Jan 25 2010

Surfacestations.org FAIL

royal-failIn 2007, Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, blogger, and global warming denier, launched the website surfacestations.org. It was created in response to “a massive failure of bureaucracy to perform something so simple as taking some photographs and making some measurements and notes of a few to a few dozen weather stations in each state”. The primary purpose is basically to expose supposed biases in the land temperature record, due to improperly placed measurement devices, thereby proving that the planet is not really warming. According to this theory, the supposed warming is due primarily to errors in temperature measurement.

Nevermind for a minute that NASA corrects for various anomalies in their analysis of raw data, or that satellite measurements match nicely with land data. A recently released study has analyzed the data from the sites recorded at surfacestations.org, and found something very interesting:

Poor sites show a cooler maximum temperature compared to good sites. For minimum temperature, the poor sites are slightly warmer. The net effect is a cool bias in poorly sited stations.

Exactly the opposite that is insinuated by Watts. FAIL.

h/t Tim Lambert

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Jan 22 2010

The Facts about Cap and Trade

I’ve often seen cap and trade legislation bashed for various reasons, and from both sides. Granted, it’s not a panacea for our planet’s environmental problems, but it seems to be a workable solultion that most people can agree on, and is therefore our best shot at tackling the problem of global warming. Take a look at this video and see what you think:

The Facts of Cap-and-Trade from Clean Energy Works on Vimeo.

I figured the point about cap and trade working would be a sticking point for many here, so I’ll go ahead and link straight to the MIT paper upon which that point was based:

http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/DDCF.pdf

Full bibliography here:

http://ga3.org/campaign/cew_facts/forward

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