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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Steve (21:31:17) Merci encore. I’m particularly amused by the link http://www.john-daly.com/sonde.htm at comment #155 in your Santer thread by Michael Sirks which shows John Daly’s expose of an earlier chicane by Ben Santer. He truncated both ends of a data series showing nearly flat trend to leave a series with a rising trend. This was almost a dozen years ago, and look where we are now.
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evanjones (20:42:55) :
–rant mode on–
Hansen is a jerk. A dishonest, incompetent bureaucrat protected by civil service rules.
He should release his code with full documentation. Rewritten in a modern computing language. One that will run on Windows and Linux. And a Mac version, too. User friendly, with snazzy graphics. And a cool whistling sound that changes pitch as it draws the “ups” and “downs” of the graphs.
But until we reach that land of milk and honey (where all the stations have CRN ratings of 1, and are never effected by UHI) what are we to do?
Should the science just stand still? Should the skeptics just keep complaining, endlessly trashing Hansen, rejoicing amongst themselves every time a trivial error is found in GISSTEMP?
Or should they get their hands dirty, do the hard work, the real science, and produce their own temperature reconstruction, the true and correct version, one that will show how wrong GISSTemp is?
Make the code and everything completely open, and submit it for publication. Then the many skeptical scientists out there (who have been cowered into accepting AGW) will surely rally around this new, correct temperature version.
— rant mode off–
Sounds like a plan, eh?
Of course, after overturning GISSTemp, the skeptics will have to move on to the other temperature sets (that show pretty much the same long-term temperature trends).
I suggest you start with an audit of UAH. 😉
Thanks Leif….doesnt look too different from the WSO site from what i can tell, staying flat and just bumping along, no opposition flows into the poles that might wake them up.
my my my….
“Don’t touch my magic rocks”
Now, now, old chap. No need to get all hot and bothered. Everyone gets audited, all in good time.
In the meantime, let’s just have a nice cup of tea.
A nice cup of tea and the code . . .
We wish to check GISS methods. I have some trouble seeing how one is to accomplish that by getting one’s hands dirty, doing the hard work and devising methods of ones own.
Sort of like a bank saying “Audit us? Why don’t you get your hands dirty and calculate what we have on our books, yourself? And start by auditing the other guy.”
One might even say that the fact that Dr. Hansen is a civil servant is the precise reason why his work is not protected by the normal rules of privacy.
And, yes, the day UAH refuses to let St. Mac. in on its data and methods is the day I stop trusting UAH.
Now about that code . . .
[…] community with spotting the error 13 11 2008 I was driving in the middle of Nevada when all this happened, and was offline the entire time. So I can’t claim any credit here. But, it sure is nice to […]
Would it make sense to take a look at the temps that satellites produce and compare them to the data from GISS. The thing to look for is uniformity in differences. If someone was fudging data only in selected areas (like Siberia) then it should become apparent. Satellites could read a 3C difference in one area and 6C in another area. I know with satellites you have orbital decay and other factors that would make the results different from ground stations but I would suspect that the differences should be fairly uniform (assuming nothing behind the curtain is going on). The thing to look for is where the differences are small and where they are great. Ideally all differences should be small. I am just a reader and am not sure how this could be done but I would love to see someone take a poke at this. Just a thought.
Chris V:
I may be familiar with the work of John V to which you refer. He took a little more than a dozen weather stations and confirmed the GISS trend with those stations. The key feature of his work was that he used a data set of stations from Anthony Watts. (Incidentally, he did not contact Mr. Watts as he did his work; in fact, Mr. Watts did not know about the study until I told him.)
Regarding developing an alternative temperature set, it is a lot easier to do that work when one is paid for it and when resources are readily available. Nevertheless, despite lack of funds, a few years ago, one skeptic — it might have been Robinson, but Iam not sure — did develop temperature trends using rural weather stations domestically. That data set never got any traction, and you can guess the outcome of that algorithm. On the international front, I believe that Augie Auer of New Zealand was assembling a data base of international weather stations that featured little local bias and was making the case of no significant warming, but that project did not continue past his death.
Both reason and experience would suggest that it will be difficult for a skeptic’s code or algorithm to get much traction in the AGW debate. We already have four which are well-funded. Yes, I believe GISS is managed by biased individuals — just look at the time frame that they pick as normal! — but as you point out the four can be used a checks on each other.
CRN seems to be up and running. Siting looks great (photos on line). Data taken hourly, collected automatically (without human interface).
All data to be served a tatar.
We’ll get our answers.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/hourly
Evanjones-
Just for the record:
http://www.remss.com/support/rss_journal_papers_by_year.html
Click on Mears and Wentz, 2005. This is the paper where they showed the error in the UAH algorithm.
They don’t mention anything about examining the UAH “code”. What they did do was look at Christy’s paper that described the UAH analysis method. That”s where they found the error, not by “auditing the code”.
So it seems the UAH code still has not been audited…
But does UAH or RSS refuse to release? GISS has done less than the bare minimum and HadCRUT just plain old won’t. We do not know their exact methods and cannot replicate their results.
If UAH or RSS refuses requests for anything needed to check up on them, I will be very disenchanted.
I have no objection to auditing all parties.
Our objection to GISS (and others) is that requests are made and they are refused. That’s not how science is done.
The reason I like the CRN concept is that the data is raw. No adjustments to audit.
Rober Jones:
“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?”
Who the hell said I was trying to limit CO2 emissions? You misunderstood my post. I think the global warming scare is nonsense, but for a different reason. You made a qualitative assertion that rising CO2 levels could not increase surface temperatures for the sole reason that the surface is warmer than the atmosphere. I noted, I believe correctly, that your assumption is false. I have an engineering degee and have studied both thermodynamics and heat transfer. Assuming an initial equilibrium heat transfer from a warm object A (the surface) receiving heat influx from an even warmer object B (the sun), and producing a heat outflux to a cooler object C (the atmosphere), if the cooler object B increases in temperature while the heat influx from the warmer object stays the same, the object A should also increase in temperature to re-establish equilibrium between the heat influx and the heat outflux at the surface of th eobject A. This is because heat flux between two adjoinging objects through conduction and convection is propotional to temperature difference between the objects [Q =k(T1-T2)] and for radiative transfer, the heat outflux is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature of the object.
With respect to the atmosphere, the NET radiative flux between the surface and the atmosphere may flow from the surface to the atmosphere, but if you increase the absolute amount of energy that the atmoshpere radiates to the surface (and the atmosphere does radiate energy to the surface since its temperature is above absolute zero), then the surface must increase its energy output to reestablish equilibrium. The only way it can do this is by increasing its temperature.
Having said that, what I noted (and what you seem to have misunderstood) was that although increasing CO2 in the atmosphere must qualitatively produce some temperature rise at the surface, this says nothing about whether that increase is significant, or even measurable. My own opinion is that it is insignificant, but I further noted that any quantitative assessment of the effect of CO2 required actual experimental measurements, which cannot be performed, hence no one can know whether CO2 is significantly changing temperatures.
Sitting back and watching what happens to temperatures over any interval, whether a year , a decade, or a century is not an experiment, first because you are not controlling the manmade CO2 input and second because you are not holding natural forcings constant. You’re just watching events unfold and guessing as to causation.
GP:
“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’m not sure why these questions are relevant. The blanket inhibits the heat transfer away from your body, essentially by removing convention influences and forcing all heat flow to occur by a less-efficient conduction process. It does this despite the fact that it is cooler than your body, and it doesn’t require a reversal of a heat flux so as to flow into your body.
With all that in mind, I will say that I wonder whether the climate model assumptions upon which the global warming theoryare based, seriously overstate the relative contribution of radiative heat transfer vis-a-vis convention and conduction. This is because individual components of a composite gas like the atmosphere do not have different temperatures. A CO2 molecule, for example, will not maintain a higher temperature than a neighboring Nitrogen molecule. When a new, manmade CO2 molecule absorbs radiation from the surface, much of that absorbed energy is not re-radiated, it’s transferred kinetically to surrounding gas molecules; stated differently, the kinetic interaction between gasseous molecules is the primary way that CO2 dissipates its heat. In essence, the extra energy absorbed by the CO2 must heat the entire atmosphere as one, and because a greater mass must be heated, the temperature increase is very, very small. Granted, this means that the Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc. are all re-radiating at a higher level than they ordinarily would without the CO2, but since radiative outflux increases with the fourth power of temperature, it is better to have more mass radiating at a low temperature than a proportionally lesser mass at a higher temperature.
Anyway, this last bit is really speculative because the slimat models actually could be taking this into effect – I don’t know.
kim – thanks for the compliments!
Unfortunately, it does not prove much in the way of ability on my part.
The clue was in John’s original post: “GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data”, in particular the line:
“…Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave…”
A ten year old could have checked this against
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
and realised what was up.
[…] the recent data replication fiasco, GISS blames NOAA for providing flawed data rather than their failure to catch the repeated data […]
I hear your laugh every time I hear distant thunder.
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kurt (23:41:05) :
but I further noted that any quantitative assessment of the effect of CO2 required actual experimental measurements, which cannot be performed, hence no one can know whether CO2 is significantly changing temperatures.
I have been wondering about this, i.e. why experiments have not been performed to have a quantitative measure of the effect of CO2. Billions have been spent on climate research. I could design an experiment:
A completely insulated large dome (vacuum between two walls) with a glass roof, also insulated: quarz sandwich ( to let infrared in and out) and a vacuum between to simulate the condition of only radiation finally entering or leaving. Controlled pressure to be able to simulate different heights. And of course controlled gas percentages. One could have ventilators to simulate wind convection patterns. Controlled simulated sunshine through roof.
Change the CO2 ppms and watch the temperature.
What is the conceptual difficulty/error with such an experiment? Would it not allow to measure sensitivity to CO2?
The experiment above has been performed on PBS several years to go to prove the very simple physics that when you add CO2, with sunlight it heats. It is simple physics for those who want to accept it on face value.
For those who dont – I suggest trying it on another planet – who knows for sure you might be right, there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming on say Uranus. But I’ll betcha there is.
I think Hansen is just engaged in the “politics of fear” here by coming up with data that suggests that October 2008 was the warmest globally ever. Considering North American and South American temperatures, I doubt this very much. Remember how cold it was for the World Series.
Anyway, its been freezing cold in the Northeast for the past week. It’s barely gotten above 40 degrees since November 17th. The temperatures have been more like January or February temperatures than fall temperatures.
I wonder what NASA is going to try to do with the data for November.
[…] this. Please link me. And its not the first time skeptics have notified them of problems: GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data Watts Up With That? I posted this in post #1184 regarding surfacestations.org : … as to the quality of data and […]