HadCrut Is Hotting Up – adjustments over a few months

By Steve Goddard

During May I wrote about a growing discrepancy between HadCrut and GISTEMP.

Dr. Hansen discusses it here. Excerpt and comparison below:

(1) insight into why the GISS analysis yields 2005 as the warmest calendar year, while the HadCRUT analysis has 1998 as the warmest year. The main factor is our inclusion of estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.

HadCrut released their January 1850 through June 2010 temperature data yesterday, and something “interesting” happened. Their temperature anomalies from January-April jumped up from their published values on June 3. May probably also jumped, but unfortunately I didn’t capture a record of it previously.

The chart below shows how the HadCrut data changed between June 3 to July 28.

HadCrut still shows 1998 hotter than 2010 so far, but they seem to be working on “correcting” that problem.

Why is it that post facto adjustments always seem to be upwards in later years, and downwards in earlier years? This whole global temperature business looks like a complete joke to me.

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Addedum: source HadCRUT data by date:

May 20

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdGkwYW1rZ044TFByd0xoTzVia1JFc0E&hl=en&output=html

June 3

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdDFaMF92Y19odXZoLUhZMHJBUVk1LWc&hl=en&single=true&gid=0&output=html

July 28

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdEdMRGVaRlJvUzJSbFNOb21TZmtGeXc&output=html

The current data is available here.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt

All three were obtained from the same link on different dates

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PJB
July 28, 2010 9:28 am

Extracted from Dr. Hansen’s paper”
“global warming is the first order manifestation of increasing greenhouse gases that are predicted to drive climate change”
I counter with this quote:
“The best laid schemes o’ mice and men, gang aft aglay”
Predictions indeed….

kwik
July 28, 2010 9:28 am

They probably just do as ordered? By the government? You cannot do much else if you work for that outfit.

Pamela Gray
July 28, 2010 9:36 am

I always have to remind myself to look at the scale. And then ask myself, if that is the scale, what the hell must the error bars look like!?!?!?!?!? And then I wonder if the reason why we don’t see error bars is because they are too big to put in the graph!!!!!!!
Just food for thought. Or indigestion.
By the way, nightcrawlers in NE Oregon are saying the summers are getting colder. So do the grasshoppers. And the bats. And the birds: there are early signs of migratory birds starting to congregate already. And the rivers. The snow melt has been steady, not instantaneous, throughout the summer, despite a slightly above average amount of snowpack to begin with, keeping river levels at average to slightly above average height. No heat wave here in NE Oregon, even through the earlier El Nino.
Oh. I know. When proxies are warm, that’s evidence of global warming but when proxies are cold that is within the margin of error. This cold summer must be within the margin of error, which is why you won’t see these proxy signs on any graph.

latitude
July 28, 2010 9:37 am

They know that they only have until Nov.

P.F.
July 28, 2010 9:38 am

Hansen’s explanation for the discrepancy was “The main factor is our inclusion of estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.” Didn’t we see on WUWT the huge hole in the Arctic data set used by Hansen? So it’s all based on an estimate without the benefit of real data. The real data (DMI) is showing a very clear cool condition in the Arctic. Hansen’s 1988 predictions were wrong. He’s wrong here and now. Why is it so difficult for others to figure out that Hansen has a very clear bias in his work?

Dave F
July 28, 2010 9:44 am

Maybe there is a factor in the many equations that biases temperatures upwards after time passes? What happens if you feed their algorithms junk numbers?

Bill
July 28, 2010 9:46 am

Someone should do a satirical story of a future when, with the snow a foot deep in Miami Florida on August 4th, the warmists are still yammering about impending runaway global warming and how it has been responsible for last 15 years without a summer.

latitude
July 28, 2010 9:52 am

P.F. says:
July 28, 2010 at 9:38 am
Why is it so difficult for others to figure out that Hansen has a very clear bias in his work?
===========================================================
That seems to be the running joke, P.F.
It’s so obvious, that anyone that doesn’t see it……….

Gary D.
July 28, 2010 9:54 am

“. . . but avoids the bias in the temperature trend in satellite data [Reynolds et al., 2002, 2010]. We adjust the satellite data by a small constant . . .”
Will there be a built in adjustment in the new NPP satellite since it is being set up by NOAA and NASA?
Similar to what nc asked in the NPP story
July 27, 2010 at 12:52 pm

Bob Kutz
July 28, 2010 9:56 am

Looks like the arctic melt season is drawing to an early conclusion, we shall see.
Here is a thought, though; looking back through this thread, I see some maps that show the entire arctic as several degress above normal (which is in stark contrast to DMI’s data; http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php, by the way).
But here’s what really strikes me; this map is very misleading visually. (first map, after the graph; http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/gistemp-vs-hadcrut/) The entire top portion of the map is dark red while the actual surface area represented amounts to the area approximated by the anomaly shown in red in southern Africa. If you were to compare the entire arctic region (roughly the top one fifth of the map) the area would compare roughly to the whole of Africa. Yet this is shown on the map as a surface area representing roughly the combined area of Europe and Asia.
I understand that they’re not using this map as data to calculate global surface anomaly, but it is still a very misleading way of presenting the data.
Wouldn’t a sinusoidal projection present a much more accurate repesentation?
Just a thought.

Henry chance
July 28, 2010 9:58 am

HadCrut show significant cooling since 1998. How should they be punished?

rbateman
July 28, 2010 10:02 am

Pamela Gray says:
July 28, 2010 at 9:36 am
Yes, the error bars might just be on the graph’s. Only we cannot see where they begin or end because those points are off the high and low ends of the scale. The truth in advertising.

July 28, 2010 10:02 am

I fully expect that “new” rationales for adjusting temperatures will be discovered and hastily published to justify “hiding the decline” of temperatures for the next decade. How long can the TOB (time of observation bias) adjustment continue to add imaginary heat to the system? Perhaps the data will develop a large measurement hole over the cooling Pacific (or anywhere else that has a cooling trend).

The Hobbs End Martian
July 28, 2010 10:04 am

AGW / Climate Change Armageddon; now firmly in the category of Pathological Science

rbateman
July 28, 2010 10:06 am

An estimation based on 100% of nothing is still nothing.
Analysis of a raw deal: Buy 100 stocks at $1,000 ea worth $0.00 on the market, and you have 100 x $0.00 = $0.00

Ed Barbar
July 28, 2010 10:10 am

That reminds me of the shining. The waiter is explaining to Jack Nicholson what he did with his naughty children “I corrected them.” Yes, those naughty temperature readings. They must be “corrected.”

John Prendergast
July 28, 2010 10:12 am

CO2 does not cause detecable global warming or else Lord Kelvin’s second law is bunk and so is Fermi who spent a lifetime looking at it.
Climate does change however and we don’t really know quite why, it did when man was in caves and there were about 05.% of current population around.

Henry chance
July 28, 2010 10:15 am

Hansen refers to heating and a tipping point. After the tipping point, it is beyond mankind’s control. I never knew mankind had control of the climate.
Hedoes admit much of the heating is at the North Pole. Of course they made up the temps since they don’t have readings.

ZT
July 28, 2010 10:16 am

Perhaps, in the general spirit of scientific openness, the CRU could explain what happened?
Such a move would tend to improve confidence in their processes…

Wondering Aloud
July 28, 2010 10:16 am

Continued modification of the data after the fact. AKA fudging, or more commonly BS. They aren’t talking about data at all anymore just some fantasy numbers they make up.

NoAstronomer
July 28, 2010 10:18 am

“This whole global temperature business looks like a complete joke to me.”
Can’t wait for the punchline.

Tom in Florida
July 28, 2010 10:19 am

“The main factor is our inclusion of estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.”
Perhaps Hansen hasn’t heard of the 5th Amendment.
From our Constitution for our non American friends:
Amendment V ” No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself…”

Ken Harvey
July 28, 2010 10:23 am

Dave F asks:
“Maybe there is a factor in the many equations that biases temperatures upwards after time passes? What happens if you feed their algorithms junk numbers?”
It depends only upon the motives of the junk feeder.

R. Gates
July 28, 2010 10:28 am

It’s all a global con game involving NASA, big government, big business, crooked politicians, and the eco-nuts, and led by the CO2 molecule.
Or, perhaps more likely, the 40% rise in CO2 over the past few hundred years is actually having a growing effect on the planet’s temperatures, oceans, and cryosphere, and honest highly skilled scientists are working hard to get the data correct, refine their models to take into account increasing knowledge about feedbacks, and discover exactly how this 40% increase (and rising) is affecting all facets of the global climate.

Max Hugoson
July 28, 2010 10:50 am

“Average Temperature” bug-a-boo again.
Meaningless number.
Just as Dr. Spencer said, “Yes, a colder object can change the temperature of a warmer object, upwards!” (See his recent blogs..) I say “Average Temperature” has NO MEANING!
Take this: 85 F. 65% RH. BTU per cubic Foot: 38
105 F, 10% RH. BTU per cubic Foot: 33
WHICH ATMOSPHERE HAS MORE ENERGY IN IT?
Average temperture: Winner of “fiction writing of the year”.
Max

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