by John Goetz
Update: Thanks to an email from John S. – a patron of climateaudit.org – we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS.
Update 2: The faulty results have been (mostly) backed out of the GISS website. The rest should be done following the federal holiday. GISS says they will update the analysis once they confirm with NOAA that the software problems have been corrected. I also removed the subtitles since the GISS data no longer reflects October as being the warmest ever.
GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISSTemp) released their monthly global temperature anomaly data for October 2008. Following is the monthly global ∆T from January to October 2008:
Year J F M A M J J A S O
2007 85 61 59 64 55 53 53 56 50 54
2008 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78
Here is a plot of the GISSTemp monthly anomaly since January 1979 (keeping in line with the time period displayed for UAH). I have added a simple 12-month moving average displayed in red.
The addition of October has changed some of the temperatures for earlier months:
GISS 2008 J F M A M J J A S O
As of 9/08 14 25 62 36 40 29 53 50 49 ..
As of 10/08 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78
The 0.78 C anomaly in October is the largest ever for October, and one of the largest anomalies ever recorded. Although North America was cooler than normal, Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave.
Also, after several months of being downgraded to a 0.61 C anomaly, 2005 has been lifted back to 0.62 C.
Sponsored IT training links:
Enjoy the first hand success with 646-046 online training. This all in one 642-975 training package includes everything you need to pass 000-106 exam.
The anomoly for August ’08 was initially released as 0.39, adjusted to 0.50 last month, and re-adjusted to 0.39 this month. Laughable.
Secondly, the UK Met Office says: “Maximum, minimum and mean daily temperatures were all below average across the UK. Most areas, provisionally had their coldest October since 2003, but Northern Ireland had its coldest since 1993 with mean temperatures around 1 deg C below average.” But GISTemp has the UK warmer than normal. GISTemp can’t be trusted.
I”m not so sure we should take this information at face value.With so many faulty temperaues sites here in the U.S. ,how not to measure temperatures,that Anthony has showed on this site watts up with that I feel sure there is a lot of bias .And as far as Asia is concerned this is the first i’ve heard of this masive heat wave.How do we know there isn’t the same bias there to .
Anthony,
Can you over lay the GISS plot with the Satellite plot, to show the difference?
Russ
Are the GISS methods peer reviewed and reproducable by independent scientists?
Excerpt from a global weather news blog posted Nov. 1st: “Eastward, however, over southern central and northern Europe (Scandinavia), the cool gave way to above-normal temperature. Eastward from Poland, Hungary and Romania into western Russia, mean monthly temperature 1.5-3.0 degrees C was widespread. And, still farther east, things really got warm. The greater part of the vast Russian Federation land mass together with northeast China and much of central Asia (Kakazhstan) had mean monthly temperature 3 to 5 degrees C above normal. Departures above normal of 1.5 to 3.0 degrees C above normal were widespread over China as a whole as well as Japan, Korea and a significant fraction of the Subcontinent. Indochina was also warmer than usual.”
Moscow’s temperature was frequently warmer than London’s during October, I happened to see, and that is super unusual. Also, most other temperatures I looked at across Russia were very warm throughout the month. Nonetheless, the GISS value seems incongruously high compared to UAH.
The GLOBAL sea ice anomaly at zero as of today, and one would not anticipate such a situation to follow on the heels of the warmest October ever.
Unprecedented! This may be the tipping point we have been waiting for. Can we now march forward and seize the helm of the Earth ship, and steer a clear course to green freedom? Yes we can!
Wow…has there ever been a greater discrepency between the satellite and GISS records than now? I doubt it.
The NOAA says the U.S. just had their 44th coolest October (out of 114 years), much of Europe was cool, ice extent grew at a record pace and snowcover exploded in Asia…and yet somehow we just had the warmest October globally ever?
One needs to see the GISS anomaly map to believe it.
All of Russia and the Arctic above Russia was +4.0C (and more maybe 13.7C?) above normal. (Obviously the ice was not refreezing as the satellites showed.)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=10&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=2008&year2=2008&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Laughable… GISS is Hansen’s sand box… no one else is allowed to play there unless they are part of the “team.”
That’s outrageous. GISS is rapidly approaching the edge of lucidity. People looking out the window will be able to see that it is unrealistic.
It si about time Hansen explained himself, this is bizarre.
Well I’ve had a look at GISS maps, and most of the hot red is around east Asia and also far northern Europe. I used 250 km smoothing and one thing that stands out like a sore thumb to me is the coverage of Australia. Only one red spot, which correponds to one of the most remote corners of our coastline.
Heatwave in Asia? Well being autumn, would it need to be a heatwave? Or just an extended mild autumn and late winter? Being a keen ENSO watcher I’ve noticed a fringe of warm water around North East Asian (Pacific side) which would be consistent with unusually warm conditions on land in that area.
Why is Giss so different to satellite? Perhaps poor coverage in areas like Australia that may have been closer to average, and high coverage in areas like Asia where there has been a lot of heat?
The difference between GISS and Uah probably has an explanation if someone looks hard enough, and this explanation may tell an interesting story….
How is that possible. Extreme cold weather in Arctic, North America, Europe and Bhutan. The southern hemisphere must have been 1,5 degrees celcius warmer than normal just to break even.
Isn’t anyone going to come up with a viable alternative to Hansens Folly ?
The addition of October has changed some of the temperatures for earlier months
How’s that possible? Why do temps need to be changed even months afterwards, aren’t they measured and automatically recorded in real-time?
May be Oct will be corrected as well, in Jan next year?
China joins Algore and the UN/IPCC in the global scam with the caveat: The cost is for thee, not for me.
China tells rich polluting nations to change lifestyle
“Chinese officials have said wealthy nations should divert as much as 1 percent of their economic worth to paying for clean technology transfers and helping the Third World overcome damage from the rising temperatures bringing more heatwaves and droughts, more powerful storms and rising sea levels.”
http://fe9.story.media.ac4.yahoo.com/news/us/story/nm/20081107/ts_nm/us_china_climate
There might be one or two issues with the GISS figure (e.g UK as mentioned by Fred in first post) but it would seem to be broadly correct. There were a number of very warm areas around the globe in October. As i’ve already mentioned on the UAH thread, AMSU temperatures support the warm surface record. October AMSU temps at 900mb (3300 ft) are also at record high levels.
You can count on the media picking up on the GISS figures and completely ignoring/disregarding UAH, RSS, and even the Hadley figures (when they are released).
I think he must be using the Magic 8 Ball method of climate prediction-
Has the temperature gone up?
● As I see it, yes
● Ask again later
● Better not tell you now
● Cannot predict now
● Concentrate and ask again
● Don’t count on it
● It is certain
● It is decidedly so
● Most likely
● My reply is no
● My sources say no
● Outlook good
● Outlook not so good
● Reply hazy, try again
● Signs point to yes
● Very doubtful
● Without a doubt
● Yes
● Yes – definitely
● You may rely on it
Twice as many positive answers than negative.
The NSIDC just put out a press release claiming that the latent heat of fusion from the freezing of the arctic ocean is keeping arctic air temperatures above normal… while there may be truth to that claim, they neglect to point out that the heat capacity of the atmosphere is dwarfed by the heat capacity of the ocean, and they neglect to mention that the atmosphere can give up its heat to space rather quickly, especially when the sun is constantly below the horizon.
In a way, they are admitting that the additional heat that may be gained by the arctic ocean when the sea ice shrinks and more sunlight is absorbed is offset by the rapid cooling of the sea when there is no ice layer present to insulate it when the sun goes down.
This is pretty much basic thermodynamics at play here. If the sea ice goes down below normal, the regrowth rate will be much higher because there is no ice layer to act as a blanket to keep the arctic ocean from losing its stored energy…
There is a lot of spin doctoring in the NSIDC press release if you ask me…
Data at this link
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
I agree with Fred that the Oct 08 GISS anomalies for Britain appear to be plain wrong – i’ve posted about this on Lucia’s blog.
However, there’s no doubt that anomalies really were pretty high over Russia. This is confirmed by the MSU/AMSU TLT anomaly map:
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html?channel=tlt
(Click next to “Anomaly” at the top of the screen)
Also, note that UAH has “NoExt Land” (i.e. land masses north of the tropics) for Oct 08 at +0.62C making it the third warmest after 2005 (+0.75C) and 1998 (+0.70C)
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
How is that possible. Extreme cold weather in Arctic,
This is the kind of stuff that needs to be challenged and corrected. The Arctic has not been cold – it has been considerably warmer than average.
This is the Met Office anomaly map for Britain in October 2008:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2008/october/maps/TMean_Anomaly%20No%20Stations.jpg
It’s in relation to the 1961-1990 average (no more than ~0.1C different to the 1951-1980 average, which is the standard GISS baseline)
Note that most of the country has an anomaly of between -0.5C and -1.0C. The pockets marked -0.5C are the least cold bits (i.e. anomaly between -0.5C and 0C)
Now compare GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
You can even change the GISS baseline to 1961-1990 to be sure.
It’s GISS that’s wrong.
John Finn-
You continue to ignore corrections about the AMSU satellite data. One more time: you cannot take the daily readings at face value. They have to be corrected because of satellite drift. Did you expect October 2008 UAH to be cooler than October 2007? It was, by .06C.
Chris-
Yes, the satellite data confirms that much of Russia was warm. But not 4-13C above normal, as GISS’s map shows. Funny how it’s always the least populated areas that GISS broadbrushes with red…
Todays forecasts tells that we will have quite a cooling within 14 days:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/prog1.jpg
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/prog2.jpg
Explanation for the above:
Left column: Temperature anomaly for 10-17 nov
In the middle: Temperatures 10-17 nov.
Right column: Temperatures 18-26 nov
On the above you see that there are 8 coolings vs 1 warming region when going from 10-17nov to 18-26 nov.
I find it interesting that with all the technology available to us and all the money being spent we cannot get to a figure we can all agree on. Yet we are suppose to believe that scientists can figure out with total certainty what the temperature was a thousand years ago from looking at a few tree rings, sea shells and other proxies.
However does GISS manage to do these things?
Silly question. Try this little trick, courtesy of a November 5 posting at ICECAP’s Blogosphere column (sorry, no direct link).
http://icecap.us/index.php
In that post there’s an image in pdf format (listed below) that compares two GISS graphs, sort of a before and after comparison, showing the effect of the adjustments GISS makes. When you click on the link and the pdf file comes up, use your arrow keys to alternate between the two images. You can see how earlier temperatures are adjusted downward and more recent temps are adjusted upward. As the author notes, Hansen seems to be creating his own hockey stick.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NASATEMPS.pdf
GISS — what’s that stand for? Gore’s Institute for Silly Science?
“Near-surface air temperatures in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska were more than 7 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal and the warming extended well into higher levels of the atmosphere.”
(from the latest NSIDC press release)
Doesn’t seem to fit with this:
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_monthly.html?channel=tlt
(click on “Anomaly”)
Also, surface temperatures at Barrow were far from record-breaking at a mean of -5.1C
(compared with e.g. 1902 at -3.8C, 1911 at -2.7C, 1938 at -3.8C, or 1949 at -4.5C to name some much earlier Octobers that were milder, alongside many more recent ones)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.425700260000.1.1/station.txt
[ Of course, there’s also more urban heat effects these days, even at these high latitudes http://www.geography.uc.edu/~kenhinke/uhi/HinkelEA-IJOC-03.pdf ]
I clicked on a station from Russia near the center of the huge temp anomalie (link posted by Bill Illis)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.222300540001.1.1/station.txt
A third of that data in the monthly set is 999.9 (which I assume means it is missing).
I suspect the problem is that the GISS “algore-ithm is actually adding in the 999.9 as if it was real data.
How can Hansen be so out of step with the other data sets and the common sense observations? This past October was simply not that warm, whether one considers the general impression of weather reports or the satellite data. We will no doubt see the news media and the politicians pick up Hansen’s extreme without consideration of the other data sets.
Well guess what?. On some days here in North Wales (UK) it was really cold in October and on some other days it wasn’t. But that’s only weather.
However, if its warm in Siberia its climate according to GISS. Are they credible anymore?
Hi Leon,
How long before the “Equatorial Global Warming Measurement Project” is initiated with the steady installation of new temperature stations along the equator that are then averaged over the world ground station data set.
A 10 year program that would provide a convenient method to keep the warmists happy.
(Just joking).
Well that’s interesting! The first station I click on in the “offending” dark orange area of Russia has a mean temperature of 8.1C for October. That’s pretty damn warm for 65.8 degrees north! And appears to beat the previous record by an impressive 7.5C. Except….. the mean temperature for September was also 8.1C. Coincidence?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222234720005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Hmm, better check with its neighbour. Oh dear, it’s also well into positive numbers at 6.9C, way way way over previous years. OK I’m truly alarmed for the first time. The first station’s figure must have been correct. Except…. The second station had a figure of 6.9C for September too. Double coincidence?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222235520002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Silly question …
I’m facing a religious problem.
I do not know how to express my feelings.
Let us pray
GISS:
…and forgive us our trespasses,(emissions)
…but deliver us from CO2.
Maybe one day, will be compulsory in schools from around globe.
FM
Also Cryosphere Today ice maps from October show noticeably less ice over Northern Asia than previous years.
RussS asked for a comparison of GISTEMP with satellite. Here’s the unsmoothed data of GISTEMP and RSS (baselines adjusted):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.24/plot/rss
and the same smoothed:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.24/mean:12/plot/rss/mean:12
Two things to note:
1) There have been times when GISTEMP has been way higher than RSS before, and vice versa
2) On average they track fairly well together.
I think this is probably a one or two-month blip, but given its magnitude granted it’s interesting to speculate on why it might be in terms of on-the-ground reality…
I have the perfect “win-win”
Obama should appoint Hansen to an Adminstration post.
He can publish the monthly GDP numbers.
Dow 15,000, here we come!
Bruce
Really interesting idea. Is there some way to get the data from the different measurements stations. The link you provided seem to be dead.
A previous occasion when GISTEMP went wild for a short time:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1994/to:1997/offset:-0.24/plot/rss/from:1994/to:1997
I hate to say this, but I fear science is not involved. This amounts to unmitigated gall. I feel it is pure propaganda.
I have become such a cynic that I believe they had two sets of data: One would be released if Republicans won, and another if Democrats won.
I confess I have no evidence to substantiate such a suspicion, but the way they re-re-re-re-adjust data just makes my stomach turn. Have they no shame?
OK, I’ve found 5 more Russian stations with Oct 08 mean temp identical to that of Sep 08. I don’t know how to react except by laughing. I mean, here we are in the 21st century, using the most incredible technology to communicate with each other around the world, in an era where we can send probes to Mars and watch videos on a mobile phone. And yet…… we’re wasting our time having to spot ridiculous errors in a simple database used to track mere surface temperature recordings?
My last comment (16:26) followed on from an earlier one, but the earlier one looks like it may have vanished? Just in case it doesn’t re-appear, here it is again:
Well that’s interesting! The first station I click on in the “offending” dark orange area of Russia has a mean temperature of 8.1C for October. That’s pretty damn warm for 65.8 degrees north! And appears to beat the previous record by an impressive 7.5C. Except….. the mean temperature for September was also 8.1C. Coincidence?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222234720005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Hmm, better check with its neighbour. Oh dear, it’s also well into positive numbers at 6.9C, way way way over previous years. OK I’m truly alarmed for the first time. The first station’s figure must have been correct. Except…. The second station had a figure of 6.9C for September too. Double coincidence?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222235520002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit forwarded me an email from John S. that said:
Steve did a spot check on some Russian sites and…sure enough…John S. is correct!!!
I will need to do some more research tonight to see if the source is GISS, NOAA, or the Russian Meteo.
I apologize for being slow here. I had leg surgery recently which has, literally, slowed me down some.
I had to walk out of the opening general session of a wildfire conference in Tampa this past week when, during an “expert” panel discussion, the gentleman from NOAA announced that the wildfires in Alaska will most assuredly become larger and more frequent over the next century, due mainly to the 20°F rise in temperature, caused, of course, by AGW. (The rest of the world is going to burn to cinders from AGW, too, but Alaska’s temps are, apparently, going to equal sub-Saharan Africa… Nevermind that almost a century of intensive fire suppression and unscientific forest management practices [Read: Zero logging in fire-suppressed forests] have been scientifically proven to be the de facto reasons for increased fire intensity and severity, along with the vastly-increased wildland/urban interface areas, across the US & Canada.)
During the course of the next few days, I talked to a number of fellow
pyromaniacsfire professionals who just shook their heads in disgust at the unmitigated, unsubstantiated AGW fear-mongering by the NOAA representative. We’ll keep on doing our parts to try to help keep the citizens of the U.S. safe from wildfires and Anthropogenic Global Cooling™ by continuing to do what we do best— Burning the woods and adding millions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. 🙂Keep up the great work, Anthony [snip]
During September I was looking regularly on the wetteronline.de weather prediction maps of Asia and Northern Amerika in order to find out why certain parts of the Arctic sea were gaining some much ice extent so rapidly.
The biggest gains in ice extent happened along the Siberian coast, temperatures there were much colder than in northern Alaska. Also, there was a lot of snow falling in Siberia during October, more than last year. See the UIUC ice extent maps.
All this is inconsistent with the GISS October map mentioned here.
In contrast, Russia up to Ural quite often had considerably warmer temperatures than Germany.
My best guess is they made an honest mistake like the one suggested by Bruce.
Wow, I can’t believe GISS would make the mistake of carrying over September’s Russian numbers into October (if that indeed is what happened)…that certainly would explain the huge area of ridiculous warmth (up to 13.7C above normal, apparently, lol) over Siberia – no doubt greatly contributed to the warm GISS number for October.
As several of us have been saying, temperatures that warm would simply not support the rapid ice/snow growth seen in that area over the past month.
Russ asked:
“Can you over lay the GISS plot with the Satellite plot, to show the difference?”
Here’s another one, comparing GISS, Hadley, UAH, and RSS:
http://cce.890m.com/giss-vs-all.jpg
Once you get past the short-term noise, there isn’t a heckuva lot of difference between them.
How anyone can claim that GISS is somehow fudging their data is beyond me.
Quite simply, there is an input error.
In completing random check of the cities in warm area, every city with October 2008 data has identical data for both October and September:
Moskva 10.9 both months
Kraznojarsk 8.6 both months
Turuhansk 8.1 both months
Tarko-Sale 6.9 both months
Bor 8.1 both months
These were just the first five I’ve checked. I did also look at data in the US (St. Louis) and France (Dijon), and these appear to be actual temperatures.
Given that they are using September temperature readings for October, it is no surprise that they are getting such a large positive anomaly. I would be interested in finding out if there is an efficient way to notify NASA of these errors, so that they can correct their number.
You all know I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but could this be a sneaky way to set up the BO presidency with an urgent need to regulate CO2?
from now on peer reviewed papers should now reject articels that refer to GISS temperatures.
HadSST2 is out: globally, the ocean surface temperature anomaly dropped from +0.371C in Sep 08 to +0.317 in Oct 08.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadsst2gl.txt
This matches nicely [bearing in mind different baselines] the drop in UAH satellite-derived temperature anomaly over the global oceans from +0.11C to +0.03C
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
Arctic ice area back to normal today, for the first time in several years. No doubt due to the record October warmth up north.
http://eva.nersc.no/vhost/arctic-roos.org/doc/observations/images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
What goes on is a contest. That is to say “The will of freedom” vs. “The will of Government”. I’ll be damned if the will of the governmnet beats me and the rest of us who will defend the will of freedom. Here’s a few pearls for Hansen and the rest of those who wish to impose their will on us, “The will to fight for freedom and independence in 1776 still exists today”. “There are a great many of us who will under no circumstance allow the oppression of government rule to pervade over our freedom—-PERIOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My best guess is they made an honest mistake like the one suggested by Bruce.
It probably is a mistake but I’m surprised they’ve not managed to pick up such obvious outliers.
GISS=Gore Institute of Swindle Science. Nothing silly about the cost to consumers of B.O.’s skyrocketing electricity prices.
You would think the temp map results would have drawn a “red flag” with somebody…. te he.
@John M (16:15:28) :
You wrote, “I have the perfect “win-win”.
Obama should appoint Hansen to an Adminstration post.
He can publish the monthly GDP numbers.
Dow 15,000, here we come!”
I LIKE the way you think! Except… you left out the tipping point. That’s where the Dow runs away to 140,000 by 2050.
Hmmm… now you’ve got me thinking. We’ve had a tech bubble, a real estate bubble, and an oil bubble. Is a global temperature bubble next?
That’s right BC, boreal forest fire incidence has absolutely nothing to do with climate whatsoever….
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2005JD006738.shtml
…..yeah.
Of course fire management practices have influenced the occurrence of wildfires, but your statements against this NOAA chap are just as un-nuanced lacking any legitimate context in climate. Yes, there is considerable ignorance of the causes and role of wildfires in controlling the ecology of the boreal forests amongst climate and atmospheric folks (this is changing – see ARCTAS this year), but that doesn’t negate the influence of climate now or the influence of a future changed climate upon this phenomenon.
I guess it’s more likely they’d have noticed a similar mistake if made in April 🙂
Not to worry everyone. After making CERTAIN headlines, Hansen will adjust Oct 08 down at least .1. No one will notice. Except us.
When you believe in global warming you don’t go looking for things that will change your beliefs.
This is, BTW, a significantly better view of what really happened last month: http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/tlt/medium/global/ch_tlt_2008_10_anom_v03_2.png
I encourace you to compare it to previous years. Not remotely close to the warmest October.
Let’s not forget “the mother of all mistakes” – the arithmetic error in the UAH processing algorithm. When it was discovered (back in 2005?), the UAH decadal temperature trend increased a whopping 25% (from 0.09 to 0.12 degrees).
I didn’t hear anybody back then saying that “peer reviewed papers should now reject articles that refer to UAH temperatures”, or that there was something nefarious going on.
And nobody here seems to think that the UAH results have been forever “poisoned” because of that (rather significant) error.
UAH made a mistake. The latest GISS results may be a mistake. If so, it will soon be corrected. That’s the way science works. Deal with it.
Chris V. (17:55:50) :
No, we leave that to the Tamino denizens. Funny, I haven’t seen you giving a similar caution over there.
Chris V.
You are probably correct, but people here see our president elect using these numbers (probably through advisers) to proceed with his declared position to stop the use of fossil fuels. It is a blind process without science or rational thinking. But you must also note that NASA has very poor oversight when publishing a data set that is used world wide. Maybe this is the new government standard and none of us has to pay our taxes as no one is checking.
Isn’t it time someone called for ‘Dr’ Hansen’s head on a silver platter? Or else sued him for fraudulently wasting tax payer’s money?
A five minute check of the text files in the hotspot reveals a number of other stations in which September data has been copied across to October, e.g. Enisejk, Kolpasevo, Suntar, Viljujsk, Minusinsk and Tura.
See my post on this here.
Simon
Australian Climate Madness
Never attribute to conspiracy what one may attribute to idiocy.
Remember folks,
Climate changes, right? My question is simple. Does CO2 cause climate change? The vast majority of the studies, which assume warming due to AGW, never address this simple question.
How can manipulating 0.00006 ppv of our atmosphere cause a tipping point?
We know the oceans inhale a few years worth of man’s emmissions every yearly breath she takes.
This GISS nonsense needs to be rooted out with FOI action. The first thing I would try to archive is the ORIGINAL, uncorrected, RECORD for all data available.
Do GISS unadulterated data still exist? Then request all calcs and other materials supporting the manipulate of the data. Get all the data first.
Can this be done?
“As several of us have been saying, temperatures that warm would simply not support the rapid ice/snow growth seen in that area over the past month.”
.
Maybe that’s why CT has Arctic Sea Ice Area falling precipitously.
But wait; it gets even stranger. Check out Erbogacen at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.222248170006.1.1/station.txt and you’ll see
Year Sep Oct
2000 4.7 -7.9
2001 4.6 -4.0
2002 5.7 -5.8
2003 6.4 -5.0
2004 5.8 -4.3
2005 7.3 -3.9
2006 6.1 -8.9
2007 5.8 -2.6
2008 999.9 5.0
This is a scream. September ’08 is the hottest October on record. Oh, my God!
=======================================
Question… is there a way to download all the text data for Russia (or the entire planet for that matter) in one step, and look at it later?
My hat is old.
My teeth are gold.
I have a bird
I like to hold.
My shoe is off.
My foot is cold.
My shoe is off.
My foot is cold.
I have a bird
I liked to hold.
My hat is old.
My teeth are gold.
And now
my story
is all told.
–Dr. Seuss
evanjones: Never attribute to conspiracy what one may attribute to idiocy.
Remarkably similar to my “Never attribute to conspiracy, that which can be accounted for by incompetence.”
Either I read this somewhere, and forgot enough to lose the source; or its a universal truth.
I agree. Its such an elemental error, that it has to be a simple mistake.
It does warm my heart, though, to see Hanson’s name attached to it.
[REPLY – Many variations. An oldie but a goodie. ~ Evan]
[Reply 2: Never assume malice when stupidity will explain it ~ my variation, charles the moderator.]
I wonder. If the oceans are getting colder, where is the heat going? Is it evenly and well distributed in the atmosphere? Does it evenly dissipate into our outer atmosphere and beyond? Given that nothing else we have finally seen pictures of, I doubt it. Warm air escaping from cooling oceans likely swirl and glob over the land masses before finally loosing energy to the upper atmosphere and beyond. It is not out of reality’s realm to consider that dissipating warm ocean air can ride the wind to warm different parts of the planet before eventually leaving altogether and leading to global cooling. But at first, it probably starts with uneven application, just like CO2, ozone, etc.
Hey ej, that bird you’re holdin’ is pinin’ for the apparently warm fjords.
============================================
It should be simple to find the error source. The NCDC, Hadley and GISS all use NOAA data.
If everyone has the same tropical October, its the NOAA. If only GISS has palm tree October, then its GISS.
This is assuming that the NOAA is the clearing house for foreign data, as well as domestic.
Well, its beau’iful plumage is blue with cold.
ning,
That the climate changes, I conclude, cool. I love the seasons. According to my study, the Earth’s climate has never remained constant, especially to the tenth of a degree, the last four billion years.
You are here to save us from climate change. Are you sure you really want this? What to you is the perfect global temperature? And in light of the geological record, how do we prevent the climate from changing. Start geo-engineering the atmosphere? Surely you don’t think spending trillions to try to manipulate 0.000002 ppv of our atmosphere of CO2 would create a tipping point.
We can’t hardly even measure this, can we? Hang out with some other people, eh?
And you are saying that we need to reduce our output of CO2 by how many 100 thousandths ppv? Have you not ran the calcs?
GISS uses the GHCN v2 data. I have confirmed that the GHCN data from NOAA is the problem. Thus we should be complaining about NOAA quality control issues rather than GISS quality control issues.
It’s eminently possible for land temperature in the northern hemisphere to get out of whack with the ocean temperatures after a La Nina year because atmospheric moisture levels take a dive during the La Nina. Then, when the northern hemisphere has summer, there is a greater than usual reduction in cloud cover. Result is more than usual heating of the atmosphere over the land masses. China and Russia get lots of sunshine.
Meanwhile the thing that has caused the La Nina, an increase in cloud cover south of the Equator continues, the southern hemisphere has a very cold winter and when the northern summer ends the ocean is found to have lost energy. Then, watch out because the swing to cold may catch you short of heating oil.
If the tropics are cold the supply of moisture streaming to high latitudes may not be enough to give an outstanding snow fall.
All very well. And I do not question your theory.
But the other metrics don’t see it, and it looks as if there might have been a rather embarrassing data error involved. So I think we need to take a wait-and-see attitude here.
–Just noticed. JG sayeth it’s an NOAA screwup.
BTW, for purposes of clarification, I am NOT username “EJ”, although those are my initials.
I do have other problems with how GISS records monthly mean temperatures over in Russia. Generally, the US and Western European GISS mean temps correlate pretty well with the mean temperatures that publicly available. Here’s a comparison between WeatherUnderground and GISS mean monthly temps for a couple random cities:
Dijon, France
Oct. 10 10.2
Sept. 13 13.8
Aug 18 18.6
Jul 19 19.8
Jun 17 17.8
May 15 15.9
St. Louis WU GISS
Oct. 14 14.6
Sept. 21 21.8
Aug 24 24.8
Jul 26 26.3
Jun 25 24.9
May 17 17.3
And then here are the comparisons between the two for a couple of Russian cities in Centigrade:
Moscow WU GISS
Oct. 7 10.9
Sept. 10 10.9
Aug 17 17.5
Jul 18 19.1
Jun 14 15.6
May 10 11.3
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 3 8.6
Sept. 8 8.6
Aug 14 15.2
Jul 17 18.8
Jun 16 18.0
May 8 9.5
We now know that the October temps are just wrong, but why are all of GISS’s mean temperatures 1-2 degrees higher? Given that data from Russia result in a huge part of the temperature anomaly over the past 22 months, it seems to me that it may be due to this discrepancy. Any thoughts?
But wait; it gets even stranger. Erbogacen at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.222248170006.1.1/station.txt is missing Sept, but has Oct
Year Sep Oct
2000 4.7 -7.9
2001 4.6 -4.0
2002 5.7 -5.8
2003 6.4 -5.0
2004 5.8 -4.3
2005 7.3 -3.9
2006 6.1 -8.9
2007 5.8 -2.6
2008 999.9 5.0
The 5.0 would make more sense in Sept than Oct. And change my earlier question to how does one get all the NOAA/GHCN data in one download.
I hope we all know too that man could cease all output of CO2 and the atmospheric CO2 could still rise, at the same rate, prior to the demise of mankind. We killed ourselvses for no reason.
Reason is a good word to ponder here.
Nothing new here. GISS trend has been running ahead of everyone else for some time. For this year through October, regressing GISS gives nearly twice the positive slope of RSS. For whatever reason, this is a consistent pattern over the years. NASA would do well do address this credibility problem. But alas I suspect that fear of charges of ‘muzzling’ and ‘interfering with the integrity (sic) of the scientific process,’ not to mention reprisals from Congress, rule out any rationalization of what everyone knows is a corrupt result.
Good, informative blog. Keep it up.
ning, you’re making the exact same mistake (By design?) that the AGW profits, er, prophets are making when you attempt to correlate increased wildfire activity across North America with
“anthropogenic global warming”“anthropogenic climate change”— Correlation, no matter how unproven, does NOT equate to causation.The mythological creature that goes by the name of “anthropogenic
global warmingclimate change” has, in no way whatsoever, been scientifically proven* to be a significant, nor even minor, contributing factor to the progressively increasing wildfire activity that we’ve been seeing over the past few decades.If you know anything about fuel loading in the wildland fire environment, (and the history of fire suppression in the US & Canada) you know that the fuel loading (grasses, shrubs, trees, houses, businesses, etc.) across just about all biomes in North America have been increasing, sometimes exponentially, since plants don’t propagate in a linear progression. (Look up the spread of exotic invasive plants species, as an example. Once a “tipping point” is reached, the population explodes.) Widespread fire suppression, poor forest management practices and dramatically increased wildland/urban interface (humans moving into non-urban areas) are THE proven overwhelming factors in the increased wildfire activity. Period.
*Note: Any modeling based on Algore’s & Hansen’s data doesn’t count. It has to be boots-on-the-ground, hard data to be considered “scientifically proven”. The Biggest & Baddest™ “UberFuelModels” have failed miserably when put to the test in the real world. The actual experts in Southern California had to give the modelers the bad news recently. (The researchers had to give the “Please don’t sue us, model makers!” disclaimer at the conference before they revealed to us that the models they’d used in their studies had taken the dive into oblivion.)
Now, back to those balmy Siberian Indian Summer beach parties on the Arctic ice floes! Surf’s up! (That WAS the topic of this post before I swerved OT, wasn’t it?)
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember
And follow.
–The Fantastiks
[…] the post and comments atWatts Up With That for […]
John Goetz: your
GISS uses the GHCN v2 data. I have confirmed that the GHCN data from NOAA is the problem. Thus we should be complaining about NOAA quality control issues rather than GISS quality control issues.
Technically, I agree.
But, in business, if one of my suppliers makes a mistake, my client does not sympathize with ME. Rather, he blames me.
Rightly so. I should have checked the product before sending it out.
“Any modeling based on Algore’s & Hansen’s data doesn’t count. It has to be boots-on-the-ground, hard data to be considered “scientifically proven”. The Biggest & Baddest™ “UberFuelModels” have failed miserably when put to the test in the real world.”
Seven-six-eleven-five-nine-an’-twenty mile to-day –
Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two the day before –
Boots-boots-boots-boots-movin’ up an’ down again!
There’s no discharge in the war!
–Kipling
I think anything associated with Hansen & co. should be tossed out as unreliable.
They have too much money and political power at stake to be credible.
The world data is telling us very different data:
Ice refreezing at record rates in the north, glaciers accumulating mass, and temps down.
Yet here is this GISS graph, with crazy numbers?
I smell more of Hansen’s back filling to jsutify the desired answer.
Walter Dnes:
My guess is that Hanson’s averaging algorithm put in a value of 5 degrees, for Erbogacen, based on neighboring stations.
If the neighbors were 5 degrees for Sept, then the algorithm would insert that value for Erbogacen for September, to replace 999.9, and that would also be the misplaced value for October.
So GISS have used Asia’s SEPTEMBER averages for October. In so doing, have falsely created a massively high October anomaly….
It’s amazing that GISS could make such simple mistake. To just take a massive Oct. anomoly of .078c without pause for thought…. Is to realize that these people are blinded by their own bias.
Anthony: in a post by Patrick K (19:09:38) :, he shows consistently higher temps for selected cities, when comparing GISS to Weather Underground.
Does not Hanson claim to account for UHI? It wouldn’t appear so, based on that limited sample. Quite the opposite, in fact.
off topic… but of interest.
The Sun Shows Signs of Life
After two-plus years of few sunspots, even fewer solar flares, and a generally eerie calm, the sun is finally showing signs of life. “I think solar minimum is behind us,” says sunspot forecaster David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
His statement is prompted by an October flurry of sunspots. “Last month we counted five sunspot groups,” he says. That may not sound like much, but in a year with record-low numbers of sunspots and long stretches of utter spotlessness, five is significant. “This represents a real increase in solar activity.”
I applaud John S. for identifying the source of the problem so quickly. I personally was surprised by the anomaly and by the magnitude of change in central Asia, but I did not actually look at the underlying data as John S. did. People like John S. constantly humble me and my abilities to dig the truth from data.
But the “Russian problem” still doesn’t explain the UK discrepancy (comment #1). 🙂
Les Johnson (19:21:05) :
[“But, in business, if one of my suppliers makes a mistake, my client does not sympathize with ME. Rather, he blames me.
Rightly so. I should have checked the product before sending it out.”]
I absolutely agree…. As a Australian prawn trawler owner operator. If I shot my trawl away in a national park closure due to a navigational error…. I would loose my licence, be called a criminal and be fined more money than my business could ever pay back… Just one little mistake…. And this has happened to a few guys…
Don’t forget that Australian Trawlers have Satellite tracking devices on them which are linked and watched in real time by Australian Fisheries Service personnel….. These are honest mistakes in navigation or interpretations of closure lines made by the trawlermen…
Yet Scientists can simply just say anything they please. Mistakes, deliberate distortions and all…. Whether this be Climate science or Marine Biology. Makes no difference.
There is one rule for the Elites and another for the poor slobs that thought working for themselves was noble and enterprising.
If it keeps going like this, there will be tears before bedtime…. It is getting intolerable.
If they are going to politicize Science… There needs to be accountability.
People claim that blogs aren’t doing “real science” yet situations like this prove how valuable blogs can be. Without a blogs like this one and CA and their devoted readers I seriously doubt this error would have been found this quickly, if at all!
And yet some people still believe we know the temperature 200+ years ago within .2 degrees. Amazing.
Lets see, NASA flew a space craft into Mars because they didn’t know the difference between yards and meters. They also blew up one shuttle because they wanted to save a few dollars by only having two rubber bands instead of three. They also ignored protocols and launched when the temperature was too cold. Then they had a problem with slabs of ice smashing into another shuttle causing it’s destruction. Having spent tens of millions of dollars trying to solve the ice problem, they have yet to succeed. To think that this Agency is still listened to is… well just wrong.
John Goetz (19:03:51) :
I partially agree. However, I work on software that is littered with various tests to make sure the data we’re working with makes sense. I work on file systems, not climate, so tests are for things like “is there actually a data block for the part of the file we’re looking at?” “Is the file size negative?” Or “is the block we’re freeing already marked as free?”
It wouldn’t be much to ask GISS to verify things like anomalies are in the range that are normally seen and flag things like the 15.7°C anomaly as being so wrong that the input data may be corrupted or bad. Then again, from what I’ve read about their code quality, perhaps it is too much to ask.
I assume enough people have contacted GISS about this that there’s no point in having the rest of us do so.
Google News doesn’t have any stories about the warmest October (except for Hong Kong and Los Angeles), so the bad data point has broken free yet.
Was the NSIDC press release due to the erroneous GISS information? But I’m not finding that press release at the NSIDC site, nor on news sites. Where is this press release?
evanjones (19:17:40) :
> Try to remember the kind of September….
Hear how the wind begins to whisper.
See how the leaves go streaming by.
Smell how the velvet rain is falling,
Out where the fields are warm and dry.
Now is the time to run inside and stay.
Now is the time to find a hideaway
Where we can stay.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can see it.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can tell.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
What are we gonna do?
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can feel it.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can tell.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
What’ll we do with you?
We’ll find four limbs of a tree.
We’ll build four walls and a floor.
We’ll bind it over with leaves,
And run inside to stay.
Then we’ll let it rain.
We’ll not fell it.
Then we’ll let it rain,
Rain pell-mell.
And we’ll not complain
If it never stops at all.
We’ll live and love
Within our own four walls.
We’ll find four limbs of a tree.
We’ll build four walls and a floor.
We’ll bind it over with leaves,
And run inside to stay.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
Come run inside to stay!
Soon it’s gonna rain.
For soon it’s gonna rain.
I can see it.
I can feel it.
Run inside and…
Then we’ll let it rain.
We’ll not feel it.
Then we’ll let it rain.
Ran pell-mell.
And we’ll not complain
– Happy ending…
If it never stops at all.
Then we’ll let it rain.
Why complain?
We’ll live and love within our walls.
Happily we’ll live and love,
No cares at all.
Happily we’ll live and love
Within our castle walls.
[REPLY – #B^1]
Regarding questions about GISS’s UK mean temps, here are comparisons with WeatherUnderground:
WU GISS
Bournemouth 10 13.7 (same temp as in Sept. 2008)
Waddington: 9 10.3
Valley 10 14.0 (same as Sept. 2008)
So it looks like Bouremouth and Valley are input duplications from Sept., and Waddington is just GISS’s typical ginning up the temperature by 1-2 degrees.
Add these as duplicates:
Eskdalemuir
Leeming
Tiree
Malin Head
Dublin Airport
Casement Aero
At first glance I was stunned at the anomaly, especially after seeing the UAH satillite data set for October. I have never trusted GISS. This is just another example of why NASA needs to dump the program. The Russians seem to have trouble with submarines as well. Hats off to John S. for looking a little harder.
These pictures acted as a catalyst for some kind of perspective on Earth for me thought you lot might like to see too, http://www.jordanmaxwell.com/articles/pictures/pictures2.html (sorry to be off topic.) Ed.
Congrats to John and others for finding this rather startling error. Let’s hope it get’s some traction in the media. Andrew Bolt has already covered it on his blog.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hansen_september_the_hottest_october/
Chris V,
In your gleeful posting concerning UAH, you fail to mention not only the recent RSS adjustments that come more into line with UAH, but their earlier admission to a major error (.1k) this year, and that Spencer & Christy were credited for aiding in the diagnosis of this most “grievous” error 🙂
You also failed to mention a recent study by Randall and Herman that concluded UAH is the more accurate data of the two groups. It is also true UAH is transparent and fully discloses and documents all adjustments with explanations. It appears you simply cannot bring yourself about to admit there are serious problems with surface station data.
ftp://ftp.remss.com/msu/data/readme_jan_2008.txt
January 16, 2008
We discovered an error in our processing of AMSU data from NOAA-15 for TLT. A new version,
version 3.1 is now available and should be used for all applications. This new version
is in much better agreement with other sources of tropospheric temperature. We apologize for
any inconvenience.
What was the error?
Last January, I made a small change in the way TLT is calculated that reduced the absolute
Temperatures by 0.1K. But I only used the new method for 2007 (the error).
When the data are merged with MSU, MSU and AMSU are forced to be as close as possible to each
other over the 1999-2004 period of overlap. This caused the error to show up as a downward
jump in January 2007. To fix the problem, I reprocessed the 1998-2006 AMSU data using the new
code (like I should have done in the first place), and merged it with the MSU data.
We would like to thank John Christy and Roy Spencer, who were very helpful during the diagnosis
process.
Carl Mears, RSS, January 16 2008
It comes down to this. When the belivers at GISS see a high anomaly they think nothing of it. It validates their belief. So they don’t think to check the sources–NOAA.
Given the using-last-month’s-data issue in both Russia and the UK, it would make sense to look through the raw data for the past, oh, say, 30 years, to see whether this exact problem may be one that has corrupted GISS anomaly values for any, or all, of the period.
Without asserting bad motives, one might want to see whether the pattern is generally one using the warmer month’s data, i.e. on the falling side of the yearly curve.
I understand that GISS uses satellite data for its estimates of sea surface temperatures. I note that most oceans have missing data in the GISS October 2008 Graph (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008). Since oceans cover 70% of the earth, is there an impact on GISS by missing the ocean data? Also, GISS seems to have data on oceans when there is an island in the area! How far into the ocean does GISS assume the island temperature to be representative of SSTs — thereby wiping out the need for satellite information?
Serious questions need to be asked of NASA’s management. For Hansen to still be employed by NASA is a sad indictment of the NASA administration. The public needs to start calling for massive funding cuts to NASA. They are not competent enough to be spending public money any longer if they can allow this sort of scientific fraud to go on.
Correcting obvious errors of these data is commendable if it can be accomplished but anyone that thinks they can accurately determine the earth’s surface temperature at any point in time is either delusional or has ulterior motives.
Nibblin’ on sponge cake
Watchin’ the sun bake
All of those Russians covered with oil
Strumming my six-string
On my front-porch swing
Smell those shrimp they’re beginning to boil
Wastin’ away again in…
[…] was the hottest October ever recorded. Wait! September?” Read more here and also here. […]
What is the bet that this story breaks in the MSM – BEFORE the correction is noted?
What is the bet that the correction is never noted by the MSM?
Steve M at Climate Audit covers this also http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4318,
Note that he also includes a link to actual russian weather for a simple check on what’s been happening during October.
This story kick’s Ar$e…
LOL.
It really goes to the whole data management quagmire at GISS. The GISS data is not worth the cost of the electrons…
So what was are the real global temperatures for October fron GISS?
[…] – this time NCDC’s Karl 10 11 2008 It has been one of those days…first the GISS data train wreck in apparently reusing last months temperatures to make this months “hottest October […]
Here in sub-tropical BRISBANE, I had the blanket on the bed for the third night in a row! Roll on global warming!
Climate science on the warmer side has degenerated to competitive lying. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars of grant money at stake. Hansen saw Willis fiddling with the XBT data to remove the recent cold trend, and knew he had to make a big move to show his new political masters that he still had what it takes. There is no way that carrying over selected stations could have been accidental. It doesn’t matter that he got found out, the important thing is that he made the effort to tell a big one. That is what will please them and it shows that he can still be relied upon.
This is a link to Willis’ XBT story: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/11/correcting-ocean-cooling-nasa-changes-data-to-fit-the-models/
It is like living in the old Soviet Union. NASA is preparing us for a change of history. Does it really take that much effort to process the Argo data? I think we need Spencer and/or Christy to take on the oceans as well. It should be possible to get monthly updates on ocean heat content.
So it looks like Bouremouth and Valley are input duplications from Sept., and Waddington is just GISS’s typical ginning up the temperature by 1-2 degrees.
Actually the Waddington figure is more worrying. The Sept duplicates are easy to spot but who would have spotted the Waddington error if it hadn’t been for the duplicates. Would the Russian temperatures, say, have been picked up if they were just a degree or two above their true values.
Being a non PC person, I wonder, can some contributers kindly use “man made” instead of “Anthropogenic”?
Thanks in advance,
Brian Johnson NLAMN [No Letters After My Name]
GISS – Gives Inaccurate Scientific Statistics
Was this the “October surprise” that everybody was expecting?
Here the october data of 222 russian sites
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gclimat?lang=en&mode=1&state=Russ&ind=&ord=REV&verb=no&year=2008&mes=10&months=
The current temperature in Olenek, Russia is -28 deg C, 31 degrees below the “October” GISS Olenek temperature, and is predicted to go to -33 deg C on the Day After Tomorrow. Dozens of related links, jokes, observations, explanations are summarized in my text about this story,
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/11/rss-msu-0013-deg-c-month-on-month.html
Real temperatures could be 0.5c lower if you multiply 10c (average temp drop from Sept to Oct in Russia) by 0.125 (Russia is 1/8th of world’s land mass) by 0.4 (rough approximation of land cover on earth). Cuuld be a higher reduction due to UK, Ireland and possible issues elsewhere.
I expect it’ll just be 0.2c ish though!
[…] Read more on the fraudulent GISS data on the websites below: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/10/giss-releases-october-2008-data […]
Anymouse:
it’s at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ to the right of fig 3
In the old days of chivalry, those responsible (in charge) would have fallen on their swords and resigned, with abject apologies for allowing such poor quality control (even a lowly minion should have seen something was wrong).
It will be interesting to see the blame being apportioned (or the whole sorry story just quietly dropped with business as usual continuing).
Money on Hansen resigning? 1000 to 1 against?
[…] Oh the Wheels on the Bus are Falling Off, Falling Off Update: Thanks to an email from John S. – a patron of climateaudit.org – we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS. watts up with that […]
Here in Western Europe, it’s already in the newspapers today: “October 2008 is warmest October month ever according to NASA temperatures”
Just my ol off topic self.. but is anyone else having a hard time seeing the latest sunspot? And the hopeful Nasa strikes again….. hehe
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/07nov_signsoflife.htm
I have got the average temp for Olenek, from weatherunderground. I used the mean temperture from every day. It was -6.5 deg C.
Range was 2 (1 Oct) to -18 deg C (19 Oct).
You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?
Actually, I think Anthony should re-instate monitoring GISStemp graphs each month
– it would help show up gross errors like this
Although Anthony doesn’t believe that GISStemp is reliable, it’s still a very important data-set
Besides, the general trend for GISStemp isn’t *that* different than RSS or UCH
– and it would be worth being able to discuss why there are such differences.
Otherwise, this site might be accused of just promoting data that agrees with it’s view-point.
More sloppy ‘science’ from a group of so-called professionals who (apparantly) don’t give a whit about accuracy.
Let’s hope this time they don’t respond in a condescending or snarky manner.
The credibility of the American-nay, Global scientific community is eroding at an alarming rate which is of great concern to many.
It’s been mentioned before (Michael Ronayne, back in April, I think), but is worth mentioning again.
This is rather like the scene in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm shows the people in the control centre that the dinosaurs are breeding; the computer hasn’t been programmed to take into account the possibility that the total number of dinosaurs could be increasing, and of course no-one has given the odd readings much thought, because they knew an increase couldn’t possibly be happening.
The same kind of blinkered mindset at work in NASA GISS?
RIP, Michael Crichton; you understood the mentality of these people very well.
To misquote Dr Malcolm: God creates Global Warming. God destroys Global Warming. God creates Man. Man destroys God. Man creates… climate models.
The credibility of climate science is melting faster than the modelled ice 🙂
Global warming IS man-made, after all :^)
This is so simple. Hansen needs the perfect data to feed Obama for his major CO2 cap and tax programs to be added in 2009. GISS is worthless data but perfect for political reasons.
Looking toward the Eastern sky, someday I am going home.
Steve
“John Finn (00:48:22) :
So it looks like Bouremouth and Valley are input duplications from Sept., and Waddington is just GISS’s typical ginning up the temperature by 1-2 degrees.
Actually the Waddington figure is more worrying. The Sept duplicates are easy to spot but who would have spotted the Waddington error if it hadn’t been for the duplicates. Would the Russian temperatures, say, have been picked up if they were just a degree or two above their true values.”
Interesting John, I guess if they had just fabricated the numbers it would have been harder to spot. However this type of “mistake” does give them some way out. What am I saying, has GISS ever owned up to a mistake?
I think the mistake was one of laziness. The recent cooling has made the old algorithm insufficient to produce desired results, hence the new tack.
I wonder if this is a new trick or has it been used repeatedly in the past? I bet this little prevarication has been used repeatedly but not noticed. Thank you John S.
It might also be possible that october temperatures were more or less the same in some regions of russia, no? There were some post from guys in Moscow on climate audit telling that october has actually been warmer than september in that city. I think we’d better wait for corrections (if any) before going crazy about this.
The NOAA error seems to be with the processing of the .dly files. I did a spot check of a couple Russian sites that have the September / October twins at GISS. The NOAA .dly files show a clear difference in temperature. The resulting NOAA GHCN v2 file, however, contains the twins.
Not to pile on, but in doing more comparisons with Weather Underground, it does appear that several of the Russian sites consistently show higher mean temps in GISS than they do in WU:
Moscow WU GISS
Oct. 7 10.9
Sept. 10 10.9
Aug 17 17.5
Jul 18 19.1
Jun 14 15.6
May 10 11.3
April 9 9.4
March 1 1.8
Feb -3 -1.5
Jan -7 -5.8
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 3 8.6
Sept. 8 8.6
Aug 14 15.2
Jul 17 18.8
Jun 16 18.0
May 8 9.5
Vytegra, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 7 8.2
Sept. 8 8.2
Aug 15 14.4
Jul 17 16.4
Jun 13 12.6
May 8 7.8
April 3 4.3
March -2 -2.0
Feb -5 -3.5
Jan -7 -5.5
Kazan, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 7 7.8
Sept. 10 10.0
Aug 18 19.1
Jul 20 20.7
Jun 16 16.4
May 11 12.4
April 7 8.2
March -1 0.1
Feb -7 -6.6
Jan -12 -11.7
Narjan-mar seems to be an exception, skewing a little colder:
Nar’jan-mar, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 2 5.7
Sept. 6 5.7
Aug 9 9.7
Jul 15 15.9
Jun 9 9.0
May -1 -1.1
April -8 -7.6
March -13 -14.5
Feb -15 -14.5
Jan -9 -9.2
IF Weather Underground is rounding down all of its mean temps, GISS’s anomalies may be less noticable. If not, then, with very few exceptions, the data skew warmer for GISS.
It looks like they also have the duplicate problem with Sept.-Oct temps in Gabes and Gafsa, in North Africa.
Steven Hill (05:54:06) Southeastern sky, my good man, southeast.
====================================
From NOAA website:
Contacts
For questions/assistance with GHCN-Monthly data, please contact Russell.Vose@noaa.gov
For assistance with the GHCN-Monthly web site, please contact Jon.Burroughs@noaa.gov
Not to be a pest, but someone last month had noticed that the Finnish Sept data were duplicates of data from August. I just rechecked, and these data are still in the Oct. dataset
Oulu
Sept. 4 WU 7.4 GISS
Aug.
Interestingly, there are no actual data for Oct. Apparently, someone saw something was odd, but they didn’t bother to change the previous data.
The problem with September data replicated as October data also applies to all stations in Finland.
Sorry about the last post. I just rechecked, and these data have been duplicated in Oct.:
Oulu
Oct. 4 WU 7.4 GISS
Sept. 6 WU 7.4 GISS
And the WeatherUnderground means are lower than the “real” GISS data.
Chris V
I hope this “mistake” will soon and publicly be corrected, I personally doubt it.
GISS takes a lot of flack not because of this error but because it is widely reported as authoritative and has a history of very questionable quality. They have more than 70 “corrections” of their past record in the last few years these changes overwelmingly make the past cooler and the present warmer. Documentation for these changes range from doubtful to non existent but they are much of the supposed warming signal. We have proof that the USHCN that is a part of GISS is strongly biased toward warming and that the bias has not been accounted for. No corrections or explanations are forthcoming on these problems, so the hope they will correct or even acknowledge this one is overly optimistic.
This is not an unheard of blog, they almost certainly know that their October numbers in Siberia are silly, have they made a correction or issued a warning? Wouldn’t you have done so if the work was yours?
[…] Chris commenting at WUWT noticed that some of the GISS temperature data records for Northern Asia at GISS show identical readings for September and October. For example: Turuhansk (65.8 N, 87.9E) which whows 8.1 C for both September and October. […]
JohnGoetz:
No. If GISS’s temperature is affected (as it appears to be), the error is shared. It’s true the GISS gets their data from NOAA. So, if NOAA makes an error, it will propagate.
That said, GISS puts out a data product. They are responsible for their product.
The process involves humans who should have written a script to check for certain types of outliers. September raw temperatures that match Octobers to the exact decimal place should be flagged at both GISS and NOAA. Anomalies 9C out of whack should be flagged.
These things can be correct, but they should be checked.
I should note that the ftp site I look at to find NOAA anomalies has not reported an October temperature. So, NOAA held their horses on processing the data and reporting. So did Hadley.
See
NOAA: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies
Hadley: http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly/monthly.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat .
As much as climate addicts like to see the processed data, it’s better for an agency to wait.
Of course, this issue will resolve itself. After all, no one really acts based on one month’s climate report. So, next month, we’ll know how far out of whack GISS’s report was. But, I don’t think it’s fair to just blame NOAA/NCDC. This sort of mistake is something programmers at GISS should be able to catch.
REPLY: The root of this problem lie is the antiquated multiple black box style of spaghetti code that is GISTEMP. And the fact that it is FORTRAN, rather than a modern language. Since the provenance of the code is owed to multiple programmers that have come and gone (Their model software is even worse) I think they’ve basically lost control of it. Hell when they released it last autumn, nobody could get it to compile and run. Big red flag.
I have a similar project for weather bulletins that was born in 1998. 10 years later it is unmanageable for the same reasons and we are starting over from scratch with a fresh project. GISS should have done the same long ago. – Anthony
If GISS’s temperature is affected (as it appears to be)
Well, I did notice one of their graphs looking down its nose at me.
This seems to be a major problem. Is there anybody out there who would have the time and resources to go over the “root” or station data for a longer period? Is it only sept-oct 2008? What other anomalies, like significant differences with WeatherUnderground, would be found? There’s enough work for a major research project!
Here in Canada, Nov 11th is a federal holiday (Remembrance Day). Is it also a holiday in the US? I took 1 day of vacation time Monday the 10th, to give myself a “4-day-weekend”. If a lot of people did something similar at NOAA and GISS, then maybe the people who should’ve caught the problem were not in. The computer output wasn’t halted, and it sailed through unchallenged.
NOAA normally puts out their Global dataset around the middle of the month. So the fact that they have not put anything yet (other than USA data) is not unusual. However, the GHCN error will propagate into their GMST as well.
Reply: The GHCN data as of Nov. 10 was generated from .dly files with November temperature records.
Wow! It seems that they are trying to hide the tracks and it might be hard to carry out the work I proposed in my posting at 08:34…
From Climate Audit commentary No.44:
PaulM:
November 11th, 2008 at 9:55 am
GISS has now deleted the duff station data.
But the incorrect 0.88 anomaly is still there in Fig.C.txt, as is the ‘red Russia’ graph.
I wonder whether they will acknowledge the error, or try to pretend that it never happened?
I was talking about this NOAA release:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/oct/global.html#introduction
which has the GHCN as a large part of the data.
One can’t generate any October maps either at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
What I don’t get is this reliance on measuring devices spread throughout the countries, some of which are not known for even reasonable monitoring of such things) that are uncalibrated prior to each and every measure taken. When I was doing my research, I calibrated the electrical impedance of the electrodes prior to each and every measurement taken from the subjects. I also calibrated the signal I was using, again each and every time I used it. This step was recorded in the data base so that the final results could be verified as being reliable. Any change I measured with the electrodes could be said to be the result of the subject’s brainstem response and not the measuring device or calibration problems of the signal going in.
With surface stations, many have disappeared from the grid (potential bias). They are not calibrated on a daily basis (potential bias). Missing data is entered as a made up value instead of just “missing” (potential bias). The data is being handled by a group of people who want it to come out a certain way (potential bias). Am I missing something here? Has standard research design changed that much? How is it that this data even sees the light of day?
[…] Hansen and His Merry Band of NASA/NOAA Socialist “Scientists” continue busily packing the booster rockets for The Obamessiah’s Algore I economy-destroying ICBM (Intentionally-Caused Bolshevik […]
Fred, do you have a cached copy? NOAA has removed the online version.
[…] on in temperature reporting. The scientists are ‘laughably’ playing games with the data, and it shows. Or should that be ‘laughably’ called […]
NOAA has not released their October Global report yet per above link(which is not unusual as they normally do it the middle of the month). So there is no cached version available. Hopefully the folks at the NCDC will catch their error in the GHCN monthly database and NOAA will capture more realistic data in their report.
[…] Todas las mediciones oficiales apuntan a que 2008 será uno de los años más fríos de la última década. Sin embargo, el Instituto Goddard (GISS), perteneciente a la NASA, uno de los principales organismos de referencia del Panel Intergubernamental sobre el Cambio Climático de la ONU (IPCC) acaba de anunciar que el pasado mes de octubre ha sido uno de los más calurosos de la historia. En concreto, según sus mediciones, la temperatura global registró el pasado mes un aumento de 0,78 grados centígrados respecto a la media de referencia. Una anomalía muy significativa, pero que no encaja con la evolución histórica que viene registrando el aumento medio de la temperatura global en octubre a lo largo de los últimos años (por debajo de 0,6 grados centígrados, y descendiendo), tal y como recoge el portal WattsUpWithThat. […]
“And the fact that it is FORTRAN, rather than a modern language. Since the provenance of the code is owed to multiple programmers that have come and gone (Their model software is even worse) I think they’ve basically lost control of it.”
I believe, Anthony, from reading over at CA that there is even some more modern Python thrown in there for good measure. So it seems someone is hacking at it with some more modern tools but overall you seem to be correct in your conclusion that at this point it is just a mess.
I believe they finally did get something close to the posted source code to run, maybe after converting many of the routines to another language, I don’t remember now. But I don’t think they ever got the thing to spit out identical results to what Hansen gets.
One of the problems with the thing seems to be that missing values are “filled” using averages over time. That means that an anomalous reading today change the average and therefore values far in the past. That is probably why the huge anomaly this month bumped 2005 back up; it changed the average value that was used to fill in some missing data for that year. While that could effectively reduce the slope of warming by raising past temperatures when recent temperatures rise, the change would have differing impact depending on the amount of missing data in the past. Also, Hansen seems to set a “break point” of sorts for some stations where temperatures appear to get adjusted upwards after that point, and downwards before. That effectively increases or exaggerates the warming.
Anyway, GISS is, as you said, a mess.
Has this happened before? Is this a measure of how many stations currently on the grid that are unable to report because they do not work anymore? If this is a one-time problem, why are so many stations apparently not reporting this time around? Has the data been scrubbed prior to September for similar problems and this one just got through by mistake? Exactly how many current stations report 999 for any one month but we don’t see that till after it has been scrubbed? How many 999 months does a station have to go through before it is finally kicked off the grid? I remember the last time the data base was reduced. It didn’t happen gradually but more all at once. And temp averages changed because of it. I have a hunch that worldwide, there are as many stations not working anymore as there were back then. But is there a reason why they are keeping them on the grid this time instead of dumping them like they did earlier in the last century?
evanjones. You have my sense of humour – and I’d like it back please.
[REPLY – Sorry, sir. Your receipt is not in order. (On second thought, we could always just share it.)]
[…] many people will have read there was a glitch in the surface temperature record reporting for October. For many Russian […]
DR-
You completely missed my point. I am not criticizing the UAH data (in fact, in an earlier post I pointed out that GISS, Hadley, UAH, and RSS all show essentially the same trend over the long run).
What I am pointing out is the blatant double standard exhibited by some/many here.
GISS/Hanson make a mistake involving a small area of the earth for a single month and (some) posters here want Hanson’ head on a platter.
But UAH’s mistake- which affected 20+ years of data, well, that’s not even worthy of mention.
GISS’s argument that surface stations provide more reliable results than satellites becomes increasingly untenable. When you try to explain to an earthling, i.e. someone not obsessed with climate, why the Goddard Institute for Space Studies uses surface stations you can watch their eyes roll as they try to make sense out of the thing. Maybe there is no sense to be made out of it anymore?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
2008-11-11: Most data posted yesterday were replaced by the data posted last month since it looks like some mishap might have occurred when NOAA updated their GHCN data. We will postpone updating this web site until we get confirmation from NOAA that their updating programs worked properly. Because today is a Federal Holiday, some pages are still showing yesterday’s data.
well;
RealClimate; our comments under attack.
We in the peanut gallery. under attack.
well…well
Bizarre, totally bizarre. It’s time to get a new weatherman, lol – Hansen is obviously out of his element now. He can’t even figure out which data is good and which is corrupt. Satellites rule, GISS drools.
[…] GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data […]
<>
Except for the media reporting October 2008 as the warmest October ever. And since this is really more about driving policy than it is about science, this is actually the bit that actually matters.
**Of course, this issue will resolve itself. After all, no one really acts based on one month’s climate report.**
Except for the media reporting October 2008 as the warmest October ever. And since this is really more about driving policy than it is about science, this is actually the bit that actually matters.
(I posted this comment earlier but it might have fallen foul of the spam filter)..
It’s been mentioned before (Michael Ronayne, back in April, I think), but is worth mentioning again.
This is rather like the scene in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm shows the people in the control centre that the dinosaurs are breeding; the computer hasn’t been programmed to take into account the possibility that the total number of dinosaurs could be increasing, and of course no-one has given the odd readings much thought, because they knew an increase couldn’t possibly be happening.
The same kind of blinkered mindset at work in NASA GISS?
RIP, Michael Crichton; you understood the mentality of these people very well.
To misquote Dr Malcolm: God creates Global Warming. God destroys Global Warming. God creates Man. Man destroys God. Man creates… climate models.
Whom gods destroy, they first make mad.
I suppose everyone thinks that the temps coming from Russian weather stations are totally reliable, and that Putin and Co. would not manipulate data to their own advantage if possible. Come on, folks, get real. Putin’s not stupid, he knows that the more we spend on this CO2 folly, the longer our economies will be flat on their backs. When the data conflicts so drastically with that of our own satellites, I think it’s time we reevaluate the data stream from Russian ground stations.
BC,
I’m not saying that there is any solid proof that AGW has caused changes in wildfire incidence rates or severity. I certainly didn’t say that, nor did the paper I cited say that. Neither would I support the NOAA chap you quote, presuming that they were accurately quoted. The upward trend in wildfire incidence and the apparent correlation with rising temps is likely superficial. I was actually talking about the variability in climate, so was the paper I cited. I’m saying that climate variability undoubtedly plays a role in modulating the temporal and spatial variability in incidence rates and severity of boreal forest fires. The paper I cited is one example of many highlighting the correlation between wildfires and climate variability. Can you honestly ignore the impact of El Nino on wildfires in places like SoCal and Indonesia for example? True, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but how you can state that knowing full well that temperature and precipitation control growth season, dry fuel loading and peat/humus drying rates is odd. Given this, how can you so confidently rule out the possible influence of future climatic change upon wildfires….bizarre!
I wholeheartedly agree with your statements regarding the influence of misguided human management of forests upon wildfires and the influence of the spread of sub-urban dwellings into fire prone areas upon wildfires. This is not in question. I just don’t see how this somehow undoes what we know about plants, rainfall, temperatures and dry fuel loadings.
Chris V
We are not paid to get it right. Hansen is paid to get it right and spends his time lobbying for CO2 reductions and supporting AGW civil actions world wide. NASA has created a non science climate in their own house and attempts to perpetrate it on the world. It was not just a simple error but one of continuing errors. If we are to believe the president elect he will spend trillions of dollars fixing a non problem. Simple mistake indeed!
Mountains, molehills
There were 90 stations for which October numbers equalled September numbers in the corrupted GHCN file for 2008 (out of 908). This compares with an average of about 16 stations each year in the last decade (some earlier years have bigger counts, but none as big as this month, and are much less as a percentage of stations). These other cases seem to be mostly legitimate tropical stations where there isn’t much of a seasonal cycle. That makes it a little tricky to automatically scan for this problem, but putting in a check for the total number or percentage is probably sensible going forward.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mountains-and-molehills/langswitch_lang/fr
MSU TLT Oct Rank warmest
1995 10 0.205 9
1996 10 0.125 12
1997 10 0.22 8
1998 10 0.461 2
1999 10 0.063 14
2000 10 0.103 13
2001 10 0.327 5
2002 10 0.139 11
2003 10 0.464 1
2004 10 0.331 4
2005 10 0.394 3
2006 10 0.315 6
2007 10 0.225 7
2008 10 0.181 10
Thanks, MartinGAtkins.
But wouldn’t it be more accurate [and honest] to say that October 2008 ranks as the 5th coldest, rather than the 10th warmest out of the last 14 years?
John Phillip-
There were only 908 stations globally used for the October 2008 numbers? That seems awfully low, considering that the U.S. has thousands of NOAA recognized stations alone…
The GISS error points out, if it needed to be pointed out again, the advantage of satellite data over ground station data…
One or two Russian bloggers have commented that October seemed to be about as mild as September, a possible explanation for the similarity in the two datasets. Now I didn’t have the energy or the brains to work out the odds on this; I did however do a quick scan of the UK Met Office UK climate dataset. In any two succesive years the chance of a particular month showing an identical temperature for both years are about 1 in 80. The chances of two months following each other being identical are of course much lower. There is no year recorded where October was as warm or warmer than September, although theoretically possible the chances of this must be fairly minimal. The odds against identical temperatures being recorded over a number of stations dispersed across Russia must be astronomical.
In similar vein has anyone ever thought to calculate the minimum number of stations needed to give a meaningful world average temperature? I would have thought a mere hundred would do if they were properly scattered. At the moment there seems to be a tyranny of numbers, surely fewer stations of absolutely unimpeachable quality would give a more accurate figure. And less chance of a GISS type screw up. I would do this myself but lack the neccessary geek qualities.
IIRC Hansen said it could be done with as few as 60.
Seems to me like a lowball.
John Philip:
Suppose UAH or RSS was off one month by something like 0.7 degrees, do you think RC would classify it as “a molehill”?
Of course mistakes happen, what is interseting is that an obviously absurd result sailed straight through GISS, most likely because it was wrong in the “right” direction. I am quite sure this would never have happened in March/April for obvious reasons.
Jared,
GISS doesn’t need to have many stations when they do 1200 km smoothing.
Jared – Messrs Watts and Goetz know far more about this than I but from memory I believe the Met Station element of GISTEMP is built on about 4000 land stations globally, being the subset that have a reasonable history. There’s a list of the stations actually used here
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/station_list.txt
US Stations have a country code cc=425.
I suspect Gavin means the corruption is confined to a single data file containing 908 station records, but I could be mistaken. If it is 90 stations affected globally then a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that correcting this foulup is unlikely to move Oct 08 off the top spot as warmest Oct in the GISS dataset.
I’ll wager that when the corrections are made another couple of warm spots will pop up.
is this change we can believe in?
Can we just go back to a system where actual temp is measured over the course of a month and an adverage temp is reached by adding them all up and dividing by the number of days in the month. who came up with this anomily crap anyhow?
evanjones,
As I recall, without a link to verify, it was Gavin Schmidt that said 60 good stations worldwide would be sufficient. He may have been referencing someone else’s work at that time…
I have a simple question, does anybody at GISS know the meaning of data quality auditing? Or is it now 100% ideology nonstop?
What would any legitimate business do if one of their research groups published this obviously flawed data set? Why yes, you are right, they would be fired.
Science deserves better.
Chris V.,
I don’t think this error is comparable to any error that occured with one of the satellite systems.
This error was ridicilously obvious, and should have been discovered and corrected immediately.
Either there is practically no quality control at all, or the software is just to poor to be maintained or checked.
Both cases demand, that GISS/NOAA should no longer be used or referred to in scientific literature.
Thanks for the info, John Phillip.
But I guarantee fixing this error will remove October 2008 from the top warm spot. Remember, because of GISS’s smoothing methods, as described by others in this thread, those 90 stations can cover a very big area (and do, in this instance, if you look at the absurdly large 4-13.7C anomaly on the GISS map). Russia is geographically the largest country on earth.
Once again, look to the satellite data. RSS and UAH are showing Oct 2008 to be one of the coldest in the past 10 years, so there is no way I’m going to believe GISS if it still says October 2008 is even close to the warmest ever.
GISS was slow to realize their mistake because the wrong answer looked so atractive to them.
>>John M (16:15:28)
HAHAHAHA, thanks for a good laugh!
Thanks and keep up the good work WUWT.
Unless Gavin has an inside track, where is he getting this 90 of 906 stations?
Secondly if that is the case, even so, the correction should be significantly down to below “record” values.
[…] was the hottest October ever recorded. Wait! September?” Read more here and also here. […]
If local climate is long term weather in one place, and if we accept that it is variable and extremes will cancel out in the long term to reveal a trend, would it not be more valuble to examine say a 10 year running average of climate at specific sites ?
If we were to take a small number of well spread reliable stations (60 as Hansen suggests? or more?) what would the trends be? Could we then average the trends and how would that look? Has someone done this already? Am I suggesting something ludicrous?
“has anyone ever thought to calculate the minimum number of stations needed to give a meaningful world average temperature?”
One would have to find a place where surrounding conditions are relatively static. I suppose that fixed buoys scattered about the world’s oceans would do the trick. No need to have land stations at all, really. There wouldn’t be such a wide range between high and low either. Use buoys to measure “surface” temperature globally between the arctic and antarctic and use satellite data to fill in the polar regions. That should give a pretty darned good idea of “global” temperature, I would think. No need to go measuring all that noise introduced by land masses since most of the planet is ocean anyway.
I have no words but one: unbelievable
Come to think of it, we can probably already do that. Chances are that at any given time there is a ship of one sort or another in just about any grid square one might draw up in the oceans. Just have ships report daily air temperature and position at a given time each day. It could be automated. The ships would report local current air temperature at, say, 0000Z, automatically. That would give you a “snapshot” of world temperatures at that given moment. You could track changes in average global temperature on a daily basis that way.
Since the ships would be reporting their position along with their data, you select one closest to the center of the grid if more than one report from that square. Such a thing would probably be a lot more accurate than land-based temperature measurements.
Today the Danish government tripled Bjørn Lomborgs research budget for 2009. The reason: He is constantly mentioned as one of most influential scientist’s world wide and the Government is hosting a big environmental event next year.
The decision to raise his research budget however is heavily criticized in the local media because of the fact that he doesn’t think that global warming is the world’s biggest treat.
Lomborg thinks that problems like malnutrition, malaria, AIDS and poisoned water in the 3. World is more important to solve than reducing Co2 emissions…What evil thoughts!
You ask: How much is his budget next year? 1,5 million $….
I don’t even think GISS could buy a desent data cleansing application for 1,5 M$
How many polar bears will drown before we come to our senses?
Global WARMING (or freezing.. I’m not sure) can be stopped if we all stop driving, eating meat, buying things, going to work, drinking water from plastic bottles, using plastic bags for groceries, spraying crops, killing seals, voting for right wing leaders, having kids, and building homes.
Listen to those that know – we are doomed.
Considering the costs such “science” could bring, this is far more embarrasing and worse than the Mars Polar Lander imperial/metric scandal in 2000.
But, lets look at the positive side; They do not control nuclear power plants…
Copy of e-mail sent to our friend James E Hansan of NASA this evening
Dear James
Re: Heatwave – Russia – October
Read this on your NASA profile:
“One of my research interests is radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, especially interpreting remote sounding of the earth’s atmosphere and surface from satellites. Such data, appropriately analyzed, may provide one of our most effective ways to monitor and study global change on the earth. The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
Well once again you have influenced the measurements obtained.
Hockey stick revisited me thinks. Surely retirement beckons.
Kind regards
Richard Lawson
Ps apparently there is some great skiing to be had in the Urals at the moment!
Daily Tech just reported this.
The article’s last sentence:
“Dr. Hansen could not be reached for comment.”
The error “might” have been a legitimate error – Hansen is so careless with all other data and statements that form all of the parts of his zealous “mission to convert the earth” that he would NOT be checking himself or expecting an error when/if he (or his underlings) makes a mistake that shows temperatures are HOTTER.
(Note that if the mistake had shown a negative or lower temperature, Hansen would have been all over it immediately.)
However …. This DOES demonstrate that Hansen’s basic, fundamental “scientific methods and practices” as head of GISS is fatally flawed and politically motivated.
—
Note that this “error” by Hansen is being picked up by sevarel political websites, as additional evidence of the false hysteria associated with Hansen’s AGW religion.
When you run a scam its a scam ,very simple really ,you have no quantified equasion that can predict the furure ,if you did you could predict everything ,without it you have nothing but rhetoric ,dont you people know its simply impossible .
The secret society of climate science continues.
Hansen could never be reached for comment because these folks (Hansen, Schmidt, Mann, etc.) think they’re so exclusive because they’re the gate keepers and key holders to the most important scientific data around these days, the temperature record.
None of them ever want to discuss their adjustment procedures, computing algoritims, or data collection processes (ie. which station to use and why not to use others).
I bet we’ll all see some press release in the coming weeks explaining that 2008 is the 5th or 8th warmest year ever recorded by GISS and how remarkable it is because we weren’t having an el nino. And WOW, could you imagine if we WERE having an el Nino? Those 4-13.7°C anomalies would be centered over the Pacific instead of Russia.
GISS should be tossed to the scrap heap. The number of mistakes found that artificially inflate temperatures are increasing with each month that passes. Temperatures from the 1920’s and 1930’s remained the same for 50-60 years until global warming became an issue and Hansen was put in charge of keeping the NASA temperature record. Suddenly it was adjusted colder at the beginning of the 20th century and wamrer at the end. Then it was found out that an error in GISS algoritim was the cause of this mistake. I guess when someone has to readjust the data dozens of times to suit their point of view there’s a greater chance for a mistake.
The thing that bothers me about this incident is “why / how” it was caught.
I am ashamed to say that when I grabbed the GISS data yesterday I looked at the anomaly graph, saw the dark red splotch in the middle of central Asia, and did nothing more but mutter “that’s interesting” to myself. I had simply become used to seeing big red splotches in such maps.
What’s worse is that the folks at GISS apparently did the same thing. I did not ask and they did not ask “why”. Collectively we assumed that it made sense.
Then comes along John S. who actually looks into the reason why, and he discovers a flaw in the data. A couple emails fly, I update this site with the discovery and Steve McIntyre writes of his classically witty posts on Climate Audit describing the problem. Emails fly to GISS and NOAA and the faulty results are pulled until they can be fixed.
The even-handed folks at RC note that even though “nothing of any consequence has changed in terms of our understanding of climate change”, it is good so many eyes are fixed on the data and results because it means a “few more i’s have been dotted and t’s crossed.”
The error was pretty big – some 10+ degrees Celsius. That seems a pretty big I or T to me. I worry about the small i’s and t’s that go unnoticed. Remember that we are talking about a fairly small trend here (oh sure, it looks big when I display it as an anomaly on a magnified plot). Case in point, Jean S. noticed this very same problem occurring with Finish stations in September. But it was not large enough to grab anyone’s attention (although it seems to have been fixed, perhaps by the addition of new Finnish records).
I am left thinking how large must the error be for it to be noticed, or how small must it be to go unnoticed?
[…] LINK TO HANSEN SHENANIGANS […]
Come on Manfred!
Do you really think that the GISS error (which involved less than 10% of the stations, for a single month, and was discovered within 24 hours) is more serious than the UAH error, which significantly affected their global anomaly trend for more than 20 years worth of data?
That there was an error in the UAH data was also “ridiculously obvious” to many for a long time, because it was so different from the GISS, Hadley and RSS temperature trends.
Would you be as magnanimous if GISS announced a 20+ year error, and suddenly increased their temperature trend by 25%?
But the UAH temperatures are produced by Spencer and Christy (who are on the side of goodness and light), while GISSTemp is produced by the evil Hanson. 😉
I don’t think the UAH data should now be thrown out because they made a mistake- they fixed it! And I don’t think the RSS or GISS data should be thrown because they made (and fixed) some mistakes.
You also might want to take a look at this:
http://cce.890m.com/giss-vs-all.jpg
and tell me which temperature set(s) “should no longer be used or referred to in scientific literature”, and why.
From DailyTech:
“NOAA’s Deputy Director of Communications, Scott Smullens, tells DailyTech that NOAA is responsible only for temperature readings in the US, not those in other nations.”
Ok, but isnt the temp trend still going up? It still looks like GW is real. There have been cooling periods around 1950 and 1965. Its not like the temp is going to go straight up.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discovered that this same kind of error has happened before and gone unnoticed. Particularly if it happened at only a few scattered stations here and there. So until someone goes back and checks every single data point from every single station, I really have little confidence in the data as presented. That checking should be coming from Hansen’s budget.
Chris V–re-plot you data over the last 10yrs and you will see a difference
[Chris V: “You also might want to take a look at this:
http://cce.890m.com/giss-vs-all.jpg “]
Also worth checking out lower chart of this:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Monthly/upper_air_temps.gif
Not so good for RSS then?
Bob B –
The inset in that graph shows a running 5-year average since 1980. Over the last 10 years, UAH looks to be the outlier (but not by too much). What do you see?
All four series for last 10 years, baselines adjusted:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/last:120/offset:-0.15/mean:12/plot/gistemp/last:120/offset:-0.24/mean:12/plot/uah/last:120/mean:12/plot/rss/last:120/mean:12
The differences are not that great given the radically different way they are calculated, I think.
Chris-
I take it you think that UAH is better (in part) because it agrees better with the surface station data (at least over the time period covered by that graph)?
I have no position on whether UAH or RSS is closer to reality over the long run. But I agree with you that comparison with the surface-stations (either Hadly or GISS-they’re both pretty much the same) is the appropriate metric.
Chris V–if you plot a graph by month you will see a big difference in the slope of the cooling trend. Taking an RMS or RSS fit of the data is deceiving.
Paul-
I agree with you. When four different groups using different methods on different data sets get essentially the same result, I have to think there is some underlying reality there.
I have never understood how people can claim that the satellite results are so much more reliable than the surface stations when: 1) they are all so close to each other; and 2) the two satellite temps differ from each other as much as they differ from the surface stations.
Funny that those who scream the loudest about the implications of this data, show the greatest ineptitude in gathering it. Looks like ol’ Jim Hansen (or “JiHad” as I call him), feeling a heightened sense of the walls crumbling around him, let desperation get the best of him and took his ruse embarrassingly over the line.
It should be priceless to hear his explanation. He now has to explain not only how such a blunder could be made by such an alleged expert, but also try to salvage the credibility of the “peer review” process that he and his ilk give the daily propaganda pieces found at realclimate and elsewhere. In light of such poor fact checking, peer-review seems highly suspect.
Most hilarious of all is that this news comes right on the heels of Gavin Schmidt’s (JiHad’s troll) editorial piece in an Australian publication, defending realclimate as being full of highly accurate scientific data and peer reviewed publishings.
While it is easy to laugh, I think the noble thing to do at this point is extend a gesture of kindness to JiHad and Schmidt. If you see either one of them, be a pal and kindly help them pull the MASSIVE FOOT out of their mouths…
Chris V:
I’m curious. Why would you post one chart [twice] that ends in year 2000, and another chart that ends in 1990?
I’ll see your charts and raise you: click
….speculating…
Putin is playing games in Siberia.
He directs his temperature folks to keep the numbers high to influence the U.S. in their march to Cap & Trade and perhaps others in the West That slowly hobbles the U.S./Western economies and then he can catch up militarily.
He remembers what Reagan did to outspend the U.S. to end the cold war.
Could China do such a thing also?
Has this happened before?
Good point.
It’s never the first time they did it, is it? It’s the first time they got caught.
John Goetz (16:18:33): Exactly my point in my comment at RC.
It is not a conspiracy. The .dly (daily temperature records) do not show the problem. The problem is a bug in software that NOAA wrote in adjusting the .dly records and merging them into the beast known as v2.mean.
Please stop with the silly conspiracy theories.
Chris V
You keep bringing up UAH “twenty year error”. RSS is still in error according to Randall and Herman
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007JD008864.shtml
Diurnal correction signatures still exist in the RSS LT time series and are likely affecting the long term trend with a warm bias.
What part of that don’t you understand?
There are also a multitude of studies concluding surface station data having a warm bias for the last 30 plus years.
Choose your poison.
Chris V:
Then I guess they don’t “get essentially the same result”…
crosspatch (14:55:32) :
“meaningful world average temperature . . . fixed buoys scattered about the world’s oceans . . . use satellite data to fill in the polar regions.”
I have doubts that you have found the Holy Grail of the global temperature. Year by year, the precise location of ocean currents shift so by fixing a particular longitude and latitude, you could be unduly influenced by inconsistent currents. Also satellite data does not capture the polar regions.”
Chris V. (16:20:08) :
Chris V: I do not think you are fair in equating GISS errors with the need to adjust UAH data.
The GISS error reflects a continuation of sloppy and questionable practices. The need for the UAH adjustment was due to the discovery of a phenomenon not previously explored – orbital decay. The issue was found because UAH data and procedures were so open and reproducible.
The “error in the UAH data was” not ‘ridiculously obvious.’ At the time, GISS and Hadley were using unknown procedures of unknown quality control. (Hadley procedures are still largely unknown and quality control issues still rage.) I do not believe that RSS was in disagreement with UAH – RSS was developed because of the orbital decay issue.
RSS and UAH have a collegial relationship where RSS readily acknowledges UAH help in solving its own shortcomings.
Actually we do have to consider that people do revise data and correct it ect. We’ve all been a bit over the top. However I still do not trust GISS data sorry, because its repetitive and always goes up! LOL
Conspiracy theory? Maybe not, but what government *doesn’t* manipulate data to their own advantage, especially one with a near-dictator in charge? Hell, NASA is an agency of the USA government, and it’s clear that temp data manipulation (ok, ‘adjustment’) has taken place, as documented on this blog over and over again. If we continue forward, as we have, with blinders on, it’s going to be a rough road ahead.
Smokey-
you’re confusing me with Chris (I’m Chris V.). WRT your link, I don’t think 6 years is sufficient to establish a long-term trend. Maybe I’m wrong. In 5? years we’ll know.
DR-
I’m only harping on the UAH correction to counter all the people who are harping on this recent error in GISSTemp. I don’t have a dog in the UAH vs RSS debate. Given all the uncertainties and possible sources of error in determining temps from the MSU data (WAY more difficulties than dealing with surface stations!) I am a little surprised that they are so close to each other, and to the surface stations.
Jeff-
I dunno. When I look at all four temp sets plotted relative to the same baseline, they look pretty similar to me! There’s a lot of noise in the short run, but over the long run they track each other pretty closely. Harping on the little details misses the big picture- kind of like comparing the S and P 500 to the DOW.
Jorgen F: The Scandinavians have been quite smart about this whole AGW thing and have not gone over the top, even though you think they would consider the pretty high anomalies seen over the past few years especially in Sverige. I think they realize that this could actually be “normal” in the context of “climate”. No silly statements or rash actions/commitments have actually come out of Scandinavia compared to USA, Britain or Australia. For example, Australia has committed AUD$50 billion to further cooling a cooling earth! Probably no one has bothered to look at the global temperature record since 2002, LOL.
DR said:
“There are also a multitude of studies concluding surface station data having a warm bias for the last 30 plus years.”
I am unfamiliar with these studies, but is that bias quantifiable? If it is, it is correctable. And GISS and Hadley both take steps to do that.
Do a little research into what goes into processing the raw MSU data to get the RSS and UAH temperatures. There are a ton of variables they have to deal with- orbital drift, instrument drift, interference between various layers of the atmosphere, instrument changes… It’s a lot more complicated than dealing with the surface station data.
For example, did you know that 9 (I think) different satellites have been used to collect the MSU data? Each time a new one comes on line and replaces an old one, there is a “step change” that has to be corrected for. It’s kind of like when a surface station gets moved, except with the satellites, it’s not just one measurement point, it’s the entire data set!
It’s kind of like moving every single surface station every few years! Imagine the fun posters on this blog would have with GISS if the surface stations did that!
UAH and RSS certainly do a very good job in correcting for this stuff, but I hope you will forgive me if I don’t take the satellite measurements as the “ultimate authority” on temperature changes.
ning @ (11:57:32) :
ning perhaps we got our wires crossed. Of course climate variability plays a role in wildfire incidence— natural climate variability. We see it in FL (where I burn) every year. Some years are wet (very few wildfires), while some are dry (lots of wildfires). What I’m saying (and an ever-growing number of others) is that “man-made climate variability” is something that has been conjured out of thin air by a group of politicians, Leftist eco-activists and their “scientists” as a means to control every aspect of the lives of the citizens of the world. For “scientists” to make hysterically-inaccurate predictions (yes, the NOAA guy was quoted accurately) and have said predictions be put into Socialist wealth-redistribution schemes, as well as misguided forest management policies, is simply unconscionable.
The more light that is shone on the UN’s IPCC and Algore and his croneys, the more it is becoming obvious that their cause isn’t based upon sound science, but a Marxist political agenda.
Again, thanks for clearing up what I misunderstood about your previous comment.
Now, I must retire for the night so that if the weather is right tomorrow, I and my co-pyros may increase our carbon footprints by a matter of tens, if not hundreds or thousands, of tons. 😉
paulm (16:35:28) :
Ok, but isnt the temp trend still going up? It still looks like GW is real. There have been cooling periods around 1950 and 1965. Its not like the temp is going to go straight up.
No.
Global temperatures have declined slightly the last ten years.
More accurately: From 1995 through 2005, temperatures were essentially stagnant, after rising approximately 1/2 of one degree from 1970 through 1995.
This year’s radical decline over the 2007-2008 winter means that average global temperatures today are about the same as it was in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The current trend (with the current La Nina cold weather oscillation continuing through (probably) the middle of next year) indicate that this cooling trend will continue.
The entire premise of the AGW extremists is based on the single 25 year period (in earth’s history) between 1970 and 1995 when both CO2 and temperatures both rose. Before 1970, temperatures were falling radically while CO2 rose, and after 1995, temperatures have remained steady (or declined) while CO2 rose.
No prediction made by any AGW climate control computer programs has been correct over even short periods of time (1-4 years).
An Inquirer said:
“The need for the UAH adjustment was due to the discovery of a phenomenon not previously explored – orbital decay.”
No, they had an arithmetic error in the formula they used to calculate the effect of orbital decay.
You think the GISS errors show “a continuation of sloppy and questionable practices”. What about an arithmetic error that goes uncorrected for 20+ years? What does that show?
I only brought this up to show the double standard that’s been applied here by posters who have said things like “GISSTemp should no longer be accepted in any peer reviewed paper!”.
I am not condemning UAH!!!! I only used it as an example because I know how much a lot of the posters here LOVE UAH. 😉
The fact is that ALL the data sets have had errors. I am sure they ALL will have more errors in the future.
The important thing is that they get corrected, right?
We like UAH because it operates in the clear.
Yes, the important thing is that the errors are corrected.
And while we’re at it, any agency that conceals any part of its procedures should be decertified and dismissed as non-science. Data. Algorithms. Operating Manuals. Code. After all, what reasonable person could possibly argue with that? GISS? NOAA? HadCRUT? Yoo-hooo!
Besides, how else will we be able to correct the errors?
Meanwhile, General Ripper, what about a nice spot of tea and the code?
[…] Via Headless Blogger comes this quote by Aussie blogger Andrew Bolt after an error was discovered in the GISS dataset for October. September was the hottest October ever recorded. Posted in Quote […]
I am unfamiliar with these studies, but is that bias quantifiable? If it is, it is correctable. And GISS and Hadley both take steps to do that.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007JD008465.shtml
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/jgr07/M&M.JGR07-background.pdf
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/cr/v33/n2/p159-169/
And for good measure:
http://www.ejournal.unam.mx/atm/Vol21-2/ATM002100202.pdf
At Least Chris V has put a possible valid point across re satellite data complexities point taken from a die hard skep[tic
Chris V.-
Sorry, but you cannot compare the mathematical formula error that UAH had with this glaring and much more obvious error. Why did the UAH error take so long to find? Because it wasn’t very obvious. This GISS error was so obvious that it was discovered within 24 hours of GISS releasing their October numbers…and yet somehow their own people did not catch it.
There is no excusing it, this is an example of very poor quality control.
Smokey (12:35:04)
Not really, because Oct 2008 is not the 5th coldest over the entire data set. Also I posted when the headline of the thread stated GISS had it at the warmest ever. None the less I understand your intent.
What’s up? The data that was withdrawn from the GISS website last night until the mess will be sorted out seems to be back and the same as before?! The explanation at the beginning of the page that there are problems with data is removed and the graphs bear a text: “(Last modified: 2008-11-10)”. No, it’s not in my cache…
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.txt
What’s up? The data that was withdrawn from the GISS website last night until the mess will be sorted out seems to be back and the same as before?! The explanation at the beginning of the page that there are problems with data is removed and the graphs bear a text: “(Last modified: 2008-11-10)”. No, it’s not in my cache…
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
What’s up? The data that was withdrawn from the GISS website last night until the mess will be sorted out seems to be back and the same as before?! The explanation at the beginning of the page that there are problems with data is removed and the graphs bear a text: “(Last modified: 2008-11-10)”. No, it’s not in my cache…
Vincent Guerrini Jr (20:54:50) : Jorgen F: The Scandinavians have been quite smart about this whole AGW thing – except for Bert Bolin, and appointing Al Gore to be a Saint, they seem pretty canny, with Segalstad, Svensmark, Humlum, and others… must be all those years hands-on in the Arctic… seeing fluctuations every year…
The “Long Tail” of small mistakes that add up – Joe D’Aleo comments in What’s New and Cool (ICECAP) on the factors: “How about looking at the known warm biases… like a 66% station dropout, tenfold increase in missing data, little or no urbanization or land use change adjustment based on flawed science and bad siting. Even here in the US, recall Anthony Watts’ band of volunteers have found only 4% of the nearly 600 stations surveyed thus far met the government’s standards for ideal siting and 69% were poorly or very poorly sited.
It would be nice to see a piece of work that puts all these together clearly, Lomborg-style – or tell me if it already exists please!
Sorry for cross posting with Climate Audits’s thread…
Re my post at 01:58:26 – the data and maps are gone again from GISS site, though the explanation about errors in source data that was there yesterday is still missing?!
I couple of days ago in another thread I pointed out that GISTEMP had spiked before and hence this wasn’t particularly unusual or likely to persist. But the revelation of this error has made me think – has this happened before?
Looking at the monthly deltas of GISTEMP:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1979/derivative
there are some pretty big spikes in there, some even bigger than this month’s error.
OT
According to Spaceweather:
“New-cycle sunspot 1008 is growing rapidly. The sun is purple today because the picture was taken through a violet Calcium-K filter, which reveals bright magnetic froth around sunspots. Photo credit: David Leong of Hong Kong”
I wonder why the SOHO sun image link at the top right of this page has not been updated. Is this spot visible without the filter?
More october heatwaves in Siberia.
Maybe someone would like to check the situation for 2007 and 2005.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=09&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=2007&year2=2007&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=09&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=2005&year2=2005&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Just a quick note: Since GISS have now withdrawn the data I’ve also backed out the errored data from WFT; it seems only fair. Hence the plots above now won’t show Oct 2008; that’s the problem with dynamically generated graphs!
(but I did keep a copy for posterity 😉
The plots are for October 2007 and October 2005
I find it strange with these Octonber heat waves in Siberia previous years
In October 2000 there is a very strong heat wave in Murmansk.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=09&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=2000&year2=2000&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
In October 1999 there is a heat wave in central Siberia.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=09&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=1999&year2=1999&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Back in October 1997 Siberia was boiling 🙂
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&month_last=09&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=10&year1=1997&year2=1997&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Dotto,
That October 2007 graphic is telling. Wasn’t that huge anomaly precisely when the Arctic sea ice was making a historic comeback? Perhaps Hansen used this trick before and wasn’t caught.
I think there is more in it than just problems in October 2008. Looking back one finds relatively frequent heat waves in Siberia. Maybe there is a general problem with data from this region due to: large temperture drops in Sept-Oct transition, slow data fram Russia, very few measurement spots per area. All this results in high impact for Earth:s temperature.
Could someone who knows how to do it check for dupilcated tempertures in the areas and years seen in the plots above?
Hmmm I can’t seem to get the any GISS link to load. Did they shut down the website?
The “climate scientists” a couple of hundred years back weren’t all that honest either…
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/the-story-of-the-witchdoctor-and-his-climate-predictions
Enjoy!
Just after publishing my findings here I can not access http://www.giss.nasa.gov/ anymore. Strange!
I have copies for 2007 and 2005
MartinGAtkins,
I was not referring to the entire data set, but only to the past 14 years. I thought you were, too, in your original post. I think we’re still on the same page.
What has always bothered me is the constant referring to anomalies as always the ‘#X warmest year’, rather than the ‘#X coldest year’ — which is equally accurate. Unless there’s something I’m missing.
It seems that if a particular year is above the mean, it should be called the X warmest, and if it’s below the mean it should be called the X coldest.
Chris V, my apologies for the name confusion.
The reason I posted that chart was in response to the charts that were posted ending eight, and eighteen years ago respectively. We know there was a warming trend during those years, and to post charts ending in 1990 and 2000 misrepresents the current situation. It appears that it was done in order to claim that global warming is still occurring. At the present time, it is not.
I suggest checking out woodfortrees‘ chart: click
The planet is still emerging from the last Ice Age, and it is to be expected that there is a gradual warming trend occurring, interspersed with decades of cooling. That is the standard theory.
But what is now being claimed by some as their new hypothesis is that this natural warming is instead caused by human emitted carbon dioxide, and that increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 will lead to catastrophic, runaway global warming. The fact that CO2 continues to rise while temperatures fall discredits this claim, and their current fallback position seems to be that CO2 also causes global cooling.
According to the Scientific Method, the burden of proof is on those putting forth a new hypothesis — not on those in the mainstream of science, who understand that the planet has been gradually warming for the past 11,000 years, and continues to do so.
Since the catastrophic AGW hypothesis has been repeatedly falsified, what we are left with is the current climate, which is well within natural parameters. It is entirely normal. The current and expected minor temperature fluctuations are nothing to be worried about.
Those still pushing the failed AGW/CO2 hypothesis have ulterior motives, which is why they consistently hide out from any neutral, moderated debate regarding their AGW/CO2/runaway global warming claims.
Just after publishing my findings here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/ became unavailable.
John Philip posted the link to Gavin’s ‘mountains and molehills’ statement, but I dare say many here might not have taken the trouble to read it. Words like ‘craven’ and ‘mealy-mouthed’ come to mind, but tell me if I am being unfair. The link is
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mountains-and-molehills/
It seems the recent GISS error is a molehill, whereas the ocean-cooling story, which was found to be really an ocean-not-warming story after some equipment errors had been corrected, was apparently a mountain.
To my way of thinking, Gavin should have acknowledged and thanked the person/s who brought the error to his attention. Instead, he tried to play it down, and attacked the “Watt’s blog” to boot.
egrey (05:15:10) Hah, John Phillip calls Gavin’s post a ‘dignified and measured response’. Touting models over data and whining about Freedom of Information requests sounds ‘outrageous and hysterical’, to me.
========================================
To the administrator of this site.
Send me an email and I will send copies of the GISS temperture anomaly maps of October 2007, 2005 and 1999 which I copied before the site was closed down.
I can’t get here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/ either.
DaveE
Evan Jones, please.
In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between natural persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement. There is no limit on the number participating in the conspiracy and, in most countries, no requirement that any steps have been taken to put the plan into effect (compare attempts which require proximity to the full offence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(crime)
FM
[…] El Instituto Goddard (GISS), perteneciente a la NASA, acaba de registrar uno de los meses de octubre más calidos de la historia. Un aumento de 0,78 ºC en la temperatura global. Sin embargo, el investigador Steve McIntyre denuncia que el GISS ha copiado los datos registrados en Rusia en septiembre.Todas las mediciones oficiales apuntan a que 2008 será uno de los años más fríos de la última década. Sin embargo, el Instituto Goddard (GISS), perteneciente a la NASA, uno de los principales organismos de referencia del Panel Intergubernamental sobre el Cambio Climático de la ONU (IPCC) acaba de anunciar que el pasado mes de octubre ha sido uno de los más calurosos de la historia. En concreto, según sus mediciones, la temperatura global registró el pasado mes un aumento de 0,78 grados centígrados respecto a la media de referencia. Una anomalía muy significativa, pero que no encaja con la evolución histórica que viene registrando el aumento medio de la temperatura global en octubre a lo largo de los últimos años (por debajo de 0,6 grados centígrados, y descendiendo), tal y como recoge el portal WattsUpWithThat. […]
I think I hae a stupid question, but can someone help me with this?
I don’t know how to use this site:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
Which one of all those altitudes I have to choose?
The health of the entire climate science community is so wretched it has me retching. YUUCK!
I’m not too concerned about posting the bad data, but looking at comparisons from the past few years between mean data provided in WeatherUnderground and those provided by GISS, it really does appear that GISS often lists the temperatures as being 1-2 degrees C higher. I have noticed this less in the US (where temps seem to be the most stable), and much more common in Russia (see my earlier post.)
There may be a reasonable explanation for this, but, at first glance, it raises some concern for me. Has anyone else looked into this? What have you found?
[…] it appears I am not the first to notice this. At WUWT, Dotto commented: Dotto (05:06:28) […]
Is Anthony’s blog on West Coast time? It’s 8:56 and giss.nasa.gov is down for me too!
Dotto–I’d love to see your images. I’m curious to see what was up!
Smokey-
The graphic I posted goes through 2007 (not 2000).
John Goetz:
I have added a simple 12-month moving average displayed in red.
I suggest when you do that not to use Excels ‘moving average’ function [as it introduces a phase shift]. Instead make a column next to your data column [say it was B] with this function =AVERAGE(Bn-6:Bn+6) and omit the first and last 6 points, then plot both columns.
[…] Did we just survive the warmest October ever? […]
Chris V.:
I can see why you would leave 2008 out:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
Many governments all over the world are in the final stage of legislation procedures
in the fight against AGW.
This “honest” mistake comes at a convenient moment in time and I am quite sure we can expect some more in the near future.
The media is bombarding the public with bias news and documentaries on any level at an intensity never seen before.
See what will happen after the USA joins the new AGW religion.
Welcome to
The most regrettable part of this is that Steve McIntyre, being a Canadian, cannot run for president of the United States.
Can we get Dotto’s images posted here?
Smokey-
I didn’t make that graph. It doesn’t include 2008 because it shows annual anomalies. 2008 isn’t over yet.
Evanjones-
Two of your links are about UHI- a well-known effect, that GISS adjusts for. You may not like the way GISS does their adjustments, but that’s a separate issue.
Your other two links (about the same paper) are interesting. But their conclusions do seem to be in disagreement with satellite and sea-surface temperature data.
BTW, I assume Mckitrick and Michaels figured out the difference between degrees and radians for this latest paper?
http://timlambert.org/2004/08/mckitrick6/
dotto and Lucia
Here you find maps from 2005 2006 2007 2008
http://www.climate4you.com/
I’m unable to enter the GISS site either. May be they’re “adjusting” their graphs to even higher temperatures… LOL. Hansen and company are getting weirder and weirder… perhaps they’re off their meds…
I managed to get copies of the temperature anomalies for October 2007, 2005 and 1999 before http://data.giss.nasa.gov/ was shut down.
If the administrator sends me an email I will be glad to share them.
[…] Doom! DOOOOOM! Al Gore warned you this would happen! […]
Evanjones said:
“We like UAH because it operates in the clear.”
Is their code available? I can’t find it on their website.
Or do they handle it the way GISS did, and just publish their methods in the journals?
Looks like GISS will hear the snapping of the rubber glove for months now.
Very interesting. If you look at the temperature anomlies maps you see that the largest anomalies always occur in Siberia!
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Monthly%20surface%20air%20temperature%20anomalies%20versus%20average%201998-2006%20in%20areas%20between%20%2072oN%20and%2060oN
[…] GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data […]
re: Chris V. (10:47:25) :
BTW, I assume Mckitrick and Michaels figured out the difference between degrees and radians for this latest paper?
BTW, Chris V. here are a few errors that are much more recent. Maybe you’ll want too ensure that they’ve been corrected, too.
Chris V,
It appears that we will disagree on appropriateness to equate the orbital decay issue in UAH vs. errors in GISS. However, I will commend you for your description of the complexity (and opportunity for differing values) in the RSS and UAH satellite data. Your summary is the best that I have seen.
At the same time, I am amazed that you can have such a good handle on RSS & UAH algorithm and at the same time be so dismissive of quality concerns at GISS & Hadley. You state that if there is any warm bias in surface station measurements “GISS and Hadley both take steps to [correct that].” After lengthy resistance and lack of transparency, GISS has given us an explanation (and code) on what it does in that regard; however, that procedure is not convincing, and it is not even reproducible. Many have pointed out that Hadley has not revealed what it does to address the issue. If you have insight on what Hadley does, I am sure that many readers would love to hear about it.
For several years, I was not concerned about what temperature measure to use since they seemed to follow the same basic trends. (In fact, if GISS is using satellite data for SST, then it would stand to reason that trends would be similar.) However, there seems to be increasing divergence recently, and it is not clear that the four continue to complement and confirm each other.
Perhaps you could share some insights on a recent question that I have not seen answered. Often on the GISS website, the graphs show no data available for ocean areas that are far from islands and coasts, but areas close to islands and coasts have temperature values. Is GISS assuming that a surface station temperature is good for 1200 km into the ocean – thus wiping out the need for satellite data in those ocean areas?
Dotto (11:23:16),
That’s because the greatest variation and most rapid swings of seasonal temperatures occur in Siberia.
Or do they handle it the way GISS did, and just publish their methods in the journals?
Getting the code out of GISS was like pulling eye-teeth. And that was a sick dodge: An ASCII dump with no operating manuals.
The “methods” GISS releases do NOT allow replication of adjustments.
I don’t know about public access to UAH code, but they demonstrably share with others (and accept corrections).
Fast timing. Dotto notices problems @ 4.29, 4.31, 4.36, 4.37, 4.39. Then at 4.49 Mike Bryant cannot access the website… nor can Dotto et al.
Here are NASA and Humlum “2005 surface temp anomalies” side by side. Even allowing for the possibility that the anomalies are against different baselines, they are, well, DIFFERENT… eh?
It just keeps getting sadder and sadder at GISS.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4325
Makes you wonder how much of what I call the “Great Trans-siberian Heat Wave” that has been driving GISS temps up the past few years is also due to some errors similar to this one.
If you look at the past monthly temp maps from GISS, the one place that seems to see more “global warming” than anywhere else is Siberia. You would think that if Siberia were truely seeing that much warming, you would hear more about ancedotal evidence of it.
Some of the fighters against the climate scam have rest their case.
One of them tells us why. I do not agree with him. I think we should fight and NEVER give up. David Archibald knows exactly where we are up against. We are dealing with people who get paid for their lies.
This is from Hans Schreuder, http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com
20 July 2008 – This is the final entry on my mission to prove the irrelevance of carbon dioxide in influencing the climate. Entrenched ignorance can not be militated against.
—–
From Science is Broken
In earlier centuries, science had a positive influence on society in developing social awareness around objectivity and rationality. It replaced the witchcraft and hocus pocus of charlatans with evaluation of objective evidence as the means of determining truth. But now, science is leading the pack for charlatanism and witchcraft, as junk science is acquiring a greater legitimacy than the charlatans ever had.
Wherever there is corruption in science the most important, underlying facts are contrived, while science is applied to more superficial elements of the subject. Omitting the science where it is most relevant isn’t an error, it is fraud. That’s why the word fraud must be used in describing the major corruptions of science.
Nowadays, science bureaucrats require that every detail of research be described in grant proposals; and in the laboratory, the researchers can do nothing but fill in the blanks with numbers. The claim is that doing otherwise would be defrauding the public. So the research has to be done at a desk instead of the laboratory.
Science bureaucrats are not politicians. They are scientists who put themselves in competition with the scientists in the laboratories. The editors and reviewers of science journals do the same. The result is that the laboratory scientists are dominated by office scientists who dictate how their work will be designed and reported.
http://nov55.com/ovr.html
—–
And so I rest my case that nothing will stop the madness that has taken over the western world, an insanity that demands we destroy ourselves over the ludicrous claim that a tiny increase of a trace gas has endangered the world due to an even more ludicrous “atmospheric greenhouse effect”.
Let me therefore conclude my “I Love My Carbon Dioxide” mission by stating the following, which is in the tradition of proper science, not radiative forcing’s greenhouse effect pseudo-science:
1.
The settled science that a greenhouse warms up due to re-radiated light (energy), as set out by Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), Arrhenius (1896), NASA (2008), et al., is false.
2.
Considering, therefore, that even inside an actual greenhouse with a barrier of solid glass no such phenomenon as a greenhouse effect occurs, most certainly there can be no greenhouse effect in our turbulent atmosphere.
Energy can not be created from nothing, not even by means of re-radiated infra red. Widely accepted theory has it that more energy is re-radiated to earth than comes from the sun in the first place, amounting to almost an extra two suns. All materials above zero Kelvin radiate energy, yes, but energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise. A block of ice in a room does not cause the room to warm up, despite the block of ice radiating its energy into the room. Yet carbon dioxide’s re-radiation of infrared energy warming up planet earth is the preposterous theory hailed by not only the alarmists, but accepted and elaborated by most skeptics as well, with mathematical theorems that do little more than calculate the number of fairies that can dance on a pinhead.
The accepted carbon dioxide greenhouse theory is thus declared a complete and total scam, as more fully detailed in these papers, amongst many (and I salute all scientists who agree with these papers and will gladly publicise all papers on this subject) :
“Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics”
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Falsification_of_the_Atmospheric_CO2_Greenhouse_Effects.pdf and
“Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics”
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/indexe.htm
Hans Schreuder
Ipswich, UK
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/FAQ.html
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/carbondioxide.html
“Really new trails are rarely blazed in the great academies.
The confining walls of conformist dogma are too dominating.
To think originally, you must go forth into the wilderness.”
S. Warren Carey
“One definition of insanity is the compulsion
to make the same mistake over and over again
all the while expecting a different and successful outcome.”
Phil Brennan
Just over at PC, I posted this exchange:
And that pretty well sums up the attitude……
and this, also left at RC:
Call me paranoid, but IMHO the Russians taken the west for a ride.
Conspired with the greens and the left, feeding falsified data. They have a Trojan
horse placed to the critical places, like Hansen at NASA.
Just think about it, Russia represent a big continent, and the MSM at the west ,
well live in the west. So we just have to except what data they provide. It’s unlikely the MSM pay a visit and ask a “babushka” how hot was the season!!
We domed.
Chris V. (10:47:25) and Dan Hughes (11:30:43)
“BTW, I assume Mckitrick and Michaels figured out the difference between degrees and radians for this latest paper?”
Have Hockey Stickers figured out which end is up yet?
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3967
Les (14:50:28) Look at Chris’s four or five comments yesterday afternoon. He may not have been the first to figure it out, but his figuring out is on the record. It’s an amazing little story, and Chris deserves a lot of credit for thinking out loud and publicly.
=================================
@Vincent Guerrini Jr,
The Australian government may well spend $50B AUD on attempting to cut CO2 emissions, however I think that you are mistaken to suggest that this will cool an already cooling world.
Given Australia’s miniscule contribution to world CO2 emissions, and the undetectable impact of CO2 on climate – the $50B will have zero impact on the worlds climate (warming or cooling).
However it is a certainty that (should the current plans be implemented) the Australian Taxpayers will have less disposable income in the future and less resources for hospitals, schools, public infrastructure such as roads, ports, power stations, water supplies, etc, etc.
kim (16:22:55) I’m not trying to detract from John S. I suspect several people were all catching the error at about the same time.
Chris’s record is kind of cute, though. The ongoing expression of his amazement and wonder is classic. Should be in a book, someday.
====================================
Really, a number of the early commenters, from Fred on, were highly skeptical. It simply exposes the GISStemp bureaucratic apparatus as lethally uncritical.
=========================================
The quotatoin above, that “energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise” is both demonstrably false and irrelevant. My house uses a heat pump that extracts heat from cool air outside to further warm the house. Throw a room-temperature blanket over your 98 degree body at night and it will keep you warmer, despite the fact that it’s temperature is lower than yours.
The earth receives radiated energy from the sun, and consequently has to produce a temperature that radiates back to space the energy it receives. Although there is never an instantaneous equilibrium in this exchange, measured over a sufficiently long interval (and this could be a very very long interval depending on the settling time of the climate system as a whole), the net energy exchanged should approach zero. The temperature necessary to shed the received energy from the sun is a function of how efficiently the earth radiates energy; a perfect black body in thermal equilibrium with itself being the most efficient, i.e. the one that has to raise its temperature the least. As more CO2 is accumulated in the atmoshphere, the Earth gets less efficient at re-radiating the energy it receives from the sun (it basically churns the energy around longer and thus introduces a greater delay in shedding instantaneously received energy). Consequently temperatures somewhere in the Earth are going to rise in response.
Having said that, the relevant question is to ask how much temperatures have to increase in response to a given quantity of additional CO2. This is a question that has not, and likely will not ever be, answered with respect to as complex a system as the Earth. Anyone who thinks that you can simply calculate the answer using pen and paper, or a computer for that matter, is beeing foolish. Instead, it the answer has to be experimentally measured, and verified. Experimental procedures to measure the Earth’s actual temperature response to increasing CO2 are not, and will not ever be, possible.
Kim: I agree that Chris was first here, and he should be credited. It was a good catch.
I guess the “revised” number for October is now 0.58.
Ballad of the Climate Scientist
Nibblin on sponge cake
Watchin the sun bake
All of those Russians covered with oil
The map its a-glowin’
With red globs a-growin’
Smell that borscht, it’s beginnin’ to boil
Chorus
Wasted away again in Bloody Mary-ville
Searching for my lost samovar
Some people claim there’s a temp gauge to blame
But I don’t think I’d go that far
I don’t know the reason
Graph shows the the wrong season
(As long as it climbs, I really don’t care.)
But it’s such a beauty
Looks real convo-luty
When the carbon trade starts, I’m getting a share
(Chorus)
We’ll show the heat’s comin’
Just takes us some plumbin’
The data we’ll fudge – just numbers you see
A new algorithm
Yeah, we’re really livin’
I’ll put it right – but I don’t work for free
(Chorus)
Such an eruption
For some data corruption!
I don’t need to be treated like this
If a government bailout
Can’t get the pale out
You surely can’t blame it all on GISS.
(Chorus)
Smoke from the main frame
That Altair is so lame
Could trade her in for a gimlet or two
But its government issue
And I’m supersti-shu
Hell, give her a kick and she’ll turn tricks for you
Wasted again in Bloody Mary-ville
Searching for my lost samovar
Some people claim there’s a temp gauge to blame
If you find out – I’ll be in the bar.
evanjones-
As far as I can tell:
1) UAH (like GISS) only provides their final product on their website;
2) The raw MSU data UAH uses (like the temperature records GISS uses) can be found elsewhere pretty easily;
3) UAH (like GISS) has published their methodologies in the peer-reviewed literature. It may be tough for us amateurs to get, but it’s no problem for professionals with access to the journals.
4) UAH accepts corrections (as does GISS- remember the corrections made to the lower 48 temps that S. Macintyre discovered?);
5) The UAH code is not publicly available to anyone who wants it; the GISS code is.
So explain to me again- how is UAH more “transparent”???
IMO, the availability (or lack thereof) of their individual computer programs is irrelevant. Anybody can read up on the UAH/GISS methods in the journals, download the relevant raw data from the web, and then do their own temp reconstructions just like GISS and UAH do.
Or they can use their own methods to reduce the raw data, and see how they compare to GISS/UAH.
IMO, GISS gets a lot more scrutiny in the blogosphere than UAH or RSS because the surface temperature data is so much easier to play with- all you need is a decent spreadsheet program.
On the other hand, calculating the absorption of various microwave frequencies as they move through different layers in the atmosphere is a bit trickier. 😉
I would also argue that the way to “check” GISSTemp is not by running their code yourself, it’s by doing an independent analysis using the same or different raw data (ala Hadley, RSS, and UAH). And the fact is (as I showed previously in the graph I posted) that all of them agree pretty closely over the long run. There are short-term differences, but not much in the long term trends.
An Inquirer (11:36:07)-
I really can’t answer your question. I am no expert on any of this- far from it. I am just an interested layman with a fast internet connection (and perhaps a little too much free time at the moment). 😉
I understand Hansen has remained quiet about his error, saying nothing – even though today is no longer a government holiday – and making no excuses or explanations?
John S sent me an email about the Russian problem at 6.08 pm Eastern, almost concurrently with Chris’ recognition of the problem with Russian stations at blog time 15.57 (5: 57 pm Eastern). I asked him if he wanted to post a thread at CA, but he said that he was too busy and asked me and/or John Goetz to do so. I forwarded his email to John Goetz about 6.14 pm Eastern and John Goetz posted up the email about half an hour later (16.43 blog time – 6.43 pm Eastern), adding the Update in the head post a bit later. I posted on the matter later in the evening.
The next morning, when I looked at the GISS website, they had not provided any notice of a potential problem. We are often told by climate scientists that they do not read our blogs and, on the assumption that GISS might not know of their error, I sent Hansen a short notice that there was an error in their Russian data. About an hour later, they acknowledged the problem and at 12:07 pm Gavin Schmidt made a post that failed to acknowledge either blog as a source, leaving the misleading impression that they had identified the error through their own routine quality control:
One of their readers http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4318#comment-311169 objected to my post stating that:
I replied that, contrary to the impression that realclimate had created, the error had not been identified through their own quality control and that they had failed to acknowledge any sources, thereby leaving the impression that they had done this on their own. At all times, I made it quite clear that the error had been pointed out to me by a CA reader and that I had only confirmed the point. I stated at the blog:
Gavin has now pretended that I sought to arrogate personal credit, which obviously I did not. Gavin:
I notified Hansen of the problem by email so that they could deal with the problem, if they weren’t already aware of it. If they had already noticed the discussion here (or at CA) and were taking steps to fix it, that’s fine. In their shoes, I’d have answered back saying thanks for the heads up, that the discussion at the blogs had already come to my attention and that the matter was being dealt with expeditiously.
OF course, if they’d done that, then they might have had to mention one of the blogs.
Honorable Jim;
My name is Albert.
I live in Bern. Switzerland
Currently (1904) working in the office of patents.
I have an idea on climate change.
Answer;
Dear Albert, when we’re busy.
We have a Tyrannosaurus rex in the room.
FM
Kurt: Quoting you from above:
“As more CO2 is accumulated in the atmoshphere, the Earth gets less efficient at re-radiating the energy it receives from the sun (it basically churns the energy around longer and thus introduces a greater delay in shedding instantaneously received energy). Consequently temperatures somewhere in the Earth are going to rise in response.
“Having said that, the relevant question is to ask how much temperatures have to increase in response to a given quantity of additional CO2. This is a question that has not, and likely will not ever be, answered with respect to as complex a system as the Earth.
“Instead, it the answer has to be experimentally measured, and verified. Experimental procedures to measure the Earth’s actual temperature response to increasing CO2 are not, and will not ever be, possible.
….
False.
You are making the politically-corrupt assumption that CO2 makes up anything but a vanishing small fraction of the greenhouse gasses (GHG). CO2 is (now) at less than 4/10 of ONE percent of gasses in the atmosphere, and is less than 2% of all the mixed GH gasses in the atmosphere. Of this portion, less than 1/3 of all CO2 is man-derived (and that ITSELF) is a tremendous fertilizer – increasing plant growth over thepast few years by 17 – 27% over earlier years. Completely eliminating ALL human CO2 emissions would NOT change the net temperature cycles of the earth.
Further evidence of this lack of an influence – even Hansen cannot detect the effect of CO2 changes in HIS (flawed/exaggerated) computer programs without multiplying the overall effect of CO2 by a factor of ten. (This factor is “explained” away by claiming that it represents the increase in water vapor in the atmosphere as temperature rises – but this flaw is exposed by the fact that a change of 1/10 of one degree in the air CANNOT increase the amount of residual water vapor by a factor of ten, a factor of 1, or a factor of 1.010 Even over the oceans, the atmosphere does become saturated (outside of fog banks) hence the amount of water in the atmosphere is limited by the available water in the round/sea/plant life, NOT by the temperature of the atmosphere above the ground.)
False; You are assuming that there have been no “experiemtns” of sufficient duration to correlate CO2 levels and global temperatures. Would you agree that a 10 year pattern is long enough? Would 25 years be better?
From 1945 through 1970; CO2 rose, and temperatures fell 1/2 of one degree.
From 1970 through 1995; CO2 rose, and temperatures rose 1/2 of one degree.
Frp, 1995 through 2008; CO2 rose, and temperatures remained steady – with one bump as the El Nino of 1998 passed – then went away.
What level of human suffering and economic waste do you require to “feel good” about trying to limit CO2 emissions? How many living breathing people do you want to suffer to restrict CO2 – and doing nothing?
BillP, sung to the tune of …… ?
[REPLY – Tequilaville, of course. Good one, BillP. ~ Evan]
Kurt, You are using energy to transfer this heat flow “up-hill”. Think a bit about basic physical laws, please.
I’ve always had a tendency to write stories,
even to write books. Finally – this interesting time –
did provide a very good title:
When the World gone bonkers– on Climate Fears and Credit/Debt Ignorance
-When Globalisation did end and the necessity for Local Production did reappear
…
Gavin (RC) was right on this (first time, as far as I know):
The “cottage industry” is it.
Somehow nobody explained to him, how the U.S. of A., and lots of other countries
did survive the ‘Great Depression’ without ‘cottage industry’ – and the ‘Greater Depression’ is still evolving.
Usually I do (Copy/Save) lot of stuff from here/CA/Icecap and others.
I did start to copy stuff from RC to document the degree of arrogance and ignorance
– in my mother language, both are from the same tree –
– We are indeed living in interesting times –
With Best Regards to Anthony
and all you other folks
Well not to worry Anthony; it’s not a big deal; after all the errors are only in the GISS anomaly; it’s not like they made a mistake in the mean global surface temperature or something else unimportant. So long as they keep the mistakes on the anomaly plot, and don’t transport them off that page, they can’t cause any harm.
George
Is there a reason why their color graph looks EXACTLY the same as it did yesterday? I think they are using the same data: Siberian heat wave; UK burn zone; and a hot spot over Tunis.
OT…but I would love to know what the solar polar field strength is doing right now, such an important metric to observe at present.
The Stanford uni site doesn’t update very often.
Leif, anyone?
kurt (16:45:04) :
“The quotatoin above, that “energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise” is both demonstrably false and irrelevant. My house uses a heat pump that extracts heat from cool air outside to further warm the house. Throw a room-temperature blanket over your 98 degree body at night and it will keep you warmer, despite the fact that it’s temperature is lower than yours. ”
Do you see a difference between ‘flow’ and ‘pump’?
You should, however, get some recognition for your effort to reduce global temperatures as you attempt to refrigerate the great outdoors.
Does the blanket provide instant and measurable warmth as you throw it over yourself? How long does the blanket stay cold on the side that is nearest to you? What effect warms it up? (I assume you are talking about a typical blanket that you might buy in a shop rather than some sort of exotic purely gaseous device?
So explain to me again- how is UAH more “transparent”???
You need to read up on Steve McIntyre’s requests for code and Hansen’s repeated refusals. Finally Hansen “delivered” a jumbled “code dump”. FORTRAN, non-working, and no operating instructions.
For months coders on Mac’s site retranslated the code (it reminds me of how the Iranians “unreshredded” documents in the US embassy in 1979). Finally they managed to get up a vaguely working version. I am quite sure Hansen believed reconstruction to be impossible.
But UAH made its knowledge freely available to those who requested it, which, IIRC, is how the drift calculation error was discovered in the first place (i.e., by “outsiders”).
The point is that one is supposed to be able to replicate results. This is key to scientific method. I have read that HadCRUT is worse even than GISS in this regard. No one knows exactly how their numbers wind up the way they do. But UAH and RSS go back and forth between each other and help each other find errors. That’s how it is supposed to work.
So GISS and Hadley are uncooperative at best. I don’t think NOAA coughs up its adjustment codes either, but I may be wrong about that (other could answer). I do know that at least USHCN-1 explanations were fairly clear, but USHCN-2 was a bunch of confused nonsense.
UAH and RSS are open shops.
The Rev (or whoever) can correct me if I am wrong about any of this, but that is my understanding of the situation.
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (19:03:16) :
what the solar polar field strength is doing right now, such an important metric to observe at present.
My website at http://www.leif.org/research is now up-to-date with the latest fields. Click on ‘Most Recent IMF, SW, and Solar Data”.
The polar fields are on page 1 [bottom]. Note the weakening in late summer 2008 due to wildfires. The polar fields are now back on track [green curve], i.e. they have really not changed at all, which is normal. Once we get serious SC24 activity, the fields will erode.
evanjones (19:16:30)-
So it all comes down to “the Code” then?
I followed the goings on at CA pretty closely when all that was going on. My feeling today is the same as it was then- if you think GISS is doing it all wrong (or intentionally fudging it, as many seem to think) then WRITE YOUR OWN CODE, write up your methods, and show everyone what GISS is doing wrong.
Remember 10 or so years ago when two physicists claimed to have discovered cold fusion? The skeptical physicists didn’t say “let us borrow your experimental apparatus, so we can take it apart and see how it works, and use it to run our own experiments”. The skeptics built their own equipment (based on the descriptions in the paper) and ran their own INDEPENDENT experiments.
About the time that the GISS code was released, one poster over a CA, John V (no relation) did just that. He wrote his own simple code (over the course of a few days, so it can’t be that hard for someone who has decent programming skills), calculated the temperature trend for the lower 48, and compared it the GISSTemp for the same area.
I don’t need to tell you the results of John V’s analysis, do I?
I have never understood this obsession with “auditing the Code”. Surely SOMEONE on the skeptical side is capable of writing their own code and proving that GISSTemp is wrong??
IMO, this obsession with “the Code” has nothing to do with advancing the science (independent analyses would do that). It’s all about embarrassing Hanson and GISS.
Chris V. said:
…if you think GISS is doing it all wrong (or intentionally fudging it, as many seem to think) then WRITE YOUR OWN CODE, write up your methods, and show everyone what GISS is doing wrong.
That’s what I”m trying to tell you. I’ve been looking at other mean monthly temperature readings from Asia, and GISS seems to generate temperatures 1-2 degrees C higher. There may be an explanation for this, but I have no idea what it is.
[…] NASA GISTEMP data has been posted 12 11 2008 After GISS’s embarrasing error with replicating September temperatures in the October analysis, the NASA GISTEMP website was down […]
Seems that if GISS simply provided all raw data, and where it was collected, and method of collection, then those interested could compare the massaging that GISS does and show folks what’s up.
Is that a reasonable proposal?
“Write your own code”?
But NASA/NOAA (Hansen) are long refusing to release their source data from the original temperature records, the locations of the baseline thermometers (for audit, correction, and comparison to the standard), their conversions, their assumptions, and their parameters. Without their long term data, and their assumptions about HOW they are manipulating the public record, Hansen has no case.
They ARE spending billions of OUR dollars for their “work” every year – but are steadfastly maintaining their “elite” control over enough of the taxpayer’s information.
Howver, ir would NOT MATTER if amateurs came up with different resutls – Hansen has crowned himself the climate king, and other sources are disregarded by the mainstream media and politicians.
It is NOT our work – nor the skeptics’ logic and calculations that are suspect. It is Hansen’s work that is suspect – in large part because of errors like this, and the secrecy he is demanding over his suspect methods.
Steve (17:36:14) Thanks for the background, and it is nice to have it documented, but my understanding is that there are 3 hours difference between blogtime and Eastern. I’m not the least bit sure of that because I have no trouble visualizing situations where springing back or falling forward are the right thing to do.
Chris was also on to the problems in the British data pretty fast.
==================================
Mmm. What it all comes down to is the ability to reproduce results.
What is at issue in this particular case is fitting raw data into one end of a black box and getting adjusted data out the other side.
And you can bet that when the others tried to reproduce cold fusion and failed, the heat was on. Not on them, but the team that claimed it. And when they were unable to produce a method that would allow outsiders to produce the results, the rest was history.
Since replication and confirmation of adjustments is what is at issue, yes, it pretty much comes down to the code. And we’ll have the operating manuals, too, please, thank you very much.
evanjones (20:42:55) It is the ‘confirmation of adjustments’ that is the critical factor here. Combine that with Anthony’s earlier thought that NASA has lost control of the archaic code leads me to a lovely speculative image. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they have lost control of the rationale and process of adjustments, and have spent the last few years just filling in blanks and seeking to resemble the satellite data? Now, that would be Wizardry of Awes.
=================================================
Yes.
RAC is right, too: It’s OUR code.
Kim 20:41,
it seems like there ought to be 3 hours between blog time and eastern, but there’s only two hours difference – I checked. Just for amusement, I checked with John S as to when he spotted the problem. He’d picked it up about 3 hours before he contacted me and had contacted some people in Europe about weather over there in October, confirming that no freaks had occurred. He and Chris were pretty much moving in parallel.
In fairness to NASA, the defect was tracked down so quickly because they provide access to the data as they use it. CRU has refused to allow anyone to see their data, even repudiating FOI requests. So they would have been able to run with the story a lot longer than GISS.
On another front, Santer has refused to provide me with his data collations used in Santer et al 2008 (coauthored by Gavin Schmidt.) Even though who works for the PCMDI division of DOE’ Livermore Lab, whose mission states:
To my request for the monthly time series that he had collated for statistical analysis under the terms of his employment at PCMDI, he refused to provide the data and contacted his 17 co-authors to ensure that they were aware of this refusal. Santer stated:
Steve (21:31:17) Merci encore. I’m particularly amused by the link http://www.john-daly.com/sonde.htm at comment #155 in your Santer thread by Michael Sirks which shows John Daly’s expose of an earlier chicane by Ben Santer. He truncated both ends of a data series showing nearly flat trend to leave a series with a rising trend. This was almost a dozen years ago, and look where we are now.
============================================
evanjones (20:42:55) :
–rant mode on–
Hansen is a jerk. A dishonest, incompetent bureaucrat protected by civil service rules.
He should release his code with full documentation. Rewritten in a modern computing language. One that will run on Windows and Linux. And a Mac version, too. User friendly, with snazzy graphics. And a cool whistling sound that changes pitch as it draws the “ups” and “downs” of the graphs.
But until we reach that land of milk and honey (where all the stations have CRN ratings of 1, and are never effected by UHI) what are we to do?
Should the science just stand still? Should the skeptics just keep complaining, endlessly trashing Hansen, rejoicing amongst themselves every time a trivial error is found in GISSTEMP?
Or should they get their hands dirty, do the hard work, the real science, and produce their own temperature reconstruction, the true and correct version, one that will show how wrong GISSTemp is?
Make the code and everything completely open, and submit it for publication. Then the many skeptical scientists out there (who have been cowered into accepting AGW) will surely rally around this new, correct temperature version.
— rant mode off–
Sounds like a plan, eh?
Of course, after overturning GISSTemp, the skeptics will have to move on to the other temperature sets (that show pretty much the same long-term temperature trends).
I suggest you start with an audit of UAH. 😉
Thanks Leif….doesnt look too different from the WSO site from what i can tell, staying flat and just bumping along, no opposition flows into the poles that might wake them up.
my my my….
“Don’t touch my magic rocks”
Now, now, old chap. No need to get all hot and bothered. Everyone gets audited, all in good time.
In the meantime, let’s just have a nice cup of tea.
A nice cup of tea and the code . . .
We wish to check GISS methods. I have some trouble seeing how one is to accomplish that by getting one’s hands dirty, doing the hard work and devising methods of ones own.
Sort of like a bank saying “Audit us? Why don’t you get your hands dirty and calculate what we have on our books, yourself? And start by auditing the other guy.”
One might even say that the fact that Dr. Hansen is a civil servant is the precise reason why his work is not protected by the normal rules of privacy.
And, yes, the day UAH refuses to let St. Mac. in on its data and methods is the day I stop trusting UAH.
Now about that code . . .
[…] community with spotting the error 13 11 2008 I was driving in the middle of Nevada when all this happened, and was offline the entire time. So I can’t claim any credit here. But, it sure is nice to […]
Would it make sense to take a look at the temps that satellites produce and compare them to the data from GISS. The thing to look for is uniformity in differences. If someone was fudging data only in selected areas (like Siberia) then it should become apparent. Satellites could read a 3C difference in one area and 6C in another area. I know with satellites you have orbital decay and other factors that would make the results different from ground stations but I would suspect that the differences should be fairly uniform (assuming nothing behind the curtain is going on). The thing to look for is where the differences are small and where they are great. Ideally all differences should be small. I am just a reader and am not sure how this could be done but I would love to see someone take a poke at this. Just a thought.
Chris V:
I may be familiar with the work of John V to which you refer. He took a little more than a dozen weather stations and confirmed the GISS trend with those stations. The key feature of his work was that he used a data set of stations from Anthony Watts. (Incidentally, he did not contact Mr. Watts as he did his work; in fact, Mr. Watts did not know about the study until I told him.)
Regarding developing an alternative temperature set, it is a lot easier to do that work when one is paid for it and when resources are readily available. Nevertheless, despite lack of funds, a few years ago, one skeptic — it might have been Robinson, but Iam not sure — did develop temperature trends using rural weather stations domestically. That data set never got any traction, and you can guess the outcome of that algorithm. On the international front, I believe that Augie Auer of New Zealand was assembling a data base of international weather stations that featured little local bias and was making the case of no significant warming, but that project did not continue past his death.
Both reason and experience would suggest that it will be difficult for a skeptic’s code or algorithm to get much traction in the AGW debate. We already have four which are well-funded. Yes, I believe GISS is managed by biased individuals — just look at the time frame that they pick as normal! — but as you point out the four can be used a checks on each other.
CRN seems to be up and running. Siting looks great (photos on line). Data taken hourly, collected automatically (without human interface).
All data to be served a tatar.
We’ll get our answers.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/hourly
Evanjones-
Just for the record:
http://www.remss.com/support/rss_journal_papers_by_year.html
Click on Mears and Wentz, 2005. This is the paper where they showed the error in the UAH algorithm.
They don’t mention anything about examining the UAH “code”. What they did do was look at Christy’s paper that described the UAH analysis method. That”s where they found the error, not by “auditing the code”.
So it seems the UAH code still has not been audited…
But does UAH or RSS refuse to release? GISS has done less than the bare minimum and HadCRUT just plain old won’t. We do not know their exact methods and cannot replicate their results.
If UAH or RSS refuses requests for anything needed to check up on them, I will be very disenchanted.
I have no objection to auditing all parties.
Our objection to GISS (and others) is that requests are made and they are refused. That’s not how science is done.
The reason I like the CRN concept is that the data is raw. No adjustments to audit.
Rober Jones:
“What level of human suffering and economic waste do you require to “feel good” about trying to limit CO2 emissions? How many living breathing people do you want to suffer to restrict CO2 – and doing nothing?”
Who the hell said I was trying to limit CO2 emissions? You misunderstood my post. I think the global warming scare is nonsense, but for a different reason. You made a qualitative assertion that rising CO2 levels could not increase surface temperatures for the sole reason that the surface is warmer than the atmosphere. I noted, I believe correctly, that your assumption is false. I have an engineering degee and have studied both thermodynamics and heat transfer. Assuming an initial equilibrium heat transfer from a warm object A (the surface) receiving heat influx from an even warmer object B (the sun), and producing a heat outflux to a cooler object C (the atmosphere), if the cooler object B increases in temperature while the heat influx from the warmer object stays the same, the object A should also increase in temperature to re-establish equilibrium between the heat influx and the heat outflux at the surface of th eobject A. This is because heat flux between two adjoinging objects through conduction and convection is propotional to temperature difference between the objects [Q =k(T1-T2)] and for radiative transfer, the heat outflux is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature of the object.
With respect to the atmosphere, the NET radiative flux between the surface and the atmosphere may flow from the surface to the atmosphere, but if you increase the absolute amount of energy that the atmoshpere radiates to the surface (and the atmosphere does radiate energy to the surface since its temperature is above absolute zero), then the surface must increase its energy output to reestablish equilibrium. The only way it can do this is by increasing its temperature.
Having said that, what I noted (and what you seem to have misunderstood) was that although increasing CO2 in the atmosphere must qualitatively produce some temperature rise at the surface, this says nothing about whether that increase is significant, or even measurable. My own opinion is that it is insignificant, but I further noted that any quantitative assessment of the effect of CO2 required actual experimental measurements, which cannot be performed, hence no one can know whether CO2 is significantly changing temperatures.
Sitting back and watching what happens to temperatures over any interval, whether a year , a decade, or a century is not an experiment, first because you are not controlling the manmade CO2 input and second because you are not holding natural forcings constant. You’re just watching events unfold and guessing as to causation.
GP:
“Does the blanket provide instant and measurable warmth as you throw it over yourself? How long does the blanket stay cold on the side that is nearest to you? What effect warms it up?”
I’m not sure why these questions are relevant. The blanket inhibits the heat transfer away from your body, essentially by removing convention influences and forcing all heat flow to occur by a less-efficient conduction process. It does this despite the fact that it is cooler than your body, and it doesn’t require a reversal of a heat flux so as to flow into your body.
With all that in mind, I will say that I wonder whether the climate model assumptions upon which the global warming theoryare based, seriously overstate the relative contribution of radiative heat transfer vis-a-vis convention and conduction. This is because individual components of a composite gas like the atmosphere do not have different temperatures. A CO2 molecule, for example, will not maintain a higher temperature than a neighboring Nitrogen molecule. When a new, manmade CO2 molecule absorbs radiation from the surface, much of that absorbed energy is not re-radiated, it’s transferred kinetically to surrounding gas molecules; stated differently, the kinetic interaction between gasseous molecules is the primary way that CO2 dissipates its heat. In essence, the extra energy absorbed by the CO2 must heat the entire atmosphere as one, and because a greater mass must be heated, the temperature increase is very, very small. Granted, this means that the Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc. are all re-radiating at a higher level than they ordinarily would without the CO2, but since radiative outflux increases with the fourth power of temperature, it is better to have more mass radiating at a low temperature than a proportionally lesser mass at a higher temperature.
Anyway, this last bit is really speculative because the slimat models actually could be taking this into effect – I don’t know.
kim – thanks for the compliments!
Unfortunately, it does not prove much in the way of ability on my part.
The clue was in John’s original post: “GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data”, in particular the line:
“…Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave…”
A ten year old could have checked this against
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
and realised what was up.
[…] the recent data replication fiasco, GISS blames NOAA for providing flawed data rather than their failure to catch the repeated data […]
I hear your laugh every time I hear distant thunder.
===============================
[…] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/10/giss-releases-october-2008-data/ […]
kurt (23:41:05) :
but I further noted that any quantitative assessment of the effect of CO2 required actual experimental measurements, which cannot be performed, hence no one can know whether CO2 is significantly changing temperatures.
I have been wondering about this, i.e. why experiments have not been performed to have a quantitative measure of the effect of CO2. Billions have been spent on climate research. I could design an experiment:
A completely insulated large dome (vacuum between two walls) with a glass roof, also insulated: quarz sandwich ( to let infrared in and out) and a vacuum between to simulate the condition of only radiation finally entering or leaving. Controlled pressure to be able to simulate different heights. And of course controlled gas percentages. One could have ventilators to simulate wind convection patterns. Controlled simulated sunshine through roof.
Change the CO2 ppms and watch the temperature.
What is the conceptual difficulty/error with such an experiment? Would it not allow to measure sensitivity to CO2?
The experiment above has been performed on PBS several years to go to prove the very simple physics that when you add CO2, with sunlight it heats. It is simple physics for those who want to accept it on face value.
For those who dont – I suggest trying it on another planet – who knows for sure you might be right, there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming on say Uranus. But I’ll betcha there is.
I think Hansen is just engaged in the “politics of fear” here by coming up with data that suggests that October 2008 was the warmest globally ever. Considering North American and South American temperatures, I doubt this very much. Remember how cold it was for the World Series.
Anyway, its been freezing cold in the Northeast for the past week. It’s barely gotten above 40 degrees since November 17th. The temperatures have been more like January or February temperatures than fall temperatures.
I wonder what NASA is going to try to do with the data for November.
[…] this. Please link me. And its not the first time skeptics have notified them of problems: GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data Watts Up With That? I posted this in post #1184 regarding surfacestations.org : … as to the quality of data and […]