Here’s a story of scientific investigation and discovery I’m proud to have
had a small part in.Regular readers may remember that I posted about a
climate station in Detroit Lakes MN last week, surveyed by volunteer Don
Kostuch, and cross posted it to the website
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1828#comments that had two air
conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an obvious cause and
effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined that the a/c units were
moved off the roof of the radio station where this station resides and moved
them to the ground where the temperature sensor is close by.
Detroit Lakes, MN surveyed by Don Kostuch – Don has
single handedly done almost the entire state of Minnesota!However, some folks on the blogosphere just went, well, a little
ballistic over that assertion. It was a good thing too, because their very
loud and somewhat uncivil complaints led to an examination of this idea: if
its not the a/c units, what then did cause the temperature jump at that
time?
Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates
www.climateaudit.org and began to
investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were
graphed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish
the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the
graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the “corrected” data. He had to
reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed
data..
Here is one of his
where he begins to understand what is happening. “This imparts an upward
discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the
monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000
– and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a
programming error.”
He further refines his argument showing the
and the problems with the
USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem.
here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web
page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a
corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA’s newly published data set from
Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation
from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations
throughout the USA.
According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the
hottest year ever. 1934 is.
Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now
from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are
from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003,
2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of
temperature are calculated separately.)
Top 10 GISS U.S. Temperature deviation (deg C) in New Order
8/7/2007
| Year | Old | New |
| 1934 | 1.23 | 1.25 |
| 1998 | 1.24 | 1.23 |
| 1921 | 1.12 | 1.15 |
| 2006 | 1.23 | 1.13 |
| 1931 | 1.08 | 1.08 |
| 1999 | 0.94 | 0.93 |
| 1953 | 0.91 | 0.90 |
| 1990 | 0.88 | 0.87 |
| 1938 | 0.85 | 0.86 |
| 1939 | 0.84 | 0.85 |
Here’s the old order of top 10 yearly temperatures.
| Year | Old | New |
| 1998 | 1.24 | 1.23 |
| 1934 | 1.23 | 1.25 |
| 2006 | 1.23 | 1.13 |
| 1921 | 1.12 | 1.15 |
| 1931 | 1.08 | 1.08 |
| 1999 | 0.94 | 0.93 |
| 1953 | 0.91 | 0.90 |
| 2001 | 0.90 | 0.76 |
| 1990 | 0.88 | 0.87 |
| 1938 | 0.85 | 0.86 |
I salute the work of Steven McIntyre, he has now made two major contributions to climate science.
1) Proving how the Mann “hockey stick” used in all Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was based on unsupportable data and methods.
2) Proving how yearly temperature anomalies for the USA are based on data that had been processed incorrectly.
Dr. Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado also deserves credit becuase he was the one who encouraged me to pursue the www.surfacestations.org project due to his broad work on land use change and it’s affect on regional and local climate.
I’ve been told that climateaudit.org has been disabled by a DDOS attack. It may be a week before it’s back up.
McIntyre’s Grenadier Guards and Watts’ Light Horse have had rather a spectacular victory. Carry on, gentlemen.
In California, the warming rate is much increased by UHIs and land use measurements. In fact, it may be doubled according to a study by Patzert and LaDochy.
“The scientists found great variations in temperature patterns throughout the state. Average temperatures increased significantly in nearly 54 percent of the stations studied, with human-produced changes in land use seen as the most likely cause. The largest temperature increases were seen in the state’s urban areas, led by Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area, particularly for minimum temperatures. Minimum temperatures at some agricultural sites showed increases comparable to some urban areas. Rural, non-agricultural regions warmed the least. The Central Valley warmed slowest, while coastal areas warmed faster, and the southeast desert warmed fastest.
The only area to cool was a narrow band of the state’s mainly rural northeast interior. While few stations overall showed decreases in average and minimum temperatures, 13 percent of the stations for which sufficient maximum temperature data were available showed a significant drop in average maximum temperatures, including some urban sites.”
From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070330221144.htm
Until GISS corrects for these non-climatic effects in California and other states, the temperature increase in the US will continue to be overestimated.
The record temperatures of 1931 vs. 1998 don’t tell the whole story. Please go to the Goddard Institute’s numbers, copy and paste them into an Excel sheet and plot. I see a higher 5-year average-temperature in the last 20 years than in the timeframe before and around WW II. This may be due to the lower number of low-temperature-years. And the decline has not happened yet.
There is lots of room for statistical games but no room for jubilations on any side. Just continue your investigations – they are very valuable.
OK. I’ll keep the green light bulbs, but I’m turning the air conditioner back on.
It appears that CA is down because of traffic overload. Mr. Limbaugh apparently mentioned the site and kaboom. I guess I will have to gettalife!
Steve’s comment on the cause of CA being down was just posted. I should have been more paranoid. Troubling.
hi
how is the mean taken ?
can this data be made into a us temp graph that shows the actual average
us temp for each year ?
fascinating stuff
regards
nick
The record temperatures of 1931 vs. 1998 don’t tell the whole story. Please go to the Goddard Institute’s numbers, copy and paste them into an Excel sheet and plot. I see a higher 5-year average-temperature in the last 20 years than in the timeframe before and around WW II.
Compare to 10-year averages. I can’t evaluate which is more meaningful, but changing the length of the float makes the curves a lot different.
The 1930s were (minutely) more consistently warm than the 1990s as a set or 2000s as a set.
Obviously this is playing around a bit, and to be discouraged without disclosure…but it’s interesting.
Of course none of this means a damn thing unless you can tell us how this revision impacts the measurement of global temperatures, rather than just US temperature.
Anybody…?
Joe,
The US data is considered the best temp record in the world with the best stations.
It will be interesting to see if the rest of the world gets audited.
Actually, I suspect Australia has the best maintained climate network in the world:
The Australian Reference Climate Station network:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml
They have already documented their sites online – this documentation could be improved with additional direction views etc., but it is a step in the right direction.
It is a pity, but it seems to me that either GISS includes various stations not in this well documented network in their analysis, or they apply some of their weird ‘adjustments’, as they always seem to produce warmer anomoly maps than the BoM does.
A caller to Limbaugh’s program yesterday made an interesting point. He said that, when the Soviet Union imploded, a couple hundred temperature recording sites were abandoned due to lack of money and resources to run them. I hadn’t ever heard such a claim before, but that many stations closing in a short period of time could have had significant consequences on global surface temperature data, depending on where the stations were located. There’s an awful lot of the former Societ Union that’s extremely cold most of the time. Anyone know any more about this interesting claim?
To answer JoeBloe, I think the real significance here is two-fold:
(1) There must be complete transparency in the methods used to derive the temperature histories used for climatological analysis. That is, raw data, algorithms, source code, etc. Why did Steve M. have to “reverse engineer” the corrections to discover the anomaly? GISS should have provided him with the source code – if or course they were truly interested in understanding the problem. The fact that they still are holding out on the source code speaks volumes…
(2) When the media (via NOAA or GISS press releases) say something like “…this year’s average temperature was the highest ever recorded…”, we know now that this is not entirely true! The raw data undergoes extensive “corrections” for various effects such as time of observation, urbanization effects (to the exent that’s known), data outliers (recorded temperatures are clearly in error), and missing data. Much of this is necessary, but even with the corrections, there will always be some level of uncertainty in the results, which typically is not mentioned in these press releases. And “highest recorded” certainly does not logically mean “highest ever” – tree ring and other proxies notwithstanding…
It is my own personal belief that a significant fraction of the “warming” detected in the last century can be attributed to progressive alteration of the microclimates surrounding the stations used to collect the climate data. Imagine for moment you have a camera at a typical US station which recorded a photo of the site (like those on sufacestations.org) every year since, say 1900. What would you see? In many cases, these sites were likely in the middle of nowhere for decades. Then development crept in and the sites became surrounded by roads, buildings, and people. Of course, the impact of urbanization is supposed to be accounted for in the temperature adjustments, but these effects can only be modeled imperfectly given the lack of information about the development histories of the individual sites.
Frank K.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is only applicable to the United States…the US accounting for somewhere around 8% of the Earth’s total mass. Last I checked the issue was “global warming,” not “United States warming.”
In other words, you have a massive variable that will no doubt have a significant impact on your numbers once they’re factored in.
Simply put, your Popperian attempt at providing a counterexample that calls into question prevailing the climatological paradigm falls on its face by simple logically fallacy: you cannot generalize or challenge an entire set by simply addressing very small, singular outlier; nor can you provide a factual counterexample via inductive logic.
As an aside, wasn’t this around the time of the Dust Bowl?
“With all that Exxon money, would think Climate Audit could buy a better server.”
It’s not like they are getting the BILLIONS of funding from the US government. Exxon is only shelling out a few millions.
TCO,
My good friend. Suppose this: I kick you in the groin and you whine. After you catch your breath you protest that I have fought unfairly.
And I respond: you should have bought a better Groin protector
BLAMING THE VICTIM for any attack is a diversion that only sociopaths engage in.
Please TCO, you have other issues with steveMc. Valid or not, they are LOGICALLY disconnected from the issue of DDOS.
At times we agreeably disagree. But at times I want to put your comments here
http://forum.defcon.org/archive/index.php/f-37.html
Joe,
Remember that AGW crowd blames the US as the prime contributor to CO2. And they correlated global warming with the increase in CO2. If 40% of the top 10 years are now huddled in the 30’s that certainly decouples that relationship. But don’t worry… the AGW crowd will change the topic from AGW to Climate Change. That way all bases are covered – cooling and warming. Regardless we (the US) are responsible and need to be reigned in by the UN and Gore.
Grow up, the earth is flat too.
JOHN
The media has always referred to 1998 as the “warmest year on record” for the globe, not for the US. (at least, until 2005 when 2005 became statistically tied with 1998 for warmest year). This result (a change by 0.02 degrees for a small portion of the globe) will not impact the global conclusions in the slightest.
Sergei: Since CO2 is well-mixed globally, it doesn’t matter where it is emitted, the warming effects are global not local. Nor is the science of global warming a science of correlating one trend with another: it is a science derived from basic physics and radiative forcing, which is why Arrhenius predicted possible global warming from increases in CO2 in 1898, long before CO2 started increasing…
Just one thing to keep in mind. This is just *one* data point and doesn’t actually ‘debunk’ global warming. Part of the thing to keep in mind is that global temperatures are what is important – not US only temperatures. This correction is actually relatively minor only causing a change of around 1% to 2% in the data. As such, this doesn’t, in and of itself, actually provide any falsifying evidence.
One last thing,
People have to make a decision. While climate change may or may not be real we still have to make a choice about what we are going to do. If we do nothing there are two outcomes: If climate change is real (regardless of the cause) then we’re screwed. If its not real, then we save a lot of money and life is good. If we do something then there are two outcomes: Climate change isn’t real and we slow down the world economy to some degree possibly resulting in a depression. Climate change is real and we mitigate the worst effects of climate change at the price of slowing down the world economy.
What you need to do is evaluate the various risks, the costs associated with mitigating those risks, and the costs associated with doing nothing. Personally, I look at it like I do my home owners insurance. My house is 120 years old and hasn’t burned up, fallen down, or been flooded out yet. It doesn’t mean it won’t be but to be honest the risk is pretty low. However, if something does happen and I don’t have insurance I’m completely screwed paying off 180k+ on a house I no longer can live in. While I’d rather do something else with the $1k or so I pay in insurance and even though I know the risk is small I still pay it – because the risk is still there.
If the insurance cost $20k a year I’d, without a doubt, risk the fire because I couldn’t afford $20k a year for an admittedly low risk.
So you have to ask yourself, are you 100% sure completely and totally convinced without the slightest shadow of a doubt that there is no risk from climate change? If you believe that there is a chance you are wrong you have to ask yourself how much you are willing to spend to buy yourself some insurance – just in case you are wrong.
Since the only people I know who are right about everything are Jesus and my wife I’m willing to entertain the idea that I might be wrong about climate change. As such, I think it might actually be a good idea to take out a reasonably priced insurance policy.
i’m a triffle confused – what I’ve read (and perhaps misunderstood) thusfar suggests that this “y2k” problem affected data from 2000 and on. that being the case, how does that change 1998 vs 1934 or any other pre-2000 year?
After reading daily diary entries of a Norwegian-American who chronicled for 45 years from 1910 to 1954, his golf scores, money spent, temperature, inches of rain and velocity of wind, I would come to the same conclusion. According to S.A. Olsness, 1934 was by far the hottest year that drove many North Dakota farmers off the land. Thanks for this blog to confirm what I already knew!!! He didn’t call it global warming back then, he called it an “eternal inferno.”
Re: One last thing, one more one last thing. Where in your analytical frame work do you consider that warming might have have positive consequences?