass.

You can call Parkinson’s press secretary, Beth Martino, at (785) 368-8500 to voice your displeasure, or send an email via a webform; You can also send an email to Wayne Penrod, Environmental Manager at Sunflower to voice your displeasure. He’s not doing a very good job, either.

On Earth Day, Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice issued the following statement:

As Canada’s Environment Minister and an avid outdoorsman, I am committed to preserving and enhancing our environment for current and future generations.

Canada faces challenges and opportunities on the environment. We need to build a dynamic and vibrant economy, while balancing the need to protect our environment. One must not overshadow the other.

As an international event, Earth Day symbolizes our need to work together to protect the environment. The Government of Canada is committed to working with its domestic, continental and international partners to address issues such as reducing carbon emissions, supporting clean energy and developing a new international agreement to fight climate change.

I encourage Canadians to mark Earth Day by making environmentally friendly choices, and I congratulate Canadians for their on-going commitment to the environment.

My false teeth almost fell into my coffee as I read!* I can’t begin to list all the ways that Jim Prentice has offended me. He’s running the Environment ministry as if he’s still locked in his previous portfolio as the Industry minister. Prentice is the Conservative government’s point man on the Alberta Tar Sands, the world’s worst environmental disaster, so he’s consisting promoting policies that trash the natural world. Just today, as the world’s environment ministers meet in Italy, he did it again!

A few more of Jim Prentice’s most egregious sins:

1. Canada is now the World’s Collossal Fossil — the worst greenhouse gas villain.

2. Prentice has continued the policies of his predecessor, the lumbering, heavy-handed John Baird, and muzzled Environment Canada scientists.
3. Canada continues to stifle progress at the International climate talks; Even at the most recent summit, Canada still allied itself with the world’s most polluting nations
4. Canada is continuing to suggest that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a viable option for the tar sands, even though this is a bald-faced lie. CCS may possibly work to capture coal plant emissions if massive investment is forthcoming, and it may be ready for deployment in the 2030s, but by that time, it will be too late.
5. The Conservative government, in their so-called stimulus budget, invested pocket change in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Canada will become an ecomonic wasteland if we don’t change course soon.
6. Prentice has been fighting tooth and nail to have the Alberta Tar Sands exempted from any North American emission standard. Take this photo tour to see the tar sands for yourself, and see what the area’s Catholic bishop thinks.
7. Prentice continues to suggest that intensity targets will cut Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, even though most analysts expect them to rise over the coming decade because intensity targets don’t work!
8. Prentice continues to promote the false dichtomy advanced by his imperious leader in the last election, which suggests that it’s either the economy or the environment. By saving the environment, and embracing sustainability, we will transform our economy and ensure properity for future generations. You know, like Obama is doing.
9. Many of Canada’s pristine lakes have been approved as dumping sites for Canadian mining companies.
10. Prentice continues to tell whoppers to Canadians, suggesting that Canadian environmental policy will mirror US environmental policy. Well, Obama wants nothing to do with Canada’s greenwashing. To give the most recent example, Obama just signed an agreement with Mexico to work together to cut greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy. If you read between the lines, it should be obvious that Canada is now alone and isolated on this continent, hewing to failed policies that will diminish our economy. Nova Scotia, for example, could produce enough offshore wind energy to power the eastern seaboard. Prentice went to school at Dalhousie, my alma mater, but he cares nothing for Atlantic Canada and its potential for economic renewal.

I follow Canadian news fairly closely, and I have NOT heard Baird Prentice — or any other Conservative minister — stand up for the environment since Lucien Bouchard jumped ship in the 1990s.

Jim Prentice is a Climate Change Double Dumb Ass.

UPDATED: Wrote this one in a hurry. I’ve corrected the spelling mistakes.

_____________

* It’s just an expression. I still have all my teeth.

George Will wrote an embarrassingly inept column for The Washingston Post entitled Dark Green Doomsayers that would almost be laughable had it not been written by a supposedly respected member of the elite press corp.

Will begins by opening a few canards, including the old classic line about scientists worried about global cooling in the 1970s (easily demolished by Dr. Joseph Romm), and then suggests that arctic sea ice has actually returned to 1979 levels this year.

Which prompted the scientists who actually measure arctic sea ice at the Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center to write:

In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

I could go on, but I find this comment by Ron on Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight to be especially insightful.

I have never thought that George Will understood technical issues. He uses his debate tactics to try to discredit technical ideas he doesn’t understand or disagrees with. His shallow comments have really turned me off to any panel discussions that include him. I can take someone who understands issues and disagrees with me but not someone who wallows in his ignorance and displays it with pride.

Global warming is settled science. I see no reason to debate its veracity in the popular literature if an analysis is not based on fact and our best science. Simply being able to express an opinion does not give anyone a credible platform to contradict objective observations and the scrutiny of top professionals. Contradictions should be based on objective observations and informed analysis and should be reported to the scientific community for review before they are reported to the general public.

I have seen crusaders of all political stripes try to reinterpret science to suit their parochial needs. As far as I’m concerned, that destroys their credibility to me. I’m quite happy to listen to those who disagree with me if they are well informed and can formulate convincing arguments. Substituting debate skills for objective reasoning, such as I believe George Will does, only serves to distract us from honest discussions of difficult problems.

George Will wins this week’s Global Warming Double Dumb Ass Award.

I shall be honest and let you in on a little secret. We can find solutions for most of the changes we need to make to usher in a low-carbon world, but the great minds that I read for enlightenment don’t have a solution for air travel.

Brilliant men like Joe Romm and George Monbiot can see no realistic way to make planes sustainable. An electric plane would come crashing to earth once that enormous plug gets pulled from the socket. You couldn’t put enough hamsters in those little round wheels to get airborn. The dilithium reactor isn’t likely to be invented for another two centuries, and who in their right mind would mix matter and anti-matter!

The simple truth is the air travel cannot be made sustainable in the next 10 years, and so it must diminish as a mode of travel because global warming will become the dominant story of our time. It’s the one huge sacrifice that hovers on the horizon.

Of course, I’m secretly hoping that dirigibles — or zeppelins or airships, if you prefer — will make a comeback. That if we want to travel to Europe, we’ll do so in a lighter-than-air craft that runs across the Atlantic like a floating hotel, gracious and elegant and relaxed at 200 mph.* Perhaps I’m an incurable romantic, but it sounds like the perfect way to travel to the continent.

But I’m not holding my breath.

And I sure as hell can’t figure out what British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been smoking. The UK has taken a mildly-effective leadership role in the battle to slow global warming, but with a single swipe of his pen, Brown has made it just this side of impossible for Great Britain to meet its international climate commitments.

Brown is spending £9 billion ($13 billion US) to build a third runway at Heathrow. It’s a craven act. It is folly. Monbiot explains at The Guardian.

But this government has always been inventive in devising ways to disappoint, and the Heathrow decision represents the final abandonment both of the sustainable, integrated transport system it promised in 1998 and of any realistic prospect that its promised carbon cuts could be met without cooking the books. As Simon Jenkins argued in his devastating column on Wednesday, its promises to restrict traffic levels and impose carbon constraints on the airline companies are both meaningless and cynical: not only has every other promise governments have made about Heathrow’s expansion been broken, but ministers know that they won’t be around to carry the can when the limits they set today are breached.

And that, dear friends, is why Gordon Brown is the deserved reecipient of this week’s Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award.

__________________

*If you like young adult fiction, might I recommend Airborn by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel which is set aboard a dirigible. It’s won a bevy of awards.

Every so often at One Blue Marble, we’re going to present the Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award to the man or woman who does something really moronic during the previous week.

Truth to tell, every seven days brings dozens of potential winners… Politicians who put personal gain before the welfare of their constituents… Columnists who are easily duped by simplistic astroturfing campaigns… Oil executives who talk out of both sides of their mouths. Sadly, the permutations and combinations are endless.

Another truth is that it would be far too easy to give the Double Dumb Ass Award to an utter nim-cow-poop like Senator James Inhofe who — by most accounts — isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. We’re going to try to avoid naming the obvious names.

But frankly, I’m shocked to be writing this post. The first-ever winner of the Double Dumb Ass Award is a brilliant Canadian who I never expected to see on these pages.

In Canada, our national broadcaster — the CBC — offers an animated phone-in program every Sunday evening called Cross Country Check-Up, and it’s hosted by the erudite and personable Rex Murphy, a voluble Newfoundlander and Rhodes Scholar who can spin words that float across the airwaves like gossamer. I’ve always enjoyed the show.

Murphy is a right-wing iconoclast, but one that I can usually respect. And that’s why I was shocked after reading his most recent Globe & Mail column called Armageddon Theory: Vancouver. As always, it’s brimming with ten-dollar words and pointed jabs and the irascible Murphy wit. But here the highfalutin’ words are just a cheap conjurer’s tricks hiding a remarkable dearth of facts and a shoddy understanding of science.

Of course, you could lay all the Canadian journalists who don’t know a whit about science end-to-end, and create something that looks remarkably like the Trans-Canada Highway, but I simply didn’t expect Murphy to be among their number. I obviously haven’t been paying attention, as the following two paragraphs relate. Murphy is talking about the perpetual food crisis mentioned in the previous post.

Perpetual? I haven’t seen that word, outside of a prayer book, for 30 years. And as to being “confident” of what’s going to be going on in this busy world in 2080 or 2100, well, let’s not call that science. Let’s call it hubris on steroids. Has the global warming movement given up all pretense of rigor entirely? Because they’re now not only telling us what the weather will be like 30 or 50 years from now, they’ve tied their fanciful projections and ever more intricate modeling to lining up the causes for World War IV. They’re giving us the causes for events that haven’t happened yet. I think Newton would have frowned on that approach.

I tie it all to Vancouver. So much of what the alarmists promised was supposed to be happening now isn’t happening. So many events are running counter to their near-term projections, they’ve decided to go all Armageddon with their long-term ones, projections for a future that none of us will be around to check. So here’s the test: The colder it gets in Vancouver, the hotter the dubious scenarios for the globe a hundred years from now will be.

Murphy is only right about only the most basic of facts. Canada is having a cold winter, the second in a row after a bevy of mild ones. Mild, green Vancouver is being buried by the snow, and the Canadian Prairies have been locked in a deep freeze for weeks.

And none of that comes as a surprise to climate scientists in Canada, or anywhere’s else for that matter.

The planet is warming. This is an undeniable and incontrovertible fact supported by the 2,500 climate scientists who worked on the IPCC, and by the national academies of science of the world’s G8 nations. Over the last two or three years, we’ve seen Arctic Sea Ice retreating to its lowest volume in 125,000 years, and watched as a melting Greenland poured 21 Chesapeake Bays into the Atlantic. Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies all point in the same direction. But Murphy is having none of it.

The simple explanation is that rising CO2 emissions aren’t the only factors at play in determining Canada’s climate. For the last two years, our weather has been driven by La Niña, the cold sister of the El Niño – Southern Oscillation. Scientists know all about it, and their computer models account for it.

When the influence of La Niña lifts, as the Hadley Centre in Great Britain expects will occur this year, we’ll start hearing about droughts and record-breaking heat waves once again. But I doubt that we’ll hear any five-syllable-word apologies from Murphy.

Rex Murphy is the unfortunate first recipient of the Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award. (Hat Tip to Desmog Blog).