Ever wonder why NASA’s Jim Hansen (and many others) see red at high northern latitudes?
Above 2011 Temperature Anomaly. Source: NASA GISS interactive plotter
With all that red up north, you’d think Jimbo, Gore, and Trenberth would want to get a look at that firsthand, instead of making a fossil fueled boat trip to Antarctica during peak of the southern summer melt season so they could give us grand proclamations about the melting there.
All the “hot action” is up north according the the latitude plot that accompanies the GISS anomaly map:
Funny how in the anomaly map above, with the great Texas Heat Wave this year, Texas is not red. WUWT? (The way it was portrayed in media, you’d think it was a permanent condition).
It seems to be all in the adjustments. Cooling the past helps the slope of the trend:
How GISS Has Totally Corrupted Reykjavik’s Temperatures
Guest post By Paul Homewood
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
Now that GHCN have created a false warming trend in Iceland and Greenland , and GISS have amended every single temperature record on their database for Reykjavik going back to 1901 (except for 2010 and 2011), we should have a look at the overall effect.
The red line reflects the actual temperature records provided by the Iceland Met Office and shows quite clearly a period around 1940, followed by another 20 years later, which were much warmer than the 1970’s. GISS, as the blue line shows, have magically made this warm period disappear, by reducing the real temperatures by up to nearly 2 degrees.
Meanwhile the Iceland Met Office say that “The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik”.
=================================================================
Just for completeness, here is the GISS trend map and latitude plot for the start of the GISS baseline (1951) to 2011.
UPDATE: 1/26/2012 10:30AM
I added (The way it was portrayed in media, you’d think it was a permanent condition) to the body of this post. since my intent with that statement about Texas wasn’t clear. I got distracted by phone calls and other business in the middle of writing this post and lost my train of thought (and I haven’t been following comments on it either). It is one of the pitfalls of trying to run a business and family while trying to keep up with the demands of this venue. Apologies to anyone who thought I was suggesting Texas summer temp data would show up in December data. Such transient events are just one more indication of the synoptic scale blocking high which caused that event, not any long term climate issue.
Paul Homewood sends his email correspondence and supporting data from the Icelandic Met Office. Here is a PDF file containing the data (referenced in the emails): Reykjavik-1871_Akureyri-1881_Stykkisholmur-1845
From: Trausti Jónsson
To: paul homewood
Cc: Halldór Björnsson
Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 17:40
Subject: Re: monthly temperatures
We have sent a questions to the GHCN database regarding this and they will look into the problem. Regarding your questions:
No we were not aware of this.
No, but we are asking for the reasons
GHCN are both valid and of the correct value? If so, why?
The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik but not quite as bad for the other stations. But we will have a better look. We do not accept these “corrections”.
No.
No changes have been made in the Stykkisholmur series since about 1970, the Reykjavík and Akureyri series that I sent you have been slightly adjusted for major relocations and changes in observing hours. Because of the observing hour changes, values that where published before 1924 in Reykjavík and before 1928 in Akureyri are not compatible with the later calculation practices. For other stations in Iceland values published before 1956 are incompatible with later values except at stations that observed 8 times per day (but the differences are usually small). The linked paper outlines these problems (in English):
Click to access Climatological1960.pdf
The monthly publication Vedrattan 1924 to 1997 (in Icelandic) is available at:
http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=278&lang=is&navsel=666
and earlier data (in Icelandic and Danish – with a summary in French) at:
http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=240&lang=is&navsel=666
http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=241&lang=is&navsel=666
Monthly data from all stations from 1961 onwards :
http://www.vedur.is/Medaltalstoflur-txt/Manadargildi.html
Best wishes,
Trausti J.
Til: “Trausti Jónsson”
Sent: Mánudagur, 23. Janúar, 2012 17:09:30
Efni: Re: monthly temperatures
From: Trausti Jónsson
To: phomewooduk
Cc: Guðrún Þórunn Gísladóttir
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 11:19
Subject: monthly temperatures
I attach a table including the monthly temperature averages for Reykjavik (1871), Akureyri (1881) and Stykkisholmur (1845).
Best wishes,
Trausti J.
Lýsing: Could you please send me, or let me know where I can access, annual mean temperatures for Reykjavik and Akureyri, back to 1900,(or when records are available from).. Many thanks Paul Homewood –
When are the legal people going to be brought into this?
um…Iceland seems to be in the blue…
REPLY: You are confusing single year anomaly and trend, see the trend map, I’m just pointing out where the red is. – Anthony
Note that the temperature plot at the top of the article is December 2011 only, not all of 2011. So of course the summer heat wave in Texas doesn’t show up. It is noticeable on the Annual plot.
Paul earlier posted on the 18th:
Seriousely need a FOI request on this. This is a big deal as I imagine that one sensor has big impacts on a large area due to a lack of nearby temp stations. Someone should go to jail if this is tampering as it appears.
Makes this Texan red in the face. I want due credit for suffering through last summer. We should be ochre, damnit!
When we look at the all-year 2011 map (not the December-only map), then we see Texas showing plenty hot .
“Wrongway Hansen strikes again!
Red crayon, meet red hand.
In the 2011 anomaly map, the north pole seems to have a 15 degree temperature swing depending upon which way you are facing. Unless this map is cropped at 85 N, I would have expected the anomaly to converge at the pole. The south pole directional variation seems to be a bit smaller.
As long as we are discussing GISS distortions….
Let’s look at the Map. It is a equi-lat, equi-longitude map that is real handy for making quick computer plots with Long,Lat plotting point. The problem is, that the plot distors area.
Apparent Area = Real Area * (1/cos(Latitude)) The Map shows Latitude 0 to 10N as the same area as Latitude 70-80 North (warm anomally) area. But the 70-80 N band is only 25% of the equatorial band.
The same goes for the Normal Mean by Latitude graph above. The X-axis should be changed to be spaced as cos(Latitude) so that 0 to 30 degrees is about 4 times bigger than 60 to 90 deg.
suddenly that spike in the right hand look a lot less important and more spurious.
Rogelio says:
January 25, 2012 at 2:20 pm
When are the legal people going to be brought into this?
That’s what I want to know as well. Especially in anticipation of the outcome of the Antarctic Oh-No Tour in progress, which is sure to be a huge lie. How can one LEGALLY challenge these adjustments hiding declines and peaks and the like? It has gone beyond foolish, and through ludicrous, to settle at the bottom of the spin cesspool.
This is pure fraud and should carry a custodial sentence, how can they get away with this? and what has Iceland’s Met Office got to say about it, are they complicit or not.We need answers.What ever reason they have for doing it, it can NEVER be good enough
Keith Gordon
Long term forecast (up to 2020) for the Iceland’s winter and annual temperatures
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/RF.htm
I love Iceland. It has the best water and the best air I ever tasted.
Life in Iceland is tough, and people there tend to be on par with it.
At the same time, there is a surprising number of intellectuals there (not in the the ignoble way of the American Academia but in the noble way of the 19th-century intelligentsia).
I talked to many Icelanders; most of them hope for global warming. No wonder, considering their climate that changes every hour, usually for the worse. But when I ask Icelanders if there is, really, any indication of warming upon their shores and glaciers, they scratch their heads and shake them sorrowfully.
here we go again. The GISTEMP package uses only publicly available data (specifically GHCNv3 for these areas) and performs analysis for which all the code is available, and has been replicated by outside groups.
So given that the post itself points to GHCN v3 as being the source of the change (and according to the Iceland met office, this change is an error), what do you expect the GISTEMP algorithm to do with it?
But I suppose it’s easier to blame GISS than look into why GHCN v3 (produced by NOAA) might be different.
“Funny how in the anomaly map above, with the great Texas Heat Wave this year, Texas is not red. WUWT?”
Probably because the map is for December only?
Paul – do you have a source or reference for the Iceland Met Office comment? TIA
This is just like an ancient map of the world, showing fabulous sea monsters and other strange artefacts outside known regions. You cant challenge the existence of the fabulous sea monsters and strange lands, because you’ve never been there to see for yourself whether they are there.
If you want to claim dangerous warming, but you cant find it, you put it in a place where noone is looking.
My comment lifted verbatim from the notalotofpeoleknowthat site. I hope the moderators will allow this call for support…
@Paul Homewood
“..Their Met Office was not aware of these adjustments, but are now!..”
Good. Now we need someone to chase this through the technical press, someone else to chase this through the ‘political’ pressure groups around GISS via the newspapers, and a third party to look at all the other ‘adjustments’ for other country’s Met Offices and compare them to the real data.
I am sure the readership of WUWT will provide….
No use looking for Texas heat waves here. This is the map for just December 2011. The trend map is just for Decembers.
The Texas Heat Wave plot is for July 2011, the “NASA GISS interactive plotter” shown on the WUWT Web page is for Dec. 2011. The only legal people that need to be brought are those required to permanently shut down the WUWT Web site for deliberately misinforming people.
Amazing how GISS is able to root out all those (dear departed) dummies of the past who weren’t able to read thermometers, and correct their readings. People were shorter back then, and looking up at a thermometer induced parallax errors on the high side, apparently.
This is the same stuff GISS has been doing for years, aped more recently in the USHCN v2 climate set.
JPY says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Which “outside group” replicated a presumed 3°C measurement error in the 1940s? The Teletubbies? How do you replicate ad hoc adjustments to verified historical data?
What effect does the location of monitoring stations have on the raw data and would it not requier newer temps to be lowered and older left alone or inflated. I look at temp records like currency inflation graphs where one is stated in terms a given point with changes ballanced out.
JPY says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Here we go again. The GISTEMP package uses only publicly available data (specifically GHCNv3 for these areas) and performs analysis for which all the code is available, and has been replicated by outside groups.
————————-
I suppose if you ask them, “Which Outside Groups?”, they’d answer, “TOP …. outside groups” 😉
This plot shows the Arctic warmed about 4 degrees between 1919 and 1939 and then, for a few years in the 1940’s, was warmer than the present. http://climate-change-theory.com/arctic1880.jpg
Temperatures on Jan Mayen Island (350 miles NE of Iceland) showed a similar pattern http://climate-change-theory.com/JanMayen.jpg
Actually North Atlantic Ocean temperatures play a big part in Arctic temperatures, so Jan Mayen Island is well placed to reflect such, as shown here: http://climate-change-theory.com/JanMayenEarth.jpg
So the Arctic has undoubtedly cooled a little since the late 1930’s. Yet carbon dioxide levels were increasing and are supposed to have had a greater effect there than anywhere else in the world.
@Stark Dickflüssig
Perhaps you are not reading properly. The error appears to be in GHCN v3. Therefore any program reading that data will have that error. This has nothing to do with GISS.
The GISTEMP code itself has been replicated by clearclimatecode.org – including the switch to GHCN v3: http://clearclimatecode.org/ghcn-m-v3/
and the difference GHCNv3 made with respect to GHCNv2 is here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/updates_v3/V3vsV2/
where the high Arctic is seen to be *cooler* in the new version. How does that fit the conspiracy?
The big question is who found this and have they informed the authorities of their suspicion of fraud? If they haven’t why not?
And has anyone issued a press release? It might sound stupid, but unless someone tells the media they aren’t going to do anything.
PS It’s probably a fair bet that the Jan Mayen Island temperatures in my post above are a pretty good indication of the real pattern in Iceland, being only 350 miles NE of Iceland with only ocean between. Also, the island is within the Arctic Circle as shown on the map in that post. The warmer temperatures in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s certainly seem a reality.
Yes, many have noticed the Texas graphic was for december only, but that was not the main point of the post. So CAGW enthusiasts, how is that eternal drought in Texas doing.
http://www.real-science.com/aggie-joke-dessler-promises-texas-drought
Another reason the “Bright red” anomalies over the poles are basically meaningless is because when it is windy up there it is warmer. (I think it is the positive AO that is conducive to wind.) When it grows calmer the cold air settles and it gets colder. Wind “mixes” the air, and rather than forty below it is “only” thirty below.
If you want an idea of what wind does to sea ice up at the pole, check out the Navy “Sea Ice speed and drift 30 day animation,” at http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticicespddrf_nowcast_anim30d.gif
In other words, when it is “only” thirty below, due to wind, the sea ice is crashing and smashing. Huge pressure ridges are getting piled up, and even in the darkest cold vast leads are opening up and exposing water to the arctic night, briefly, before swiftly freezing over to a thickness you could drive a car on, because, after all, it is thirty below.
Compare this situation with a calm, when it is ten degrees colder. No pressure ridges are built. No leads of open water are exposed. The ice remains nice and neat and flat, and is a layer of insulation which keeps the cold from increasing the formation of ice underneath much, despite the fact it is ten degrees colder.
I argue that more sea-ice is likely to form when it is thirty below and windy, than when it is forty below and calm.
However Hansen’s silly maps only show a crimson arctic, and silly people assume the crimson means less ice must be forming.
For those whinebags crying about the Texas heatwave not showing up on the map….. so what, it isn’t suppose to. All it did was return Texas’ trend to normal. We all know, or rather, should know the baseline period GISS picked was a rather anomalously cool period. Especially for Texas. Go here…. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/spot-the-anomalous-period/
Now, I’m know I’m asking a lot out of some of the commenters here (you know who you are), but try to apply this new found knowledge, and look at the actual temp graph of Iceland. Paul shouldn’t have to spell out every little detail for this. Knit pick all you wish. This is clearly more malfeasance on GISS’ part.
Paul! Great job! And congrats!
Pierre says: January 25, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Pierre, do you often go to your neighbor’s homes, accuse them of malfeasance and suggest burning down their house? Do your friends allow you to treat them this way? If not, then please refrain from coming onto this site and acting in such a disrespectful manner.
If you believe than the article is factually in error, please point out exactly which facts you think are wrong and provide reputable sources for the correct data.
JPY:
That’s assuming it’s even an error.
So far, I’ve seen more problems in the write up (misattribution of the “error” to GISS, using a December anomaly map to look for a July heat wave, etc.) than any evidence that GHCN messed up in their adjustment in Reykjavik, other than an unsourced statement supposedly made by the Iceland Met Office. I’ve looked and not found any similar claims on line.
I think it has been pretty widely known that NOAA has been fiddling with the NCDC database. I saw one site that showed month by month adjustments to older temperature records. The database has seen older temperatures adjusted colder each month of 2011. Every month they seem to go in and tweak older temperatures just a little bit colder in order to prevent the flattening recent raw data from reducing the “warming” trend. If today’s temperatures aren’t getting warmer, they can always “adjust” older temperatures colder … and they have been. Every month.
David says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Drought? What drought? It rained 4.25 inches last night at DFW. Set a record for the date and for the month as I understood. Lots of water standing in the fields…
You can see a less “adjusted” Alaska record on this page
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/
about halfway down the page.
When you look at the annual record, you’ll see that it’s all about the 1976 phase shift of the Arctic Oscillation; it has no correlation at all to the supposed upturn from carbon. In fact, the last decade has been regressing back toward the mean.
Pierre says: January 25, 2012 at 3:48 pm
The Texas Heat Wave plot is for July 2011, the “NASA GISS interactive plotter” shown on the WUWT Web page is for Dec. 2011. The only legal people that need to be brought are those required to permanently shut down the WUWT Web site for deliberately misinforming people.
Pierre. Please look in the mirror. I think you have a turd on your head.
Texas summer heat wave = weather, not climate.
Substitute 2010 in the URL for the interactive plotter and it shows Alaska for December a year ago to be a couple degrees cooler than the baseline, meaning it’s a whopping 12 or 13C above the year ago.
With the stories of the terrible winter they’re having there, it’s hard to see how it can be that warm.
I have hourly METAR data for all METAR-equipped Alaska airports for 12/2010 and 12/2011. If someone would tell me how they’d like them structured, I’ll format them and upload. They ought to show a lot higher for 2011, RIGHT?
JPY says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:19 pm
That was an awful lot of words to say, “I don’t know.” So, let’s try again:
What justification is given for a 3°C adjustment to historical temperatures? Answer (from your link): *silence*
What “replication” has been done? Answer (according to your link): flagrant manipulation of data using a methodology that gives a similar result. Replication in the context of science, means to recreate an experiment and obtain similar results. It does not mean to take extant data and recreate a graph. Again, curve-fitting =/= replication.
If you want to lie, by all means do so. But when someone ask you why you are lying, “Because science and webpage!” isn’t a valid justification.
The very first thing that pops into my head when I see maps like that is “Error, something is obviously wrong. Read data doesn’t look so stupid and wrong.” I just think the global warming argument is so sadly stupid… just read a geology textbook and WHAM! Carbon dioxide has been higher in the past and temperatures have certainly been higher. Argument over… move along, nothing to see here. Start making maps that make sense. Start seeing things in a positive light. Be happy. Be productive… enough pessimism. Enough doom and gloom. Enough.
Holy crap! NOAA, NCDC, GISS….. they all play on the same team and they all have the same goal. GISS is responsible for their product. If the malfeasance is for one, it is for all. Cry about the maps all anyone wishes.
It boils down to this. Iceland says their temps are such. NOAA/NCDC/GISS alters them to render as what was shown above. We can choose to believe those lying Icelanders or we can choose to believe the mathematical purists who know what the temps in Iceland really were. If we are to believe the lying Icelanders, then we must also question the temps rendered in other near-arctic and arctic locations as well; meaning the temperatures of places with thermometers as well as the majority of places without thermometers which GISS/NCDC/NOAA gives us. The lying Icelanders couldn’t possibly know what they are talking about because they only take the readings. They don’t know how to properly interpret the readings. We know this because the Texas map shown doesn’t properly reflect the anomalous heatwave (worst evuh!!!) Texas had this year. Or……
Or, it could be Paul and Anthony expected a little cerebral function from some of the various readers. (Most are still sharp as ever!) and that in spite of holding people’s hand most of the way there, they didn’t completely show all that could be shown. And, it is possible that the lying Icelanders aren’t really lying and that they are in a better position to tell us what their temps really were and are.
Yes, its scary when we have to think for ourselves. My condolences to the ones in which this is the first time.
Stephen Rasey says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:04 pm
As long as we are discussing GISS distortions….
There is a long history of using cartography to make things seem the way you think they ought to be seen.
‘How to Lie with Maps’ by Mark Monmonier is an interesting book.
http://www.markmonmonier.com/
In the case of these “climate” maps, I, and others have mentioned the need to use “equal area” maps. All one needs to know – here:
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj_f.html
Blog discussions of the topic are not new. This one happened about 6 months before I had a DSL connection and began to read this stuff on-line.
http://climateaudit.org/2008/02/12/equal-area-projections/
While on Steve McIntyre’s CA site, the post is by Hu McCulloch.
James Keenan says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:55 pm
I’ve searched and can’t find any confirmation of your bizarre claim “that GHCN messed up in their adjustment of Reykjavik”. I think accusing other people of libel should be an actionable offence. You ought to at least apologise.
At some point, there has to be an accounting, in the Sheaksperian sense. So much tumult about so many lies. Heads shold role. To paraphrase Sheakspere, “First **** all the climatologists”
Thank God for Al Gore! If he hadn’t invented the internet, these pickpockets would rob us blind!
I wasn’t confident that the story about recent changes to Reykjavik in GHCN was accurate, given the messup here with showing December plots for Texas heatwaves etc. But I looked up the original GHCN V3 data. I have many on file – I looked at one from July 2011, Jan 10 2012, and the latest. For 1991 they were identical in all three:
620040300001991TAVG 110 W 220 W 180 W 130 W 680 W 940 W 1300 W 1100 W 770 W 470 W 20 W 130 W
No change there. The mean, weighted for days in month, is 5.07 °C
Doug Cotton Jan. 25th – You are right about Jan Mayen being a good comparison point for Iceland. NOAA’s Arctic Report Card for 2010 shows a temperature curve for 60-90 degrees north very similar to Jan Mayen graph of yours. Both show a warm peak at 1940 followed by cooling until 1970 and new warming thereafter. Records show that the Arctic as a whole really has been warming since the start of the twentieth century. What is warming it are warm North Atlantic currents (http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf), just as you suspect. It started suddenly at the turn of the century, after two thousand years of slow cooling. The warming itself was not accompanied by any increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which rules out the greenhouse effect as its cause.
Meanwhile the Iceland Met Office say that “The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik”.
I doubt they do. I rather suspect you made that up. But perhaps you can provide a link to the source of this claim.
[REPLY: By all means, ask for a citation, but do not EVER call a poster or commenter here a liar again. -REP]
Try that anomaly map shown with a 250km smoothing, and a polar projection, and see the red disappear.
Not really. Amplified warming for the region 60N – 90N shows up in every global data set. Eg the high latitude (60N – 82.5N) trend for UAH satellite record is 0.47C per decade. That’s more three times the rate of their global trend.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt – (decadal trends given at the bottom of the page)
Back in the mid-70’s winter weather at Prudhoe Alaska was pretty reliably around -35F with a 20kt wind blowing west to east. “Summer” weather was in the high 30’s to low 40’s with an occasional short burst to the upper 60’s. So the net warming effect is now it may be warming to only -30F. And the impact of this is likely to be….What? If you accept this it means that food production moves hundreds of KM north. This is a bad thing?
Watts, you ask “Texas is not red. WUWT?”
WUWT is that you messed up and plotted the December 2011 anomaly instead of the 2011 annual anomaly, as you claim. This is the annual map, and yes, Texas is dark orange.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=1212&year1=2011&year2=2011&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
crosspatch Jan. 25th — This so-called “adjustment” has been going on for years and contrary to your belief it is not well known. It shows up very clearly if you compare their temperature curves with satellite-measured temperatures. These have been available since December 1978 but neither NASA, nor NOAA, nor the Met Office recognize their existence. When you compare their temperature curves with satellite temperature curves you discover why: they all manufacture warming where none exists. The worst case is in the eighties and nineties that these guys say were the years of that “late twentieth century warming.” According to satellite observations there was no such warming. Satellites show that the real late warming did not start until the super El Nino of 1998 arrived, ten years after Hansen’s testimony to the Senate that warming had started and that we were the cause. I demonstrate graphically how they fake these temperature curves in figures 24, 27, and 29 of “What Warming?” – a book that has been available on Amazon.com since 2010. Get it for your institution or library if you don’t get it yourself.
Arno Arrak says: January 25, 2012 at 7:15 pm
“Doug Cotton Jan. 25th – You are right about Jan Mayen being a good comparison point for Iceland.”
Thanks Arno – I’ve now linked your paper on my Home page http://climate-change-theory.com
Alan Statham says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:28 pm
I can’t help with the quotes, but you can go here…… http://en.vedur.is/climatology/clim/nr/1213
And then you can see where their graphics says as much. Second graph down. Maybe, your doubts are misplaced.
It will be interesting to see what they show for January of 2012 versus January of 2011. I’m showing based on METAR temperatures a whopping 13C drop from January this year versus January last. This is just an average of the raw reported temperatures at ASOS/AWOS-equipped airports. It is not gridded or any other attempt made to infer temperatures across Alaska. It merely compares recorded temperatures from weather stations.
select avg(temp_air) from wx_metar_history where airport in (select airport from wx_metar where airport in (select icao from ais_airport where latitude > 51.013755 and latitude -170.15625 and longitude < -140.800781 and icao is not null and icao ”) group by airport) and time > ‘1-1-2011’ and time 51.013755 and latitude -170.15625 and longitude < -140.800781 and icao is not null and icao ”) group by airport) and time > ‘1-1-2012’ and time < '1-24-2012' ;
avg
———————-
1-1-2011 to 1-24-2011… -10.7673091418111338
1-1-2012 to 1-24-2012… -23.9249495893375301
[Moderator Asks: Is THIS what you wanted? -REP]
this post makes claims that deserve some scepticim.
we all know what that is.
looking at the period when the adjustment is made should
clue folks in.
Nick Stokes says:
January 25, 2012 at 6:55 pm :
Nick, being you have the data set from years ago, what was the temperature data for the period of 1927-1946?
DMI produced Greenlands historical temp data and the current warm period is certainly not out of bounds compared to fairly recent warm periods there. Nor exceptional.
Recent temperature patterns there as the rest of the world warmed?
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/greenland.pdf
I wil have to dig to see if I can find long term historical reconstructions that really show how unexceptional the current short warming is.
i saw this today: http://www.climatecentral.org/videos/web_features/nasa-finds-2011-ninth-warmest-year-on-record
makes sense to me. is it wrong?
steven mosher says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:32 pm
this post makes claims that deserve some scepticim.
we all know what that is.
looking at the period when the adjustment is made should
clue folks in.
============================================
Steve, you’ve got to follow the links to get the full story. Some are not yet as jaded as others, so certain documenting and referencing doesn’t occur to them as quickly as some of us. There really is, a good story here. You should look. I think a few clicks and you’d find it intriguing.
Camburn says: January 25, 2012 at 8:37 pm
“Nick, being you have the data set from years ago, what was the temperature data for the period of 1927-1946?”
Camburn,
Here’s the version from 14 July 2011. I’ve removed some unneeded chars. The numbers are monthly avg, in units 0.01°C.
1927 -170 140 330 180 640 990 1160 1100 760 420 240 180
1928 -60 -10 320 510 860 980 1260 1160 920 570 260 110
1929 260 330 610 510 640 950 1180 1050 700 220 130 160
1930 -100 160 -210 500 760 940 1110 1080 970 350 -150 230
1931 -20 -310 110 320 740 900 1160 1190 1010 460 270 40
1932 -30 540 330 80 840 1010 1230 1140 720 400 240 220
1933 170 -180 220 350 870 1090 1280 1140 970 420 460 -170
1934 100 210 10 400 500 1070 1220 1210 930 390 200 290
1935 260 -330 350 310 930 970 1070 1090 960 360 320 -10
1936 -320 -80 170 470 780 970 1320 1150 940 620 210 -230
1937 80 -160 -130 500 690 960 1160 1040 860 400 360 230
1938 10 180 200 470 600 920 1130 1060 940 490 170 200
1939 -150 130 360 500 870 1080 1300 1230 1180 740 150 160
1940 160 170 -20 300 760 970 1120 1010 710 630 130 230
1941 -30 -150 210 540 880 1150 1230 1150 1150 710 480 250
1942 160 190 270 360 770 970 1140 1130 790 260 410 190
1943 40 -90 150 290 500 990 1140 990 810 450 200 240
1944 -170 60 140 410 660 990 1300 1180 800 460 10 30
1945 -260 10 410 440 760 980 1190 1200 960 720 650 240 0
As a check, here’s the full line from the latest dataset for 1927.
620040300001927TAVG -170 0 140 0 330 0 180 0 640 0 990 0 1160 0 1100 0 760 0 420 0 240 0 180 0
The data is identical. GHCN almost never changes its numbers.
To put it politely:
It would seem that UCHN needs to re-examine the data that they have used.
And GISS needs to be aware of the revisions to data BEFORE they publish public temperature records.
Alan Statham says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:28 pm:
There has been a warming trend since 1800 @
http://en.vedur.is/climatology/clim/nr/1213
So we are supposed to get alarmed that the trend is continuing?
And the recent high temps are in no way abnormal within the channels of this trend.
When?…..will the AGW folks finally understand that the rate of warming during the late 20th century is NOT exceptional when looked at through the eyes of a person with 2 ounces of grey matter between their ears?
dana1981 says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:56 pm
“Watts, you ask “Texas is not red. WUWT?””
Nucitelli, any opinion about the real topic of the post, the Reykjavik meltdown? Is that a case of positive water vapor feedback?
@John F. Hultquist says: 1/25, 5:51 pm, RE: How to lie with maps.
I read that book maybe 15-20 years ago.
There are books known by many by there first lines. “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of time, it was the worst of times,…”, “In the Begining, …”, “Who is John Galt?”, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… “, “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts,..”
For me some memorable lines are:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm … ” – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galexy
“I always get the shakes before a drop.” – Starship Troopers.
and
“Not only is it easy to lie with maps — it is essential.” – How to Lie with maps.
Boy! that got my attention. It encapsulated the entire book into one sentence.
GHCN, NOAA, GISS, HadCru – where the data with its modification come from matters not. Hansen and Gore present the data as a bone fide, US government. scientifically reviewed, accurate description of what is going on. Their position is based on the long-term temperature profiles they publish, promote and portray as the best of the best. And they are able to discern, or have those able to do discern for them, what is reasonable and what is fabrication.
Hansen/Gore speak for the warmists and use the GISTemp profiles as their evidence. On a legal level you might look elsewhere for responsibility, but on a practical, taking-my-taxes basis, whatever group puts their stamp on the picture should be accountable. I doubt that the staff under Hansen are as happy as he is with what is presented, but that is the backside of having a salary. Ask anyone who doesn’t work only for himself what compromises the “bosses” require.
I suggest we encourage GISS/Hansen et al to adjust, adjust, adjust. The combination of excess enthusiasm for warming can only make the discrepancy worse. Already Hansen’s “C” scenario, in which CO2 stopped in Y2K, is the best match for the last 12 years. Not that he is able to admit it. But by 2015, will he be able to ignore the disconnect? Will Al? Or will they admit the disconnect, and blame/praise China for all the soot that has saved the planet?
I bet on “thank the Lord for small mercies” from the warmists. And maybe then the temps will be “readjusted” to show that the pre-cooling warming wasn’t so extreme, after all: thank the Lord, redux.
dana1981 says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Mr. Nucitelli:
There seems to be a large diversion of temperatures from GISS generated results verses Icelands Met Office results.
Would you care to comment on that? And why would GISS, as published, be more certain than Iceland’s core data as exibited by their own office?
One of these data sets is wrong. Maybe you can help us in decideing which one is correct.
Thank you.
Please see my blog about this: http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/1218545/
You may not understand all because it is in Icelandic 🙂
But see this:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004013000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004018000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004030000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004048000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004063000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004065000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004082000.gif
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004092000.gif
Reagrds
Agust
Iceland
So, I Google ‘The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error’ and get 4 hits on WUWT and Paul’s homepage. Strangely I don’t get any hits on a source for the quote. And neither on WUWT or Paul’s home page is any link given to the source of this quote. So why should anyone take this supposed statement from the Iceland met office seriously without any means that they actually said it, are being quoted in context, no caveats left out, all that basic stuff. In Journalism 101, let alone Investigative Journalism 101, this would be a ‘FAIL, Resubmit after you have done the work properly’.
Yet read through the comments here. Apart from those who point out the obvious fact that the Texas Heat-wave won’t show up in an anomaly graph for winter, just about every respondent has lapped this up.
Are you all so totally, utterly and completely lacking in credulity that when a piece of atrociously sloppy and unprofessional journalism like this is put forward your only reaction, characterised by Rogelio first comment – ‘When are the legal people going to be brought into this?’, is the best that you can manage? Have you ever considered that Paul’s entire piece might be a great big pile of Hogs Droppings?
If Paul wants to suggest that the Iceland Met Office said something, he can’t just claim it. He has to show it. Just one little link, showing context, who said it etc. Not that hard really. Just basic journalism.
Stephen Rasey
A quote that got my attention, many years ago was from a bit of fiction. Robert Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers as well. In ‘Time Enough For Love’, his life story of Lazasus Long, The Senior, the oldest man alive who has lived for several thousand years, he includes two sections of the saying from LL – really a way for Robert to pontificate a bit (his postumous work was called ‘Grumbles from the Grave’ after all)
LL opines on the art of Artistic Lying. And his First way to Lie Artistically – ‘Tell The Truth! But Not All Of It!’
Ain’t the blogosphere such a fantastic medium for Partial Truth Telling.
Thank you Agust:
I think I will print out your blog and have my neighbor translate this for me.
If I have read this post correctly – its a bit unclear – Anthony has put some stuff at the beginning then Paul’s cross-post follows. I have commented about Pauls article. However the preliminary section appears to be Anthony’s work.
Therefore, when Anthony puts up a comment about the Texas SUMMER heatwave using an anomaly plot for the NH WINTER, the failure to spot that the plots shown wouldn’t show the heatwave because they are looking at the wrong half of the year, can we assume that the error in doing so (as pointed out by a number of commenters here) can be laid at Anthony’s feet. Could it be that the fact that the default settings for the GISS calculator when you first go to the site are for December only have anything to do with it? Surely if you wanted to highlight the Texas heat wave one would change the default settings to do a plot for those months of the year? Not December.
Again, basic journalism. Checking sources, understanding what you are reporting. Busting your Balls to make sure what you report is as accurate a reflection of the facts as possible.
Journalism 101 really!
Glenn:
And not even important to the topic which is Iceland temps and why the dramatic change in ACTUAL observed temperatures?
Agust Bjarnason says:
January 25, 2012 at 10:44 pm
Please see my blog about this: http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/1218545/
You may not understand all because it is in Icelandic 🙂
=============================================
Google translate does a fair job. Thanks Agust! Let me know what part of this might be incorrect!
“Does this mean that NASA-Gizur to “correct” temperature curve for Reykjavik before it is used for the global temperature curve because they consider it contaminated the urban effects (urban heat island effect)?
Hardly can it be, because this correction is in the wrong direction. They would rather have the lower curve in recent decades, is not it?
Now I just quit trying to understand … Hopefully, some readers may explain the matter.”
Glenn Tamblyn says:
January 25, 2012 at 11:07 pm
If I have read this post correctly ……
========================================
Maybe you did to your low understanding, maybe you didn’t. Here’s the graphic which corroborates the post…… second one down. http://en.vedur.is/climatology/clim/nr/1213
If you want to obsess over Texas, go here…… http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/spot-the-anomalous-period/
Paying attention 101 really….
Glenn,
I agree that the comment on the Texas heat wave being found missing in a December plot does not lend credibility to the poster. I also agree that there should be a link to the alleged quote from the Iceland MET office, and that if such a link or other reference can not be made it should be removed.
However, the main part of the post is about Reykjavik temperatures being adjusted down by several degrees in the early part of the record. Journalism 101 calls for following that part too, don’t you think? What is the justification used for that type of adjustment?
Comparison of the fourth link provided by Agust Bjarnason above (first link below) shows that the adjustments detected by Paul Homewood are just the difference between the GHCN quality controlled unadjusted data, and the quality controlled homogeneity adjusted data. The method used for that adjustment is detailed in the peer reviewed literature by Menne and Williams, 2009 (second link below). NOAA quote clearly indicates that they make this adjustment, and cites the paper in which it is detailed (third link below).
It takes real gall to identify an adjustment clearly identified and explained by NOAA, and conclude from the fact of the adjustment alone that some sort of subterfuge has taken place. At a minimum, to show the adjustments are an error (let alone subterfuge) it would be necessary to show either that the algorithm detailed by Menne and Williams is faulty (ie, likely to give incorrect results) or that while the algorithm itself is well grounded, unusual features in this particular case have led it to give an erroneous result. Of course, that would take effort. In lieu of actual analysis, therefore, WUWT and its regular commenters have decided to skip the trial and proceed straight to the sentencing.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004030000.gif
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008JCLI2263.1
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcnm/v3.php?show=homogeneity_adjustment
Tom Curtis,
the Menne et.al. paper describes an algorithm for automatic detection of changepoints in a timeseries. It specifically states that it compares two synchronous timeseries with the purpose of detecting anomalies that give artificial changes in level and trend. It also includes an automated correction of the time series in case such finding is made. I have just browsed the Menne papare, but I could not find any discussion of applicability with regard to how geographically (or spatially, if you like) close the two time series need to be for the comparison to be valid.
The question then remains, which timeseries were used to make the adjustments of Reykjavik?
I can assure you that the data by The Icelandic Met Office http://en.vedur.is/ is generally very reliable. The graph “Hitafar í Reykjavík 1866-2009” in my blog http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/1218545/ is from their web, http://www.vedur.is/vedur/frodleikur/greinar/nr/1801. This article is written by Trausti Jonsson, a well known meteorologist who is actively blogging here: http://trj.blog.is/. Maybe Anthony would like to contact him. His Email can be found here: http://www.vedur.is/um-vi/starfsfolk/
The graph shows the yearly average, 10 year average and 30 year average temperature in Reykjavik for the period 1866 to 2009. This graph is probably as accurate as it can be.
Regards
Agust
Iceland
http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/
Babsy says:
January 25, 2012 at 5:11 pm
David says:
January 25, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Drought? What drought? It rained 4.25 inches last night at DFW. Set a record for the date and for the month as I understood. Lots of water standing in the fields…
———————————————————————————————–
Yes Sir Babsy, and I am not a CAGW advocate, and so I provided a link to show yet another disaster prediction going underwater. (I guess you missed the link)
“Yes, many have noticed the Texas graphic was for december only, but that was not the main point of the post. So CAGW enthusiasts, how is that eternal drought in Texas doing.
http://www.real-science.com/aggie-joke-dessler-promises-texas-drought “
Going back to a report published in Nov of 2000 ( http://www.smhi.se/hfa_coord/nordklim/old/rapport0900.pdf ) (graph #5), the published linear temperature trend for the Reykjavik area from 1890-1999 was .05C per decade, or 0.55C increase from 1890-1999. If the data hasn’t been adjusted or tampered with since 2000, how come the GISS data above now shows ~1.0C of warming over the same time period? Also, look at figure 20 for Stykkisholmur. The temperature profile clearly shows the 1940s as the warmest period in the 1900s.
I’ve looked more into this Reykjavik story. You don’t have any quarrel with GHCN. I’ve checked back to V2 in 2009; there just isn’t any significant change. The top plot of the NOAA fig that Agust linked is pretty directly from GHCN. And they are consistent with the Iceland Met plot. For example, Paul Homewood says on his blog:
“According to the Iceland Met Office, 1939 and 1941 were the two hottest years of the 20thC in Reykjavik at 5.90 and 5.91C respectively”
GHCN pretty much agrees; 1939 was 6.29 and 1941 6.31.
So when people complain that the original data has been changed, that isn’t true. These are the accepted sources and they agree.
So the issue, if any, is with the GISS adjusted and the NOAA adjusted. These BTW are quite different and have different roles. AFAIK, the NOAA adjusted is not used in major indices. GISS does use their adjusted data in the GISS index.
But the purpose of adjusting is misunderstood. It isn’t an attempt to say that the station readings should have been something different, in terms of a measurement of that exact place. When station readings are used in an index, they are used as representing some region. It isn’t the only source for information about that region; other stations are also a guide. The adjustment is called homogenization; it’s the process whereby that other info is taken into account. As a representative of the region, the station is corrected when it appears to be out of line.
Of course cynics say that the purpose is to increase the trend. But that was looked into two years ago when there was a similar fuss about Darwin. That was about NOAA adjustments, and a histogram of trend modifications showed that the effect on trend could be large, but was almost equally likely to go up or down.
James Sexton says:
January 25, 2012 at 5:48 pm
Holy crap! NOAA, NCDC, GISS….. they all play on the same team and they all have the same goal. GISS is responsible for their product. If the malfeasance is for one, it is for all. Cry about the maps all anyone wishes.
————————————————————————————
Exactly James, We constanly see this lowering the past, raising the recent in blink plots from around the globe. They all do drink from the same trough, and there is no excuse, and only the gullible would think it innocent.
If anyone skipped this post (Ágúst Bjarnason says: January 26, 2012 at 12:34 am)
go back and click on it, do google translate) Despite the Texas gaff, the main point of the post is spot on.
It is interesting that the GISS map shows it as being so “warm” up in the Bering Straits in December, but when you look back at the maps of how the arctic ice built up this fall and winter, the Bering Straits were the one place with more ice than normal.
There are some rather confused comments on this thread.
It would help if people followed the links to Paul Homewood’s blog and read his sequence of posts carefully before commenting.
The main issue is with the adjustments to the raw data introduced by GHCN.
The raw data for Iceland shows a consistent picture of warming from about 1900-1940, then cooling to about 1980, then warming to now, with 1940s temperatures similar to (in some cases higher than) today.
In the adjusted GHCN data, large adjustments are introduced that cool the past, completely changing this picture.
For Reykjavik, the GHCN adjustment reaches a maximum of 2.2 degrees in 1940, and is about 0.6 degrees earlier in the century.
All this can be checked by downloading the adjusted and unadjusted data from the GHCN website.
This matters because it is the GHCN adjusted data that is used by GISS.
Yet another case of “extraordinary claims require extra fraud in any evidence”. (Sigh) You’d have thought they’d have sussed by now that this would be noticed by somebody, but perhaps imagining they have a direct line to God’s Own Truth makes them think they’re somehow immune.
–> Another excellent book everyone here should read is Darrell Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics”. It celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2004, and apparently has never been out of print because so many stats lecturers recommend it to their students. I’ts only a slim paperback, so won’t break your finances, and you’ll never regret reading it. I’ve had my copy since the long, hot summer of ’76.
Anders Valland says: January 26, 2012 at 1:14 am
“The question then remains, which timeseries were used to make the adjustments of Reykjavik?”
There are 6 GHCN stations in Iceland that have been reporting since 2009. GHCN classifies three of these as non-urban (Vestmannaeyja, Stykkisholmur and Hoen i Hornafirdi). They would very likely have been used.
There are also Jan Mayen and some stations in Eastern Greenland. You can see them with this Google Maps tool, which lets you color them according to reporting period, rural status etc.
lol Anthony, very funny.
Because the December temperature map from GISS should show the summer heatwave. You’re right! It doesn’t! WUWT!??! Looks like NASA are fudging the data by using December data on the December graph. Somebody call McIntyre!
But your absolute gem in this post is probably here:
“Funny how in the anomaly map above, with the great Texas Heat Wave this year, Texas is not red. WUWT?
It seems to be all in the adjustments. Cooling the past helps the slope of the trend:”
Hilarious! 😀 So suppressing the past temperatures makes the latest anomalies smaller? Brilliant! Doesn’t it give you a little thrill of power to think that people BELIEVE that?
@ Keith Gordon – what has Iceland’s Met Office got to say about it
They tell me they knew nothing about these adjustments until I pointed them out. They sound none too pleased and have now raised them with GHCN.They also say they have no intention of altering their own records as they totally reject the adjustments.
@JPY – But I suppose it’s easier to blame GISS than look into why GHCN v3 (produced by NOAA) might be different.
If you check the earlier posts you will see that I make it quite clear they are GHCN adjustments. However GISS have compounded matters by reducing historical temperatures so that current ones are accurate.
NOAA were asked a week ago to explain the errors, but are still investigating.
@ slow to follow – Paul – do you have a source or reference for the Iceland Met Office comment?
Both the Met Office temperatures and their comments have been emailed to me. If Anthony feels it appropriate to publish them, I would ask them if they agree with that.
Anders Valland, that information is provided under the section “a. Selection of neighbors and formulation of difference series” of Menne and Williams. (p 1072) Of course, it would be necessary to apply this process to Rejkavik and surrounding stations in the GHCN to determine which stations where used. I do not know of an independent listing.
@ Isonomia – The big question is who found this and have they informed the authorities of their suspicion of fraud? If they haven’t why not?
At the moment GHCN are investigating this. Once I get a reply we can decide the next step.
Nick Stokes is sowing confusion.
Firstly he talks about “people complain that the original data has been changed”. Nobody is claiming this. The issue is with the adjusted data which feeds from GHCN into GISS. Nice straw man Nick.
Secondly he does not explain which numbers he is quoting.
He is quoting the unadjusted numbers, about which there is no issue.
Here are the adjusted numbers for 1935-1940 as they were in GHCN version v3.0.0 in November 2011:
1935 260 -330 350 310 930 970 1070 1090 960 360 320 -10
1936 -320 -80 170 470 780 970 1320 1150 940 620 210 -230
1937 80 -160 -130 500 690 960 1160 1040 860 400 360 230
1938 10 180 200 470 600 920 1130 1060 940 490 170 200 0
1939 -150 130 360 500 870 1080 1300 1230 1180 740 150 160
1940 160 170 -20 300 760 970 1120 1010 710 630 130 230
Notice that these are the same as the unadjusted numbers Nick quotes.
Then in November 2011 GHCN switched to version v3.1.0, the version currently used. Here are the adjusted numbers for the same period in that version:
1935 187 -403 277 237 857 897 997 1017 887 287 247 -83
1936 -393 -153 97 397 707 897 1247 1077 867 547 137 -303
1937 7 -233 -203 427 617 887 1087 967 787 327 287 157
1938 -63 107 127 397 527 847 1057 987 867 417 97 127
1939 -223 57 138 278 648 858 1078 1008 958 518 -72 -62
1940 -62 -52 -242 78 538 748 898 788 488 408 -92 8
At the beginning of this period there is a downward adjustment of 0.73.
In March 1939 this adjustment suddenly changes to 2.22.
This adjustment can’t be explained as a homogeneity correction because other icelandic stations show a warm summer in 1939.
This looks like an error either in the GHCN adjustment algorithm or in its coding.
I reported this to GHCN nine days ago.
Tom Curtis says:
January 26, 2012 at 12:24 am
“It takes real gall to identify an adjustment clearly identified and explained by NOAA, and conclude from the fact of the adjustment alone that some sort of subterfuge has taken place. At a minimum, to show the adjustments are an error (let alone subterfuge) it would be necessary to show either that the algorithm detailed by Menne and Williams is faulty (ie, likely to give incorrect results) or that while the algorithm itself is well grounded, unusual features in this particular case have led it to give an erroneous result”
Menne and Williams have written a classification algorithm. Do you want to posit that their classifier is 100% perfect? That would be a tall statement. I know of no classifier that has zero percent false classifications. Maybe Reykjavik is simply one case where the machine seriously botched it. You say
“At a minimum, to show the adjustments are an error (let alone subterfuge) it would be necessary to show ” – Sorry, it is not our responsibility to prove that the MW algorithm is capable of misclassifications. It would be the responsibility of MW to prove that misclassifications cannot occur. You don’t say “in dubio pro algorithm”, that’s not how it works. Paul Homewood and other bloggers have already shown that the MW algorithm botched it, simply by pointing at this ridiculous adjustment.
An analogy: The X-Ray machine at the airport says you have TNT in your suitcase. You deny it; and the border agents hold that their machine is really well designed and that you must be a terrorist. You offer to open the suitcase to show that you don’t have TNT (the equivalent to the thermometer readings) but they say: “No, you have to prove that our machine is capable of errors. We already looked into your suitcase and the machine says you have TNT in there.”
The MW algorithm might need an improvement.
@James Keenan – So far, I’ve seen more problems in the write up (misattribution of the “error” to GISS, using a December anomaly map to look for a July heat wave, etc.) than any evidence that GHCN messed up in their adjustment in Reykjavik, other than an unsourced statement supposedly made by the Iceland Met Office.
The anomaly maps were added by Anthony, presumably to highlight the “Arctic Warming”. If you check the earlier links, you will see I have made it quite clear that the errors stem from GHCN, but GISS have compounded the problem by revising all their temperatures downwards to avoid having to artificially increase current ones.
The GHCN adjustments can be seen here.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/noaa-dont-believe-the-iceland-met-office/
Nick Stokes says:
January 26, 2012 at 12:41 am
“Of course cynics say that the purpose is to increase the trend. But that was looked into two years ago when there was a similar fuss about Darwin. That was about NOAA adjustments, and a histogram of trend modifications showed that the effect on trend could be large, but was almost equally likely to go up or down.”
The strength of the trend is not important for the CAGW movement. What’s important for their theory is that most of the warming takes place after 1950, and that the last few years are far warmer than, say, 1934. And that’s the direction Hansen aims at with each GISS revision – making the past less wavy, especially reducing the warming trend in the beginning of the 20th century.
I grant you and your kind that it is a subtle form of manipulation, not at all ham-fisted. You have thought of the histogram, and made sure the adjustments look balanced. That’s an important consideration when manipulating data – is the suspension of disbelief still working. Does it still smell like science.
You do that well.
@Nick Stokes – But I looked up the original GHCN V3 data. I have many on file – I looked at one from July 2011, Jan 10 2012, and the latest. For 1991 they were identical in all three:
Nick, As I understand it the adjustments arose in the original Version 3.0, which I believe was introduced last May. However, GISS did not update from Version 2 till Dec19th 2011, so it has only recently become apparent.
Therefore your July 2011 records will show the same as today’s.
@ Alan Statham – Meanwhile the Iceland Met Office say that “The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik”.
I doubt they do. I rather suspect you made that up. But perhaps you can provide a link to the source of this claim.
See my previous comment. I will forward their email to Anthony so he can verify. I will also ask for their agreement for it to be made public.
Where is Tim Flannerys persistent droughts in Australia and above average temps?. Bet we won’t hear from him again!
Paul Matthews says: January 26, 2012 at 3:06 am
“The issue is with the adjusted data which feeds from GHCN into GISS. Nice straw man Nick.”
No, the adjusted data does not feed from GHCN into GISS. GISS uses the unadjusted GHCN data, and other data sets. They have their own adjustment algorithm.
@Glenn Tamblyn – If Paul wants to suggest that the Iceland Met Office said something, he can’t just claim it. He has to show it. Just one little link, showing context, who said it etc. Not that hard really. Just basic journalism.
Glenn, the earlier posts do show the “paper trail”, such as the three different GISS graphs and the GHCN station plots.
Fair point about the Met Office stats and comments though. See my previous comments about forwarding these to Anthony. I will also put these up on my site if you want to check them.
Ágúst Bjarnason, it is not a question of whether the Icelandic Meteorological Office is reliable or not. Nobody is doubting that. The question is whether the rush to judgement exhibited above is justified. As it stands, and allowing for Nick Stokes comment that GISS do their own adjustments, we have four sets of data for Reykvavik. We have the Icelandic Met Office (IMO) data and the GHCN unadjusted data, which essentially agree. We also have the GHCN homogeneity data and the GISTEMP UHI adjusted data (described by Hansen et al 2010 http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_et al.pdf), which also essentially agree but disagree with the first two. That is all that is established by Paul Homewood.
At that point you can apply a decision tree.
Is the IMO/GHCN-QCU data more accurate a record of Reykjavik temperatures than the GISTEMP?GHCN-QCA data?
If yes, is their a good reason for the adjustment based on the different uses for the data (as Nick Stokes plausibly suggests)?
If no, is algorithm used to make the adjustment valid, ie, unlikely to make an error except rarely, and in unusual cases? (Again, Nick links to information that plausibly suggests this is the case.)
If yes, is the situation in Reykjavick such that the algorithm made a mistake their due to unusual circumstances?
It is only when you get to the end of the full decision tree (rather than the schematic above) that that there can be any plausible suggestion of wrong doing by GISS. Yet without discussion of any point other than that there is a difference in the records, comentors above are all set to call in the lawyers. The proper conclusion is that the justice they are after is lynch mob justice.
[SNIP: Policy. -REP]
@ Nick Stokes – The question then remains, which timeseries were used to make the adjustments of Reykjavik?”
There are 6 GHCN stations in Iceland that have been reporting since 2009. GHCN classifies three of these as non-urban (Vestmannaeyja, Stykkisholmur and Hoen i Hornafirdi). They would very likely have been used.
Nick
These stations also show the same pattern of adjustments!
@ Tom Curtis
The GHCN adj is intended to pick out any sudden changes which could be the result of station moves/errors, i.e. non climatic changes (as opposed to GISS homogenisation which adjusts for UHI).
I personally wonder whether the sudden warming which started in 1939 confused the algorithm. In any case the adjustments seem totally wrong.
I appreciate many are reluctant to take my word for the Iceland Met figures!! However to remove any doubt, check out these two GISS graphs.
The first is the original based on “After GHCN adj” (version 2)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Then the new Version 3.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=12&num_neighbors=1
Re: Paul Homewood @ January 26, 2012 at 2:53 am
Thanks – I hope you can share them.
GISS have further complicated matters by changing their figures on 19th Jan. On the 19th Dec, for instance they showed 2003 as 7.32C. Then on 19th Jan they lowered all temperatures back to 1901 by between 0.9C and 1.2C, so that 2003 becomes 6.42C (which tallies with the unadjusted actuals).
These graphs are shown here.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/giss-make-the-past-colder-in-reykjavik/
Apologies on my last comment, which was out of date. I see from the GISS site that as of 15 Dec 2011, they are using adjusted GHCN data.
I do think though that the post should note that GHCN is producing an unadjusted set that is consistent, in this case, with the Iceland Met data.
Too right, DirkH. And let’s not forget that a warming trend in the Arctic/sub-Arctic is twice as valuable to CAGW proponents as one elsewhere. I doubt this adjustment would have been made back in the early 80s when climatologists thought the Antarctic would warm at least as fast as the Arctic (those climatologists who didn’t believe the ice age was imminent, that is).
“[REPLY: By all means, ask for a citation, but do not EVER call a poster or commenter here a liar again. -REP]”
How about do not EVER put words into my mouth again?
I have contacted the Icelandic Met Office to ask them if the quote attributed to them is real or fabricated. I’ll let you know what they say.
[REPLY: “I doubt they do. I rather suspect you made that up.” Of course, you didn’t call him a liar. You just suggested he wasn’t telling the truth. Don’t do it again. -REP]
Tom Curtis:
This is a time when you throw the “paper” out the window and look at facts, then look at why the error occured.
I am sure most of the data is done by computer.
GISS should be thankful that someone was diligent about local/regional conditions and is bringing this to GISS attention so that the reliability of their temperature projection has credibility.
As it stands, it is extremely obvious to anyone that there is something very wrong with how the algorithims have been developed.
The next feat will be to see if this regional error is extrapolated over the Arctic as a whole and other areas of the world.
We need reliable temperature sets. At this time GISS is not one of them and should be.
Augst Bjarnason says:
January 26, 2012 at 12:34 am
“I can assure you that the data by The Icelandic Met Office http://en.vedur.is/ is generally very reliable. The graph Hitafar Reykjavk 1866-2009? in my blog http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/1218545/ is from their web, http://www.vedur.is/vedur/frodleikur/greinar/nr/1801. This article is written by Trausti Jonsson, a well known meteorologist who is actively blogging here: http://trj.blog.is/. Maybe Anthony would like to contact him. His Email can be found here: http://www.vedur.is/um-vi/starfsfolk/”
“The graph shows the yearly average, 10 year average and 30 year average temperature in Reykjavik for the period 1866 to 2009. This graph is probably as accurate as it can be.”
Well, my trust is put in the people who actually LIVE on Iceland versus NASA-GISS or NOAA (or the usual collection of WUWT trolls).
Nick Stokes:
“But the purpose of adjusting is misunderstood. It isn’t an attempt to say that the station readings should have been something different, in terms of a measurement of that exact place. When station readings are used in an index, they are used as representing some region. It isn’t the only source for information about that region; other stations are also a guide. The adjustment is called homogenization; its the process whereby that other info is taken into account. As a representative of the region, the station is corrected when it appears to be out of line.”
Well, that clears things up! Heh, LOL!!
The suggestion from Tom Curtis and Nick Stokes that these adjustments arise from a homogenisation correction does not survive a moment’s scrutiny.
Just look at the unadjusted GHCN data graphs at
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/
Click on the eight icelandic stations (ones starting with 6200…) and you’ll see that all six of the stations that go back far enough show a warm period 1930-1940.
Maybe somebody could put these 6 raw-data graphs together on one page?
The GHCN adjustments are wrong and the GHCN adjusted data should not be used.
Tom@2:59am: Not really, that section describes the statistical requirement for the neighbour, i.e. all they do is require that it should be correlated. They do not say anything at all about geographical constraints. The procedure is developed and tested for US mainland stations, where it is reasonable to assume that there are several stations within short geographical distances and that they will exhibit similar trends (at least within the bounds of 0.5 correlation or better). It is not necessarily known if the procedure is robust when the geographical distance between neighbour cross a certain limit, and the Menne/Williams paper does not contain any discussion on this point.
I do not know if Iceland can be regarded as one climatic zone where one can expect that any station would exhibit similar trend to any other. I do know that if the neighbour stations used are from any other country then such an assumption would not be consistent with reality.
I just found this:
Greenland:Degree Days and the Lack of Warming
http://themigrantmind.blogspot.com/2009/06/greenlanddegree-days-and-lack-of.html
There is also a graph for Reykjavik there.
I was stationed in Iceland several times with the P-3 part of the IDF. The US Navy has records that go back to the 40’s for the air base and I am sure Loftleider (sp) has some also. Aviators need accurate met info so there should be no reason to adjust those records.
Paul Homewood, it is entirely possible that the sudden temperature changes in 1939 and 1941 confused the algorithm. It is also possible that those sudden changes are due to some extraneous factor resulting in high readings at the time. Which of the two is not clear from the data that you present. What is clear, is that this situation should be looked at more closely to either determine that the algorithm is acting properly; or that it fails in this circumstance, and therefore not use the algorithm in this instance. On that point I am not criticizing your post at all. I am, of course, strongly criticizing the rush to judgement exhibited by some of the comments.
By the way, you may be interested in the IMO’s comments on 2010:
“The average temperature in Reykjavík was 5.9°C, 1.6°C above the 1961 to 1990 mean, and has only once been higher, 6.0°C in 2003. It has twice before been equally high as now, in 1939 and 1941. The temperature has now been above average (1961-1990) for 15 years in a row. Nine months registered above average temperatures, three were below. January had the largest positive anomaly, almost 3°C, October the coldest, about 0.5°C below average.”
http://en.vedur.is/about-imo/news/2011/nr/2112
Clearly the IMO is using the unadjusted figures and considers them sound. Clearly also the temperatures in the 21st century are warmer than those in the 1930’s/40’s in Reykjavik even on unadjusted figures, although only just.
Paul Matthews, look at the GHCN data linked by Ágúst Bjarnason, Nick Stokes and myself. It clearly shows the effects of the homogeneity adjustment, which are also clearly a close match for those found by Paul Homewood. What you say cannot survive a moments scrutiny is there before your very eyes.
Caleb says:
January 26, 2012 at 2:14 am
It is interesting that the GISS map shows it as being so “warm” up in the Bering Straits in December, but when you look back at the maps of how the arctic ice built up this fall and winter, the Bering Straits were the one place with more ice than normal.
________________________________
Caleb,
Total Arctic ice isn’t dependent as much on temperature as it is on “storminess”. December ice was at the highest levels seen in years, but has experienced precipitous loss twice since, due to large storms breaking up the mass and ejecting slush out through the Fram Straits, etc.
Wind and ocean currents rule Arctic ice, not temperature.
So they have kept today’s temps unadjusted but reduced temps of 100 years ago by 2 degrees down. Now we know why temps in the last ten years have been stable – no room for adjustment as the studies were published openly 10 years ago and are now “fixed”. We can all play a waiting game, comparing the temps over the next 20 years with the studies of ten years ago, knowing that climate is flatlining. GISS and GCHN will be skewered on their own data with the passage of time.
@Tom Curtis:
Please give us just one clear example where the same algorithms have resulted in a cooling trend instead of a warming trend. Because every adjusted dataset I have seen either has no effect or results in a more pronounced warming trend. Remember, skeptics don’t have to prove anything but we have already shown that these algorithms produce unacceptably skewed datasets. It is up to Team AGW to prove that these erroneous corrections are exactly cancelled by erroneous corrections of the opposite trend – or simply run their data through a better algorithm.
Alternatively we sit and wait. Because the data of 10 years ago is now fixed and there can be no justification for further “corrections”. So we wait to see what these electronic thermometers in their new sites next to major airports will be telling us in 20 years time. So far they have been flatlining since the “great adjustment” was made – I have a suspicion they will still be flatlining in 20 years time despite China pumping out enough CO2 to terraform Mars.
There is an equivalent adjustment all across the USHCN data, which I document, state by state, on Bit Tooth Energy
Tom Curtis says:
“At that point you can apply a decision tree.
How about this in the decision tree.
1) If GISS publicly acknowledges the inadvertent error of their algorithm and corrects the corrupted adjusted data set(s) in a timely manner then maybe it was an inadvertent mistake afterall.
2) If GISS doesn’t publicly acknowledge the error and doesn’t correct the adjusted data sets, then it probably was NOT an accident.
If (2) comes to pass, it would be in my opinion be because they believe that only a relatively few dedicated blog readers will ever know about the “corrections” that have been made. The MSM will never cover such a story but will in all likelihood accept as accurate any reports that are based on information gleaned from the corrupted, adjusted, data sets.
Tom, perhaps I should have said ‘arise from a valid homogeneity correction’.
It’s worth looking at what the literature says on Iceland temperatures.
Hanna et al, 2004,
http://bprc.osu.edu/~jbox/pubs/Hanna_et_al_Int_J_Clim_2004.pdf
“The 1930s was the warmest decade of the 20th century in Iceland”
“The 1990s was definitely not the warmest decade of the 20th century in
Iceland, in contrast to the Northern Hemisphere land average (Houghton et al., 2001). It was cooler than the 1930s by 0.45 °C for Reykjavik, 0.41 °C for Stykkisholmur and 0.16 °C for Teigarhorn”
There’s also a paper on sea surface temperature
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/JCLI3933.1
“a cold latenineteenth-century, rapid warming around the 1920s, an overall warm peak circa 1940, cooling until an “icy”period circa 1970, followed by warming.”
“peak SSTs typically being attained around 1940; and cooling thereafter until the 1970s, followed once again by warming—but not generally back up to the level of the 1930s/1940s warm period.”
A couple observations.
Many posts have attempted to ridicule Anthony for not seeing a summer heat signature in a December plot. Making the observation and asking the question in fine. If a mistake was made, Anthony is usually quick to admit it and correct it, unlike Hansen, Mann, etc. Do you have a reply Anthony?
Second, many posts have been quick to blow off the size of the adjustments because studies have shown they balance out. This may be true globally, but remember there are very few northern temperature sites. A large upward temperature adjustment in a northern site averaged with few other northern sites would have a much greater effect than a temperate or tropical site with a large downward adjustment averaged with many other temperate or tropical sites. The sine of the N matters a great deal.
That should be “The size of the N matters a great deral”. Sorry.
Tom Curtis says:
January 26, 2012 at 7:05 am
“Paul Homewood, it is entirely possible that the sudden temperature changes in 1939 and 1941 confused the algorithm.”
Confused “the algorithm”? Really? Can you precisely state “the algorithm”? Why was it “confused”?
Tom Curtis:
What would be interesting would be to see maps of temperatures using non-adjusted data with a long term mean average as the base.
The short periods that are used now with the adjustments etc do not honestly reflect the actual climatic temperature changes well at all.
Why all the fuss? When I was a student and we carried out experiments then, if the experiment worked, we did not adjust the data. If, on the other hand, the results of our experiments did not agree with the relevant theory we realised that we had made a mess of the experiment and would either do it again or, if there was not enough time, make suitable “corrections” to the data so that the results were in reasonable agreement with the theory.
Everyone knows that CAGW is true and therefore if the data does not agree with the theory it obviously needs to be adjusted. The only difference is that when I was a student we were cleverer than climate scientists because we were careful not to get caught!
JPY says:
January 25, 2012 at 3:17 pm
“…So given that the post itself points to GHCN v3 as being the source of the change (and according to the Iceland met office, this change is an error), what do you expect the GISTEMP algorithm to do with it?…”
I would expect GISS to go over to GHCN and ask for an explanation for these changes, and make a determination that they are reasonable, and explain why or why not they have used the data. The current practice suggests someone – or even the whole group – needs to be fired because they seem, prima facie, irresponsible.
@Tom Curtis and Nick Stokes
It is only when you get to the end of the full decision tree (rather than the schematic above) that that there can be any plausible suggestion of wrong doing by GISS.
I agree totally with what Tom says. I am waiting for GHCN to explain what they have done. As the same sort of changes appear at 7 out of 8 Iceland stations, it suggests their methodology is wrong.
I am not suggesting this has been done deliberately, but I am keen that they get to the bottom of this and eventually get their records right, which is why I wanted to bring this into the open.
I am more than happy to work through this with you and/or Nick. To this end, I am happy for Anthony to pass on my email address to you, so we can work together.
As promised I have downloaded the Iceland Met figures. They can be seen here.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/iceland-met-office-temperatures-for-reykjavik/
@ Agust Bjarnson
Thanks for your reference to Greenland. Four out of five stations there exhibit the same sort of adjustments.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/ghcn-say-it-cant-be-that-cold-in-greenland/
Paul Homewood:
The important thing in all of this is to find out if the new adjusted data set is corrupted by the apparant poor methodology.
Anyone can make errors, that is who we are.
Is the apparant error confined to only Iceland or is manifest throughout the data set as a whole?
Thank you for bringing this to our and GHCN’s attention.
“Many posts have attempted to ridicule Anthony for not seeing a summer heat signature in a December plot. Making the observation and asking the question in fine. If a mistake was made, Anthony is usually quick to admit it and correct it, unlike Hansen, Mann, etc. Do you have a reply Anthony?”
Was the caveat in comments about media portayal there in the original – I can’t recall?
Note: I added (The way it was portrayed in media, you’d think it was a permanent condition) to the body of this post, since my intent with that statement about Texas wasn’t clear. I got distracted by phone calls and other business in the middle of writing this post and lost my train of thought (and I haven’t been following comments on it either). It is one of the pitfalls of trying to run a business and family while trying to keep up with the demands of this venue. Apologies to anyone who thought I was suggesting Texas summer temp data would show up in December data. Such transient events are just one more indication of the synoptic scale blocking high which caused that event, not any long term climate issue.
P.S. I’m about to add the supporting data and emails from the Icelandic Met Service, sent via Paul Homewood, to the body of the post.
Paul Homewood says:
January 26, 2012 at 9:30 am
@Tom Curtis and Nick Stokes
It is only when you get to the end of the full decision tree (rather than the schematic above) that that there can be any plausible suggestion of wrong doing by GISS.
—
I get it — It wasn’t GISS’s fault – it was “The Algorithm” ™ that done it!! [heh]
By the way, regarding “the suggestion of wrong doing by GISS” – here’s an analogy.
Let’s suppose Oscar Meyer unknowingly used tainted meat in it’s hot dogs, and as a result people who purchased the hot dogs got sick. Do you think Oscar Meyer could absolve itself of blame by saying “it was the farmer’s fault for selling us the bad meat!”??
So, GISS is providing the world a climate “product” much like the tainted hot dogs – but we musn’t place blame GISS since they only process “the meat” using “The Algorithm” ™.
It is actually very revealing to see how this discussion has developed. Some points, which may not have been clear initially, have been clarified and it seems we have a pretty good basis to move on from.
We have established that the unadjusted GHCN figures are the same as the Iceland figures and that a large adjustment has been made. It is now up to GHCN to prove that this is justified.
This is how good science should work.
I would ask one question :-
If these discrepancies had not been spotted and queried with GHCN, would they ever have been addressed?
At some point in my life, my fervent desire would be to see a visual with all the known or available original, unadulterated, temperature records from around the world averaged together in a single graphic. Disregard station changes, homogenations, spatial corrections, missing data points, etc., etc., etc. I readily admit It probably would not be a true approximation of temperature reality. Then show a seperate graphic with those temperatures adjusted for humidity, where available. Then let those who adjust the data do it stepwise. Wouldn’t that be informational.
I meant this comment “(The way it was portrayed in media, you’d think it was a permanent condition).”
For everybody who is insisting that the GHCN adjustments are automatically faulty, I refer you to this historgram of the trends in adjustments for the GHCN and CRU, first linked by Nick Stokes above:
http://www.gilest.ro/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/dist1.png
If you will look at it, you will see the most frequent adjustment is a very slight cooling adjustment (ie, one that reduces warming trends). Small adjustments are more frequent than large adjustments, and except for the smallest adjustments (where cooling adjustment predominate) are of about the same frequency whether warming or cooling. Overall, this means the adjustments are close to neutral with respect to the global trend. It also means that prima facie the adjustment algorithm is sound.
If you were to automatically exclude warming adjustments from the algorithm as some are in effect proposing, the result would be to bias the algorithm to ensure cooling trends.
So, rather than rushing to judgement again, you would do well to wait on a detailed examination of the case. Where there, for example, significant changes in the siting or locale of the site in Reykjavik in 1939 and 1941? Was there any sudden change in traffic at Reykjavik Airport that might have resulted in biasing the reading due to warming from engines and prop wash? Or was there some well defined climate event that would explain the large shifts in temperature over that period? Without enquiry, you do not know, and your simply assuming the algorithm is wrong in its application shows your “skepticism” is non-existent.
As it happens, I know for a fact that the second suggestion above (increased traffic at the airport) is in fact what happened. I do not know that it was the cause of the unusual temperatures, but to assume that the sudden influx of aircraft at Reykjavik Airport due to its use as a staging post between the US and Britain during WW2, and also as a base for antisubmarine operations had no effect without any bother of inquiry is absurd.
Tom Curtis @ 10:47
What this may show is that the adjustments, whether cooling or warming, is the issue.
Even with increased traffic at the airport, the surrounding temp metrics would not/should not have been affected.
This is about trying to have accurate temperature metrics used for climate no matter where they are located. A data set should be “uniformally” correct, not correct in some spots, cold in other, and warm in others. To use such a set as I described for any type of accurate research would/should be absurb.
Ever heard of the rounding effect concerning interest rates etc? While a very small per item thing, it can and does amount to huge finacial gains/losses that do not average out.
I think the same applies to the current data set in question.
Anyone/everyone makes errors. Best to find the error and then correct them. That will result in sounder science and more confidence in the merics.
Gosh:
Anyone/everyone makes erros. Best to find the error and then correct it.
That will result in sounder science and more confidence in the metrics.
See, I just made some errors in typing and hopefully corrected them.
Tom Curtis says
“As it happens, I know for a fact that the second suggestion above (increased traffic at the airport) is in fact what happened. I do not know that it was the cause of the unusual temperatures, but to assume that the sudden influx of aircraft at Reykjavik Airport due to its use as a staging post between the US and Britain during WW2, and also as a base for antisubmarine operations had no effect without any bother of inquiry is absurd.”
The US didn’t enter the war until Dec 7. 1941. The warm spikes were 1939 and 1941…. there was a strong cooling trend from 1942-1945 in the data. From 1942-45 should have been the WARM spikes if it was due to “aircraft in my opinion.
Anthony – so definitely not changing the body of a post as a direct consequence of commenters pointing out errors (such as has been claimed that Skeptical Science do). I think we can all recognize that you made a mistake and have corrected it, no big deal. Perhaps that same courtesy could be extended to others?
REPLY: Thanks Louise. The difference here is that SkS did their “corrections” long after the post and comments were made, with no notice of any kind. They were caught out and called out for doing so, and have been unapologetic. If I did such things without notices, months or years after the fact, I’d rightly be called out on it too. Making mistakes and correcting them in the open for all to see while the discussion is live is one thing, “correcting” them months/years later with no notice is something else entirely. – Anthony
This has got to be one of the greatest examples of the general climate discussion I’ve ever seen.
Paul and Anthony give us a post which shows some real problems with the way data is treated and temps being represented to the world. Now, clearly, the post could have been cleaned up and aesthetically better. But, this doesn’t change the base premise. The temps GISS is reporting the to world clearly isn’t anything like what the actual temps are.
Cue the merchants of confusion! We can bicker about Iceland’s Met office actually quoted, but does that change the fact the data and temps are being altered? WTF difference does it make, Alan?
Next up, people rush to the defense of GISS!! “It was the GHCN what dunnit!!! Not GISS!!!” Turns out that they’re both jacking with the data, but again, WTF difference does it make? Are we to believe GISS doesn’t know GHCN data is jacked? Of course they know, and approve. But, even if they didn’t, is shirking the responsibility to vet the data an excuse? Either way is outrageous and unacceptable. Nations and governing bodies are making decisions based on what GISS spews. GISS apologists are worse scumbags than the GISS historical revisionists!
Lastly, please someone start hand-waving about Texas again. Does the map alter the data? Does it change the premise one iota?
There are a bunch of well educated, morally corrupt, intellectually vacant, people on this thread.
Alcheson, Britain entered the war in 1939, and immediately began sourcing a large portion of their aircraft demands from the US, not to mention a lot of other goods. They also immediately began anti-submarine operations from out of Iceland from 1940. As it happens, the homogeniety adjustment for 1941 to the end of the war is larger than that for 1939. Pure coincidence, of course /sarc.
From Wikipedia:
“The first flight from the airport area was September 3, 1919, with the takeoff of an Avro 504, the first aeroplane in Iceland. Until 1937 there were experiments with airline operations in Vatnsmýri but with the foundation of Iceland’s oldest airline, Flugfélag Akureyrar, currently operating as Icelandair in Akureyri in 1938, operations began in the area and in March 1940 scheduled flights started taking off when Flugfélag Akureyrar moved its hub from Akureyri to Reykjavík (and changing its name to Flugfélag Íslands)
The current airport was built by the British military during World War II on the south coast of Reykjavík peninsula, then a small town. The military began construction in October 1940 at which time the airport still only had a grass surface. The Black Watch regiment constructed the first runway constructing the piste over sunken oil barrels. On July 6, 1946, the British handed the airport operation over to the Icelandic government and since then it has been operated by the Icelandic Civil Aviation Authority (now named Flugstoðir).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk_Airport#History
Now, are you going to tell me on WUWT that commencing flight operations in 1938, constructing a sealed runway (of a sort) in 1940 cannot have effected temperature measurements? Well, so much for the surface stations project then.
I don’t have a dog in this hunt. The problem could be with the temperature adjustment, or the problem could be related to the history of the station, and the algorithm has worked properly. You cannot find that out just by looking at the statistics of nearby stations (ie, performing a manual homogeneity adjustment) as the UHCN is more or less restricted to doing. You also have to look at the actual details of the station history. You also have to look at specific historic climate events in the period so see if they can explain the temperature changes. You absolutely cannot find the correct conclusion to this issue by observing that there has been an adjustment and concluding that therefore the adjustment introduces an error.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
– George Orwell’s 1984
[Snip. Anthony is not a liar, and I won’t tolerate you labeling him as such. ~dbs, mod.]
[snip. ~dbs]
Although I’m a (moderate) sceptic the points Tom Curtis made about Iceland seem quite reasonable. The British occupied Iceland on 10 May 1940, one month and a day after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway. Iceland could have been a useful base for the German navy and airforce so to prevent that up to 25,000 British troops were stationed on the island. A little more than a year after the start of the British occupation the governments of the UK and US agreed that responsibility for the defence of Iceland should be transferred to the still neutral United States in order to free up the British forces engaged on that task. Thereafter 40,000 Americans were stationed in Iceland.
Of course this might not have anything to do with the adjustments to the temperature records but it does seem a plausible explanation. However there will probably still be doubts about the adjustments until those responsible for them provide a detailed explanation of what they did and why they did it.
Tom Curtis says:
January 26, 2012 at 11:54 am
You absolutely cannot find the correct conclusion to this issue by observing that there has been an adjustment and concluding that therefore the adjustment introduces an error.
============================================================
Of all the obnoxiously arrogant and absurd statements……… Read the post.(Including the update) Do you believe the people of Iceland don’t know these things? Do you honestly believe we need GISS, NOAA or anyone else to tell us what the real temps of Iceland are? Do you understand that those people are educated and aware of the issues just as well, if not more so, than you are?
I weep for western civilization.
@Camburn
Is the apparant error confined to only Iceland or is manifest throughout the data set as a whole?
It seems basically Iceland and Greenland. Also Lerwick, in the Orkneys! The concern is that if these “errors” have happened this time, how many others have slipped through the net previously?
And the ‘Team’ knows about errors in their adjustments. From ClimateGate 2.0 # 1057.txt
From: Thorne, Peter (Climate Research)
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 2:34 PM
To: Phil Jones; Parker, David; Stott, Peter
Subject: Tom’s thoughts on urban errors …
… Everybody wants to add an estimate of what UHI bias might be into their error bars, but it seems to me that rather than trust folk lore that there is a uhi bias, they first need to find one systematically in the network. Until they do that, the former is just hand waving to appease the know-littles. Jim Hansen adjusts his urban stations (based on night-lights) to nearby rural stations, but if I recall correctly (I’ll send that paper shortly), he warms the trend in 42 percent of the urban stations indicating that nearly half have an urban cold bias. Yet error analyzers want to add a one sided extra
error bar for uhi…..
Regards,
Tom
Explain how urban areas get cold?
@Tom Curtis
As it happens, I know for a fact that the second suggestion above (increased traffic at the airport) is in fact what happened
You will find the same pattern of adjustments at other Iceland stations e.g.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040130000&data_set=12&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040130000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
But I agree, lets wait for GHCN to explain.
It is good to see the correspondence between Paul Homewood and Trausti Jónsson. Trausti is a specialist in climate research and probably one of the most knowledgeable persons in Iceland’s climate history.
Trausti has a new blog post almost every day where he discusses the current weather, the weather trend, how to read and interpret weather maps, climate and weather history, theory, unusual weather patterns, etc… See http://trj.blog.is He is constantly educating his readers in his humorous writing style. Every day more the 1000 people read his blog which is quite a lot considering that the population is only about 320.000, or 1/1000 of the US population. Equivalent to one million readers every day is something…
Well, his name Trausti means a person you can trust. I am sure you can trust what he tells you 🙂
By the way, I have updated my blog with links to the interesting posts and discussions here at WUWT and at Paul’s site.
Keep up the good work Paul and Anthony!
http://agbjarn.blog.is/blog/agbjarn/entry/1218545/
Regards
Agust
Ryan says: January 26, 2012 at 7:43 am
“Please give us just one clear example where the same algorithms have resulted in a cooling trend instead of a warming trend.”
I did that in the post that I linked, with the histograms. I listed a large number, and showed in detail Coonabarabran in New Soulh Wales, where adjustments produced a steep decline. But the histogram gives the more complete picture.
Tim Clark says: January 26, 2012 at 9:54 am
“At some point in my life, my fervent desire would be to see a visual with all the known or available original, unadulterated, temperature records from around the world averaged together in a single graphic.”
It’s been done, many times. As occasionally grudgingly conceded here, GHCN produces two data sets, one adjusted, one not. The unadjusted set comes straight from the data supplied by Met offices. That’s formalised for the last fifteen years or so with CLIMAT forms, which are lodged monthly and can be inspected on the web. The published GHCN set does not deviate from those. In this case, it is in accord with the Icelandic Met set.
Several indices have been produced using this set. BEST uses unadjusted data. I maintain a set myself, TempLS. Here is a post comparing several such efforts; I don’t think any of them used adjusted data.
If you want to see a plot of individual station trends from raw GHCN data, with no processing other than local regression, collected in a global shaded plot, it’s here.
Missing link – here is the Blackboard post comparing numerous indices using unadjusted GHCN data, showing that it made no systematic difference.
“Does the Met Office accept that their own temperature data is in error, and that the corrections applied by GHCN are both valid and of the correct value? If so, why?
d) Does the Met Office intend to modify their own temperature records in line with GHCN?”
These questions from Paul’s letter to the Icelandic Met clearly show the confusion about the GHCN data sets. GHCN was not in any way saying that the Iceland data was wrong, or should be replaced. They continued to publish it in their unadjusted data set.
Here is GHCN’s own statement about the status of the sets:
” V3 contains two different dataset files per each of the three elements. “QCU” files represent the quality controlled unadjusted data, and “QCA” files represent the quality controlled adjusted data. The unadjusted data are often referred to as the “raw” data. It is important to note that the term “unadjusted” means that the developers of GHCNM have not made any adjustments to these received and/or collected data, but it is entirely possible that the source of these data (generally National Meteorological Services) may have made adjustments to these data prior to their inclusion within the GHCNM. Often it is difficult or impossible to know for sure, if these original sources have made adjustments, so users who desire truly “raw” data would need to directly contact the data source. The “adjusted” data contain bias corrected data (e.g. adjustments made by the developers of GHCNM), and so these data can differ from the “unadjusted” data.”
Glenn Tamblyn said @ January 25, 2012 at 10:48 pm
Hmmm… first thing I did was check the data underlying the graphs. They checked out. Then I applied the Principle of Charity to Paul’s claims regarding the emails from the Iceland Met Office. There appears to be no good reason to assume that Paul is lying. I have no problem with checking with the Iceland Met Office, but accusing someone of being untruthful is going a step too far IMHO. Good journalism? I don’t think so.
Barbara Tuchman relates in her book Practicing History that she was scoffed at by fellow journalists for researching before writing her articles; they thought she was wasting her time.
Her book seems to be available for free download here:
http://www.ebook3000.com/Practicing-History–Selected-Essays-By-Barbara-W–Tuchman_19865.html
She was not only resented by journalists BTW, but academic historians also. By the latter because she wrote clearly such that ordinary people could understand her. Academic historians hate that.
@ Nick Stokes
The “adjusted” data contain bias corrected data (e.g. adjustments made by the developers of GHCNM), and so these data can differ from the “unadjusted” data.”
Yes we know they have adjusted them, Nick. We want to know why.
Nick Stokes says:
January 26, 2012 at 1:05 pm
In the link you presented showing raw data, it only goes back to 1951. Would be much more informative if it went back to 1900. Then we could see actual climate rather than weather.
Yes, the world is warming following a ~1000 year natural cycle likely to pass its maximum within 200 years, such maximum being about 1 degree C higher than at present.
As the yellow line on this plot http://climate-change-theory.com/360month.jpg shows, the rate of increase is declining … 0.06 deg.C per decade, down to 0.05 deg.C per decade, down to zero within 200 years when temperatures should pass a maximum and then decline for ~500 years.
There has been no additional effect of carbon dioxide because any radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot warm or slow the rate of cooling of a warmer surface. (Claes Johnson “Computational Blackbody Radiation.”) In fact, “backradiation” can’t even melt frost on the ground, let alone warm the oceans.
If anything, carbon dioxide might have a slight cooling effect as it can absorb some of the solar insolation which is in the IR part of the spectrum.
Paul Homeward, as it happens, you will not find the same pattern of adjustments in other Icelandic Stations, as you could confirm for yourself following the links provided by Ágúst Bjarnason at 10:44 pm, Jan 25th. The only one (other than Reykjavik) showing adjustments even close to those at Reykjavik is Vestmannaeyja, about which the only thing I know is that it is an Island of the south coast of Iceland.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004048000.gif
Grimsey, and island of the North coast of Iceland has adjustments which reduce the warming trend.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004065000.gif
The Stykisholmur data to which you link has an adjustment which reinforces a warming trend, but has a very distinct pattern from that for Reykjavik, most notably in lacking the large adjustment in the early 1940’s, and also the somewhat smaller adjustment in the 1950’s and early 60’s.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004013000.gif
I cannot be certain, of course, that the GISTEMP adjustment is identical or nearly identical to that by NOAA, but neither can I distinguish their effects by eye.
Given the very specific nature of the adjustments at Reykjavik, with the large adjustment coinciding, first with the first introduction of commercial air traffic to the airport, and then with the sealing of the runway and commencement of intensive military operations from the airport, it would be remiss of the IMO to not make careful inquiries of the detailed history of the station to see if, in fact, the NOAA adjustments have not in fact picked up on the impact of real events on the station record.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004030000.gif
That sounds familiar.
See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/09/new-zealands-niwa-temperature-train-wreck/
“New Zealand’s NIWA temperature train wreck
Posted on October 9, 2010 by Anthony Watts
This is an old argument, adjusted data versus non adjusted data, and why does the adjusted data show a trend and the unadjusted data does not? We’ve battled this here on WUWT many times with GISS and NCDC, now the battle is spreading down under to New Zealand. And surprise, they cite NCDC’s own adjustment techniques. And it’s the same thing NCDC and GISS does, “
Tom Curtis says “If you will look at it, you will see the most frequent adjustment is a very slight cooling adjustment (ie, one that reduces warming trends). Small adjustments are more frequent than large adjustments, and except for the smallest adjustments (where cooling adjustment predominate) are of about the same frequency whether warming or cooling. Overall, this means the adjustments are close to neutral with respect to the global trend. ”
It just gets to be tiresome when all of these little ups and downs in temperatures (which are not applied randomly, especially after 2007, as shown over at Climateaudit ( http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/26/nasa-giss-adjusting-the-adjustments ) invariably results in a “Hockey Stick” after the “necessary corrections” are applied. Even when the most famous hockey stick of all has been thoroughly discredited, the most ardent supporters of CAGW continue to trash their credibility and reputations defending it rather than admit it is not an accurate representation. In the current example we now have temperatures profiles for Iceland that were widely accepted by the publishing scientific community in 2000 ( http://www.smhi.se/hfa_coord/nordklim/old/rapport0900.pdf ) that have been once again morphed into a hockey stick. And the rationale being given for morphing this temperature history into a hockey stick?…. a few prop driven airplanes on a grass field a couple of years in the 1940s after the temperatures started spiking up in 1939. Sounds like Chinese aerosols hand-waving to me.
Interesting comment here from Trausti at the IMO
“No changes have been made in the Stykkisholmur series since about 1970, the Reykjavík and Akureyri series that I sent you have been SLIGHTLY ADJUSTED FOR MAJOR RELOCATIONS AND CHANGES IN OBSERVING HOURS. Because of the observing hour changes, values that where published before 1924 in Reykjavík and before 1928 in Akureyri ARE NOT COMPATIBLE WITH THE LATER CALCULATION PRACTICES. For other stations in Iceland values published before 1956 ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH LATER VALUES except at stations that observed 8 times per day (but the differences are usually small).” (my emphasis)
Seems there are issues with the Icelandic records that do need to be looked at and quite probably some sort of adjustment is needed. Which is what the agencies have done. Were they reasonable adjustments or not? Dunno. But when we know the raw data has inaccuracies in it – Trausti said as much – due to the measurement history of the sites.
If you look at the GISS station record from GISS shown by Paul, what you see are gaps in the 20’s, 40’s and 60’s. Whenever you see something like that, that is a red flag saying that you shouldn’t just assume that the disconnected sections can be treated as one series. Connecting up those sort of gaps without understanding why the occur is a BIG NO NO. But in Paul’s second graph, which doesn’t show any attribution for its source by the way, those gaps are joined up.
We seem to now have a quite clear case that adjustments WERE needed to the Icelandic records and the agencies have made them. Were the adjustments an improvement or not? Dunno. There may be an issue with the specific changes made for Rekjavik but then again they may be spot on. But I see no reason to draw any conclusion of any sort of malfeasance or subterfuge. Just people actually doing their job, trying to improve the quality of the temperature record.
Yet look at the Kangaroo Court type opinions from many previous commenters. Would you want your freedom and liberty left to the judgement of these sort of people. Those folks a completely entitled to live in their ‘Conspiracy Theory filled alternate reality’. Enjoy playing in that little sand-pit of yours. But please don’t attack the grown ups.
Paul Homewood says: January 26, 2012 at 2:49 pm
“Yes we know they have adjusted them, Nick. We want to know why.”
Well, here is the current reference. But my point in setting out that quote is that GHCN make it quite clear that they provide one set adjusted, for those who like that sort of thing, and one set that is the original data. The latter is essentially unchanged from the Iceland Met set, in this case. So I think the phrasing of your questions to the Met was quite misleading.
Alcheson says: January 26, 2012 at 4:46 pm
‘It just gets to be tiresome when all of these little ups and downs in temperatures (which are not applied randomly, especially after 2007, as shown over at Climateaudit ( http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/26/nasa-giss-adjusting-the-adjustments ) invariably results in a “Hockey Stick” after the “necessary corrections” are applied.’
Tom, who you are disputing, cites an actual histogram of results to show that the adjustments do not increase trend singificantly. You respond with unsupported assertion. Many people, most recently BEST, have shown that the adjustments have no significant effect on the global trend.
Paul…
Congratulations for you attitude and information throughout. You have kept your end of the discussion on a rational, even keel, and have not risen to the bait of either those who would steer the discussion in different directions, or those who would incite an emotional reaction by suggesting that you’re just making things up. You have even offered to work WITH some of your critics to resolve the issue.
I understand both skeptics and warmists are angry, but there’s been too much emotion and not enough discussion on WUWT lately. The noise to signal ratio is way too high. I hope others can look at Paul’s demeanor and take example.
I look forward with interest to the furthering of this discussion.
Note this in the reply from Trausti to Paul
“No changes have been made in the Stykkisholmur series since about 1970, the Reykjavík and Akureyri series that I sent you have been slightly adjusted FOR MAJOR RELOCATIONS AND CHANGES IN OBSERVING HOURS. Because of the observing hour changes, values that where published before 1924 in Reykjavík and before 1928 in Akureyri ARE NOT COMPATIBLE WITH THE LATER CALCULATION PRACTICES. For other stations in Iceland values published before 1956 are INCOMPATIBLE with later values except at stations that observed 8 times per day (but the differences are usually small)” (my emphasis)
Next look at the graph for Rekyavik from GISS that Paul posted. Gaps in the series in the 20’s, 40’s and 60’s. Gaps like that are a Red Flag. They mean that ‘something’ happened at each point in time and that the disconnected series may have biases relative to each other. So there is demonstrably, from Trausti’s comments and the GISS graph, issues in the Icelandic records. So adjustments are needed if they can be determined. Which is what the folks at the agencies have done. Just doing their job. There may be an issue with the specific changes made for Rekjavik but then again they may be spot on. If no change had been made then that would be suspicious.
And as has also been highlighted here the range of adjustments made to the trends from around the world tend to be small and pretty evenly balanced between warming and cooling, perhaps with a slight cooling bias.
Yet the idea that the surface temperature products are wrong, biased or being manipulated is an idea that some people just can’t let go of, no matter how much evidence there is that the temperature records are pretty solid. Multiple temperature products in good agreement, BEST, Multiple independent analyses on the Net, surfacestations.org and the analysis from it, even this little storm in a thimble. All saying the same thing. The surface temperature record is pretty solid, not distorted and there is no malfeasance, manipulation or any such thing.
So why can’t some people let this whole idea go? A classic Idee Fixe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idee_fixe_(psychology) perhaps?
Paul Homewood – thanks for the correspondence copies.
Nick above –
“Many people, most recently BEST, have shown that the adjustments have no significant effect on the global trend.”
This begs the question why adjust? Also are any of the sets you linked at the Blackboard raw data only?
slow to follow,
When the BEST data is not “adjusted”, the result is no longer alarming:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/article-2055191-0e974b4300000578-216_468x4731.jpg
slow to follow says: January 26, 2012 at 5:54 pm
“This begs the question why adjust? Also are any of the sets you linked at the Blackboard raw data only?”
I believe all the “amateur” indices at least use GHCN unadjusted. I certainly do. Here is a more recent post at the Blackboard which includes BEST. It has ,a href=”http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/Fig2.png”>this plot comparing NOAA with some indices not using homogenization.
Why adjust? Good question – it doesn’t make much difference. But you can bet that if they didn’t adjust, there would be posts at WUWT that found some station that had moved, or some such, and commenters wanting charges laid because no adjustment had been performed.
Nick Stokes says:
January 26, 2012 at 6:50 pm
The link that you posted on to the Blackboard proves nothing as it doesn’t even go back to 1900. Only goes back to the 1970’s. The time frame we are talking about here is the late 30’s and early 40’s….20th Century.
As far as the validity of adjustment to this posts questions, it seems that Icelandic Met has already done so, thus baring the need for further adjustment.
The results of adjusting an adjustment from a basic statistical sense is that the derived results will have expanded error bars.
I will await the response from GHCN as to the reasons they have adjusted the adjustment.
My posts are not indicateing any malfeaseance on GHCN’s part, nor GISSTEMP’s part.
Camburn, to see the effect of the GISS adjustments over the last century, see this page:
http://clearclimatecode.org/gistemp-urban-adjustment/
and especially, this graph (sorry for the large URL)::
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lc&chds=-100,100&chtt=ccc-gistemp:+global+land+index&chdlp=t&chdl=old+adjustment+(r344)|new+adjustment+(r345)|no+adjustment&chd=t:-9,-13,2,-4,-40,-21,-25,-44,-23,8,-20,-50,-35,-36,-28,-29,-23,-12,-15,-21,-3,-1,-26,-34,-39,-23,-13,-39,-29,-30,-19,-24,-32,-27,-1,6,-20,-46,-33,-8,-17,-3,-9,-15,-11,-15,5,-5,-1,-22,-3,3,4,-11,2,-8,2,12,15,-2,14,12,11,6,11,-1,1,12,-3,-9,-17,-2,3,11,-9,-8,-18,8,9,5,-1,10,5,3,-25,-15,-8,-2,-9,1,4,-10,-5,18,-6,-2,-21,16,7,14,28,40,9,34,15,12,19,35,42,28,49,44,14,18,31,44,36,39,70,44,39,55,67,65,59,76,63,71,53,70,-999%7C-24,-19,-14,-19,-45,-32,-42,-54,-23,-4,-40,-47,-38,-41,-29,-20,-10,-3,-21,-13,2,2,-17,-26,-37,-17,-7,-36,-22,-25,-17,-20,-22,-19,2,4,-20,-39,-32,-7,-13,-6,-14,-17,-12,-13,6,-6,-1,-21,-3,3,1,-12,5,-9,0,11,15,-1,14,11,10,4,9,-1,0,12,-3,-9,-17,-2,4,12,-8,-7,-17,8,10,5,-1,9,5,3,-25,-15,-7,-1,-9,0,5,-10,-6,19,-7,-2,-23,15,6,13,27,39,7,33,13,12,18,34,41,27,47,42,13,17,30,44,36,38,69,43,40,56,67,65,59,77,65,73,55,71,-999%7C-23,-24,-29,-35,-60,-37,-36,-51,-29,-10,-43,-44,-41,-50,-38,-34,-21,-15,-32,-21,-5,-8,-26,-35,-45,-26,-15,-44,-31,-32,-26,-28,-26,-22,1,1,-22,-40,-33,-11,-16,-6,-12,-15,-11,-13,7,-6,-2,-22,-6,3,1,-13,3,-9,0,10,15,-2,13,11,9,3,9,-2,0,11,-3,-10,-18,-2,3,12,-8,-8,-17,8,9,5,-1,9,4,3,-26,-15,-7,-2,-9,1,4,-10,-5,18,-6,-2,-22,16,7,14,28,40,9,34,15,12,19,35,42,28,49,44,15,18,31,45,38,41,72,46,42,58,69,67,61,79,67,75,57,73,-999&chxt=x,y,r&chxl=0:%7C1880%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1890%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1900%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1910%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1920%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1930%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1940%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1950%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1960%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1970%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1980%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C1990%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C2000%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C%7C2010%7C1:%7C%7C-0.5%7C+0.0%7C+0.5%7C%7C2:%7C%7C-0.5%7C+0.0%7C+0.5%7C&chco=ff0000,0000ff,000000&chs=440×330
I don’t know, I find it a bit alarming that the warmists all point to arctic warming as being the canary in the coal mine then find that it is the polar (or near polar) records that have these upward trend changes (Greenland and Iceland). I am not ready to say fraud, but definitely would stretch to confirmation bias.
Tom Curtis,
Your first link is bogus, and your second link is worthless.
Hansen/GISS constantly and deviously “adjust” the temperature record to show either cooler past temperatures [making natural warming appear alarming], or artificially raising current temperatures. GISS never adjusts the temperature record to show moderating temperatures:
http://zapruder.nl/images/uploads/screenhunter3qk7.gif
http://i44.tinypic.com/295sp37.gif
http://img.umweltluege.de/fudging0809.jpg
http://i31.tinypic.com/5vov3p.jpg
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/RevisionismSPPI.jpg
http://www.klimadebat.dk/images/articles/lansner/f9.jpg
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NASACHANGES.jpg
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/gw-us-1999-2011-hansen.gif
http://i54.tinypic.com/fylq2w.jpg
No GISS doesn’t do anything dishonest…… they’re just wrong 1/2 the time. WELL, WHICH IS IT? [snip]
The first is the original based on “After GHCN adj” (version 2)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Then the new Version 3.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=12&num_neighbors=1
==========================================================
This is all that should need to be stated, but, we’ve still a bunch of scumbags on this earth pretending that a dynamic history is OK. It is not OK. You don’t get to alter history because it doesn’t fit your world view.
It is laughable that there are people here who assume GISS and GHCN and whoever else knows the real temps more than the people of Iceland. Well, it would be laughable if their unwarranted arrogance wasn’t so odoriferous. But, it is. The stench of a rotting mind is worse than rotting flesh.
One or anyone, or all of you a$$bags, please justify how you believe Iceland doesn’t know how to adjust their temps properly. DEMONSTRATE IT!
Tom Curtis says:
January 26, 2012 at 10:47 am
“So, rather than rushing to judgement again, you would do well to wait on a detailed examination of the case. Where there, for example, significant changes in the siting or locale of the site in Reykjavik in 1939 and 1941? Was there any sudden change in traffic at Reykjavik Airport that might have resulted in biasing the reading due to warming from engines and prop wash? Or was there some well defined climate event that would explain the large shifts in temperature over that period? Without enquiry, you do not know, and your simply assuming the algorithm is wrong in its application shows your “skepticism” is non-existent.”
I disagree. Assuming that a classifier like the Menne-Williams algorithm is perfect shows a lack of experience and extreme gullibility. Assuming that it creates false positives or false negatives in a certain number of cases is the ONLY acceptable position; and it has NOTHING to do with skepticism.
DirkH, nice strawman, but I have consistently argued that the issue should be looked at from both sides, ie, from both the IMO and from the GHCN/GISS. I have also clearly stated that I have no opinion, nor any preference as to the result. It is possible that NOAA needs to readjust the Reykjavik data back towards the IMO product, possibly all the way. It is also possible that NOAA has found a genuine problem with the Reykjavik data, that IMO will be able to confirm by studying the historical records of the station. It is that possibility, which most regulars are excluding a priori that also needs to be considered.
But YOU do not get to pretend that I am accepting the accuracy of the Menne/Williams algorithm a priori as a substitute for actually proving that is were the actual error lies. It is certainly a safe assumption that the algorithm produces false positives and negatives. IT IS NOT a safe assumption that in any particular case it is a false positive or negative without actually examining the details of the case. Making that assumption is simply avoiding skepticism in favour of ideologically driven dogmatism.
Two things I’m struggling with here. The first is that several commenters say that adjustments to temperature series zero out globally, i.e. they do not matter. I can understand the rationale for wanting to make corrections, but if experience shows they cancel out in the ende why continue doing them? We can then just as easily do without the adjustments and use the raw series, because the only thing we are after is the deviation from a defined normal.
The second thing I do not understand is how the Menne et.al. algorithm works when it is is basically using uncertain timeseries in a pairwise comparison in order to make adjustments. It is somewhat akin to the problem of using redundant temperature measurements in a process. That may, on the face of it, seem to be a robust strategy since when one indicator fails you can still use the other. For those of us more interested in the state of the temperature sensor than the actual temperature the issue is a bit more complex. If one sensor starts to drift, how do you figure out which is correct? If one says constant temp, the other varies up and down, can you safely conclude that the constant one is in failure? If there is a constant difference between the two, but else they act similarly, which is showing the correct temperature? And so on….
I need to read the paper more closelsy as I have still to find how they make sure they do the right corrections.
James Sexton says: January 26, 2012 at 9:40 pm
“You don’t get to alter history because it doesn’t fit your world view.”
No one is altering history. The history is to be found on the GHCN qcu file. That contains the data just as reported by the Iceland Met. It hasn’t changed.
If you’re in the business of compiling a global index, you’ll want a value that is representative of SW Iceland. So GHCN offers you a homogenized value, with papers to explain why they think their homogenization is better. Read the papers, and use it if you think it is better for that purpose. Some do.
I checked with Trausti Jonsson about Reykjavik station moves.
It moved in 1931 and 1945 but not between those dates, so station moves cannot explain the drastic adjustments introduced by GHCN in 1939-41.
Agreeing with Caleb, I thought Nome had record ice that prevent the fuel oil arriving but it is shown as having record highs. Not a missing “-” sign again is it?
Luther implies in his reply to Caleb that there isn’t a link between ice formation and temperature. That may need further explanation.
The other interesting point is GISS baseline warming map shows no warming for the Antarcic Peninsula. What happened to Larsen B?
Alaska is shown as deep red. Yet Alaska had a ‘surprise’ early onset of cold and sea ice such that Nome has had to work hard to get an icebreaker to bring in needed fuel…
I think the good folks of Alaska would not think they were red hot in December…
As the “QA process” tosses out any data that are a number of degrees ‘too low’ (and not a percentage or fraction of normal range), it preferentially tosses out extreme cold data from high volatility places (like the cold arctic north) and the replaces them with an average of surrounding ASOS airport data. BY DEFINITION, an average will be less volatile, so clips downgoing peaks.
As each run of GIStemp does a new re-imagining of the data with now homogenizing, there can be no individual explanation for each “adjustment” other than “the computer did it”…
IMHO, GIStemp is an automated nightmare fabricator that depends on mathematical artifacts to find warming even where their is none. There simply can not be a ‘global temperature’ (based on fundamental physics – an average of intensive variables is meaningless) and the way missing data are ‘re-imagined’ fabricates warmth where there is no data.
Glenn draws attention to the gaps in the graph at 1926, 1946 and 1966. There is also a gap at 2008. He describes these as a ‘red flag’.
If he had looked at the graphs of the unadjusted and adjusted data, which several people have linked to on this thread, he would have seen that there are no gaps in unadjusted data.
The gaps in the data are introduced by the GHCN ‘adjustment’ algorithm itself!
The reason for this may be ‘duplicate data’ – Jan and Feb 2008 both have the same monthly average of -0.2, and Oct and Nov are both 2.8. The GHCN algorithm may (incorrectly) assume this is an error and delete a chunk of data (though I don’t know why that would result in the deletion of two years of data).
In some cases, for example Stykkisholmur, there are gaps in the unadjusted GHCN data. But this is just because GHCN have failed to collect the data. The ‘missing’ data for Stykkisholmur 2001-2007 can be found at the website given by Trausti Jonsson.
I have just received the following mail.
Our discussions regarding temperatures in Iceland are discussed on page 8 in the newsletter (see below):
Regards
Agust
— — —
Dear all.
Please find below a link which will take you directly to a short newsletter (ca. 1.5 MB) with meteorological information summarised for the year 2011:
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_Year_2011.pdf
All temperatures in this newsletter are shown in degrees Celsius.
Previous issues of the newsletter, diagrams and additional material are available on http://www.climate4you.com/
I apologize for any double mailing. If you do not want to receive further mails of this type, please mail me to that effect.
All the best, yours sincerely,
Ole Humlum
Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography
Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Box 1042 Blindern
N-0316 Oslo, Norway
following mail:
— — —
From page 8:
“”Note:
Please note that as the GHCN v2 database is no longer being updated, and since late November 2011 the GISS surface temperature analysis is based on the adjusted GHCN version 3 data. Graphs comparing results of the GISS analysis using GHCN v2 and v3 are available on the GISS homepage for comparison. Apparently this change also resulted in some surprising effects for several individual station data series available from the GISS database, which raises a number of concerns, see, e.g., http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/another-giss-miss-this-time-in-iceland/#more-55440
In general, the corrections associated with taking the adjusted GHCN v3 database into use are apparently quite substantial for years before 1993, especially concerning the early 20th century warm period around 1925-45, as least for some stations. However, changes for the years following 1993 are small or absent. The maps shown on pages 1-2 in this newsletter are therefore not affected by these somewhat unanticipated changes of the original data”.”
@Agust – especially concerning the early 20th century warm period around 1925-45,
Warm period? Not according to GISS.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=620040300000&data_set=13&num_neighbors=1
I have just received an email from Trausti Jonsson at the Iceland Met. He makes this very telling personal observation.
In 1965 there was a real and very sudden climatic change in Iceland (deterioration). It was larger in the north than in the south and affected both the agriculture and fishing – and therefore also the whole of society with soaring unemployment rates and a 50% devaluation of the local currency. In the questions above the year 1965 is mentioned twice. It is very sad if this significant climatic change is being interpreted as an observation error and adjusted out of existence.
I have been working for more than 25 years in the field of historical climatology and have been guilty of eager overadjustments in the past as well as other data handling crimes. But as I have lived through these sudden large climatic shifts I know that they are very real.
I guess he means this.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/image22.png
(I have forwarded this email to Anthony, if anybody needs verification)
Anders Valland says:
January 26, 2012 at 11:21 pm
Two things I’m struggling with here. The first is that several commenters say that adjustments to temperature series zero out globally
—————————————-
The point is that all the negative adjustments are done on the earlier periods and all the positive adjustments are done to the recent periods.
They do not balance out to Zero over “time”. The histograms shown above do not show time in them.
NCDC, GISS and CRU started adjusting the temperature record in the late 1980s. Since then, every month, they add in a little 0.01C there and a 0.01C there. Subtle enough so that it not noticeable for that month. After 2.5 decades, 300 monthly opportunities to adjust 1572 months of historical temperatures records in 5000 stations, dropping the cooling ones, adding new warming ones and, viola, one has an increasing trend of 0.7C.
Someone needs to check how much the Raw unadjusted GHCN database has actually been changed itself.
Nick Stokes says:
January 26, 2012 at 12:41 am
It was also shown that the size distribution of the Darwin adjustments was a red herring. The issue was the order in which the adjustments were made, which, very conveniently for the alarmists, increased the warming trend.
Bil Illis,
I also believe that these corrections do not cancel each other if you consider area as well. It seems the corrections made in the Arctic have more impact, possibly because of the relative scarcity of measuring sites.
Paul Homewood, that’s a very interesting comment from Trausti about 1965.
Looking at the unadjusted data you can see the sharp cooling around 1965 in all 8 of the data sets, so there can be no doubt that it is real.
And in the adjusted data, you can see that the GHCN algorithm puts in an adjustment at 1965 to get rid of or greatly reduce that cooling in all but one of them (the exception being Vestmannaeyjar).
Another indication that the GHCN adjustment process is flawed.
It is excellent that the discrepency has been noted. This is how science is suppose to work.
I will await the answers of why, as I am sure that the methodology will also be explained.
We may end up going back to the original raw data, as the revisions to such may have removed the accuracy by replication.
Or the methodology may be sound.
More information is required, that is a certainty.
Paul, (January 27, 2012 at 3:50 am) Re the mail from Trausti:
I remember this year very well. I was 20 then. This was the start of an unusually cold period that lasted more than a decade, maybe about 15 years. Almost all Icelanders remember them as “hafísárin” meaning “the sea ice years”. Sea Ice was quite common in fjords in north Iceland, potato crops were damaged because of late summer frosts, etc.
What Trausti wrote to you about this period is true. Probably no Icelander knows climate history for Iceland better than him.
I find it also strange that the cold year 1918 is not visible in the adjusted graph. Every Icelander knows “frostaveturinn mikli” or the “the great winter of frost” . This year was unusually cold.
This “correction” can be seen in this graph ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004030000.gif
In my opinion this is not simple data correction, but someone has been falsifying the data.
Nick Stokes says:
January 26, 2012 at 11:33 pm
James Sexton says: January 26, 2012 at 9:40 pm
“You don’t get to alter history because it doesn’t fit your world view.”
No one is altering history……..
=================================================
Yes, they are, written rationalizations for history revision doesn’t mean the revision isn’t occurring. One only needs to look at HadCrut, to know this is history revision.
I think Agust says it as well as anyone, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/25/another-giss-miss-this-time-in-iceland/#comment-877021
In my opinion this is not simple data correction, but someone has been falsifying the data.
Paul Homewood says January 27, 2012 at 3:50 am
“I have just received an email from Trausti Jonsson at the Iceland Met. He makes this very telling personal observation…”
Paul, Trausti and others – thanks for presenting the local data and historical evidence. I find the graph you link to in your 3:50am comment very worrying. Given Trausti’s comments the Quality Adjusted Data is more akin to corrupted data. I am however open to explanations how this QAC data is “better” because I cannot fathom it myself.
ChrisM says:
January 27, 2012 at 1:04 am
Agreeing with Caleb, I thought Nome had record ice that prevent the fuel oil arriving but it is shown as having record highs. Not a missing “-” sign again is it?
Luther implies in his reply to Caleb that there isn’t a link between ice formation and temperature. That may need further explanation.
The other interesting point is GISS baseline warming map shows no warming for the Antarcic Peninsula. What happened to Larsen B?
_________________________________
Hello Chris,
I apologize for the confusion and meant no such implication. Temperature obviously plays a part in the annual ice/melt cycle.
Since Caleb was referring to the early onset of icing which caused problems for Alaskans, I shouldn’t have confused the issue by referring to total Arctic ice loss.
Why is the ‘adjusted’ data not showing the colder Bering Straits?
It appears that comments and hard data links in this thread have uncovered the reason.
If past is prologue, perhaps we should stand by for more Antarctic data modeling.
Luther
Thank you for your reply.
I agree that the thread and links have shown something ishorribly wrong with the anomaly calculations. It isn’t something that “modelling” would fix. I suspect that the code doing the calculations has had numerous rejigs and “fixes” – the type of stuff Harry complained about. Another bodge isn’t what is needed. It calls for a good old fashioned data audit. You know the type of stuff retired mathmeticians up in Canada are really good at.
Bill Illis says: January 27, 2012 at 4:41 am
‘The point is that all the negative adjustments are done on the earlier periods and all the positive adjustments are done to the recent periods.
They do not balance out to Zero over “time”. The histograms shown above do not show time in them.’
The histograms show the effect on trend. If what you say is true, the trend changes would be positive. The histogram shows that trend changes are equally likely to be negative.
DaveS says: January 27, 2012 at 5:20 am
“It was also shown that the size distribution of the Darwin adjustments was a red herring. The issue was the order in which the adjustments were made, which, very conveniently for the alarmists, increased the warming trend.”
Likewise. Yes, the adjustments increased the trend for Darwin. The histogram shows that this was unusually large (among GHCN stations), and that large negative changes were about equally likely.
Paul Matthews says: January 27, 2012 at 5:58 am
“Looking at the unadjusted data you can see the sharp cooling around 1965 in all 8 of the data sets, so there can be no doubt that it is real.”
Exactly. The reference point quoted is GHCN’s currently published data. Yet GHCN is accused of altering history.
It does seem likely that this was a false positive.
Agust Bjarnason says:
January 27, 2012 at 6:26 am
Agust:
We both know that Iceland has the highest literacy rate in the world. What you don’t know about me is I am of Icelandic heritage and a US citizen. We both know that the warm period in Iceland prior to the present one was about equal in intensity, just as we both know there was a really cold period in the very recent past. My knowledge prior to this article was based on emperical evidence. At least that is what my cousins tell me.
I consider us lucky. It is quite apparant than an error in the methodology has presented itself concerning the revisions of temperature. I am 100% confident that these are done by computer, as I can’t see someone pouring line by line over the temp data.
The obvious answer to the delima presented is for GHCN to examine their programs and potentially find the raw data from the world and start over.
I am sure the Icelandic Met has adjusted errors as required. I take pride in doing good work, having a semblence of knowledge etc. I can’t see that ethic having changed dramatically in a few years in Iceland….can you?
I am glad that this error has been uncovered. There is nothing wrong with robust examination of “revisions”. And it is readily evident that this revision needs examing.
I do not believe that there is malfeseance happening at GISS. They are doing the best they can with what they have. I do believe that honest men make honest mistakes.
As far as relying on BEST data, has it even made it to publication yet? Are folks relying on a pre-published report of temperatures that has not stood the robust examination required of methodogy etc?
Camburn says: January 27, 2012 at 2:08 pm
“The obvious answer to the delima presented is for GHCN to examine their programs and potentially find the raw data from the world and start over.
I am sure the Icelandic Met has adjusted errors as required. I take pride in doing good work, having a semblence of knowledge etc. I can’t see that ethic having changed dramatically in a few years in Iceland….can you?
I am glad that this error has been uncovered.”
This gets very frustrating. But again:
“find the raw data from the world and start over”
They don’t need to find the raw data. They have it, and currently publish it in their qcu file. It hasn’t changed.
“I am sure the Icelandic Met has adjusted errors as required.”
So am I. This isn’t about “adjusting errors”. If GHCN thought there were errors, they would have removed the data from their qcu file. What they are doing is homogenizing, for the purposes of a global index.
“I am glad that this error has been uncovered.”
An error has not been uncovered. All it shows is that homogenized data is different from unhomogenized. In the process of homogenization, some true causes of change that are unrepresentative of the region are detected, and there will be some false positives. In a global index, there is a lot of averaging, and what matters is that bias is reduced. It’s the statistics thta matter.
@Nick Stokes – All it shows is that homogenized data is different from unhomogenized. In the process of homogenization, some true causes of change that are unrepresentative of the region are detected,
Seven out of eight Icelandic stations all show similar adjustments, so clearly the changes are not representative of the region.
e.g.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/6/62004018000.gif
Same in Greenland
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/products/stnplots/4/43104250000.gif
Nick Stokes says:
January 27, 2012 at 2:40 pm
“So am I. This isn’t about “adjusting errors”. If GHCN thought there were errors, they would have removed the data from their qcu file. What they are doing is homogenizing, for the purposes of a global index.”
My point entirely Nick. They are homoginizeing the data. And the homoginization has an error.
I will be the first to admit that I dont know the homoginization process, nor do I have the time to break down this process to try and understand it.
What I want is a reliable temperature metric that bears scrutiny well.
And off topic, but how do you italicize someone elses quote???
It makes it so much easier to follow something the very nice way that you have done this.
Camburn says:
January 27, 2012 at 3:04 pm
“And off topic, but how do you italicize someone elses quote???”
====================================================
Camburn, scroll up towards the top, on the right side of your screen, you’ll find a button. It has the words “Rick Werme’s guide to WUWT” If you click on it, it will take you here…… http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html
Scroll down until you see a section titled Formatting in comments …. while not complete, it gives you some common ways to employ HTML formatting.
Camburn,
Wordpress allows a few html tags. If you write < i > italics < /i > it comes out as italic.
< b >bold < /b > makes bold. But remember to close the tags with </i>
Paul Homewood says: January 27, 2012 at 3:01 pm
“Seven out of eight Icelandic stations all show similar adjustments, so clearly the changes are not representative of the region.”
Paul, what I said was:
In the process of homogenization, some true causes of change that are unrepresentative of the region are detected, and there will be some false positives. In a global index, there is a lot of averaging, and what matters is that bias is reduced. It’s the statistics that matter.
The homogenized (adjusted) file is not the place to look for the true record of individual stations. It is designed to statistically improve the averaging in global index preparation. There are hits and misses, and if the hits reduce bias more than the misses increase it, it is worth doing. It’s likely that in this case, the sudden (real) temp drop did cause a false positive, and that gives a wrong picture of the history of part of Iceland.
But that’s not what they are after – they want a picture of global temperature. So it’s that balance again. If net bias is reduced, they are ahead.
Maybe you think it won’t be. You’d need a statistical argument there, not just one station.
GHCN should definitely not correct this “error”. The algorithm is based on the tendency of the unavoidable false positives to have cancelling effect. If you intervene manually to fix some and not others, the bias will increase, not decrease.
Thank you James and Nick.
Nick Stokes says:
January 27, 2012 at 3:54 pm
GHCN should definitely not correct this “error”. The algorithm is based on the tendency of the unavoidable false positives to have cancelling effect. If you intervene manually to fix some and not others, the bias will increase, not decrease.
Nick:
What is the present bias of the GHCN at this time?
Camburn says: January 27, 2012 at 5:03 pm
“Nick: What is the present bias of the GHCN at this time?”
The issue is the bias that station changes etc might impart to the global index. The answer is, I don’t know. What I do know is that whether you homogenize or not makes little difference. I suspect that there wasn’t much bias, and homogenization didn’t add any. But maybe there was and homogenization created an identical bias.
What I also know is that NOAA has a statistical argument for believing the homogenized data works better for indices. If you’re thinking of using it, you need to read and understand their argument. Otherwise I’d suggest leaving it alone and sticking to their unadjusted data.
Nick Stokes says:
January 27, 2012 at 6:08 pm
“What I also know is that NOAA has a statistical argument for believing the homogenized data works better for indices. If you’re thinking of using it, you need to read and understand their argument. Otherwise I’d suggest leaving it alone and sticking to their unadjusted data.
I wish this had come up earlier as limitations on my time won’t allow the study and confirmation required. I would think this would be great thesis material. To go grid by grid to see what the actual confirmation bias is.
One thing I can and will say is the histograms presented in this thread, which also includes Greenland, does not bode well for the methodology used to homoginize.
For now I will have to go with the adjusted data. Altho, some presentations of temperature pictures based on adjusted data have not accurately portrayed the area of which I live which is also a bit north.
This bears further investigation and I hope someone does the work.
Moderator:
Please pull this as I am trying to learn the art of italics:
Please pull this as I am trying to learn the art of italics:
Did the italics stop now?
[REPLY: Yes they did. We have a test page for just this purpose here. -REP]
Nick Stokes says:
January 27, 2012 at 6:08 pm
The issue is the bias that station changes etc might impart to the global index. The answer is, I don’t know. What I do know is that whether you homogenize or not makes little difference. I suspect that there wasn’t much bias, and homogenization didn’t add any. But maybe there was and homogenization created an identical bias.
When you say “you do know is that whether you homogenize or not makes little difference”, on what bases do you know this?
Can you point me to reference materials that can confirm this?
Smokey:
In your link:
http://zapruder.nl/images/uploads/screenhunter3qk7.gif
Is the anomoly base period identical?
Camburn,
Sorry, it’s not my graph. I found it on WUWT, but I don’t recall the thread.
Camburn says: January 27, 2012 at 6:32 pm
“Can you point me to reference materials that can confirm this?”
Yes. I’ve done it on this thread, here,
here, and
here. There’s even a thread at WUWT Many indices from GHCN, some with adjustment, some without. There are still more at the Blackboard. Zeke has done both with his code.
Nick,
There are hits and misses, and if the hits reduce bias more than the misses increase it, it is worth doing. It’s likely that in this case, the sudden (real) temp drop did cause a false positive, and that gives a wrong picture of the history of part of Iceland.
Sounds a bit like two wrongs making a right to me! I am still curious why the algorithm suddenly created this adjustment, when the previous GHCN V2 did not.
While you might be right from a statisticians’ point of view, my experience tells me that if you find a mistake, you correct it rather than worry if there is a compensating error somewhere else.( I am an Accountant by the way!!)
According to the GHCN Technical Report
The process of removing the impact of non-climatic changes in climate series is called homogenization (e.g station moves, land use changes etc)
If the adjustments to Reykjavik and other Icelandic stations are correct, then they must be justified by comparison with other stations that are not affected in this way. I see no evidence for this.
BTW Nick
I think you said you still had Version 3.0 from last July. Do these adjustments appear then or only in Version 3.1 released in November.
According to Reto Ruedy at GISS, they switched straight from Version 2 to Version 3.1 in December, so I cannot tell from their dataset.
Thanks
Paul
Nick:
I have what some might consider to be a rather simplistic question.
IF there is no difference between unadjusted trends and adjusted trends, why waste time adjusting? Seems like a lot of busy work created with no discernable change.
Why not just use the raw data and then there are no questions/doubt created.
Nick, you are disregarding the fact that our friends in Iceland have already made corrections for location changes…… “‘No changes have been made in the Stykkisholmur series since about 1970, the Reykjavík and Akureyri series that I sent you have been slightly adjusted for major relocations and changes in observing hours.”
As I stated earlier to some others, the people in Iceland are aware of these issues and already have made the proper corrections. Then GHCN corrects the corrections and then GISS will apply theirs….. always, the corrections/homogenization result in decreasing historical temps and increasing the ones near the present.
Nick, Tom Curtis, R. Gates etc:
If, as Nick claimes, there is no difference between the raw data and the homogenized data’s results, what scientific basis is there for all these revisions etc?
As a simple layman, I don’t get it. I know the further you remove yourself from the raw data, the errors increase.
GISS has adjusted mean monthly temperatures in Reykjavik downwards by an average of 0.12C prior to 1965.
Since 1965, they have been adjusted upwards by an average of 0.11C.
At another Icelandic station, Vestmanneya, GISS has adjusted mean monthly temperatures downwards by an average of 0.85C prior to 1942, and left them unchanged since.
And this doesn’t affect the trend?
Nick Stokes, Paul Homewood:
In this blog, http://statpad.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/ghcn-and-adjustment-trends/
the assertion that the GHCN records are a mess is done twice.
I don’t know computer code anymore. At least not the code skills required to do what has been presented in the above so have to rely on folks skilled in this, just as they rely on me to grow food.
As a person who uses stats for a different purpose, one basic premiss has always been the accuracy of the underlying data used to make business decissions. When I see charts that average the errors, rather than finding the errors and correcting them, I have little faith that said charts are valuable as a basis for making sound decissions.
It does seem that GHCN data is a mess. Nick, you seem to say that the mess is ok. From my experience in the world, I find that messes create more messes.
At this point in the discussion, I am not ready to yield to authority as it appears that authority is not ready to yield to accuracy. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/accuracy
I find this very troublesome.
Camburn says:
January 28, 2012 at 9:23 am
………..
At this point in the discussion, I am not ready to yield to authority as it appears that authority is not ready to yield to accuracy. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/accuracy
I find this very troublesome.
=========================================================
Welcome to the world of skepticism. This discussion is “old hat” for most of us. The alarmist arguments are unyielding and predictable……. “they’re making adjustments, but not revising history”……..”it doesn’t make any difference to the total historical record”…….. “the errors average themselves out”…….. But all of this is hand-waving, attempting to distract people from the facts. The facts are Iceland has recorded and adjusted their temps accordingly. Our climate data collectors, GHCN, GISS, Hadley, NOAA, ……. they all then fiddle with the numbers presented to fit the narrative they wish to present. Their defenders are unwilling to acknowledge that these agencies of alarmism simply lie. They lie to them, they lie to use, and they lie to the entire world.
Camburn
The process of GHCN homegeneity adj is designed to isolate “non-climatic” factors, but in practice only weeds out “step changes” ,e.g. station moves. (For this reason it cannot identify UHI which happens gradually – GISS do this).
As long as these adj are done correctly, it should not matter whether they are positive or negative in total. What does concern me is where they weed out genuine climate factors as may be the case here.
Even though the incidence and effect of these “errors” may be low, for a system to generate confidence, it must have robust quality precedures that both check for potential slip ups and allow for their correction.
This does not seem to have happened here, as it has needed independent observers to spot them.
Paul Homewood:
The solution is quite simple.
We pay people to do this correctly, with accuracy
You have found one point of contention. The question I have is, how many other points of contention are there?
Why is accuracy so hard for our employees to understand?
And why settle for average errors on something so important?
We all make mistakes. Man/Woman up, admit mistakes, correct the mistakes with the goal of 100% accuracy
James Sexton says: January 28, 2012 at 7:49 am
“As I stated earlier to some others, the people in Iceland are aware of these issues and already have made the proper corrections. Then GHCN corrects the corrections…”
No! You don’t seem able to get your head around these files. GHCN maintains an unadjusted qcu file. They make great efforts to ensure that the data is as reported by the Met organization at the time, and then it remains unchanged. No “proper corrections” from Iceland or anywhere. No “rewriting of history”.
The adjusted file is processed (from the qcu file) with a universally applied algorithm. GHCN has 7280 stations from over 100 countries. They can’t rely on a patchwork of adjustment policies. A single algorithm can be properly analyzed statistically. And if you come up with a “better” algorithm, it can be universally applied from the same starting point. That is what has happened here.
Camburn says: January 28, 2012 at 6:45 am
“Why not just use the raw data and then there are no questions/doubt created.”
No, there would be different doubts, and I’m sure they would be loudly expressed here. A global average is reasonably tolerant to unbiased noise, but affected if there is a bias. When you have a mish-mash of station moves etc, it is likely that some will be warming, some cooling etc, with little nett effect. But you can’t be sure.
The homogenization catches most of these (and their bias, if any), but introduces false positives, which come from the fluctuations in the time series. But you have a better chance of analyzing these for bias. You know the statistics of what you are dealing with.
The likely outcome is that the original non-climatic issues would have cancelling effect. But you can’t know until you have made the correction.
“the assertion that the GHCN records are a mess is done twice”
Assertion is cheap and frequent, and on blogs rarely substantiated. The BEST enterprise was an attempt to substantiate, but ended up with far more of a mess, and results which do not contradict GHCN-based results. I think the GHCN records are good. At least they are accessible, and in the case of the qcu files, rarely modified. And they are the best we have.
Nick Stokes:
Thank you for your response.
Can you point me to a site or documentation of what the divergence is if one ran a temp chart for the whole period of GHCN qcu file and the newest version of the adjusted data file?
I have spent the last hour trying to find this and have not come across a site that has done so.
I feel at a loss as I don’t have the skill set to do this. I find it hard to believe that no one has not done this either who has the skill set to do this.
Paul Homewood says: January 28, 2012 at 3:50 am
“I think you said you still had Version 3.0 from last July. Do these adjustments appear then or only in Version 3.1 released in November.
According to Reto Ruedy at GISS, they switched straight from Version 2 to Version 3.1 in December, so I cannot tell from their dataset.”
The files are pretty big, but I’m working on a program and blog post to update the histogram for the latest V3, so I’ll run the July files through that as well.
I don’t think the July qca affects GISS. My understanding is that prior to Dec 2011, GISS worked from GHCN unadjusted (v2 and v3 are very similar there) and applied their own algorithm, which was somewhat similar to GHCN. It would make sense for them to agree on one method, and it looks like they are both happy with the Menne/Williams version. I assume that GISS no longer adds its own homogenization.
Camburn says: January 28, 2012 at 12:25 pm
“Can you point me to a site or documentation of what the divergence is if one ran a temp chart for the whole period of GHCN qcu file and the newest version of the adjusted data file?”
No, I’m not aware of anyone having done that. Steven Mosher has an R package which should make it fairly easy, provided you’re prepared to tackle some R scripting.
A dynamic ever altering history…… because alarm is a horrible thing to waste.
Nick:
Oh boy, I didn’t even know what R scripting was. Remember, I am an old fellow. I used to write my own programs for accounting using basic, but when Lotus 123 came about I went spreadsheet with macro’s etc. And programs have since evolved that I just buy them and use someone else’s intellect at programming skills. This would be beyond me I think.
Altho, with that said…a challenge is always good.
By the way, you have a nice blog. I see you have skills, altho, I do wish you would go back further in time as I mentioned in a post there. Maybe you could do this? Or Mr. Mosher?
Camburn says: January 28, 2012 at 2:17 pm
In terms of programming, I was pretty antiquated too. But it’s amazing what modern software makes possible.
As I mentioned there, the problem going for really long periods is that you run low on stations with continuous data. That’s less of a problem with a global average than with individual trends.
Nick:
Yes, the lack of stations would increase the spatial error.
The reason I mentioned this is that by only going back to 1950’s, you loose the warmth of the early 20th century and it somewhat distorts the actual amount of warming that occured during the 20th Century and negates that. The trend over a long time period is not very steep, at least in CONUS. I know that isn’t the world, but certainly a part of the world.
Camburn
The early 20th century can be a bit misleading if you look at it just as the global trend. Several things happened between the 20’s to 50’s that call into question the degree to which that warming actually was ‘global’. Firstly, the warming in SST’s seems to have been more focused on the late 30’s, 40’s. And when the records have been looked at there is very strong evidence that the mix of nationalities of the ships that measured SST’s back then (there were no buoys or satellites) underwent significant changes. Different nations used different methods to measure the water temperature and each method will have its own bias. This isn’t a problem so long as the biases don’t change and the % of ships from each nation taking part don’t change. But that wasn’t the case. During the war years the proportion of US ships taking the readings increased markedly. Then dropped off sharply in Aug 1945. Exactly the same time that SST’s seemed to drop sharply. The Hadley SST record is being released as a new version that attempts to deal with the bias issues associated with this problem. It seems to have significantly smoothed out the 30’s/40’s hump.
For land temps, the 20’s – 40’s warm period seems to have been longer but less pronounced. But when you look at where the warming occurred, it really seems to have been Arctic warming. The rest of the planet barely changed. So not really Global at all. And it may even have been that it was particularly warming in the Greenland/European sector of the Arctic.
The third thing happening during this period was that measuring stations in the polar regions were only just being established. The Canadian arctic, Greenland, Nortern Scandinavia and then later Siberia. Then during WWII this coverage increased for military reasons. But any start on extending comparable coverage in Antarctica didn’t happen until the 50’s.
So for 30-40 years we had an assymetrical coverage of the polar regions, just at a time when one of those polar regions, the Arctic, may have been seeing a local warming event.
So how much confidence should we have that the record of the ‘global’ trend during that period isn’t really a local warming in the Arctic,, and perhaps to some degree an artefact of the transition in station coverage.
I sometimes wonder what a global temperature series for the 20’th century would look like if a rule was enforced that if there is inadequate station coverage at a latitude on one side of the equator then data from the same latitude on the other side of the equator should be ignored. So for example, ignore new Arctic stations when the corresponding Antarctic stations don’t yet exist.
Maybe an interesting challenge for the ‘amateurs’ who work on temperature data.
Glenn
The rest of the planet barely changed.
According to GISS most of the Northern Hemisphere was warmer . The few areas that were cooler were mainly sea, which you correctly point out suffered from measurement problems.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1950_1975_1930_1950/GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1950_1975_1930_1950.gif
Glenn
Compared to 1910-30, there is significant warming in most areas during 1930-50.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1930_1950_1910_1930/GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1930_1950_1910_1930.gif
You may or may not have seen this:
http://climate4you.com/ClimateReflections.htm#28012012:%20Reflections%20on%20effects%20on%20NCDC%20and%20GISS%20global%20data%20series%20by%20transition%20to%20GHCN%20version%203
See the graphs for Reykjavik at the bottom of the page.
Regards
Agust
The above mentioned page http://climate4you.com is tended by
Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography
Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Norway.
See http://climate4you.com/Text/BIBLIOGRAPHY%20OLE%20HUMLUM.pdf
Thanks for a great link Agust,
Dr Humlum about the adjustment removing earlier warm periods: “It is somewhat difficult to understand the background for the number and magnitude of adjustments introduced in the GISS ‘after removing suspicious records’ data series, especially as the resulting data series differs significantly from the official Icelandic data series. ”
(from the climate4you.com , the ‘20120128: Reflections on effects of the NCDC and GISS transition to GHCN version 3’ section)
Paul
Your links don’t work. However from the contents of what your links are saying it appears you are using the anomalies for just Dec rather than the whole year. And your link is showing Land & Ocean combined. And using one period as the baseline for the other period.
Below are some links that should work. What I have done is use a common baseline for everything of 1950-1980. I have used annual means rather than just one month. Then I have shown 3 periods all relative to 1950/80 – 1910/30, 1930/50 and 1939/45. And done this separately for Land & Ocean Data. Finally I have included GISS Zone vs Time graphs for Land & Ocean separately. Things to note. On the Land Maps the station coverage in the Arctic is incomplete and there is no coverage in the Antarctic. And the zonal maps are showing the time transition of this coverage. So we are looking at periods of significant change in station coverage. Also illustrative is to show the same land maps but with smoothing set to 250 km. Then you see that stations in the Russian arctic appeared between the 10/30 and 30/50 plots and these very stations are showing some of the highest warming.
Also note that GISS aren’t using the newer SST data from HadSST that has attempted to compensate for these nationality of shipping biases.
An interesting analysis, perhaps something someone like Nick could do, is look at what the temperature record looks like if a rule is imposed that if their is inadequate station coverage at one end of the Earth, then stations at the same latitude at the other end can not be used. I wonder what the temperature record would look like if data from the high Arctic wasn’t acceptable until the 50’s when Antarctic data became available as well?
Another interesting exercise is to look at GISS map plots of ocean data using a common baseline and working forward in 5 year intervals for the mean. Between 1940/45 a range of ‘warm areas’ appear that are gone again in the next 5 year interval. And ‘look’ like they correspond to areas of major naval & convoy activity – North Atlantic, US to Hawaii and the North Pacific, Indian ocean West of Australia. I might be reading too much into this but a study that uses the updated HadSST data to look at geographical impacts of the compensation would be really interesting.
So, the graphs:
Map Land 10-30
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1910&year2=1930&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Land 30-50
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1930&year2=1950&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Land 39-45
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1939&year2=1945&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Ocean 10-30
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1910&year2=1930&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Ocean 30-50
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1930&year2=1950&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Ocean 39-45
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1939&year2=1945&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Time & Zonal Land
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/modelEt/time_series/work/tmp.4_observedTs_12_1880_2010_1950_1980-0/map.gif
Time & Zonal Ocean
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/modelEt/time_series/work/tmp.4_observdSST_12_1880_2010_1950_1980-0/map.gif
Moderators!! Is there any way images can be embedded into a post, rather than just linked to?
[Reply: Sorry, no. Posting an image requires Editor permissions. ~dbs, mod.]
Glenn:
When looking at the short anamoly for the oceans, 39-45, I am not so sure that the area surrounding the US is abnormally warm. The St. Roch sailed the Nothern Route of the Northwest Passage in 1944. I have Capt Larsens log and am about to re-read it. For that little ship to accomlish this was a feat in itself. Even as low as the ice has been the past few years, I don’t believe the route he took was open.
DMI did a reconstruction of Greenlands surface temps. There most deff was a warm period as also shown in Icelands temps. By extrapolation, and guessing, one would have to guess that the Arctic as a whole was warm because of the St. Rock making it in a single season.
Thank you for going to work to do this. I am tired, and am going to re-visit your post tomorrow.
Trausti Jonsson of the Icelandic Met Office has started a new blog in English,
http://icelandweather.blog.is/blog/icelandweather/
At the moment, commenting is difficult because you have to answer an arithmetic question written in Icelandic, but I think I managed it with some help from google.
He says he will discuss the recent controversy on his blog in a few days.
The climate4you page linked to above is interesting, but the situation is very confused because that page does not distinguish between the adjustments made by GHCN and those made by GISS. It seems there are two different agencies each making their own erroneous adjustments and changes. As Paul H pointed out, GISS have changed their numbers by about 1 degree some time during the last two weeks, but there is no mention of this on their web page.
Paul.
Re Trausti´s English blog.
This simple arithmetic question is just a spam filter (=Ruslpóstvörn). You only have to answer this question if you want to write a comment.
For example: “What is the sum of three and eight [ 11 ]”
To help you with the numbers:
0 núll
1 einn
2 tveir
3 þrír
4 fjórir
5 fimm
6 sex
7 sjö
8 átta
9 níu
10 tíu
11 ellefu
12 tólf
13 þrettán
14 fjórtán
15 fimmtán
16 sextán
17 sautján
18 átján
19 nítján
20 tuttugu
Other requierd information:
Nafn = Your name
Netfang = Your Email
Veffang = Your web or blog address if you have any
I hope this helps
Regards
Agust
Tom Curtis writes “Given the very specific nature of the adjustments at Reykjavik, with the large adjustment coinciding, first with the first introduction of commercial air traffic to the airport”
And what about the decade before that? Do you have a hypothetical excuse for the cooling adjustments made then?
This won’t help with the historical adjustments, but a thought occured.
Is there any way to compare the past 30 years of GISS in the Arctic area verses UAH data?
I would think that UAH must use some type of grid. I know one channel is gone, but the historical data should still be there. That might clue us in as to whether the adjustments are more of a persistent problem rather than a one time item.
Using the global mean, there is a divergence problem between UAH and GISS. I don’t know the reason for this, however, after observing the adjustments to temperature exibitied in this thred, it may be that GISS needs to look at its algorithims.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1977/to:2012/trend:0.5/plot/uah/from:1977/to:2012/plot/uah/from:1977/to:2012/trend:0.5
It would seem that GISS has corrupted more than Iceland:
Compare and if you have answers I am all ears:
http://webcitation.org/63wGUTWt6
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.D.gif
Camburn – your webcitation link doesn’t work for me?
slow to follow:
I just clicked on the links and they took me to the url’s presented.
I am using IE as a brower.
Camburn – thanks. Worked ok in IE with cookies on.
Apologies if this has already been posted but has anyone had a look here;
http://moyhu.blogspot.com/2012/01/reykjavik-and-ghcn-adjustments.html?showComment=1328457411120#c5587337558620352701
Looks like an attempt at refuting the claims of this article but I must admit that being a mere human I still couldnt work out why they reduced the temps of the past (and how come every change ever made has always been in the same direction…downwards).
Regards
Mailman