“Climate records stretching back 5000 years seem to show a strong link between rainfall in the tropics and changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, according to new research”.

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=296

ISO 9000 is an audit trail. It says you have documented procedures for your production and can track everything through the process. It doesn’t mean your product or service is any good, but it is well documented.

ISO 8000 is similar. Your procedure for data collection is well documented and any exceptions must by noted. No late night mysterious ‘adjustments’. You can still put measurement boxes in sewage treatment plants, but you must document it.

While this won’t assure good accurate data, there would be well defined procedures and policies concerning the data. Transparency.

That would be a big step in the right direction.

I will have to check what I got as results when I get home again (at work at the mo). It was the first time I’ve put my own data together so there may be something dodgy in what I’ve done.

It might not be the right standard to describe the raw temperature data, but there is more to the temperature record than the temperature itself.

From (mostly) lurking here since the whitewash experiments began, it has become exceedingly clear that the surface station network could benefit from following better practices with what I would call their station metadata… but which could be called data that “describes individuals, organizations, locations, goods, …”. We see the issues in the fun people have even finding the stations at their documented locations. And don’t get me started on the number of unrecorded equipment changes and moves. Then there are the consumers of the data who apparently fail to do their own consistency checks resulting in the issues identified over at Climate Audit with data series misplaced by thousands of miles when used by Mann et. al.

Better still would be to see the beginnings of a quality audit program of their own, not to mention a calibration program. Does anyone know the ages of the thermometers used at the Mohonk Lakes USHCN weather station, let alone when (or even if) they were last calibrated?

As full disclosure, I am married to an ASQ Certified Quality Auditor (she’s also a CQE and CQM, and has been certified as an ISO-9000 auditor) who is employed in the pharmaceutical industry. I’ve gained a fair amount of respect for proper quality systems and their auditors as a result.

Even so, the data quality cannot be good if the siting of the temperature stations is not good. What you start with matters a lot. If that is off due to UHI or other siting anomalies, you’re off to a rocky start. And who knows how good the algorithms are that are used to adjust for siting anomalies. NOAA obviously does not check the quality of their sites to begin with or Anthony would have no need of his Surface Stations project. And how do you use an algorithm that treats all the UHI-induced stations the same (homogenizing) when each station site is affected differently by a variety of things in its environment? Adjusting for the same conditions means you assume the same conditions exist, or that minor differences are negligible.

http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/publications/pdf/glp-handbook.pdf

http://www.oilit.com/papers/Benson.pdf

My reading of the above linked overview of ISO 8000 reminds me of my ISO 9000 Lead Assessor training and how I quickly formed the opinion that ISO 9000 was not all that appropriate for government research projects, since it has more to do with supply chains where goods and services move from manufacturer to customer, and where conformance to ISO 9000 is customer driven.

My first thought from a brief look at ISO 8000 is that it really would not be the standard you would use for climate data quality assurance. ISO 8000 seems an XML based supply chain management standard, dealing with codification of data that “describes individuals, organizations, locations, goods, services, rules and regulations” (from link).

Sorry to run counter with you on this one. Maybe I will come around after I spend a little more time looking into the scope wording contained in the standard. I will order a copy tomorrow.

1) Say what you do, do what you say.
2) Accountability, accountability, accountability…
3) Do not under any circumstances attempt to intimidate the auditors. When they say jump, you better have a document handy that says how high you will be jumping for them.

If 2008 is not used, the slope is still positive from 1998. It does not go negative until the start date is moved up to 2001.

This is the data I use.

1998 0.600291
1999 0.354782
2000 0.307351
2001 0.424473
2002 0.484325
2003 0.50359
2004 0.493032
2005 0.530529
2006 0.463274
2007 0.41
2008 0.37

Global prosperity goes on

23 September 2008

Anyone who thinks global prosperity has stopped has their head in the sand. The evidence is clear – the long-term trend in global prosperity is rising, and the stock market is largely responsible for this rise. Global prosperity does not mean that each year will be wealthier than the last, natural market forces will mean that some years will be much wealthier and others poorer…

In the last couple of years, the underlying prosperity is partially masked caused by a strong sub-prime loan crisis. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years are the highest stock markets ever recorded.

When I look at the 10 year data (Jan 1999 to Jan 2008), I get a negative slope too, of around -0.02
However, August to August, I get a positive of around 0.08
Unfortunately, I get the average (2008 averaged over 8 months) of positive 0.04. I realise that this is just preliminary as the 2008 average is missing 4 months of data. Who knows what will happen by the years end.

I hate to say it but based on the HADCRUT data, it looks like their claims are feasible.