Via Jo Nova, an Australian Surface Stations Project has just reported its results.
The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?
We need a professional audit.
A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog) has been going through the Australia Bureau of Meteorology records (BOM). They’ve audited some 8.5 million daily observations across 237 High Quality and other close sites in Australia. Shockingly, while the BOM calls their database “High Quality” and instructed observers before 1972 to record in tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, the auditors started finding sites with long stretches of records where the weather suspiciously rose and fell only in Fahrenheit quanta, like 72.0, 73.0, 72.0, 71.0, 73.0, 72.0. After 1972, the BOM went metric, and oddly, so did parts of the Australian climate. Numerous sites started warming and cooling in pure Celsius integers.
The bottom line:
- The BOM records need a thorough independent audit,
- It’s possible that a significant part of the 20th Century Australian warming trend may have come from something as banal as sloppy observers truncating records in Fahrenheit prior to 1972.
- Many High Quality sites are not high quality and ought to be deleted from the trends.
- Even current electronic equipment is faulty, and the BOM is not checking its own records.
- Even climate scientists admit that truncation of Fahrenheit temperatures would cause an artificial warming effect.
Ken Stewart has the whole in-depth report at his site: “Near Enough For a Sheep Station”
They have done a huge amount of data crunching. Ken has all the graphs of maxima and minima (people were extra lazy on the minima).
Then there is the wierd effect of rounding Fahrenheit to Celcuis and back and getting results of 0.1 and 0.9 when the regenerated Fahreheit records are used instead of the original.
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It’s not clear to me why rounding would always bias up.
When you round data off, its usually up, otherwise you call it truncating data.
[Multiple screen names violate site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
More of what we knew already: even advanced countries temp records are patchy, riddled with siting/equipment/operator error, so the Democratic Republic of Congo’s record is probably somewhat less good. Put them all together and you can, limitations notwithstanding, get a rough idea of global temperature. But a rough idea is no good for convincingly constructing the argument that the world has significantly warmed in recent times (because we don’t actually know what the ‘normal’ temperature might have been) so every other possibility being eliminated, it must be CO2 which means it must be mankind. Now if I, merely a lucky taxpayer, can figure that out, why can’t our ‘political elite’ hahahaha?
Bill, if one truncates the data and simply lops off everything after the decimal, you’re left with an integer value that is, in fact, less than the value that included the decimal. Once you restore use of the decimal value, any trend that includes the old, truncated values and the new decimals would show a warming trend.
ThePowerofX says: @ur momisugly March 15, 2012 at 11:55 am
“A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog)”
I stopped reading after this.
__________________________________
Why because it was a bunch of independent people who are not eating from the public trough like the Climate Scientists?
Warmers quit reading after anything the least bit contradictory to their religious beliefs.
Imagine how accurate those wet bulb analog readings were… not. Of course, if you can beleive tenths of a degree accuracy from millenia old tree rings… I guess you can believe anything.
Bill says:
March 15, 2012 at 11:35 am
It’s not clear to me why rounding would always bias up.
1 – 4 round down
5 – 9 round up
That’s 4 rounding down, 5 rounding up. On average, rounding will result in an increase.
I remember an old story from Boeing, back in the slide rule days. They recognized this bias and added an extra rule. If the whole number was even, then 5 rounds down. If it’s odd, it rounds up.
4.5 rounds to 4. 5.5 rounds to 6.
Is this the same Australian BOM that some years ago advised the Government that prolonged drought would be the norm in Queensland? This advice led them to build a $6 Billion desalination plant which was never used and has now been mothballed.
If you cant trust their advice what is their point?
I think that people forget that the older mercury thermometers are only accurate to a degree or so; the standard error of the readings was plus or minus a degree or two. I remember using some maxima-minima thermometers and I needed twenty of them to get a dozen of them to give the same reading! Scientifically one could explain a warming trend of less than a degree a century, which it is, by this explanation, but politically this is just not accepted.
And now GHCN are making their “Iceland” temperature adjustments in Alice Springs, creating a false warming trend.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/an-adjustment-like-alice/
Sounds like a bunch of Jazz players trying to pass off a classical ensemble, playing by ear
Tez says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Is this the same Australian BOM that some years ago advised the Government that prolonged drought would be the norm in Queensland? This advice led them to build a $6 Billion desalination plant which was never used and has now been mothballed.
If you cant trust their advice what is their point?
Tez. I just recently read that the $6 Billion desalination plant has to run a minimum amount of water though to keep it from a Flannery seizure or some like that. The good news that it only costs a mere $40+ million / year to keep it at minimum output. Isn’t that sweet for thee taxpayers?
Thanks to Tim Flannery the Flim Flam Man of Climate Change!!!
@ur momisugly PowerofX
““A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog)”
I stopped reading after this.”
Deny all you like, buddy !!
If you don’t read the truth, you will never know it..
which , of course, is your religious rite.
Robert Orme says: @ur momisugly March 15, 2012 at 12:57 pm
I think that people forget that the older mercury thermometers are only accurate to a degree or so; the standard error of the readings was plus or minus a degree or two. I remember using some maxima-minima thermometers and I needed twenty of them to get a dozen of them to give the same reading!
_______________________________________________
Then you were lucky. I went nuts ordering thermometer after thermometer and trying to get even ONE that was accurate enough for my lab. These were L shaped specialty thermometers and had to be calibrated against an NBS standard. Heck I could not even use the darn things because the correction factor put the reading off the scale!
Anyone who has mess with thermometers in a lab has a distrust for thermometers if they are smart.
ThePowerofX says:
March 15, 2012 at 11:55 am
“A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog)”
I stopped reading after this.
Mr. X it is hard to learn anything if you stop reading when the words get difficult.
Without digesting it all, I comment that I was taught that rounding is that anything less than 5 in the last place goes down, anything 5 or higher goes up. Over a large sample size that should average out.
But I’ve seen people truncating (just drop the last digit – which biases the data) but incorrectly call it rounding.
Of course it all depends on the calculation and data. If you ask me before leaving your abode to go to the street for me to pick you up what the temperature is, I won’t worry about precision – it is enough to know if it is well below freezing or near freezing or warm (if cold, knowing that there is high wind is more significant than precision). But if using the difference between two values that are close in size precision is critical. That’s the case with atmospheric temperature.
Thanks for posting, Anthony.
The whole point is: if data were simply rounded, it would cause uncertainty but no change to the trend. But as half of all sites examined had very probably half of their readings rounded, even a small amount of truncating at these sites would cause artificial warming. If truncating was significant, the effect would be larger. There are large regional areas where we estimate the effect could be 0.1 to 0.4C difference in trend.
Ken
As anyone who has done weather obs knows – the last thing that you would be thinking about is that some twerp of a climatologist would be trying to use your manual readings of a thermometer to generate averages to an accuracy of hundredths of a degree.
These climatologists come from the large group who believe that so called ‘green house gases trap temperature; so that is what they measure. Who cares if its illogical and the incorrect metric they can use it and the man in the street and PhD climatologists believe them.
However, those who are truly scientific like forecasters and real weather men know that so called ‘green house gases’ interrupt the radiation of heat and that measuring temperature without knowing the enthalpy of the atmosphere at the time is meaningless. It is perfectly possible for the heat content of the atmosphere to drop even as the temperature rises.
Nevertheless, we have long records of the incorrect metric – so the climatologists happily patch that onto the almost as reliable treemometer records and even then they have to fiddle statistics and hide declines.
While you read this around 12 children have died of starvation, tainted water or malaria…
one every 5 seconds
A $1 a day can save a life
How much are these people paid?
The artifical trend arises because OLDER measurements were truncated i.e. these readings are lower than actual levels. More RECENT records are not truncated in the same way, so these readings are not lower than actual.
Imagine there was a constant temperature of 15.5 deg. Older temperatures would be recorded at 15 deg, recent temperatures would be recorded at 15.5 deg. hence there would be an artifically measured trend.
AS posted earlier, the trend is caused not by “rounding”, but by “truncation” of the pre 1970 values. Truncation simply removes the decimal, recording everything from 72.0 to 72.0 as 72. Once this stopped being done, the new figures would be between 0 and 0.9 degrees higher, thus creating a warming trend.
Without reading the report in full, it is not clear what the evidence is for truncation vs rounding. There may be none, but it certainly introduces a reduction in quality when data of uncertain provenace is used.
The BOM only shows temp results from 1910 (both land and sea). This hides the high Australian temps in the 1880s and 1890s. Their reason is that stevenson screens were not widely used before 1910, but the BOM provides no evidence of this.
1. Did they use Stevenson screens for sea temp?
2. When did they start using Stevenson screens in remote places such as central Africa and the Amazon?
3. Why does GISS use pre 1910 Austrailan Temps?
Oops, seems like a lot of people have picked up on this. Sorry for the repetition.
Maybe the folks running these networks of thermometers should work in a brewery.
After losing a few batches of beer, and maybe their job, they would appreciate there is nothing simple about getting accurate temperature readings.
See http://www.mosi.org.uk/media/33871137/jamesprescottjoule.pdf
I stopped reading after this.