I was working on another project related to the CRU emails and came across this email from Dr.Phil Jones. I was stunned, not only because he was dissing another dataset, but mostly because that dissing hit many of the points about problems with the NASA GISS products we’ve covered here on WUWT and at Climate Audit.
Here’s the email with my highlights added. Email addresses have been partially redacted.
The original email can be seen at this link:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1042&filename=1254850534.txt
Here’s the thing, we’ve seen the problems with CRU’s temperature series in the code already. If Dr. Jones is aware of those problems, and he thinks GISS is inferior, well then, wow, just how bad is GISS?
I thought this statement was quite telling:
Their non-use of a base period (GISS using something very odd and NCDC first differences) means they can use
very short series that we can’t (as they don’t have base periods) but with short series it is impossible to assess for homogeneity.
One thing about GISS that has bothered a lot of people – the base period they use for calculating temperature anomaly is for 1951-1980. See it listed here on the GISTEMP page. No other data sets use that period. Critics (including myself) have said that by using that period, it makes this graph’s trend look steeper than it would if the current 30 year period was used.
In the past couple of years we’ve seen two significant errors with NASA GISS that had to be corrected after they were discovered through the work done here at at WUWT and Climate audit. Public errors have not been found in CRU products during that time, because the data an code have been withheld.
To the credit of NASA GISS, they have been more transparent than CRU on data, stations used, and code.
Here are some of the relevant posts on WUWT where we address issues found with the NASA GISS temperature products:
How bad is the global temperature data?
And now, the most influential station in the GISS record is …
NASA GISS: adjustments galore, rewriting U.S. climate history
Absence makes the chart grow fonder
A comphrehensive comparison of GISS and UAH global Temperature data
Getting crabby – another missing NASA GISS station found, thanks to a TV show
More on NOAA’s FUBAR Honolulu “record highs” ASOS debacle, PLUS finding a long lost GISS station
Weather Station Data: raw or adjusted?
GISS Divergence with satellite temperatures since the start of 2003
Divergence Between GISS and UAH since 1980
GISS’s Gavin Schmidt credits WUWT community with spotting the error
GISS, NOAA, GHCN and the odd Russian temperature anomaly – “It’s all pipes!”
Corrected NASA GISTEMP data has been posted
A new view on GISS data, per Lucia
The Accidental Tourist (aka The GISS World Tour)
Rewriting History, Time and Time Again
Why Does NASA GISS Oppose Satellites?
How not to measure temperature, part 52: Another UFA sighted in Arizona
How not to measure temperature, part 51.
NASA’s Hansen Frees the Code !
Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”? – guest post by Steve McIntyre
1998 no longer the hottest year on record in USA
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
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ROFL. I wonder if Jones wrote this in response to someone asking him about the large divergence that has happened between GISS and HadCrut3 in the last decade or so. Jones is kicking the stool out from under Gavin, since Gavin is clinging to the argument that temperature is still rising because GISS shows it rising.
Palpable consensus?
Oh the irony, hyenas do bite each other?
What I don’t understand that they had 20 odd years to calibrate/homogenise the process between different instruments, methods and countries.
Before they want to take over the world…
I’m still waiting for the story on who they were that released ClimateGate and how they did it. It’s still sinking in how astonishing it is! Who could have imagined GISS would be talked about this way by CRU—and that it would be made public! There’s more fun to come I’d bet.
ClimateGate is gold!
Perhaps Anthony should have highlighted this gem for comedy value:
GISS does have less year-to-year variability – when I last looked.
The graph at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.gif above is not loading – can you repost link? Thanks
This just gets stranger and stranger. I doubt any of these folks know what they truly have nor what it means. FUBAR, indeed.
BTW, a day or so ago I was thinking of the Honolulu “record highs” when I posted this: “What was it the man (I’ve forgotten where) said earlier this year when the sensor was reporting false high readings? Something like ‘We can’t change the numbers, we have to just report what the equipment displays.’ ”
The forgotten where = Honolulu
New readers should follow Anthony’s link to –
More on NOAA’s FUBAR Honolulu “record highs” ASOS debacle, PLUS finding a long lost GISS station
…and also related posts mentioned therein.
But you guys already know CRU is corrupt, so you can take from this that GISS is better. Or is Phil’s opinion suitable when it suits you?
Dr Jones said that last week was the worst of his academic life. Thank you Anthony for helping to show that he was wrong about that too and that it’s worse than he thought.
This is what I said! I emailed Phil Jones a while ago and asked why there was a difference between HadCRUt and GISS, and he actually personally emailed me back saying simply that HadCRU’s was/is ‘better’. He added other comments as well that I cannot remember. I could have put the email up on here, but irony of ironies I deleted it along with a lot of others just a month ago! Seriously!
Pulpable consensus, more like!
What does this do the story that, “even if you ignore HadCrut, the science is still solid, because it’s corroborated by other studies from around the world — such as from NASA”?
It’s worth reading the marvellous E.M.Smith on the GISS Temperature record issue. Data and source code in the public arena, reviewed with a great deal of effort, persistence, and, yes, brilliance.
And all made available online so that faith-shaken folk who can follow the code and the math, can have their own Popperian stab at falsifying the conclusion. The more the merrier.
That’s how real science happens.
Is there going to be warfare between CRU and GISS? Jones dissing Hansen and tossing James under the bus might erupt into a pissing match.
Gee, thought those guys were brothers-in-arms. Sounds a little more intense than the UAH/RSS difference.
We really need to go back to the raw, raw data, sans TOBS, etc., and see what the global charts look like.
All the corrections we know about (GISS and USHCN, HadCrut unknown) have been in the pro-AGW upslope direction, warmer now, colder way back when, while one would think corrections should average out to zero or downslope, given increased population and UHI effect.
At what point is government policy on global whining I mean warming irreparable. If the data on which it is based is so faulty as to be meaningless then does that render policy meaningless!
Uh, isn’t there a bit larger issue here?
Depending on who you look at as an authority, we have various temperature reconstructions going back anywhere from 1,000 years to many millions of years.
Ann arbitrary 30-year period of recent vintage has been selected as “normal”.
Go back and read the original Lamb, from East Anglica, on the climate history of the world.
The larger question is, given the length of the inferred record, is a 30-year base period statistically defensible? Can you select any arbitrary 30-year period and make accurate hindcasts and forecasts from that point? If you can demonstrate that it is, was the correct 30-year period chosen?
A second part of the question is do you actually understand the role the sun’s activity plays in shaping climate?
Isn’t this whole thing statistically irrelevant? Can you really draw Solar System sized conclusions from such a tiny data set?
lol…..
I foresee much fun and censoring of questions, next time Surreal Climate or the like, do anything about GIStemp!
tallbloke: I find the end of the third sentence in the quote to be the most telling part of Jones’s argument. “They also impose some urbanization adjustment which is based on population/night lights WHICH I DON’T THINK IS VERY GOOD.” Is this climate science at its best?
This post proves yet again that ‘The science is settled.’ – NOT.
The only thing HadCrut and GISS have in common is the way data has been bent and base periods cherry picked to show the desired trends.
Makes me sick when people calling themselves ‘climate scientists’ can’t admit that trends have zero information when dealing with non-linear systems, like our chotic climate, and the real measurement of what is happening is the amount of energy being gained, lost and stored at any moment in time.
The history of what happened in the past has no predictive value for the future, apart from a broad-brush observation that periods of cooling and warming are the norm. The notion that climate is stable and has an ‘ideal’ temperature, as pushed by the CAGW benders, is nonsensical. Energy flow changes on a second by second basis, as does the capacity of the various storage systems to absorb or release it.
And still, no coverage of ClimateGate in the Australian MSM, and our pollies are more concerned with Tiger Woods and the Dali Lama.
Mattb: You wrote, “But you guys already know CRU is corrupt, so you can take from this that GISS is better. Or is Phil’s opinion suitable when it suits you?”
Did you miss the last sentence in Anthony’s opening? Don’t bother to scroll up. Here it is again: “…but mostly because that dissing hit many of the points about problems with the NASA GISS products we’ve covered here on WUWT and at Climate Audit.”
And did you miss the links to the other posts here at WUWT that Anthony listed at the end of the post?
RICHARD LINDZEN ON COPENHAGEN
I fervently hope that Copenhagen will avoid canonising the absurd notion that climate is determined by any single parameter like CO2. The dubious attempts to link this parameter to every form of catastrophe is producing unwarranted fear. Imposing this notion as a matter of international law will set science back several centuries. The accompanying policies seem designed to do the same for society as a whole. The carbon control movement, like every malicious movement, seeks to cloak itself in an aura of virtue. Sentient citizens should be able to see through this patent ploy.
Richard Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427366.800-great-and-good-share-hopes-and-fears-for-copenhagen.html?page=1
OT but a good lead for you:
The Royal society have launched a website with much publicity called trailblazing where they claim the RS have the first Peer Reviewed paper in history. They then have highly sophisticated graphics where visitors can pick up on historic scientific papers (I presume with connection to work by RS members).
[quote]Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010.
Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.[/quote]
They have one paper for the period 2005 – 2009 and you guessed it; it is written by no other than Professor Michael Thomas who is very taken by the idea that we are all going to die of CO2 poisoning.
[quote]Switch off lights! Leave your 4×4 at home! This may help, but the magnitude of global warming forces scientists to think big. They want to filter sunlight by positioning a trillion sunshades in space; launch fleets of robot ships spraying water into the atmosphere; fertilize carbon-absorbing plankton by dumping tons of iron into the oceans. Massive interventions such as these are proposed and critically assessed in a Theme Issue of the Society’s Philosophical Transactions. They may be risky, but could become less risky than doing nothing. In a scene-setting paper, James Lovelock outlines his idea for stimulating blooms of algae that sequester carbon dioxide to the ocean floor. He emphasizes the extreme dangers of climate change, drawing on parables from simple models such as ‘daisy world’. Stocked with competing species of black daisies (absorbing the Sun’s heat) and white daisies (reflecting sunlight), this world evolves in ways similar to that of Earth. He ends with ethical advice. We should focus less on ‘human rights’ and more on ‘human obligations’ to preserve the biodiversity of Gaia, our living planet.
Michael Thompson, Dept of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.
This commentary is free to share under a Creative Commons license[/quote]
I wonder if this forum, or members fo teh forum, might like to rubbish this idea that this paper is of historic importance given that the data sets underlying the claims that global warming is occurring have been corrupted and rendered worthless by malpractice and the riggig of peer review etiquette. An opportunity for a challenge the RS establishment and make some headlines for them at their expense?
Further to John F. Hulquist’s FUBAR, is this little gem from the UK Telegraph, you really couldn’t make it up better than this:- (SNAFU also springs to mind.)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6683770/GPs-should-offer-climate-change-advice-to-patients.html
I just hope that whilst they are examining me for whatever climate related clap-trap they think I might have (a cold, seasonal flu, a viral infection, you know, the sort of things that we have always suffered from & always will, only now they can atribute it to CC) that they frigging well get it right. However, I would prefer that they get the hospitals clean first, stop patients dying unnecessarily, stop giving our wounded troops MRSA (yes they really did many times), & generally improve the health care system first! The sickening rate of green infestation is amazing, Totalitarianism UK style I guess. Once noble & professional institutions debased, cheapened & brought down to the level of Micky-Mouse Disney World (no disrespect, Walt!) & nobody raises an eyebrow at it. All part of the government’s dumbing down programme of all insitutions that it has indulged in since June 1997, I expect! Colonials, et al, don’t even bother coming to the UK, I know we need the mighty dollar but this is ridiculous to the extreme. You’re next folks, trust me!