Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Denier Weirdness, Begorrah, from WUWT

Sou | 10:58 AM Go to the first of 16 comments. Add a comment

WUWT gets sillier by the day

See updates here and here below and see this post about Darko's follow up article.

This is not just a silly comment from one of the WUWT rabble. It's from an article in WUWT - at the express invitation of Anthony Watts.

In the article the author, Darko Butina, claims that the global warming isn't real, based on his analysis of the temperature record at a single location, the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. The dataset used goes from 1844 to 2004.

Darko Butina writes (I've just realised this is the actual title he's given to his twenty page 'paper'. What a laugh!):
Should We Worry About the Earth’s Calculated Warming at 0.7OC Over Last the Last 100 Years When the Observed Daily Variations Over the Last 161 Years Can Be as High as 24 (degrees) C?
Good grief - I guess he's not experienced the Chinook:
In Pincher Creek, the temperature rose by 41°C (74°F), from -19 to 22°C (-2 to 72°F), in one hour in 1962.
And there's more:
So if one wants, for some bizarre reason, to compare two annual patterns then one year can be unequivocally declared as warmer only if each daily reading of that year is larger than each corresponding daily reading of another year:
Really? Here is an example to illustrate what Butina would have you think.  Butina's thesis would be that Week 1 below was not hotter than Week 2 because not every day of Week 1 was hotter than the same day in Week 2.

As more astute WUWT commenters observe:
lsvalgaard says:
April 15, 2013 at 2:22 pm Troed Sångberg says: April 15, 2013 at 1:56 pm
but claiming that every single day over the year would need to be warmer than every single day another seems to stretch things a bit. If “day”, then why not “hour”, “millisecond” or “three week period”? It becomes quite arbitrary.
More than arbitrary: nonsense. Why not “century”, or “decade” as well? There is no doubt that Houston, TX is hotter than San Diego, CHA, but there are every year days with temperatures below 25F in Houston, but never in San Diego.

How not to determine temperature trends

Let's leave aside the fact that Darko Butina bases his dismissal of global warming on a single location in Northern Ireland. We'll look at how he determines the temperature trend despite having more than 150 years of detailed temperature observations at his disposal:
Can we detect unambiguous warming trend over 161 years at Armagh (UK) in thermometer data? All we need to do is to take difference between the youngest (2004) and the oldest (1844) annual fingerprints and display it as a histogram:
No, that is not "all we need to do".  Taking the difference between same day readings (ie 1st January compared with 1st January through to 31 December compared with 31 December) over two different years will not yield nearly as much information as would a series. In fact, it probably wouldn't tell you anything at all.
By contrast, here is the chart of the mean annual temperature at the Armagh Observatory, plotted with a ten year moving average (red line).  The chart is based on these data:

The data for the above chart were compiled by the same people who compiled the daily set used by the author of the WUWT article.

Does it prove or disprove global warming? Of course not.  It shows the temperature trends at Armagh in Northern Ireland.  It indicates that at Armagh Observatory there was a cooling trend to the 1870s, then a warming trend, then a slight cooling in the sixties and seventies followed by a more rapid warming since the late 1970s.

There's more...

There is a lot of other silliness in the article, such as:
Thermometer reading of 15.1 has several links attached to it that cannot be broken: it is linked to a unique grid point, unique date and time stamp, unique instrument – thermometer and that thermometer to unique symbol (OC). So if someone wants to analyse any temperature trends those trends have to come from thermometer readings; it follows that if thermometer to be used is calibrated using Celsius scale, no datapoint can be older than 1743, follow link to Anders Celsius.
Surely he is not saying that the entire history of Armagh observations were recorded in degrees Celsius? (They weren't.)  Or that degrees Fahrenheit cannot be converted to degrees Celsius?

Put on a head vice if you decide to read the article.

Anthony Watts seems to be getting sillier by the day inviting nonsense like this to his blog.  At least some of the commenters are a bit more discerning than he is.


Just for fun I subtracted the daily maximum temperatures in 1844 from those in 2004 and took an average of the daily difference for each month.  The result is shown as a chart below. The chart doesn't actually tell us anything much more than that 2004 was hotter in seven months out of twelve in 2004, and by a fairly large margin in February, August and December.

All the chart above suggests is that no two years are ever the same (more precisely, these two years were not the same). To see the trend over time you'd need to look at a time series (as above), not just compare two years of data.

Update 2:

Richard Telford has done some different calculations on his blog.  Worth a look see.


  1. This would mess with the head of the Deltoid troll KarenMackSunspot...

    It also recalls another Deltoid troll from years ago, one Harold Pierce Jnr, who use to cherry pick individual sites and then use multiple t>-tests which which to analyse them.

    The sad thing is that people such as these can never understand why they are so completely wrong.

    Bernard J.

    1. Yes, Bernard. The author says he has a 20 page paper published on the topic, but provides no information other than the title, which is itself weird and wrong. He also makes the preposterous claim that:

      it is the first paper that looks for temperature patterns in the data that is generated by the instrument designed to and used by experimental scientists since early 1700s – calibrated thermometer.

      My guess would have been that he's never read any papers on climate science or any other science for that matter. But my guess on the latter part would probably be wrong, going by his summary bio. Dunning and Kruger eat your heart out!

      Perhaps we should send him to Tamino's blog.

    2. Please no, there are enough occasional trolls on Tamino already.


  2. Have you discovered which journal this joke paper is published in?

    1. Richard, the title suggests it's not Nature or Science or PNAS. (Among other more obvious reasons, the title alone would take up half the allowable words.)


      All Mr Butina said was (Sou writes while trying to keep a straight face):
      ..it is published in journal that deals with data analysis and pattern recognition of data generated by a physical instrument...

      The dog astrology journal perhaps?

    2. it's published in this paper. Volume 4 Issue 2-3 (International Journal of Chemical Modeling)

    3. Thanks - when I searched I could not find it. Here's the link. Hard copy only available from the look of it:


      He's written a part 2, which is even more ridiculous. I think he should stick to his own subject (or try to learn something of atmospheric physics and climate).

  3. In comments,the ever-ridiculous Richard S Courtney opines:

    "I submit that the above article is among the most important which have been posted on WUWT"

    It may be, but not in the way 'Dr' Courtney thinks.


    Comments like this show that you are not remotely serious in your discussion. The point being OBVIOUSLY made is that as the opening data is in C then it can not be earlier than the introduction of C as a measurement.

    If only you enthusiasts would deal in facts and prepare your own papers rather than spend time and energy trashing others. Could it be that fear beats facts.

    As I heard a scientist state recently "I believe in global warming as the place I am standing had a mile of ice in the past so it must have melted due to DA DA - GLOBAL WARMING. Dinosaur farts I suppose.

    1. ha ha ha. I don't know if nbl957 is extremely young or supremely ignorant or both. I've consigned the above comment to the HotWhoppery for obvious reasons, but I couldn't resist leaving it here as well.

      nbl957 thinks that Armagh thermometers were in degrees Celsius way back in the 18th century.

      Below is the page on the Armagh weather records with some links to papers on precipitation and temperature. I think I've got it in the above article as well.


    2. Holy shit, it was in the mid-50s in Armagh in May 1796 -- whereas last time I was in Ireland it was front-page news that it was sunny and the thermometer read 25. Clear proof that the world is cooling fast!




      Someone didn't do his due diligence and RTFR before opening his mouth to change feet.

      There's another pseudonym that is now effectively useless unless the user has no self-dignity.

    4. Numerosis, have you considered that the temperature was not recorded in C in 1796. In F 50 would make for a fairly chilly May Day, even on the Emerald Isle these days.

    5. "As I heard a scientist state recently" - this would be while you were doing that very cool thing with the friend of yours who's a very famous Hollywood actor, right? Is the fart joke yours, incidentally, or this, um, 'scientist's? With the unclosed quotation it's hard to tell...

    6. Catmando, I believe Numerobis was having a little fun at nbl957's expense :)

    7. I've done it again - missed the sarc. For my benefit, could everyone post "I'm being sarcastic" at the end of their comments in future.



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