SEE UPDATE 2 AT END OF POST
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
GISS released its August 2014 global surface temperature data today. As I was preparing the graphs for the August 2014 surface and lower troposphere temperature update, I noticed a sizeable jump in the short-term trend in the GISS data. (I’ll try to post the full update this evening.) The August GISS LOTI value is higher than July, but it should not have had that much of an effect on the trend for the period of January 1998 to present. Not too surprisingly, much of the increase in trend was caused by adjustments to data from 2000 to 2013.
Figure 1 compares the short-term annual trend of two recent versions of the GISS global surface temperature data, from 1998 to 2013. The version as of August 7, 2014 (through June 2014) is available through the Wayback Machine here, and the August 2014 update is available through the GISS website here.
Figure 1
Now keep in mind that we’re not looking at the 2014 data so any variations this year do not impact these trends. In June 2014, the 1998-2013 trend was 0.062 deg C/decade, and a few months later, it jumped up to 0.066 deg C/decade.
The old short-term trend must not have been high enough. GISS must not like it that the UKMO’s HADCRUT4 data is catching up with them during this period. Can’t have that.
It has been said before. It will be said again. The adjustments always seem to add to global warming.
PS: Yes, I realize we’re discussing a trends presented in thousandths of a deg C/decade. But these small changes keep coming and they add up.
UPDATE (September 15, 2014): Sorry, I should’ve included a graph with the year-to-date (January to June) 2014 data to also show the impacts of the tweaks on this year. See Figure 2.
Figure 2
With the adjustments, 2014 has a better chance of matching or breaking records.
That explains it.
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UPDATE 2 (September 16, 2014): Animation 1 compares GISS trend maps. One was downloaded on June 12, 2014. The second was downloaded yesterday June 15, 2014. To complicate the comparison, GISS recently revised their Robinson projection maps. On their Updates to Analysis webpage, they write:
September 15, 2014: Color maps using the Robinson projection are now presented without contour smoothing, since that process occasionally results in skipping some color bands.
It appears, however, that there is new data in the Arctic, north of eastern Siberia. GISS must’ve found an island in the Arctic Ocean with some data so they could infill that region with missing data.
Animation 1
Gee, I wonder why the adjustments never go down in any year?
Because the homogenization routines assume errors will be for both cooling and warming. In reality the vast majority of station moves, modifications, etc are due to things that will contaminate the record with an ever-increasing warming trend. When the station is moved, repainted or maintained…the temperature record has a step change (usually down) and the homogenization routine assumes it to be error and realigns the temperatures, lower the temperatures of the past.
But its peer reviewed so the past must really be getting colder.
They do adjust previous years downward to make the temperature trend look more upward. We have the worst bunch of liars running the US government that I have seen in my lifetime, by far. Inflation calculations have been adjusted to make inflation look small when by 1980’s standards it would presently be about 9.5%, unemployment/underemployment is much higher than reported due to all the folks no longer in the employment numbers, the propaganda outlets (news reports) do not tell us that most of the new job formation is part-time, low wage McJobs, GDP calculations ahve been changed and include items like government spending that make it look better and the list goes on and on. Benghazi, IRS, Fast and Furious, etc., etc.
The media outlets are heavily responsible for the lack of informed citizens in our country and unfortunately there are few to hold them accountable. Even Fox News falls down on the job not reporting the full story ie the effects of the fed’s open market operations on the markets or the rules of engagement which cause even conservatives to oppose troops on the ground when the goal of war should be to win, decisively, and it is not, and has not been since WWII.
Really? I heard that was all mostly due to the unintended consequences of a rather fractious and intransigent winter.
The EU has REJECTED the Global Warming crisis in QUEST OF SAVING THE ECONOMY – green filed to produce enough power at a competitive cost excluding the carbon tax which was used to subsidize wind and solar – well the economy crashed, millions of JOBS were lost and entire industries were forced to move.
To correct the economic disaster created by e=green projects Germany is now building COAL PLANTS – India and China are building 2 or more each week – so the air will not be clean for decades as they build their economy. 2 or 3 billion jobs need to be created between them if they are to escape 3rd world Standards.
Here is the current EU actions . . a lot to read but very informative.
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=02e1f5a684&e=cdaa309e6c
Government spending has been part of GDP/GNA since those statistics were first issued. Any claim to the contrary is simply wrong. Whether the contribution of government to GDP should be valued at the price of the inputs is another matter.
How can money the government took for the people or they borrowed from the future be added to the GDP as they created no product . . just debt/
Jim- I think you are aware that the US Air Force was established based on the theory that wars can be won from the air, and if people admit we can’t win a war without ground troops, then there’s no reason for a separate Air Force, and where are we then, with all those generals out of work? 😉
Except the GDP, see PA Ken’s comment below, Amen! The current administration seems to have an unusually high number of prevaricators, no?
@ur momisugly profitup10
September 15, 2014 at 11:17 am
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Interesting link, thanks.
You are welcome – I wonder why we are not reading any American press on the numerous articles? I even take a Australian news paper and not a peep?
If they went down I’d suspect criminal intent. They go up because that is what is needed to attract government money.
Anthropogenic statistical entropic inflation is its technical term. Its inflation sort of like mixed up with entropy always trending in one direction. Oh and man made of course.
There must be a tipping point.
They need to expand the vertical axis, 0.001C should make a truly “scary” trend apparent.
As it is, if they used the error bars, as normal science must, the signal would be noise.
And of course the imaginary information of an accuracy of 0.01C, continues to be perpetuated.
As a tool for destroying citizens confidence in their government institutions, CAGW has few peers.
The IRS.
I wonder if any one has bothered to count the total number of adjustments over the years and whether any of them where downwards?
I was thinking the same thing.
I would really love to see a tally of all adjustments (up versus down) for satellites, tide gauges, balloon data, Argos, … and so on. It’s my perception that corrections are overwhelming biased towards increasing the trend. Maybe that’s just my own bias …
A rather good site is this: http://climate4you.com/
He shows how the temperature series have been changed in time. Their stability or unstability.
This is a followup on Svend Ferdinandsen’s observation.
The author of http://climate4you.com speaks of the maturity of temperature estimates. This simply refers to the inevitable adjustments one might see in a data set over time. However, we would expect the oldest parts of the data set to be settled on, hence the term maturity.
You can decide for yourself if the adjustments made to the GISS data set appear reasonable or not.
See http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#GISS MaturityDiagram
The entire webpage of GlobalTemperatures.htm is a very good read on the subject.
There are maturity diagrams for each of the major data sets.
There are many downward adjustments in the PAST. The effect is an ever increasing trend up.
Looks like its gone up about 0.07 deg C in 15 years. So many half a degree per century ? If they would plot this on a linear graph with absolute zero as the X-axis that would put it in perspective.
Regardless, from NOAA’s own global temperature data, the trend from 2002 to 2013 is a downward trend of -0.02 C. But that is my own little cherry picking. Even with its adjusted data, it does show a downward trend for a recent 12 straight years.
Catastrophic climate cultists compel culling.
[Always avoid alliteration ~mod.]
climate cultists compel pruning (CCCP)
Mods mainly monitor midnight- mornings monthly; making mid-afternoons mostly magnanimous.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the adjustments are to achieve more warming. It’s only that folks want to find more warming, and so do not consider strongly those things that might show more cooling.
At some point if the adjustments continue to weigh strongly in one direction (more warming), it won’t be necessary to even know how the numbers are calculated. The percentage chance will be so overwhelmingly lopsided as to prove in and of itself there is bias. 32 all warming adjustments, no cooling, chance is 1/4B, for instance.
I think expectations bias is so strong that if data shows a strong up-trend, it is simply assumed to be correct (no need to look further), but if data shows a flat, weak up trend or a down trend – it is assumed to be in error and the search is on to find reasons WHY the data should be ‘corrected’. If you look hard enough, you will always find a reason. When you are dealing with pathological data (noise >= signal), it’s fairly easy to find just enough adjustments to get the signal you want. It’s not a conscious ‘fraud’, just the result of a group wanting a particular outcome so badly.
Currently adjustments are as large or larger than the ‘signal’ we are supposed to see. This should sound warning bells for anyone with an ounce of objectivity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
The climate4you.com site showed this graph. Is that convincing enough?
http://climate4you.com/images/GISS%20Jan1910%20and%20Jan2000.gif
This is a very convincing plot. Thanks.
Anthony I know I’ve asked for it before, and I know it would be a huge amount of work, but I sure would appreciate a WUWT Data Adjustments Reference Page. Thanks as always.
I am deeply saddened that our tax funded federal agencies, NOAA, NWS, NASA, are totally involved in the Climate Change scare campaign. Small and large actions are constantly building a federal foundation under this bad science. We mere citizens have little power to battle back. Thanks to all the great scientific minds that display the truth in posts and comments here on WUWT. I know many of you are posting on other websites as well. I really think the time has come to organize into a active, coordinated blitz email, letters, posts and cyber invasions on selected sites. Otherwise, I fear I will die among losers.
From what I’ve seen its not that they’re not doing it on purpose. But they are at this point “actively ignoring” (its brought to their attention but they refuse to act) the recent discovery that the routines they use for homogenization will add a warming trend to many stations’ data…turning flat (Or even negative) trends positive, and making positive trends worse. Its ironic…they did a good job removing urban heat island but every time a station moves to avoid UHI, these routines effectively adjust the UHI back in by cooling the past.
John, do you have a list of names to hit up? Emailing into the maw gets any effort deleted by hirelings, who are do-as-you’re-tolders hired to cull cranks and those who should be ignored. It’s a waste of time and resources. An email directed to a specific person should make it by the first cut. Since you are far closer to the biz and an insider, perhaps you could expand on this comment by saying who should be contacted by email and letter, and have Anthony put it up as a headline post.
I would be more than happy to write, but I am not going to waste two to three hours to have it deleted by a minimum-wager whose success depends upon pleasing the boss. I DO know that physical letters carry enormous weight; the logic is that someone must [really] give a damn to take the time. A well-written physical letter carries the weigh of 10,000 letter/opinions. The non-smoking sections in airplanes came about as a result of three letters.
Don’t think that way John! We mere humans are indeed battling a Jagger naught of corruption, that said, good things are happening, and the continued sobering effect of the earth in a cooling phase ( god forbid a full on ice age ) and the general public experiencing reality in the face of mass media climate scare porn has delivered a kind of tipping point of public awareness we are being assaulted by bogus policy by the entire elite power paradigm. Pitch forks may well come out, lets hope we stay focused and sober emotionally as the house of cards smoke and mirrors come tumbling shattering down! And yes Mr. Coleman and organized media push back is in order, you my friend and hero must hear how your work and efforts are absolutely appreciated and needed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Best model…..errr dropped data…….hmmmmm….complex arrangement………uuuhhhhh…more accurate than the raw data…..heh! denialist scum!
Tweaking? Twerking!
For http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1995/from/plot/gistemp/from:1995
The OLS trend of the difference, GISS – RSS, from 1995 to now, is +.075 C per decade. At this rate there will be a whole degree difference between them in only 8 years.
The dead hand of DR Doom once again makes is presence felt .
The real shame is that other are playing three wise monkeys while this is going on, to their shame.
They ought to store data in a revision control system, it is not enough to publish stuff on the web any more. Failure to do so is inexcusable.
Errata control might be more appropriate.
It’s not really data if it’s been adjusted… However, I think the output should be stored in a data warehouse or data mart — that’s if they do things like actually use a database.
They may be outputting individual files. If so, a revision control system would work.
Not only that. A proper revision control system would reveal the full history of how history is being rewritten and make it impossible to tamper with that aspect of the process retrospectively. It has a built in facility with a standard software interface to make as many local copies of the full process as the general public wishes, therefore it would effectively prevent hidden &. undocumented manipulations and would make easy to visualize changes over time by adding another software layer.
These tools are developed to deal with complexity in a transparent way and transparency is the lifeblood of science, is it not?
What’s their excuse for increasing it this time?
there’s a perfectly good excuse for this….
…we were too stupid to read a thermometer 10 years ago
Why are people still lettin them get away with this?
If global warming is causing all what ills us, what does global cooling do?
@ur momisugly policycritic.
If global warming is causing all what ills us, what does global cooling do?
———————————
Hi there.
The climate scientists, if you ask them this question, will be in no problem to tell you what global cooling do, or a natural global warming can do, and you by now know their answer about the AGW.
If any of these scenarios possible to happen they will be found correct with their explanations, in general, I think.
(But very little chance there for any as such as above.)
But the problem that the only scenario they can give you an answer when the ever rocketing CO2 emissions considered , as in the way been till now, unfortunatly is the scenario of AGW.
They can have an explanation about it, a kinda of theory, also the possible problems can be identified at most and quantified, and no any paradox there.
But in a natural climate trend, either of warming or cooling, to explain it how come to be and what it could do, in a such already high CO2 emissions and in the prospect of ever increasing CO2, any theory or explanation it will be more complex and difficult and very hard to comprehend.
Further more no way of any possibility to identify or quantify the problems related to, simply because, ever rocketing CO2 emissions in a natural climate change or trend, becomes a paradox, at a given moment.
There is a natural tolerance in the system about CO2, at a given point the tolerance will be reached.
There is ways of estimating while that reached, more or less.
The AGW scenario has the higher tolerance of CO2 emissions allowed, to a point that climate will be in a new equilibrium, meaning a higher tolerance and further in future point of that tolerance reached.
With all the scare stories Agw is the most benign autcome, one to wish for.
But unfortunately is becoming more clear with every day passing that that is not the case.
In the natural cause, in the scenario of a warming trend or period in the given condition, the tolerance is much less than in the case of AGW, but more than in the scenario of the cooling.
So the scenario of a natural cooling period is the most difficult scenario to explain, and a disturbing one while trying to explain,………. the point of paradox is reached earlier and quicker.
And a scientist confronting a paradox is like Mozart facing his own piano and looking at his own partitures unable to play it or even make head from tails. or like Davinci not been able to Identify his own Mona Lisa while told how much it cost today to own it……
But anyway, I don’t think there any posssibility, if all taken in account, to really identifie or quantifie what a cooling can or would do in the particular way is happening.
That is the harder part, avoided by climate science, and that is what I think makes these scientist to still persue the AGW way. To desperate and shocked to see it otherwise.
The simpler answer you would get to your question, probably the most correct one will be in the lines: “We don’t know, is an unprecedented scenario, contradictive and soon to become a paradox.”
A simple way will show that with a cooling and CO2 ever increasing, the natural tolerance will be reached while the CS or TCS will reach the lower value of 1.5C, the moment the climate will show no any sensitivity at all to CO2 emisssions and the further increment. Simply that is the point when further CO2 emissions become a paradox.
All the data fudging thus far is causing an artificial postponing of that day by increasing artificially the warming and therefor keeping for longer the droping of CS or TCS metric and artificially increasing the amount of CO2 considered as allowed and still below the natural tolerance value. .
From the day one, AGW science has tried to convince the rest about the imediate need to cut CO2 emissions, while in the same time has artificially increased the amount of the considered tolerance of CO2 allowed in the system,…….and still at doing it.
If science can be viewed as a magnifying glass used to check-view-look wider and further in the horizons for better understanding and comprehention of the environment and the place we thrive and belong, this AGW scientists seem to be using it backward, looking at it from it by the wrong end.
Very sad indeed if that happen to be the truth.
First, the AGW science or the orthodox climate science from this point will just be in regression modus operandi, as far as intellect and real scientific method considered.
Second there will be a long or rather very long time before any turn on the right direction expected to really happen.
Anyway that is just what I think in this particular point, I do consider that probably, hopefully I am wrong.
Cheers
It is the new process being used called Gavinization!
Are these adjustments cumulative in any sense? Ponzi schemes collapse under the weight of the constantly increasing payout required to keep the scheme afloat. Can they keep these small adjustments up forever, or could they reach a point where the departure from reality is too large to hide. Is there any way they are sowing the seeds of their own exposure and downfall? Can they tweak the satellite record or is that safe from manipulation?
That would work if they weren’t cooling the past…..to fabricate the incline
In what other field of science would constant adjustments to the historical record be tolerated without fully published, bullet-proof justification?
In climate science, we make unidirectional adjustments every time a team member waves their arms.
Oh golly, it’s just an occasional helpful nudge for the sake of the planet.
Why not look on the bright side.
These nudges are likely to make reality a lot more hard to swallow as the climate itself refuses to cooperate.
These adjustments may coddle the alarmists in an immediate sense but as time marches on and the climate disappoints them they’ll increasingly find themselves wishing they had not traveled so far from the comfort of truth.
…..And you thought mann-made global warming adjustments would stop, when Michael Mann left the GISS operations??
[Mann at NASA/GISS? or Hansen? .mod]
Thanks for the correction! Juggled too many things on a hurried lunch break….
Mac
These activities in the US, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere demonstrate that so-called climate change is anthropomorphic, not anthropogenic: Anthropomorphic is to assign human traits to thigns in nature: Faces in mountains, clouds; patterns in stars controlling human destiny, etc. What is abundantly clear is that climate data, filtered through the anthopomorphism of the climate obsessed, is interpretted by the climate obsessed as *proof* of climate doom caused by CO2.
Yes, astrology comes to mind.
In college, if I had gone back into my lab books and altered recorded data, I would have been tossed out of the program. If in my report of the experiment I modified the recorded data using approved statistical analysis, I had to show and justify the statistical treatment. Looks, like I should have majored in climatology – could have saved myself a lot of effort.
The GISS and HADCRUT4 data are sure to reflect ever increasing temperatures as the ice packs begins its march southward out of N Canada’s higharctic.The Global Warmists alarms will get ever louder as theGreat Lakes start retaining ice through the summer.
Too much money for renewable subsidies and carbon tax schemes are in jeopardy if this is not.