“How citizen science is tracking changes in shorelines around the world” is a report in the Guardian by David Hambling. He writes,
The shoreline changes with the weather. Tracking these changes over time is a labour-intensive task, and an army of citizen scientists with camera phones is a great asset.
The CoastSnap project started in Australia in 2017 and has spread to beaches worldwide. You may have spotted the setup while out walking along the coast: a cradle to rest your phone on while taking a picture and a sign explaining where to send the snap.
Large waves and high tides remove sand from a beach, while gentler conditions deposit sand and build the beach up again. Sandbars migrate in and out, and change shape with the waves and tides. Some shifts are temporary, some permanent. CoastSnap enables researchers to follow these changes day by day.
This project sounds as if it could be a very useful contribution to science.
The sentence above took me about three seconds to type. Then I reached my limit of pretending that I had not immediately thought about whether the results might prove embarrassing to all those in the Guardian who had made dramatic predictions of the sea level rising due to global warming. As regular readers know, I am a “lukewarmer”. I think man-made global warming almost certainly is happening, but that it is a problem that can be mitigated, not a catastrophe, and that many of the things governments are doing – for which read “the things governments are forcing ordinary people to do” – in order to combat global warming are catastrophes.
Nineteen years ago, in 2007, Anthony Watts of the climate blog “Watts Up With That”, which takes a sceptical line on man-made climate change, posted this:
“My summer project – a national weather station audit”
I remember a talk in the spring where Jim Price of CSU had to interrupt (at the behest of a couple of folks that felt a comment about the sun’s role in climate change studies was being ignored was “biased”) the Chico observatory series, Cosmic Hike to give us all a tongue lashing on why Global Warming is “good science”. I asked him a question in front of everybody about how well biases in measurements at weather stations had been accounted for (Jim’s on the IPCC committee) and he said that they had been “carefully accounted for and considered”. I didn’t believe him then, even less now.
Ok back to my summer project. Thanks to Quammen’s inspiration, I got busy putting together a website called www.surfacestations.org for the purpose of doing a nationwide, and hopefully a worldwide audit on the viability of the weather stations used in climate research.
To seed the effort, I’ve been driving around Northern California photographing and logging weather stations, and blogger Russ Steele from Grass Valley has been helping do surveys too. You’ve seen some of them in my blog posts titled: How not to measure temperature.
Some, like Marysville, are just unbelievably badly biased, and to be blunt, the data they produce is simply useless. Yet, they are part of our “official” climate temperature record, and the data is in fact used in the computer models.
So Monday, I go live with the www.surfacestations.org website showcasing some of the US Historical Climate Record sites which is the major framework that global warming science is built upon.
The reaction was immediate and visceral in the science blogosphere. I’d hit a nerve. Some posters called for my “removal”, not knowing that I’m not funded by grants, nor employed by a government agency. I’m funding all this myself, out of my own pocket. I had to chuckle. Some called me an amateur, others said I would taint the outcome, some just ranted (I think maybe Tasker joined in). Many questioned why such an effort was needed at all. The reaction to taking photographs of weather stations to document their conditions raised a stink I never could have predicted. Why? How can something so simple raise so many hackles? Aren’t many climate scientists saying “case closed” and “no more debate”? How could a few pictures threaten this established science?
I must admit that my attention has wandered away from the global warming issue in the years since then. I know that a lot of volunteers did go around taking photos of weather stations, and that a report was produced, and, I think, an updated report a few years later. I couldn’t quickly find links to these reports on Wattsupwiththat.com, but that’s not what this post is about. My point is that the sweet, optimistic sentence that I could hardly wait to get past typing so I could get to the controversial stuff is actually true. The CoastSnap project is potentially a very useful contribution to science. And so was the Surface Stations project. And it’s a damn shame that both of them are seen as belonging to a side.
Could a good use of AI be to somehow statistically verify the results of these and similar projects, so that people from all sides could trust the announced results?
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