This story in the UK register today outlines some of the modification that has occurred in climate data.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
Climate Audit and Steve McIntyre figure in greatly. They gave me a mention too.
NASA’s original data: 1999
NASA’s reworked data: 2007
I can’t elaborate much, I’m posting this from a WiFi in McDonald’s as I’m traveling again today. Comment approval will be delayed a few hours.
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Ric Werme
Just checked out your website…I’m from Vermont and the Old Man on the mountain in NH was only about 100 km away from my boyhood home! I wasn’t aware that it had fallen off. Has anyone attributed this to you know what?
Anthony,
In the 2006 Hanson, Ruedy, Sato paper “Global Temperature Change” Hanson describes “quantifying” the temperature anomally in places where there is “incomplete station coverage” by extrapolating what is known about the temperature in the area with poor station coverage with ” a model generated data set”. Using this technique, he managed to show warming of Antarctica and the Eastern Canadian Arctic where the available surface records showed cooling for the past 20 years. (one of many funky manuevers) More recent mapping of the “temperature anomalies” continues to show the greatest change in areas like the Arctic and parts of Africa where surface data is very limited. The question I have is: ” Does the NASA-GISS data still use computor generated temperatures to extrapolate with the data from areas with limited coverage?” If the computor is set to generate temperatures consistant with the General Circulation Models currently used by NASA and these temperatures still extrapolated with the actual measurements then of course the NASA_GISS temperatures would continue to rise as well as be subject to the revisions pointed out in Climate Audit and wattsupwiththat.
REPLY: Yes they still use the data extrapolation for tehse areas…part fot eh reason GISS runs warmer than the other data sets.
Pierre Gosselin commented about my home page and my photo of The Old Man of the Mountain, a rock formation that put all other rock faces to shame. Especially the Face on Mars formation that some thought was an alien structure designed to get our attention. This is completely OT, but this thread is old enough so what the heck.
The Old Man remains New Hampshire’s state symbol and will for the indefinite future. California’s symbol includes an extinct bear, so I expect he’ll be around for decades to come.
Pierre, did you check out the link to http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/oldman.php ? It has the best description of what happened and a combination before/after image. Basically the entire weight was borne by a small contact region at the base of his chin. That slipped or broke and all five blocks fell. Falling in spring after another season of freeze/thaw cycles is what I expected. No one has suggested that climate change did him in, though my wife wrote a letter to the newspaper suggesting that recent election wins by the Democrats led the Old Man to jump.
The fall happened during the night, and may have been heard by a couple campers. The morning started with Cannon Mountain in the clouds so it was mid morning before people realized what happened. As the news spread, a lot of people drove up to pay their respects, I was tempted to. No one knows when the profile first became visible, most people think he was around since the Ice Age, I would be surprised if it were more than a few hundred years, there’s a lot of rock in the talus pile at the base of the cliff and that’s all since the glaciers retreated.
Driving through Franconia Notch just isn’t the same any more.
Pierre: Thanks. I am looking into some of the various cycles and their warm/cool phases.
Description (basic). Duration (of cycle). Variance (how hot? how cold? local or worldwide?). Currency (where are we in the cycle?). History (“the record”).
You’d be surprised how hard it is to nail down some of this most basic data from the various articles. One would almost think they don’t actually know and are trying to sound as if they had answered the basic questions while not doing anything of the sort.
HOW warm? HOW cool? Ids it a local or worldwide scale on the left side of the ^%$& graph? Put a LABEL on it. already! I don’t care about the ^%$&* pressure, how does it affect TEMPERATURES? Sheesh!
I am boiling it down to filecard form. Short, sweet, concise. (One of several papers I am working on.)
Bias and wanting the results a certain way can be strong corrupters of science. But, this continual revision of the past to be cooler, just to make the present seem warmer ought to strain the credulity of the most ardent AGW fanatic. Add to this the fact that the site and observer bias is known to strongly favor warming so that any realistic correction should be a lowering of current temperatures, and what we’re seeing, especially from NASA/GISS is leaving the realm of scientific debate and entering the realm of either fantasy or fraud.
Obviously, the state of climate science in the year 1999 was not sufficient to correctly compute the past temperatures of the US, i.e. the country with the best available temperature records. What does this say about the capability to predict future global temperatures?
Anthony-
I found today’s Dilbert comically relevant to some of the discussions you have here about temperature data. I can’t seem to link to the specific strip, but for today, http://www.dilbert.com has it on the front page.