Plus answers to yesterday’s Fun puzzle: Name these official stations.

Given that California Governor Jerry Brown has recently setup a website at the governor’s office basically telling skeptics to “shut up” I thought this would be a good time to publish this.

This is a paper that was presented at a climate conference by Jim Goodridge, former State Climatologist of California, titled Population and Temperature Trends in California at the Pacific Climate Workshop, in Pacific Grove, CA March 22-26, 1987.

In this paper, Jim presented what I believe to be the very first photos bringing attention to the issue of station siting. Yesterday, I published both of those photos on WUWT here: Fun puzzle: Name these official stations.

The answer to the first photo was correctly made by commenter “Hoser”:

It’s been a long time, but the top one might be Mt. Hamilton, Lick Observatory. That might be the astronomer’s dormatory behind the car. Yikes, 25 years since I’ve been there.

Yes, the official temperature at the Lick Observatory is measured on a concrete slab rooftop where cars can park and there’s a chimney nearby:

Surprisingly, that station is still in operation today. It has been converted to MMTS electronic thermometer, but from what I can tell, still appears to be at the same location as before. Note the walkway bridge and chimney shadow:

Interactive source map: http://binged.it/PscDx2

NOTE: Perhaps one of our WUWT readers in the Bay Area can make a trip up to the Lick Observatory this weekend to advise with a photograph if the station still exists on the same spot or not. You’d think that on such a hallowed grounds of science, they’d know enough to put the thermometer away from the chimney and concrete. Let’s see if they’ve figured it out in 25 years since then.

As for the other station near the incinerator, that is a Taylor max-min thermometer used by the Quincy, CA Highway Department, now since closed. Nobody got that one, but there were some good guesses.

Siting issues aside, Jim made some important discoveries in this paper where he looked at rural -vs- urban temperature trends. He only has a paper copy left, as the Mac disks this was done on have long ago been lost. I took the paper copy to Staples and had it scanned into a PDF file, which is presented in full below.

This page 9 of graphs below, figures 4 and 5 tell the story for California Surface Temperature data:

Mind you, this is data that Jim used prior to the big range of adjustments that have been applied by NCDC. Jim provides all that data in the paper. It might be interesting to compare the data then and now to see what has been done to it. Another important distinction of note is that this paper was presented over a year before NASA’s Dr. James Hansen went before the Senate in June 1988, and touted his science and model predictions, deeming it so solid that they had to turn off the air conditioning in the hearing room for “theatrical effect”.

Figure 6 and 7 on page 10 are also instructive:

But this set of graphs from page 12 is really interesting:

The trend for rural stations is interesting, because Jim found a correlation for it:

Here are figures 15 to 18:

And here is Figure 19. Indeed the similarity is remarkable.

The other conclusion to Jim’s paper is that there is a correlation between population trend and temperature trend for inland urban stations, as seen in this graph:

Jim eventually went on to publish a letter in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1996 on this issue. This one graph from that letter was a “light bulb moment” for me:

The reply from Kwang-Y Kim, published next to Goodridge’s letter is an interesting admission:

Kim had co-authored a CO2 regional modeling paper with Gerald North in 1995, suggesting that temperatures were on the rise to CO2, but Goodridge in his letter had suggested their base temperature data had been polluted:

I have to wonder, if somebody had put Goodridge’s 1987 paper in front of Jim Hansen in 1987 or early 1988, would it have made any difference in his claims made in June 1988 before the Senate?

Probably not, because as we’ve seen, there seems to be an unwavering belief system that climatic scale temperature is controlled only by Carbon Dioxide concentration, and anyone who presents a contrary view is immediately denigrated and labeled. For example, Hansen’s CRU compatriot Dr. Phil Jones already had formed a strong opinion of Goodridge’s work, which we see thanks to Climategate 2 (bold mine):

file 4789.txt

date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 09:25:14 +0100

from: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxx>

subject: Re: CA climate

to: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxx>,Mike Hulme <m.hulme@xxxxx>

Tom,

Bryan Weare is at US Davis. He would know about some of the things you

mention. The jerk you mention was called Good(e)rich who found urban

warming at all Californian sites.

I’m away until today until May 5 in Nice and Geneva. I hope you can do

the temperature plots yourself and that Mike can do the precip ones.

Mike has the data as 5 degree grid boxes, so the it would be good if

you could define these for him. I think he’s back tomorrow.

It would be possible to use the 0.5 degree grid boxes but we’d have to

get Mark New to do that for us.

Cheers

Phil

At 12:13 PM 4/24/00 -0600, Tom Wigley wrote:

>Phil and Mike,

>

>I have to attend a meeting organized by EPRI and the California Energy

>Commission on June 12, 13. The focus is future climate scenarios and the

>implied impacts. It will include discussions of GCM results and

>statistical and LAM downscaling. They want someone to address observed

>climate (homogeneity problems; E-W and N-S contrasts; ENSO effects;

>changes in circulation — such as increased offshore cyclogenesis, changes

>in storm tracks; etc.), but they don’t have anyone invited yet. Chuck

>Hakkarinen (EPRI) says there is someone at UC-Davis who is an “expert” on

>CA climate. Who is this? Do you know any other Californians who are in

>the observed climate game and who you respect? (From memory, there are

>some nitpicky jerks who have criticized the Jones et al. data sets — we

>don’t want one of those. Wasn’t one of these guys called Goodrich?)

>

>For myself, I would like to have some monthly time series for the CA area

>average. I can possibly do this for temperature, but certainly not for

>precipitation. Is there any way you two could send me time series within

>the next day or so (before I leave for Australia)? For the regions, I’d

>like results for the following separate areas (as near as you can do it):

>(1) 32-36degN, 115-121degW

>(2) 36-42degN, 118-124degW

>(3) 32-42degN, 114-124degW

>(4) 36-42degN, 106-114degW

>The last one represents the headwaters of the Colorado River.

>

>Finally, if you had some PDSI time series for the region, I’d very much

>like these too.

>

>Many thanks,

>

>

>Tom

>

>

>

>**********************************************************

>Tom M.L. Wigley

>Senior Scientist

>ACACIA Program Director

>National Center for Atmospheric Research

>P.O. Box 3000

>Boulder, CO 80307-3000

>USA

>Phone: 303-xxxx

>Fax: 303-497-xxxx

>E-mail: wigley@xxxx

>Web: http://www.acacia.ucar.edu

>**********************************************************

>

>

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 xxxx

School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 xxxx

University of East Anglia

Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxx

NR4 7TJ

UK

—————————————————————————-

Tom Wigley and Phil Jones are some piece of work, aren’t they?

The entire 1987 paper by Jim Goodridge is available here as a PDF: Goodridge_1987_paper (16mb)

We owe Jim Goodridge some thanks, not only for the work he has done, but also for the abuse he’s suffered alongside us all from “The team”.