Jones et al 1986 methodical insertion of warming bias
by Warwick Hughes
Jones et al 1986 looked at 86 Australian stations and rejected 46 (25 Short term – 21 long term). Of the 40 they used 27 were short term and 13 long term. Of the long term there were 5 large cities.
The 27 short term stations were mostly only quoted from 1951 onward – regardless of what data was available. It just so happens that the years just post WWII were not prominently warm in Australia so an “automatic” warming trend was reinforced into the CRU Australian component.
Here are 11 examples where Jones et al systematically truncated pre-1951 data or ignored more rural data around many small town Australian stations. These graphics and text have been extracted from a 1992 vintage Word doc that somehow survived the decades and how many HDD’s.
Port Hedland
The aerodrome records 1951-80 shows a clear warming trend. Marble Bar, 150 kms south east, shows a similar trend over that period but a flat trend over 80 odd years.
Longreach
For the period 1951-80 this trend is sharply upward, yet if the Longreach Post Office record is spliced to the aerodrome record (post 1940s) the trend becomes markedly flatter. When Longreach is compared to Isisford, a much smaller rural centre 80 kms south, the trend is closer to neutral over about 70 years.
Mackay
The A.M.O. record 1951-80 shows a clearly steeper warming trend for Mackay when compared with St Lawrence and Pine Islet Lighthouse.
Rockhampton
Compared to Bustard Head Lighthouse and St. Lawrence, Rockhampton shows a warming trend of about 0.5°C over 70 years. Rockhampton data was used only for the period 1951-1970. The two nearby more rural sites show a similar temperature pattern but a negligible temperature change over 70 years.
Meekathara
The Aerodrome record 1951-80 shows a clear strong warming trend. The small centre of Cue, 120 kms south west however has a flat trend over 90 years.
Charleville
The trend for this station 1951-80 also shows a strong warming trend. Cunnamulla, a smaller centre approximately 170 kms south, shows a much flatter trend over about 80 years.
Kalgoorlie
The aerodrome record 1941-80 shows a well defined warming. However, when Post Office records are spliced on, the trend is much closer to zero over 90 years. Looking at Southern Cross, a continuous Post Office record, approximately 200 kms west, the trend is very similar, flat over some 90 years.
www.warwickhughes.com/cru86/tr027/kalgoorlie.gif
Forrest
This station 1951-80, shows a steeper warming trend than the nearby Rawlinna, where records go back to 1926.
Ceduna
A warming trend is seen over the 1951-80 period, yet the longer term and more remote Streaky Bay, where records are available back to 1925, shows a flatter trend.
Woomera
Once again, this record shows the 1951-80 warming. Broken Hill, the nearest long term station in a similar climate, shows a cooling trend over a hundred year time span.
Mt. Gambier
From 1951-80 this aerodrome station shows a strong warming trend. When the Post Office records are spliced on the trend 1860s to 1990, it is close to neutral.
It gets better, in Warwick’s blog comments, Warwick points this out:
The situation for Jones 1986 Sth Hem compilation – is that Sydney and Melbourne aside, there is not one station, long or short term, between Brisbane and Mt. Gambier. This area includes all of NSW and Victoria and contains the greatest concentration of long term recording stations in Australia. Must be one of the great and complete exclusions in the history of science.
He adds in another comment:
I have never been able to discover which stations contribute to their gridded data.
Maybe that will change now.
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Jeff C comments under “The Code” at Bishop Hill’s blog:
There appear to be some “adjustments” or variations in the algorithms for both Australia and New Zealand – at least in this “unpublished” CRU code!
Man, this is like Christmas in November.
Add this to E. M. Smith’s analysis of station dropouts. here.
He’s basically pointing out that you can manufacture warming with perfectly flat temperatures if you are creative with your station openings and closings.
Looks like the perfect “How to” lesson on cherry-picking.
Keep it coming.
I’m getting to the point of getting on top of my house and shouting:
“AVERAGE TEMPERATURE IS A FICTION! IT IS MEANINGLESS! IT’S B.S.”….
It’s energy in, energy out.
Temperture is INTENSIVE. Not an extensive variable. BY DEFINITION you cannot average temperatures from different locations.
YOU CAN ONLY TALK ABOUT “MEAN” Temperatures for a PLACE and then only in a SEASONAL CONTEXT.
The fact that these yo-yo’s have been “averaging” temperatures from divergent locations TELLS YOU THEY ARE NOT SCIENTISTS! Only political hacks.
Aside from the other “weak kneed” aspect that finally dawned on me. The “big guns” don’t do their own programming. They have a “graduate student slave” do that. (Thus the “comments” on the impossibility of doing various data manipulations IN THE CODEs.)
The “big guns are 45 to 65 years old. With probably a mean age (valid) of 54 or 55.
A LOT of folks my age have NOT kept up with the rapid changes in computing technology. It’s a GREAT temptation to LET SOMEONE ELSE (i.e.,
younger, eager, needed a stipend, etc.) to do that work.
Making the “big guns” all the more fraudulent.
Sad, very sad..
Seems that CRU has a policy of being paricularly selective in their choice of data!!
Since government funding seems to turn scientists into whores, I suggest that it either be eliminated OR provided to opposing viewpoints as well. Truth will eventually prevail even against all odds but should it be severely handicapped? In the legal system, we have open ADVOCATES of both guilt and innocence, no pretense of objectivity is made.
“The first to plead his case seems right,
until another comes and examines him.” Proverbs 18:17
My thanks to Anthony, the moderators and all patient “examiners.”
hmmmmmm a new level of contempt from the Club of Ethically Challenged Scientists
We see a pattern. There are motives to block the release of data. The CRU “helps” the data along.
Surely someone can provide similar analysis for the UK
My, my. Things just get better by the day.
Oh, excellent. Thank you.
TonyB has done an excellent and beautiful article at Jeff Id’s blog Triplets on the Hudson River which shows rank uncorrected UHI in the GISS records. You might like to put it up here presently.
Also, this reminds me, I think you would do well to post up John Daly’s page What the Stations Say which has a goldmine of global station records; this sheds lots of light on the heavy questions still hanging over GISS. It would also be a fitting tribute.
Is there any justification in the paper as to why some sites were used and not others and why available data was truncated? It certainly seems that the paper chooses data points that are misleading and only serve to bolster the desired conclusion, but I would be interested in reasoning, if indeed there is any, behind the choices.
BTW – link did not work for me.
I think a number of us have long suspected the alarmist crowd of cooking the books but without any evidence it was always dodgy ground – perhaps that will change now
John would have been pleased that his work would be so useful after his death.
I am afraid that they don’t know where the stations are and which of them exist themselves – as some of the programmer’s notes in one of the files indicate. The only thing one can safely learn from the CRU hacked documentation is that there is a lot of mess in this enterprise.
By the way, some people still underestimate how much bias one can obtain by simple cherry-picking. Let me offer you the following model.
Imagine that you have N random quantities that are randomly and normally distributed around 0, with the standard deviation (a typical error margin, if you don’t know statistics too well) equal to one. They’re copies of a quantity that should give you zero after averaging.
But imagine that one is allowed to pick a fraction of these quantities. He wants their average to be maximized, so he cherry-picks M largest values, and takes their average. For large enough M,N, only the ratio M/N matters. So let us write M as f times N, where f is between 0 and 1 and will be written as a percentage.
Again, the average of the M entries should be zero if you’re unbiased. But if you take the maximum (positive) bias, i.e. the f.N maximum entries the results will be different. The averages will be
f=10%: 1.76
f=20%: 1.40
f=30%: 1.16
f=40%: 0.97
f=50%: 0.80
f=60%: 0.64
f=70%: 0.50
f=80%: 0.35
f=90%: 0.20
f=100%: 0.00
So if one can throw about 60% of the things away, he can easily get the average which is 1 standard deviation above the right mean value. That’s not “too much” but such cherry-picking in alarmist climate science is being done at several level because the calculation has several steps and the results are progressively substituted to the following step.
So in some counting, the results obtained in this way are K standard deviations above the right value where K is the number of steps. Of course, it’s not hard to elevate proper climate sensitivity, which could be 1.0 plus minus 0.5 degrees Celsius, to 5 degrees Celsius in five biased steps. In proper science, noisy things are pretty sensitive to a fair methodology and ways to avoid bias are pretty much the main criterion of quality in this kind of scientific work.
Seems to me that a natural target for the warmists will be those stations with aerodromes because of the rate at which activity increases over the years.
It would be nice to see an Oz surface stations.org analysis of these and many other such stations (and if we are to have a repository of global climate records, and it shouldn’t be the University of East Anglia any more, that repository should have a very strictly limited responsibility for collecting, maintaining, collating and verifying the data and nothing esle. They should not be scientists involved in warming or any other research where a conflict of interest could arise).
I was struck that in the US many weather station locations were compromised by a need for 24/7 attendance so were, in water treatment plants and on airfields where temperature anomalies (warmer) could be expected.
It would be easy to suggest that there has been some dereliction amongst those responsible for the siting and maintenace but I suspect they were never expected to be put to such a use, the “detection” of sub decimal temperature changes over decades or even centuries.
Still, I couldn’t help but note how many stations where where aerdoromes were mentioned.
I think we have yet to see the Icing on the cake concerning Climategate. Google now reporting 6,790,000 Hits, up over 1m in half a day! And when papers such as The Telegraph (hardly a sceptics friend!) show their story from the 20th No 2 for “Today”, 1st place for “The Week” and 1st place for “The Month” of most read – I mean first place for THE MONTH considering it broke on the 20th is staggering in the way the Wild Fire has swept across the globe!
Increasing temperatures at aerodrome stations? Really? How surprising.
That’s still called “science”?
Tar and feathers.
But I bet that Bob Carter is turning cartwheels, and he should.
“Climate Science” is now officially the laughing stock of the scientific community, the new Scientology, the new Phrenology.
It gets worse – how about changing the source data points to suit your arguments – like only picking data from the beaches of California for example?
I’m appalled – I really am
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/
This is slightly off topic, but it seems to me the constant focus on Phil Jones and his shenanigans — though necessary simply to expose the extent — may ultimately be a problem.
The constant calls for his resignation seems to me that the establishment cabal will simply use him as the fall guy, along with one or two other light weights, and then it will be back to usual with the damage control spin being “there were a few rogue scientists and they have been released and so now everything is fine — move along nothing to see here.” There might be a whitewash investigation that will come to the same conclusion.
This is the standard cover-up damage control play in these situations, and has been used very effectively time and time again to appease the public that nothing serious happened and get back to “business as usual” — i.e. nothing really changes: new players/leaders, same game.
I’ve yet to see truth really prevail in any major scandal involving any large entrenched establishment (military, govt, academic, etc.) because too many vested interests are involved, too many people have too much too loose and so whatever the reason ( pay-cheques, reputations, etc.) everyone joins the bandwagon to have a fall guy out of self-interest and preservation.
REPLY: a valid email is required to comment. anon@Anthony Watts.com is not a valid email, you’ll be blocked unless you provide one. Emails are not automatically published. – Anthony
Try this for a damning summary for just the Pacific area
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/
“The Pacific Islands and Australia / New Zealand:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/ghcn-pacific-basin-lies-statistics-and-australia/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/gistemp-aussy-fair-go-and-far-gone/
And one of my favorites where we see how one island can shift the whole region:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/new-zealand-polynesian-polarphobia/
The end of it all is that the entire Pacific Basin is substantially flat on temperatures. Hard to have “Global Warming” if the Pacific is not participating. Australia and New Zealand show warming, but only due to thermometer change artifacts. For New Zealand, it is one single cold thermometer: And when that one is deleted from the whole record, not just the last few years, New Zealand has no “Global Warming” either.
Hard to have “Global Warming” when the 1/2 of the planet that is the Pacific Basin is dead flat with only a small “ripple” as the PDO flips state every 30 or so years.”
This is slightly off topic, but it seems to me the constant focus on Phil Jones and his shenanigans — though necessary simply to expose the extent — may ultimately be a problem.
The constant calls for his resignation seems to me that the establishment cabal will simply use him as the fall guy, along with one or two other light weights, and then it will be back to usual with the damage control spin being “there were a few rogue scientists and they have been released and so now everything is fine — move along nothing to see here.” There might be a whitewash investigation that will come to the same conclusion.
This is the standard cover-up damage control play in these situations, and has been used very effectively time and time again to appease the public that nothing serious happened and get back to “business as usual” — i.e. nothing really changes: new players/leaders, same game.
I’ve yet to see truth really prevail in any major scandal involving any large entrenched establishment (military, govt, academic, etc.) despite intense heat from the internt because too many vested interests are involved, too many people have too much too loose and so whatever the reason ( pay-cheques, reputations, etc.) everyone joins the bandwagon to have a fall guy out of self-interest and preservation.
Not sure what the solution is.