Wood Romances

I frequently see challenges to the US temperature record that claim that many stations are affected by poor station sighting, and that biases introduced by poor station siting may account for a significant fraction of observed warming in the US. The claim is that a significant number of stations located near asphalt or at airports or too close to buildings can cause thermometers to record artificially high temperatures, adding spurious warming trends to CONUS temperature trends. With the USCRN project, NOAA developed a classification system based on exposure characteristics affecting the siting of stations, and this classification system was retroactively applied to the stations in the old USHCN network by Anthony Watts and surfacestations.org. In this classification system, ratings of 1 and 2 indicate "good siting" and ratings of 3, 4, and 5 indicate "poor siting." These classifications can actually be used to test whether station siting has any impact on CONUS tem...

For over 100 years, scientists investigating climate change have estimated that the Earth's surface temperature is ~288 K (or ~15°C), which is about 33 K warmer than the Earth's effective temperature of ~255 K (or -18°C). The first paper I know of to use ~15°C as the Earth's "current" temperature is Svante Arrhenius' paper .[1] I've read reports that Fourier did as well but I haven't been able to find where he actually uses this figure. The figure of ~15°C has become somewhat standardized in explanations of the greenhouse effect, with various authors continuing to use the same figure of ~15°C, even as global temperatures rise. Since the sources using this figure are not basing the value on global measurements, I suspect it's best to view it has having an uncertainty of at least ±1°C. Can we do better? Accuracy of Anomalies vs Absolute Temperatures More recently, organizations like NASA have estimated that GMST for their 1951-1980 baseline averaged ...