In the morning, there were enormous piles of bacon, which is, as all competent doctor’s should recommend, the best way to start a day.

Robert Balling of Arizona State gave the coffee talk, emphasizing measurement error and uncertainty overall, and with observation stations in particular. He showed how the IPCC reports, through time, gently acknowledged other sources of climate forcing, like sulfates, burning biomass, irradiance, land use changes, etc. This is in line with what I’m also harping about: people are too certain all the time.

Ross McKitrick went over a paper he and P. Michaels did on adjusting observation stations for such things as population size etc. It was a fairly standard econometric model applied to observational data. This is a vast improvement over the regular method and just the right thing to do, for a start. Individual stations should not be adjusted and then entered into the record, they should be modeled as part of an overall system, and then we can look at the overall system to see if changes are taking place. This is too vague, I know. I’ll have to write about this later.