Zeke is upset that I made this statement in a story at Fox news:
Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported … changes with the moment. In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.
he says:
In the spirit of civility, I would ask Anthony to retract his remarks. He may well disagree with NCDC’s approach and results, but accusing them of fraud is one step too far.
I’d point out that Zeke has his interpretation but nowhere did I say “fraud”. He’s mad, and people don’t often think clearly when they are mad. That’s OK.
Without getting into semantics, I’d like to ask Zeke these simple questions:
- What is the CONUS average temperature for July 1936 today?
- What was it a year ago?
- What was it ten years ago? Twenty years ago?
- What was it in late 1936, when all the data had been first compiled?
We already know the answers to questions 1 and 2 from my posting here, and they are 76.43°F and 77.4°F respectively, so Zeke really only needs to answer questions 3 and 4.
The answers to these questions will be telling, and I welcome them. We don’t need broad analyses or justifications for processes, just the simple numbers in Fahrenheit will do.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Anthony, come on, I can already hear the crickets warming up…. LOL
Absolutely! It’s well past time to stop the history revisionism.
The warmists don’t understand that the amount of warming the “consensus” of the IPCC believe is human-caused is of the 1.0F difference between CONUS and other versions. That the possible UHIE inaccurate correction is 40% of the “unprecedented” warming. That an unknown but if going only from 28% to 26%% in global cloud cover you can account for 100% of the warming. Or that a regional change, say a 28% to 18% change over only 20% of the planet, could do the same.
Global warming is a process of fractions made out to be thing of large, whole numbers. As if multitudes of “extreme weather” events were the way the world is getting warmer, so you could see a wall of heat moving across the landscape. A reversal of cause and effect.
Isn’t it said that “History is written by the vanquished?” no no wait … that can’t be correct …
.
How can current “warming” be proved by making yesterdays temperatures cooler?
Was that what Global Cooling was all about in the 1970’s? (sarc)
Keep your eye on that pea now!
Eventually, CAGW will be a text book case of stock manipulation.
Anthony:
As you know, all the climatological temperature time series data sets are changed with time, and it is a rare month when at least one of them does not alter past data. This is not only true for the US temperature compilations: it is also true for the hemispheric and global temperature time series.
It seems appropriate to remind people of how GISS global temperature data sets have been adjusted, and this picture is worth a thousand words
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/giss/hansen-giss-1940-1980.gif
Richard
I’d like to ask Zeke why his organization reduced the recorded Jan 1900 temperature at Teigarhorn, Iceland from 0.7C to -0.2C. http://endisnighnot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/giss-strange-anomalies.html
If historical temperatures are adjusted downward (they did this from 1900 to 1962) and more recent temperatures are bumped up then….. oh, you finish the sentence Zeke. You use the word “fraud”; I use the word “fiddling”. Tell ya what, Zeke, let’s agree on this phrasing: “Distorting the historical record in order to create an artificial warming trend in furtherance of a political or financial agenda”.
“I’d point out that Zeke has his interpretation but nowhere did I say “fraud”
Well, you did say that in the business world people go to jail for such manipulations of data, so you were implying the error, if there was one, was a lot worse than an honest mistake.
Accusing someone of manipulating data, suggesting that they should go to jail, but not uttering the word “fraud” is a trick. “Climate skeptics are like those people who refuse to admit the holocaust happened.” See? I never used the d word but i said the same thing.
REPLY: Sort of like suggesting some ex NASA scientists skeptical today caused the space shuttle to blow up?
Can you answer the questions? – Anthony
“In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data.”
To be fair, that does sound like an example of “fraud” even if the word was not used. Unless “manipulations of data” for which “people go to jail” has an alternative definition.
Not disagreeing with the comparison, considering how climate data is indeed adjusted and manipulated. Just confused as to why the comparison with illegal “manipulations of data” in the business world doesn’t constitute an accusation of fraud. Is a spade not a spade?
Huh, not only did it change, it also gained an extra significant digit.
Wait till I tell my 7th grade science teacher he was wrong.
Anthony – this must be akin to handing the microphone to someone who develops incontinence when handed the microphone in a karaoke bar.
Let the bed wetting commence.
Steven Mosher:
At January 23, 2013 at 3:22 pm you say
Words fail!
The holocaust happened. Claiming it did not is a lie.
The historic temperature data are often altered. Saying they are is the truth.
Why people change the historic temperature data can be debated. But it is NOT ascribing any motivation to point out that it is done and to ask if it is acceptable .
Richard
Richard Courtney, why should a measurement be re-adjusted later? Why, also, in the case of Crimatology, alll the adjustments have the same effect of cooling the past. This is a neat strategy as it enables the Crims to show that current temperatures are what they say they are so obviously no malarky there.
Go look at the US HCN data from the GHCN site for 2012 and then tell me how they got anything useful out of it. The last 4 days of December are missing for virtually all sites and there are huge swaths of missing data across the nation for October and other months. A good exercise would be to see if the missing data was cold. I suspect it was but have been too busy in the last couple of weeks to write the code to analyze that hypothesis.
I do have all of the data pulled and archived though if anyone wants the mid-January dataset. 2012 is a freakin’ mess. This from the best data source in the world, from a government that thinks they can manage money. They can’t even record data from an instrument. Yeah, I trust that record.
Mr. Mosher you avoid the point at all costs. Why are the temperatures for items 1-4 not the same. If they are the same then they have not been manipulated. If they have been manipulated all of the points of manipulation need to be described. Who, What, Where, Why and When. Certainly modern computer databases can handle those issues. Of course you know this but choose to not address the issue of professional data keeping.
I may be proved wrong, but a series of thousands of small occasions of rounding up, confirmation bias, in filling missing data just slightly too high, siting problems, mis-estimation of UHIE, and other errors that just happen do go in the direction wanted, can account for all of it. Intentional fraud? That may never be found.
Steven Mosher said @ur momisugly January 23, 2013 at 3:22 pm
I fail to see where Anthony suggested that the people who are clearly manipulating the data “should go to jail”. He merely pointed out that people engaged in business are put in jail for manipulating data. Anthony might well have been arguing that business data manipulators deserve the same treatment that climate data manipulators receive.
Anthony said:
Robert of Ottawa:
At January 23, 2013 at 3:31 pm you ask me
I have been objecting to these changes for strong personal reasons for many years. Clearly, you have not read this
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
Richard
Would such OVERWRITING of meta data “to correct the uncertainty” have happened in any other branch of science ?
http://climateaudit.org/2011/07/12/hadsst3/
Hi Anthony,
Unfortunately, calculating the absolute temperature for the entire contiguous U.S. in July of 1936 is a non-trivial matter. I could download the raw absolute average temperatures from all stations available July of 1936. However, many of those stations were located on the rooftops of city buildings (this was the pre-airport age, after all). These stations also used liquid-in-glass thermometers which produce notably higher maximum temperature readings than modern electronic instruments. All of these things mean that a simple average of instruments available at that time would tell us something interesting about the conditions at the locations of those instruments, but not necessarily produce an unbiased estimate of CONUS temperatures.
Instead, I will start with the Climate Reference Network, and assume that is represents a true unbiased estimate. I will estimate the actual U.S. temperature from 2004 to 2012 by assigning each CRN station to a 2.5×3.5 lat/lon gridcell (using the standard NCDC gridding approach), average the temperature readings in each gridcell, and average the grid cells based on their land area to get a CONUS average.
It turns out that during the period of overlap (e.g. 2004-2012), USCRN and USHCN largely agree on U.S. temperatures, at least once they have been converted into temperature anomalies (absolute temperatures will differ due to siting, elevation, wind exposure, and other factors). See this figure: http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Screen-Shot-2013-01-16-at-10.37.51-AM.png
If I add in the average absolute temperature obtained from CRN over that period to the HCN anomalies, I can get a good estimate of the actual temperatures for CONUS in the past. This yields an estimate of 75.44 F for July 1936. This is slightly higher than the 2012 July temperature of 75.34 F. However, the result will differ a tad based on the grid size chosen and the baseline years used. Even in the homogenized data the July temperatures in the 1930s are about as warm as today; for annual average temperatures, not so much.
This does raise the point that NCDC probably erred in hyping July 2012 as the “hottest ever” when the difference (0.2 C) between it and July of 1936 is within the range of error introduced by methodological choices.
For folks still confused about the use of anomalies, and why they are important when estimating regional averages of temperatures (especially when individual stations are subject to biases), this post should serve as a useful primer: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/the-pure-anomaly-method-aka-a-spherical-cow/
REPLY: Thanks for pointing out the 0.2C error band issue. Note that I’m not asking you to calculate it, just show what the reported averages were. The Climate Reference Network is irrelevant to the July 1936 issue, as it did not exist prior to 2001. That said, it all becomes an issue of reporting.
While the work products of those at NCDC may be fully steeped in the belief they are doing things correctly, comparing things than have been changed through history is most certainly an incorrect way to do it. NCDC is charged with knowing these figures, yet, they change depending on who you ask.
Again, what are the temperatures for July 1936? Which one is the “real” one? – Anthony
As far as the fraud question goes, while you didn’t use that word, accusations of data manipulation and remarks that folks would be jailed if they engaged in the same behavior in the business or financial realms amounts to effectively the same thing in my reading at least. Perhaps I should have used the term unethical behavior instead of fraud, and I apologize if I put words in your mouth.
REPLY: that’s OK. To the point though, the historical data has in fact been changed (manipulated as you describe), and the question is: when reporting record temperature comparisons to the public, is this ethical?
Really, what is the correct temperature for July 1936? Nobody seems to know for certain, and that’s my point. – Anthony
Freudian slip by Zeke, it appears.
By the way, I always see questions asked of Steven Mosher, but he never answers them. I’m going to apply the nickname “Crickets” to Steven.
Sorry, Steven, er…., Crickets, but it fits.
Zeke Hausfather:
I have personal interest in the frequent “adjustment” of the data sets. You can see my interest from my answer – especially its link – to Robert of Ottawa at January 23, 2013 at 3:37 pm.
Hence, I appreciate your having made your post at January 23, 2013 at 3:45 pm.
However, your post says different methods give different results. It does not say why each of the methods is often changed, and that is the only answer which matters, isn’t it?
Richard