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 see that the collection of people who visit and post here have had an impact. I offer my particular thanks to WUWT contributor John Goetz. It seems Gavin agrees. I’m up early this morning on my trip back home, and I was quite surprised to find this on RC. See this comment from Gavin Schmidt on Real Climate:
You and McIntyre are mistaken. The first intimation of a problem was posted on Watt’s blog in the comments by ‘Chris’ at around 4pm EST. By 7pm in those comments John Goetz had confirmed that the NOAA file was the problem. Notifications to the GISTEMP team of a problem started arriving very shortly after that, and I personally emailed them that evening. However, no action was taken until the next morning because people had left work already. They had decided to take the analysis down before 8.14am (email time stamp to me) since the overnight update to the NOAA file (uploaded 4.30am) had not fixed the problem. McIntyre’s intervention sometime that morning is neither here nor there. Possibly he should consider that he is not the only person in the world with email, nor is he the only person that can read. The credit for first spotting this goes to the commentators on WUWT, and the first notification to GISTEMP was that evening. – gavin
John Goetz writes later in RC comments, it appears that Steve McIntyre at least raised the consciousnous level with his first blog posting:
For what it is worth, Chris posted his discovery on WUWT about 45 minutes before I made my update indicating an error existed. However, I made my posting because of two emails Steve Mc sent me about two hours prior. The first was the email John S. sent him, quickly followed by a confirmation from Steve. I simply had not checked email due to being busy with work. Steve had already written most of his post by the time I saw the emails.
Not sure it really matters who was there first. I am ashamed to say I saw the big red blotch in central Asia and was so insensitized that I did not investigate it further. Perhaps I’ve lost my critical eye.
Despite some commenters there at RC referring to WUWT in less than glowing terms, I’m pleased that this blog has been a vehicle for, ahem, “climate change”. 😉 Being first really isn’t all that important, getting the data right is.
Quality control is the issue. It is the reason that I started the surfacestations.org project. If after QC for climate data has been suitably addressed with a standards compliant methodology, such as ISO-8000, I’ll be satisfied with the final data. Right now I’m not convinced that the surface data is truly representative.
Gavin, if you’d like to do a guest post here on this error, the floor is yours. Just leave a comment or drop an email. – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I think gavin is graciously responding to a post I made stating that we can all agree on two things. Finding errors is good. giving credit where credit is due is good. Everybody, ( yours truly included) has engaged in some unscientific motive hunting. generally, this diverts us from factual questions we can at least hope to answer.
All: Off topic.
I received an invitation for this UNEP “Climate Change Survey”. As Leif and I have commented on before, this does not indicate a keen selection process.
It regards the upcoming COP 14 and 15, and the negotiations post Kyoto.
I am pretty sure that they didn’t want this out in the wild, but they didn’t tell me NOT to, so…
I would hope that Mcitrick, McIntyre, Peilke and Watt (amongst others) have received this already. If not, its important that their voice be heard.
http://surveys.globescan.com/unep_gs_invite/
Steve, keep up the good work. [snip]
Steve McIntyre, I would consider all the fire you are receiving from Santer, Jones, Gavin et al a compliment because it means they see you as a legitimate threat to their kingdom of malfeasance, mistakes, and mischief of which you are the king of ferreting out. You and Anthony are doing yeoman’s work for those of us who merely want honest answers to questions we have about mans influence on the Climate and we appreciate it
From RC….
# gavin Says:
13 November 2008 at 10:14 AM
Groan… The NOAA fixes are not complete. There are still some stations where they have some Sep data in the Oct column. Stay tuned for more updates…
I have just read Gavins defence of GISS over at ‘real climate'(if you say so Gavin), his article entitled ‘mountains & molehills’ made for interesting reading.
A response by Gavin to post 48 was very interesting, according to Gavin GISS doesnt run any weather stations, is not an international weather service(but the GISS compiled data IS used internationally), employs no staff to verify surface station accuracy or integrity, takes no part in international negotiations on sharing weather station data and all GISTEMP can do when major problems occur is to query the originators of the data.
The question that springs to mind is what if there are previous ‘misreadings’ that are small enough to pass unoticed into the GISTEMP climate record but still support a positive warming trend and have already been passed on to policy makers and organisations like the IPCC, will they all have to revise their data led conclusions if the GISTEMP hisorical record is found to have processed bad data that has already been included and compiled?
So what does NASA GISS actually do then,do they just take in data on trust, do they just accept weather stations are perfectly well set up/callibrated and run without recourse to the worlds finest verification tool in the form of the ‘Mk1 eyeball’? How do they know that stations are still active/have the most accurate sensors/send in accurate upto date data?
Gavin seems to suggest that they are happy to accept any data coming in and would publish it without due dilligence, only checking if gross errors occur(or if they are caught out), if so this would be very strange because NASA GISS/GISTEMP is often used by the IPCC/MSM/goverments/researchers/climate model projections as a source of accurate weather data, so in effect Gavin is saying that GISS has no way of checking their raw data and they just accept it on blind trust in the innocent hope that all will be well?
It does seem likely that errors will be very common in an unchecked grid of far flung data collection points that have no common data collection methods or independent quality control systems in place, surely to gain accurate and reliable readings from a censor network a sesnsible unified method of verifiable and accountable quality control should be in place?
In effect NASA GISS are using junk figures taken entirely on trust to build a clamate history taken to be highly accurate by world policy makers/NGOs, is that a fair summary?
[snip]
The credibility of the “real” “climate scientists” is in a spiralling tail-spin, as they are being held to account.
Meanwhile, all of the fuss about CO2 AGW is diverting attention from the real issue, which as Roger Pielke Sr points out (along with others) is that man IS having an impact on climate, at least regionally, through land-use impacts. A particularly sad example is the encroachment of the Gobi Desert over the Beijing hinterland. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-gathering-sandstorm-encroaching-desert-missing-water-399653.html
Desertification is a VERY serious problem in many countries, yet is largely being ignored due to the antics of Al Gore, James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann et al, who persist in alarming world populations, and hence governments, about CO2 and AGW based on what is increasingly being shown up as dodgy evidence.
Following the goings on at GISS, as recorded on this climateaudit thread ,http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4332#comments, it appears that Larry, Moe and Curly are running GISS
Cassandra,
As I understand it GISStemp is an algorithmically derived computation of a GISStemp anomaly; which I take to be an abnormal deviation from some baseline; whose own value is also unknown. Presumably the raw field data consist of some kind of temperature readings, each of which is obtained in some evidently not too standardized fashion; but presumably consistently repeated (I hope).
In that the temperature at some location tells us exactly nothing about the net heat (energy) flows at that location or anywhere else; I think it is a giant and unwarranted stretch to characterize GISStemp as any kind of record of “climate” or even “weather”.
GISStemp seems to have a total scale range of perhaps a couple of “anomaly degrees”; whereas on any ordinary summer day (north), the surface/ lower troposphere temperature at different spots on earth ranges from about +60 deg C down to about -90 deg C; and due to a classic argument in Galileo’s “Dialog on the two World Systems”; every possible temperature between those extremes exists simultaneously, somewhere on this planet.
I think both weather and climate are a whole lot more complex than can be represented on a simple graph like GISStemp.
George
[snip] lets dial back the rhetoric please.
Moptop (11:08:57) :
I do not understand your comment. John V has done the logical next step in the surface station project — perhaps prematurely in the view of some people, but he does have a statistically valid sample size. I would describe the GISS procedure as bizarre, obtuse, non-reproducible, and counter intuitive. (Almost half of time, GISS adds a warming trend to a station’s data record because of a calculated cooling bias.) However, regardless of these appearances, John V has showed that the trend produced by GISS’s machination is the same trend as inherent in the highest-quality domestic weather stations. Now, there is validity to questions about geographical dispersion and perhaps foreign stations have issues that diverge from domestic stations, but according to available information, the GISS adjustment process is not introducing a spurious warming trend, despite appearances. Furthermore, for years, GISS trends have matched the independent trends of satellite data.
Or am I missing something?
(I do note that GISS and satellite trends seem to be drifting farther apart in the last few months — time will tell on that issue.)
Steven Mosher, well said.
moptop:
The CRN12R stations are *rural* stations that have been classified as being (relatively) free of micro-site bias. They are the best stations available. Their signal is free of UHI and micro-site issues. The trend from the CRN12R stations is IMO the best estimate available of the true trend in the USA48.
GISTEMP very closely matches the trend from the CRN12R stations.
The CRN5 stations obviously have issues. The trend from the CRN5 stations is significantly different than the trend from the CRN12R stations or from GISTEMP. The analysis strongly suggests that for the USA lower-48, GISTEMP is not affected by the issues in the CRN5 stations. That’s good news. Right?
Anyways, I don’t want to hijack this thread. I only answered helvio because I’ve seen the same question asked quite a few times here. Perhaps our host would like to host a thread for comparing GISTEMP to the historical temperatures from the best stations. Anthony?
REPLY: When I’m ready for that I’ll certainly let you know. – Anthony
What a mess, and world decisions are made on such? It just goes to show you that man contunes to think that he is in control. Control of what is the real question.
Steve
re Les Johnson (11:19:11)
I dashed off to take the survey.
It is solidly built on the assumption that CO2 is the cause, but does admit that efforts can be spent on adaptation as well as mitigation. You need to supply a name, organization, and email address to submit the survey. I was honest so I have no idea if any of the identifying information is validated. I did not time the effort but the survey claims it takes about 20 minutes. There is a progress bar to give some indication of how far you are toward completion. You can leave portions blank, but there are some strange requirements to fill in some lines labeled “other” with a blank space.
An Inquirer,
Think about it this way.
Given that:
– The earliest point in the bad stations that JohnV is graphing the difference between that point and his moving average.
– Over thirty years, if there is a pronounced UHI trend in the bad stations that is missing from the good stations, the difference between the earliest point in the graph and the average is increasing. How could it be otherwise?
One can conclude that the earliest part of the graph for the bad stations has been pushed down by the UHI trend during the normalization period like a thumb on the scale.
– The GISSTEMP line takes a middle position between the good and bad stations in the early part of the graph.
Once could infer that the GISSTEMP likely overstates the coolness of those early days, or the warming today.
I don’t know of a better way to explain it than that. I think that JohnV’s approach is naiive.
Les Johnson (11:19:11)
Take the survey 🙂
Youn can see from it what they are planning for at the next COP. Preparing for a shift to adaptation, away from mitigation, I reckon. Any excuse to ponce around the world for free.
“GISTEMP is not affected by the issues in the CRN5 stations. That’s good news. Right?” – JohnV
I clearly don’t think you have shown that over the entire time domain of the chart. I think there is likely less warming on the century scale than GISTEMP shows.
John V-
Are you saying the CRN12R stations’ temperature trends closely match GISTEMP trends for the U.S. only or globally? Obviously, those CRN12R stations only represent temperature trends in the U.S….which has not seen as much warming as the whole globe, according to several temperature sources.
Robert/Chuck: Of course, the survey is biased towards “the science is settled”.
I used the “other” boxes and filled the blanks with lines like “Its a high priority to determine if the current cooling is persistent.”
Yes, they are least leaning away from mitigation. They also asked about including all countries, which is a no-brainer.
For the last question, about determining success of COP 14; I said that COP 14 will declare itself a success, because they all agreed to meet again, and only agreed on meeting…..and in someplace warm.
Gentlemen! Gentlemen!
CRN will answer our questions. (Assuming it is as advertised.)
John V may be right. He may be wrong. He has, however, convinced me that he is honest.
“Climate” is NOT the average or mean of “Weather”; it IS the Integral of weather.
What happens tomorrow, is todays state plus the influence of all the physics and chemistry that takes place from now.
All we can say about tomorrow, is that it will be incrementally different from today. Since we have no information of what will take place between now and tomorrow; or subsequently, we have no means of saying what it will be at any future time.
SteveMc
Gavin really blundered. He spoke the name of who that shall not be named.
Les Johnson (14:07:16) :
I did to.
“What can your organization do to reduce energy usage, ….”
Go bankrupt.
“What is the major obstacle to blah blah bla…”
Lack of man made global warming.
I also tried to answer seriously, so nuclear power was right up there; and research etc. Much fun