by John Goetz
Update: Thanks to an email from John S. – a patron of climateaudit.org – we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS.
Update 2: The faulty results have been (mostly) backed out of the GISS website. The rest should be done following the federal holiday. GISS says they will update the analysis once they confirm with NOAA that the software problems have been corrected. I also removed the subtitles since the GISS data no longer reflects October as being the warmest ever.
GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISSTemp) released their monthly global temperature anomaly data for October 2008. Following is the monthly global ∆T from January to October 2008:
Year J F M A M J J A S O
2007 85 61 59 64 55 53 53 56 50 54
2008 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78
Here is a plot of the GISSTemp monthly anomaly since January 1979 (keeping in line with the time period displayed for UAH). I have added a simple 12-month moving average displayed in red.
The addition of October has changed some of the temperatures for earlier months:
GISS 2008 J F M A M J J A S O
As of 9/08 14 25 62 36 40 29 53 50 49 ..
As of 10/08 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78
The 0.78 C anomaly in October is the largest ever for October, and one of the largest anomalies ever recorded. Although North America was cooler than normal, Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave.
Also, after several months of being downgraded to a 0.61 C anomaly, 2005 has been lifted back to 0.62 C.
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evanjones-
As far as I can tell:
1) UAH (like GISS) only provides their final product on their website;
2) The raw MSU data UAH uses (like the temperature records GISS uses) can be found elsewhere pretty easily;
3) UAH (like GISS) has published their methodologies in the peer-reviewed literature. It may be tough for us amateurs to get, but it’s no problem for professionals with access to the journals.
4) UAH accepts corrections (as does GISS- remember the corrections made to the lower 48 temps that S. Macintyre discovered?);
5) The UAH code is not publicly available to anyone who wants it; the GISS code is.
So explain to me again- how is UAH more “transparent”???
IMO, the availability (or lack thereof) of their individual computer programs is irrelevant. Anybody can read up on the UAH/GISS methods in the journals, download the relevant raw data from the web, and then do their own temp reconstructions just like GISS and UAH do.
Or they can use their own methods to reduce the raw data, and see how they compare to GISS/UAH.
IMO, GISS gets a lot more scrutiny in the blogosphere than UAH or RSS because the surface temperature data is so much easier to play with- all you need is a decent spreadsheet program.
On the other hand, calculating the absorption of various microwave frequencies as they move through different layers in the atmosphere is a bit trickier. 😉
I would also argue that the way to “check” GISSTemp is not by running their code yourself, it’s by doing an independent analysis using the same or different raw data (ala Hadley, RSS, and UAH). And the fact is (as I showed previously in the graph I posted) that all of them agree pretty closely over the long run. There are short-term differences, but not much in the long term trends.
An Inquirer (11:36:07)-
I really can’t answer your question. I am no expert on any of this- far from it. I am just an interested layman with a fast internet connection (and perhaps a little too much free time at the moment). 😉
I understand Hansen has remained quiet about his error, saying nothing – even though today is no longer a government holiday – and making no excuses or explanations?
John S sent me an email about the Russian problem at 6.08 pm Eastern, almost concurrently with Chris’ recognition of the problem with Russian stations at blog time 15.57 (5: 57 pm Eastern). I asked him if he wanted to post a thread at CA, but he said that he was too busy and asked me and/or John Goetz to do so. I forwarded his email to John Goetz about 6.14 pm Eastern and John Goetz posted up the email about half an hour later (16.43 blog time – 6.43 pm Eastern), adding the Update in the head post a bit later. I posted on the matter later in the evening.
The next morning, when I looked at the GISS website, they had not provided any notice of a potential problem. We are often told by climate scientists that they do not read our blogs and, on the assumption that GISS might not know of their error, I sent Hansen a short notice that there was an error in their Russian data. About an hour later, they acknowledged the problem and at 12:07 pm Gavin Schmidt made a post that failed to acknowledge either blog as a source, leaving the misleading impression that they had identified the error through their own routine quality control:
One of their readers http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4318#comment-311169 objected to my post stating that:
I replied that, contrary to the impression that realclimate had created, the error had not been identified through their own quality control and that they had failed to acknowledge any sources, thereby leaving the impression that they had done this on their own. At all times, I made it quite clear that the error had been pointed out to me by a CA reader and that I had only confirmed the point. I stated at the blog:
Gavin has now pretended that I sought to arrogate personal credit, which obviously I did not. Gavin:
I notified Hansen of the problem by email so that they could deal with the problem, if they weren’t already aware of it. If they had already noticed the discussion here (or at CA) and were taking steps to fix it, that’s fine. In their shoes, I’d have answered back saying thanks for the heads up, that the discussion at the blogs had already come to my attention and that the matter was being dealt with expeditiously.
OF course, if they’d done that, then they might have had to mention one of the blogs.
Honorable Jim;
My name is Albert.
I live in Bern. Switzerland
Currently (1904) working in the office of patents.
I have an idea on climate change.
Answer;
Dear Albert, when we’re busy.
We have a Tyrannosaurus rex in the room.
FM
Kurt: Quoting you from above:
“As more CO2 is accumulated in the atmoshphere, the Earth gets less efficient at re-radiating the energy it receives from the sun (it basically churns the energy around longer and thus introduces a greater delay in shedding instantaneously received energy). Consequently temperatures somewhere in the Earth are going to rise in response.
“Having said that, the relevant question is to ask how much temperatures have to increase in response to a given quantity of additional CO2. This is a question that has not, and likely will not ever be, answered with respect to as complex a system as the Earth.
“Instead, it the answer has to be experimentally measured, and verified. Experimental procedures to measure the Earth’s actual temperature response to increasing CO2 are not, and will not ever be, possible.
….
False.
You are making the politically-corrupt assumption that CO2 makes up anything but a vanishing small fraction of the greenhouse gasses (GHG). CO2 is (now) at less than 4/10 of ONE percent of gasses in the atmosphere, and is less than 2% of all the mixed GH gasses in the atmosphere. Of this portion, less than 1/3 of all CO2 is man-derived (and that ITSELF) is a tremendous fertilizer – increasing plant growth over thepast few years by 17 – 27% over earlier years. Completely eliminating ALL human CO2 emissions would NOT change the net temperature cycles of the earth.
Further evidence of this lack of an influence – even Hansen cannot detect the effect of CO2 changes in HIS (flawed/exaggerated) computer programs without multiplying the overall effect of CO2 by a factor of ten. (This factor is “explained” away by claiming that it represents the increase in water vapor in the atmosphere as temperature rises – but this flaw is exposed by the fact that a change of 1/10 of one degree in the air CANNOT increase the amount of residual water vapor by a factor of ten, a factor of 1, or a factor of 1.010 Even over the oceans, the atmosphere does become saturated (outside of fog banks) hence the amount of water in the atmosphere is limited by the available water in the round/sea/plant life, NOT by the temperature of the atmosphere above the ground.)
False; You are assuming that there have been no “experiemtns” of sufficient duration to correlate CO2 levels and global temperatures. Would you agree that a 10 year pattern is long enough? Would 25 years be better?
From 1945 through 1970; CO2 rose, and temperatures fell 1/2 of one degree.
From 1970 through 1995; CO2 rose, and temperatures rose 1/2 of one degree.
Frp, 1995 through 2008; CO2 rose, and temperatures remained steady – with one bump as the El Nino of 1998 passed – then went away.
What level of human suffering and economic waste do you require to “feel good” about trying to limit CO2 emissions? How many living breathing people do you want to suffer to restrict CO2 – and doing nothing?
BillP, sung to the tune of …… ?
[REPLY – Tequilaville, of course. Good one, BillP. ~ Evan]
Kurt, You are using energy to transfer this heat flow “up-hill”. Think a bit about basic physical laws, please.
I’ve always had a tendency to write stories,
even to write books. Finally – this interesting time –
did provide a very good title:
When the World gone bonkers– on Climate Fears and Credit/Debt Ignorance
-When Globalisation did end and the necessity for Local Production did reappear
…
Gavin (RC) was right on this (first time, as far as I know):
The “cottage industry” is it.
Somehow nobody explained to him, how the U.S. of A., and lots of other countries
did survive the ‘Great Depression’ without ‘cottage industry’ – and the ‘Greater Depression’ is still evolving.
Usually I do (Copy/Save) lot of stuff from here/CA/Icecap and others.
I did start to copy stuff from RC to document the degree of arrogance and ignorance
– in my mother language, both are from the same tree –
– We are indeed living in interesting times –
With Best Regards to Anthony
and all you other folks
Well not to worry Anthony; it’s not a big deal; after all the errors are only in the GISS anomaly; it’s not like they made a mistake in the mean global surface temperature or something else unimportant. So long as they keep the mistakes on the anomaly plot, and don’t transport them off that page, they can’t cause any harm.
George
Is there a reason why their color graph looks EXACTLY the same as it did yesterday? I think they are using the same data: Siberian heat wave; UK burn zone; and a hot spot over Tunis.
OT…but I would love to know what the solar polar field strength is doing right now, such an important metric to observe at present.
The Stanford uni site doesn’t update very often.
Leif, anyone?
kurt (16:45:04) :
“The quotatoin above, that “energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise” is both demonstrably false and irrelevant. My house uses a heat pump that extracts heat from cool air outside to further warm the house. Throw a room-temperature blanket over your 98 degree body at night and it will keep you warmer, despite the fact that it’s temperature is lower than yours. ”
Do you see a difference between ‘flow’ and ‘pump’?
You should, however, get some recognition for your effort to reduce global temperatures as you attempt to refrigerate the great outdoors.
Does the blanket provide instant and measurable warmth as you throw it over yourself? How long does the blanket stay cold on the side that is nearest to you? What effect warms it up? (I assume you are talking about a typical blanket that you might buy in a shop rather than some sort of exotic purely gaseous device?
So explain to me again- how is UAH more “transparent”???
You need to read up on Steve McIntyre’s requests for code and Hansen’s repeated refusals. Finally Hansen “delivered” a jumbled “code dump”. FORTRAN, non-working, and no operating instructions.
For months coders on Mac’s site retranslated the code (it reminds me of how the Iranians “unreshredded” documents in the US embassy in 1979). Finally they managed to get up a vaguely working version. I am quite sure Hansen believed reconstruction to be impossible.
But UAH made its knowledge freely available to those who requested it, which, IIRC, is how the drift calculation error was discovered in the first place (i.e., by “outsiders”).
The point is that one is supposed to be able to replicate results. This is key to scientific method. I have read that HadCRUT is worse even than GISS in this regard. No one knows exactly how their numbers wind up the way they do. But UAH and RSS go back and forth between each other and help each other find errors. That’s how it is supposed to work.
So GISS and Hadley are uncooperative at best. I don’t think NOAA coughs up its adjustment codes either, but I may be wrong about that (other could answer). I do know that at least USHCN-1 explanations were fairly clear, but USHCN-2 was a bunch of confused nonsense.
UAH and RSS are open shops.
The Rev (or whoever) can correct me if I am wrong about any of this, but that is my understanding of the situation.
nobwainer (Geoff Sharp) (19:03:16) :
what the solar polar field strength is doing right now, such an important metric to observe at present.
My website at http://www.leif.org/research is now up-to-date with the latest fields. Click on ‘Most Recent IMF, SW, and Solar Data”.
The polar fields are on page 1 [bottom]. Note the weakening in late summer 2008 due to wildfires. The polar fields are now back on track [green curve], i.e. they have really not changed at all, which is normal. Once we get serious SC24 activity, the fields will erode.
evanjones (19:16:30)-
So it all comes down to “the Code” then?
I followed the goings on at CA pretty closely when all that was going on. My feeling today is the same as it was then- if you think GISS is doing it all wrong (or intentionally fudging it, as many seem to think) then WRITE YOUR OWN CODE, write up your methods, and show everyone what GISS is doing wrong.
Remember 10 or so years ago when two physicists claimed to have discovered cold fusion? The skeptical physicists didn’t say “let us borrow your experimental apparatus, so we can take it apart and see how it works, and use it to run our own experiments”. The skeptics built their own equipment (based on the descriptions in the paper) and ran their own INDEPENDENT experiments.
About the time that the GISS code was released, one poster over a CA, John V (no relation) did just that. He wrote his own simple code (over the course of a few days, so it can’t be that hard for someone who has decent programming skills), calculated the temperature trend for the lower 48, and compared it the GISSTemp for the same area.
I don’t need to tell you the results of John V’s analysis, do I?
I have never understood this obsession with “auditing the Code”. Surely SOMEONE on the skeptical side is capable of writing their own code and proving that GISSTemp is wrong??
IMO, this obsession with “the Code” has nothing to do with advancing the science (independent analyses would do that). It’s all about embarrassing Hanson and GISS.
Chris V. said:
…if you think GISS is doing it all wrong (or intentionally fudging it, as many seem to think) then WRITE YOUR OWN CODE, write up your methods, and show everyone what GISS is doing wrong.
That’s what I”m trying to tell you. I’ve been looking at other mean monthly temperature readings from Asia, and GISS seems to generate temperatures 1-2 degrees C higher. There may be an explanation for this, but I have no idea what it is.
[…] NASA GISTEMP data has been posted 12 11 2008 After GISS’s embarrasing error with replicating September temperatures in the October analysis, the NASA GISTEMP website was down […]
Seems that if GISS simply provided all raw data, and where it was collected, and method of collection, then those interested could compare the massaging that GISS does and show folks what’s up.
Is that a reasonable proposal?
“Write your own code”?
But NASA/NOAA (Hansen) are long refusing to release their source data from the original temperature records, the locations of the baseline thermometers (for audit, correction, and comparison to the standard), their conversions, their assumptions, and their parameters. Without their long term data, and their assumptions about HOW they are manipulating the public record, Hansen has no case.
They ARE spending billions of OUR dollars for their “work” every year – but are steadfastly maintaining their “elite” control over enough of the taxpayer’s information.
Howver, ir would NOT MATTER if amateurs came up with different resutls – Hansen has crowned himself the climate king, and other sources are disregarded by the mainstream media and politicians.
It is NOT our work – nor the skeptics’ logic and calculations that are suspect. It is Hansen’s work that is suspect – in large part because of errors like this, and the secrecy he is demanding over his suspect methods.
Steve (17:36:14) Thanks for the background, and it is nice to have it documented, but my understanding is that there are 3 hours difference between blogtime and Eastern. I’m not the least bit sure of that because I have no trouble visualizing situations where springing back or falling forward are the right thing to do.
Chris was also on to the problems in the British data pretty fast.
==================================
Mmm. What it all comes down to is the ability to reproduce results.
What is at issue in this particular case is fitting raw data into one end of a black box and getting adjusted data out the other side.
And you can bet that when the others tried to reproduce cold fusion and failed, the heat was on. Not on them, but the team that claimed it. And when they were unable to produce a method that would allow outsiders to produce the results, the rest was history.
Since replication and confirmation of adjustments is what is at issue, yes, it pretty much comes down to the code. And we’ll have the operating manuals, too, please, thank you very much.
evanjones (20:42:55) It is the ‘confirmation of adjustments’ that is the critical factor here. Combine that with Anthony’s earlier thought that NASA has lost control of the archaic code leads me to a lovely speculative image. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they have lost control of the rationale and process of adjustments, and have spent the last few years just filling in blanks and seeking to resemble the satellite data? Now, that would be Wizardry of Awes.
=================================================
Yes.
RAC is right, too: It’s OUR code.
Kim 20:41,
it seems like there ought to be 3 hours between blog time and eastern, but there’s only two hours difference – I checked. Just for amusement, I checked with John S as to when he spotted the problem. He’d picked it up about 3 hours before he contacted me and had contacted some people in Europe about weather over there in October, confirming that no freaks had occurred. He and Chris were pretty much moving in parallel.
In fairness to NASA, the defect was tracked down so quickly because they provide access to the data as they use it. CRU has refused to allow anyone to see their data, even repudiating FOI requests. So they would have been able to run with the story a lot longer than GISS.
On another front, Santer has refused to provide me with his data collations used in Santer et al 2008 (coauthored by Gavin Schmidt.) Even though who works for the PCMDI division of DOE’ Livermore Lab, whose mission states:
To my request for the monthly time series that he had collated for statistical analysis under the terms of his employment at PCMDI, he refused to provide the data and contacted his 17 co-authors to ensure that they were aware of this refusal. Santer stated: