Jim Steele watts up with your venomous self-indignation?

Dear Jim Steele,

With time to reflect, I'm confused by your display of moral outrage in that January 7th WUWT broadside? Come on, lighten up, you should recognized the Shakespearian overtones and appreciate we were made for each other.  

Besides, it was you who jumped into my lil climate change sparing camp over at SkepticForum back last spring.... you were the big shot daring anyone to dispute your nonsense.  Did you really think I was going to allow your Republican/libertarian "hey no worries, it's all a hoax" challenge to go unanswered?  Then in your IEEE 'climate science horror' series and LandscapesAndCycle you're the one that told folks to check original sources.  Well, I have and I've received responses including many full texts of published studies from:
Dr. Ainley,
Dr. Breckner,
Dr. Fretwell,
Dr. Guillaume,
Dr. Jenouvrier,
Dr. Kaiser,
Dr. Kato,
Dr. La Rue,
Dr. Tate,
with a couple still in the pipeline.  {And that's just for my most recent project reviewing your 7/1/14 "Blinded by Beliefs, Penguin Poop" article.  Due to be posted any day now.}

Be happy!  Here we are, "Citizenschallenge" vs. "LandscapesAndCycles"

You the defending champ of "NoWorries - it's a hoax" 
vs. 
Me the advocate for "Learning about our Global Heat Distribution Engine"  

We've even achieved an audience.  All we need is a good cartoonist to document it.   ;- )  

For the record, I hold no animosity towards you the person Jim Steele, (a fellow child and lover of the Sierra Nevada Mtns), and I don't understand why any needs to be fabricated.

My issue is with the words and memes and nonstop derision poured onto scientists who don't deserve it.  My target is the misrepresentation of the scientific process and published papers and the ignoring of inconvenient facts and observations.  My goal is educational, both my own and anyone else who might be interested.

Please, never forget it's the dishonest claims... those false Republican/libertarian memes you parrot, who are my enemies, not you personally!  I'm simply striving to convince you, and onlookers, of the errors in your words.

Sincerely,
Citizenschallenge

Defamation and lies are unacceptable part of the AGW 'debate' !

There was some big news yesterday that I found fascinating in light of Mr. Jim Steele's 'climate science horror' series along with his January 7th, 2015 WUWT attack article aimed at me - particularly considering San Francisco State University administration's indifference and avoidance of my inquiries about their standards of academic excellence (or lack thereof) and their expectations (or lack thereof) of their teaching staff members regarding fidelity to scientific honesty.

I've asked for and received permission from Carol Linnitt at DeSmogCanada.ca to mirror their informative article and I tip my hat to Sou and HotWhopper for alerting me to this promising development.  It would be nice to think that the days of accepting malicious lies and dirty tricks as an OK part of the public "debate" regarding the all important matter of becoming educated about the state of climate science and Earth observations are numbered.  With a thank you to DeSmogCanada, take it away Carol:

Fri, 2015-02-06 DeSmogCanadaCAROL LINNITT

Climate Scientist Andrew Weaver Wins $50,000 in Defamation Suit Against National Post, Terence Corcoran

The B.C. Supreme Court awarded $50,000 in damages to climate scientist Andrew Weaver in a ruling Friday that confirms articles published by the National Post defamed his character.

The ruling names Terence Corcoran, editor of the Financial Post, Peter Foster, a columnist at the National Post, Kevin Libin, a journalist that contributes to the Financial Post and National Post publisher Gordon Fisher.

Four articles published in 2009 and 2010 refer to Weaver, now MLA for Canada’s Green Party, as an “alarmist” who disseminates “agit-prop” and a “sensationalist” that “cherry-picked” data as “Canada’s warmest spinner-in-chief.” Weaver was previously a lead author on a number of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports.

In the damages section of the ruling (attached below), Madam Justice Emily Burke notes, “the defamation in this case was serious. It offended Dr. Weaver’s character and the defendants refused to publish a retraction.”

Justice Burke concluded the defendants “have been careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts,” adding, “they were more interested in espousing a particular view than assessing the accuracy of the facts.”

possessed by the idea of catastrophic climate change?

My "LandscapesAndCycles Penguin Poop (7/1/14)" critique project keeps stretching out.  The price of taking Mr. Steele's advice and going to first sources with my questions.  But, it's a small price indeed considering the many responses and scientific papers I've been receiving and reading, nearly 50 at last count. 

I keep getting closer, but it's still not ready for posting, though I did make it down to the final paragraph today which is such a text book example of deception, and of the ruthless disregard for the civility our man Steele professes and expects of others, that I decided it deserves it's own write up.  

"¶19  "... despite the lack of any warming trend what so ever, the scientific literature is spammed and the public bombarded with more propaganda claiming climate change has put penguins in peril. ... Robert Bolton wrote, “A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind” and catastrophic climate change is tragically possessing too many minds."" 

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As for the "lack of warming trend whatsoever" 

this video puts the big picture into perspective, 

followed by links that put the Antarctic situation into perspective,
followed by a look at this CAGW that's "possessing minds".

ClimateCentral.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1J09xL0NGQ

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Mr. Jim Steele, Can you clarify your argument?

A) That wildlife biologists working in extreme conditions and over continental landscapes make mistakes?

B) Disputing that Anthropogenic Global Warming with it's profound changing climate driven landscapes alterations causes adverse cascading consequences for wildlife and eco-systems (read our biosphere)?  

Can Mr. Steele come clean and explain what his fundamental thesis is?

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I have been wrestling with Mr. Jim Steele's YouTube "Climate Science Horror Story" talk to the IEEE for quite a while because it slammed right into my long-time {some call it} obsession with trying to grasp how people can so easily lie to themselves about something as fundamental as understanding and appreciating how our fantastic, beautiful, bountiful, wonderful planet Earth functions and how our society and we ourselves are damaging it.

Besides the YouTube talk Mr. Steele has a blog "Landscapes And Cycles" and his spiel is that local landscapes and natural cycles are ALL important and that we the people should disregard the global.  His talk ignores that natural cycles and wildlife dynamics operate within the biosphere which is dependent on our Earth's protective atmosphere… which regulates the conditions our biosphere inhabits.  

To me it seems that Jim and his public doesn't want to recognize that we exist within a "global heat distribution engine" and that as with any engine when we supercharge it with extra fuel/energy {just like at NASCAR} that engine will break loose.

Senator Inhofe's Medieval Warm Period deception - by John Mashey

Here's a slight digression.  While Jim and I are engaged in our little "climate science horror story" altercation, the big boys running our country are playing the same intellectually dishonest juvenile games as Mr. Steele does.  For instance, Oklahoma's Senator Inhofe, now Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, a force not to be dismissed.  This man has real power and yields it with brutal efficiency.

Tragically for our children this Senator Inhofe is an absolutist with open contempt for serious science (see here and here) and anyone who disagrees with him on anything.  

I mean this is the Senator who brought in a writer of pulp thrillers to testify on climate science!  Worse, Inhofe's fiction author was in the middle of a book-selling campaign for his most recent yarn.  But than, that was no coincidence, was it?  Farcical though it seems this paperback writer was put in front of a US Senate committee that was charged with learning about what professional climatologists were discovering - a fiction story peddler!  And Republican's are good with that.

Then Inhofe used this storyteller's words to justify ignoring what actual professional scientists, who have dedicated their lives to understanding these processes, were trying to convey.  What up with that? 

And now this powerful Senator has repackaged another fable, the infamous Medieval Warming Period's "Lamb Graph" - of no purpose but to waste yet more precious time - rather than getting down to business.

Peter Miesler Helps Expose USHCN Homogenization Insanity - WUWT

That's Mr. Jim Steele talking in that title, I myself intend to expose something quite different.

Although it'll be a few days before I'm ready to comment on the USHCN itself and the way Mr. Steele puts their data to work, (too many other things going on, for now I offer the following reading list courtesy of VV at VV).

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Victor Venema at Variable Variability 
put together a good reading list of articles that look into temperature adjustment: 

Climatologists have manipulated data to REDUCE global warming 

Variable Variability

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy comment on the Telegraph piece: No, Adjusting Temperature Measurements Is Not a Scandal 

John Timmer at Ars Technica is also fed up with being served the same story about some upward adjusted stations every year: Temperature data is not “the biggest scientific scandal ever” Do we have to go through this every year? 

The astronomer behind And Then There's Physics writes why the removal of non-climatic effects makes sense. In the comments he talks about adjustments made to astronomical data. Probably every numerical observational discipline of science performs data processing to improve the accuracy of their analysis. 

Steven Mosher, a climate "sceptic" who has studied the temperature record in detail and is no longer sceptical about that reminds of all the adjustments demanded by the "sceptics". 

Nick Stokes, an Australian scientist, has a beautiful post that explains the small adjustments to the land surface temperature in more detail. 

My two most recent posts were about some reasons for temperature trend biases: Temperature bias from the village heat island and Changes in screen design leading to temperature trend biases 

You may also be interested in the posts on how homogenization methods work (Statistical homogenisation for dummies) and how they are validated (New article: Benchmarking homogenisation algorithms for monthly data)

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For now I want to focus on two more fundamental issues:  
1) Why does Mr. Steele rely on a few graphs based on a data set he also belittles as next to worthless?  
2) Why doesn't he allow the copious observational evidence to guide his convictions - rather than obsessing over fractions in a very complex data set?

The courier font are Mr. Steele's words lifted from his January 7th, 2015 WattsUpWithThat blog post. "Peter Miesler Helps Expose USHCN Homogenization Insanity and Antarctic Illusions."
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¶6  I have referred to Yosemite’s temperature trend because it represented similar trends recorded in USHCN data throughout montane California, from the north at Mt Shasta in the Cascades, to Lake Tahoe (where my research was focused) and south to Death Valley. Likewise the peak warming in the 20s and 30s supported past analyses of California’s climatologist illustrating California’s rural counties had not experienced any warming that exceeded the 30s. 

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Check it out, here Mr. Steele relies on a two decades old study that affirms the Urban Heat Island effect.  There is no climatologist out there that would disagree, and every climatologist will also explain that real though UHI effect is, it does not make a fraction of the global impact that humanity's injecting some 3 gigatonnes per month of insulating greenhouse gases into our atmosphere does. (think: compounding interest)

Goodridge, James D. "Comments on regional simulations of greenhouse warming including natural variability." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 77.7 (1996): 1588-1588.

Also, one might ask, what do today's climatologists think?

Regarding the question of USHCN homogenization

Regarding Mr. Steele's January 7th, 2015 WUWT blog post, while I won't respond to the personal stuff beyond answering any question in the comments section - Mr. Steele's January 7th, 2015 WUWT blog post does make some interesting points regarding US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and data homogenization.  Now that stuff get's up into pure expert level and is quite frankly beyond the abilities of non-experts such as Mr. Steele and myself to realistically judge.  But, he does open up yet another avenue of investigation and I will be making inquires at the USHCN to see what they can teach me about their records and temperature data processing.

In relation to my dialogue with Mr. Steele, the irony is that he relies on his interpretation of USHCN data to make his point that California is not experiencing any warming, yet he broadcasts contempt for USHCN homogenization methods and their models.  What's up with that?  I also have to wonder why he didn't respond to my emails requesting more details and share this information with me.  In any event, I'll share the information I'm able to gather over the next days and weeks.

In the meantime, perhaps it would be good to bring all this back down to Earth and actual observations.
Mr. Steele's repeatedly claims it's the local that matters.  But in truth any appreciation of the "local" is impossible without understanding how it fits into the global pattern.  I hope the following video drives that message home (followed by 2014 NOAA, NASA videos and look at California temperatures):

NASA | A Year in the Life of Earth's CO2