Dubya
Senior Member
- Dec 29, 2012
- 3,056
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I've never read Jones' UHI paper and if it exists on an internet search engine, it's covered with a ton of Denialista spam. You may think getting information from a blog is information, but I don't and it isn't unless it's a somewhat private blog of professionals exchanging information. My experience in examining Denialista claims is they have always turned out to be baseless and a waste of time, but Denialistas are all about wasting other people's time.
Jones was involved in setting up 5 degree lattitude and 5 degree longitude grids and that date would indicate one of the early HadCRUT maps which had good bit of China missing data for many grids, like 40% to 50%. I don't know what Jones' paper was about, but for an urban heat island to be meaningful over such a large area requires a lot of asphalt and many cities to change the area much differently than rural measurements. It's not the size of the city that's important, but what the city is like. The HadCRUT grids are large enough that they can contain many geographic features with different climates. You also have the problem of having good data during a base period of 30 years and HadCRUT has been using 1961 to 1990 as a base period, at least lately. That may be why Jones wrote a 1990 paper, but wouldn't Jones have been involved with setting up these grids all over the world?
You do realize don't you if Jones biased the base period upward, it would show less increase in temperatrure after the base period? Temperature data tends to be biased upward, until there is vigilance to make the data representative of a grid. Once established, there is a very conscious effort to obtain reliable data, because it will screw up future measurements, whether it's biased one way or the other, if you don't. You should also realize a task the size of China would require a trained team to accomplish. I seriously doubt Jones was running all over China examining weather stations to make sure the data provided is representative of the grid. The Chinese wouldn't have been concerned before HadCRUT to make their temperature measurements representative of a grid that hadn't been established before the system was set up. The station is usually assigned to a meteorologist who reports monthly averages of continuous measurements back to the archive. Grids need enough stations to be averaged into representative measurements.
As far as the other stuff goes, Jones would need a computer bank to carry around that amount of data and didn't he leave HadCRUT before all the testimony you are citing? 5 degree by 5 degree grids are rather large, but if you had to set them up everywhere where you could on the Earth and examine the reliability and continuity of weather station data for the past 30 years, then it had to require a considerable effort, even before receiving data to your archive.
See if you can find Jones' UHI paper and I don't see how someone can object or support anything they just hear about on a blog without reading it. Later, I'll try to check some other sources where it won't be buried in Denialista spam. A lot of good science has been buried on the internet by the nonsense of the right-wing and I'm not just talking about climate science.
