Thread by @Coyoteblog

I don't do much blogging on climate any more because the conversation has become unproductive and at the end of the day very little changes in our understanding of the key questions (and 99.9% of media writers don't even know what the key questions are)

- People are still extrapolating from tail of the distribution weather events and attempting to use these as evidence of climate change
- People are still claiming trends (eg drought or more hurricanes) that don't actually exist when one looks at the data

- Most scientists still think the actual direct sensitivity of temperatures to CO2 is low
- Most catastrophic warming forecasts are still driven by assumptions of very large net positive feedback effects that multiply small amounts of direct CO2 effect many times

- We still don't have a good handle on the value of these feedbacks, or even their net sign. They are the single most important variable in this public policy debate, & media never mentions them.
- And we still are doing all our work based on surface temperature data that sucks

To this last point, the article below highlights issues with the US surface temperature data (which is in turn likely the best in the world). It discusses two problems with the data

wattsupwiththat.com/2020/11/03/rec…

First, the signal to noise ratio in the data set is low. Specifically, almost the entirety of the 20th century warming signal we are trying to measure is in the manual adjustments we are making to the data -- the raw data shows very little temperature rise

Some skeptics will falsely argue that this makes this means that the historic temperature rise is "fake", but that is the wrong conclusion -- though the warming may be exaggerated. (Satellites, using a totally different methodology, shows warming too but less)

What it means is that the data is not of high quality, and we likely under-estimate our errors as scientists are likely over-estimating their confidence in the various manual adjustments they make.

The second problem highlighted here is the disappearance of stations and the infill of missing station data with what are essentially educated guesses. The FIRST investment we should have made c. 1990 was not in windmill subsidies but in a new temperature measurement network.

There are still problems in the network (though the one I documented below has since been fixed). But it is inexcusable that our measurement of such a key variable in policy debate should be getting worse. coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/20…