Blink comparator of GISS USA temperature anomaly – h/t to Zapruder
The last time I checked, the earth does not retroactively change it’s near surface temperature.
True, all data sets go through some corrections, such as the recent change RSS made to improve the quality of the satellite record which consists of a number of satellite spliced together. However, in the case of the near surface temperature record, we have many long period stations than span the majority of the time period shown above, and they have already been adjusted for TOBS, SHAP, FILNET etc by NOAA prior to being distributed for use by organizations like GISS. These adjustments add mostly a positive bias.
In the recent data replication fiasco, GISS blames NOAA for providing flawed data rather than their failure to catch the repeated data from September to October. In that case they are correct that the issue arose with NOAA, but in business when you are the supplier of a product, most savvy businessmen take a “the buck stops here” approach when it comes to correcting a product flaw, rather than blaming the supplier. GISS provides a product for public consumption worldwide, so it seems to me that they should pony up to taking responsibility for errors that appear in their own product.
In the case above, what could be the explanation for the product changing?
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It is not necessarily a nefarious scheme to increase the warming trend:
Giss does make retroactive changes to in filled data based on monthly averages that are, of course, always changing as more data is collected and averaged.
Plus, doesn’t Giss retroactively remove stations in the past if they find a problem with, or lose one today? I think I read that somewhere. Now, I dont like their method, but:
These retroactive data revisions would cause chaotic changes to the historical temp graphs over time.
I think it’s time to put a lawyer on this case.
Find a professional GISS data user in Europe too and start the lawsuit on two fronts.
It could put a legal bomb under the whole AGW scam that will cost as all deerly because Government policies are based on the data.
Let us all put some dollars on the table, find a good lawyer few interested parties and let’s sew them.
I also believe there is a certain congressman who has spoken out against the AGW hysteria?
@M White (11:51:40) :
“Climate change ‘to halt ice age’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7722300.stm
”
Well spotted. It’s looking like the mighty BBC AGW lobby is getting nervous!
They’ve seen their bolthole- and it has two faces :
(1) CO2 may be less of a factor in ‘Climate Chaos’ than originally thought – But that doesn’t mean we should use more fossil-fuels!
or
(2) Thanks to recent advances in Climatology – spurred on by NASA funded ground-breaking research – Negative aspects of decreasing Global temperatures can be painlessly mitigated by swift, unified action!
Ach weel- whatever
Why would 1964 be the pivot point?
From Hansens CV:
NASA Graduate Traineeship, 1963-1966
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/files/cv/cv_hansen_200702.pdf
radar (14:46:43) :
Think of it this way. You conduct an experiment. After you conduct the experiment, you find out that (a) some of your instruments were either miscalibrated, defective or improperly located, (b) external factors that you did not take into consideration or measure at the time the experiment was running have affected your measurements, (c) some of the measurements during the experiment were not recorded, (d) you used different instruments to record measurements over different time periods at different locations during the experiment. You find all of this out AFTER you have been running the experiment for many years. Then, instead of throwing out the data as hopelessly compromised and starting the experiment over with these factors corrected, you (a) do a study estimating how miscalibrated, how defective and how improperly located your instruments were and apply adjustments to all past data to “correct” the improper reading, (b) you do a study to estimate the effect of the external factors at the time you discover the problem and apply adjustments to all past data to “correct” the effects of the external factors even though you have no idea what the effect of the external factor actually was for a given instrument at the time the data was recorded, because you only measured the effect years later and then at only some locations, (c) you “fill in” any missing data using data from other instruments and/or from other measurements by the same instrument, (d) you do another study to determine how best to deal with measurements from different instruments over different time periods and at different locations and apply adjustments to all past data to “correct” for differences between readings from different instruments over different time periods at different locations. Then you continue running the experiment, while you continue applying all of your adjustments on an ongoing basis to all past data as new measurements are recorded. Finally, you believe that all of your data has been meticulously recorded with great accuracy and any uncertainties are minimal. Then you proceed to use the results of your experiment to justify changing policies for the entire world at a cost of many trillions of dollars, with the unerring belief that your experimental data is completely reliable.
Why are so many of the remaining stations at airports? (Three quarters of the GISS stations in Australia are at airports.)
PaulM, one interesting factor concerning Australian airports is that a number have had irrigation installed. Geraldton, Western Australia is a good example used by GISS. On Google Earth you can clearly see the green grass around the terminal and runway, while surrounding areas are brown scrub. From memory the weather station is directly in front of the terminal right in the middle of that nice green irrigated grass.
While UHI gets all the attention, I believe irrigation heat islands are much more widespread and have a greater impact on the temperature record. Due to the potent local greenhouse effect of water vapour.
Why are the honest but gullible scientist not “jump ship” ?
Sure risking carrier and live style is relevant, but honour and conciseness should overwrite fear! The politicians are very sensitive of the wind direction!!
If a scientist aware of the political manipulation of any data, and not raise their voices they are guilty as charged for collaboration of this treason.
What they are not releasing, is that, after the free World destroyed, the gravy-train is go with it!! Like cutting the tree branch one sitting on….
And of rant 🙁
Thanks Antony for your work.
Jonas N!
Your HANSEN article from 1999 also have another interesting content:
Take at good look at fig 3, (The figures comes after the reference list way down)
See something?
UHI. Hansen is in 1999 actually counting UHI for 2 – 3 whole degrees Celcius in big towns. In general GISS reduces with 0,05 degrees today.
Fact is, that there are many more urban temperature stations than rural.
Hmmm?
Heres the link http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_etal.pdf
This is typically what the models predict/hindcast (GISS Model E):
http://i36.tinypic.com/14e15sl.jpg
There is no temperature hump in the mid 20th century – so that, like the MWP, is a problem for the modelers.
The hump in the US temperature record still exists – but it has progressively disappeared from the temperature record elsewhere.
The 1975 National Academy of Science publication “Understanding Climatic Change” included a graph of Northern hemisphere surface temperature from 1880 to 1968 which showed a big hump in the northern hemisphere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DSCN4904-nas-a.6_crop.jpg
This Northern hemisphere temperature hump and the 1940 peak, which appears to be some 0.3C higher than today’s GISS, is no longer there.
See also:
http://solarcycle24com.proboards106.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=display&thread=214&page=1#4567
cheers
Arnost
And to get on my other schtick. We know that UHI and other anthropogenic effects are influencing temperature records. What we don’t know is which stations are influenced by which effects and by how much. The UHI is little more than finger in air guesswork and we know so little about the other effects like irrigation that no one has even attempted to adjust for them.
The solution is simple. We only use stations remote from known and unknown anthropogenic effects. What I call pristine sites. This is the only possible way to measure any global (average) temperature change.
Statistically we need less than a 100 sites to get an acurate measure of global temperature and a 100 pristine sites certainly exist.
That should have read,
The UHI adjustment is little more than finger in air guesswork ..
Mr. Watts,
I wasn’t sure the best place to leave this question, but hope you find it here and can comment.
With all the interest in the current sunspot cycle, I haven’t seen anything about the next cycle, #25. You, and/or your readers, may have seen this article on NASA’s website: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm
This article says that, not cycle 24, but cycle 25 is supposed to be the real downer. I have seen nothing on it recently, and am wondering if this is still believed to be likely.
Thanks,
Bruce
Looks like about 20% of the recent “warming anomaly” is introduced by the “corrections” . I think it speaks to how noisy our surface data set is really. Someone needs to quantify the “noise levels” of surface data with some statistical error bars. We know from Anthony’s work how many stations have issues & are collecting less than pristene data. I am sure surface data from around the world have similar problems. Anyway, if noise levels could be quantified, temp records could be displayed with error bars instead of just a single line. I would bet that the error bar would be at least half as big as the anomaly. I am sure there would be those who would complain that “it is too confusing” or “it is a distraction to those who don’t understand” (read : it makes it harder to support the AGW agenda with that display) . Well, this is science. Uncertainty needs to be quantified & understood. Not everyone is trained in math & science & they should not expect to understand (unless this is just about politics, then you can display whatever you want). This analysis sounds like something that might be right up Steve McIntyre’s / CA’s alley. I would be very interested to see that analysis. Does it already exist somewhere out on the web?
It looks to me like they want to increase the R2 value of the overall relationship, by straightening it out. They achieved this by lowering the values from 1930-1950, including the anomalously warm values around the turn of the millenium, and then ending the plot before the recent cool-down… and yet they claim that you ‘can’t spin nature.’
“Mike Bryant (12:49:39) :
Record high temperatures by continent:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Continent.jpg
Interestingly, none of these were in the ’30s, and none of them were more recent than 1974.”
That link has an all-time high of 59F for Antarctica. But apparently it was 72F there only last month in spring-time!
http://www.wunderground.com/history/station/88963/2008/10/28/WeeklyHistory.html
Note GISS has the same monthly mean for the station for last month as Wunderground 🙂
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=301889630008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
[ btw several stations on the Antarctic Peninsula do appear to have genuinely had a record-breaking mild month in Sep though.
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/climate/surfacetemps/ ]
Thanks Chris I guess I can delete that file.
Speaking of the head of GISS, where is Hansen in all of this? [snip]
REPLY: Dr. Hansen typically stays above the fray, and Dr. Schmidt deals with the PR. – Anthony
RE:
Any chance that someone could repeat the graph using the same data periods (only)???
REPLY: Unfortunately the 1999 data in raw form is not available to redo this. But if anyone knows of it, please advise. – Anthony
For the purposes of this display, it would easy to digitize the data & create a new display with the same dates. If you are interested, send me the graph, I’ll digitize & send the data back to you. Obviously, this isn’t perfectly accurate, but for a visualization, there would be no visual difference.
More on Base Esperanza:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base
“……The temperature trend since 1948 is……..”
“……Built in 1975, the base houses 55 inhabitants in winter, including 10 families and 2 school teachers. Provincial school #38 “Julio Argentino Roca” was founded in 1978 and acquired independent status in 1997. The LRA 36 Radio Nacional Arcángel San Gabriel radio station started transmitting in 1979…..”
“……The 43 buildings of the station have a combined space of 374,400 square metres (4,030,000 sq ft) covered; 18,000 litres (4,800 US gal) of fuel are used annually by the 4 generators to produce electricity for the station…..”
“…….The Base has tourist facilities that are visited by approximately 1,100 tourists each year…….”
Not urban heat effects again surely?
c.f. http://www.geography.uc.edu/~kenhinke/uhi/HinkelEA-IJOC-03.pdf
re: Barrow, Alaska
e.g.
“…On a daily basis, the UHI is best developed under calm, cold conditions and can reach hourly magnitudes exceeding 9 °C; this reflects the increased (anthropogenic) heat input at this high-latitude site…”
Population of Barrow? 3,982.
UHI applies whatever the population, whether it’s a large city, Alaskan village, or Siberian base.
Nice illustration, Arnost.
But remember, this is not fraud. I would never intimate such a thing. This is a rigorous scientific effort to refine the data.
[snip] – ad hom – please refrain, Anthony
In my line of work, this is known as cooking the books, and can result in a perp walk if discovered and prosecuted.
Philip_B – if you go to weatherzone
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/wa/central-west/geraldton
and click on Full Climateology – top right in the bottom section, on the next page at the bottom is the coordinates for the weather station, copy and paste it into google and there you are. The Geraldton unit is not near the terminal and is not in irrigated land according to the google image taken april 18 2006.
You can see all the sites in the system following this method.
Note to readers.
I often make sarky posts, such as the previous one. But I do take this all very seriously. I follow the science and study. It’s amazing how much I have learnt and how many preconceptions I have had to drop.
However, I am that little boy who points out the nakedness of the emperor.
Derision is necessary for these 6-figure salary high priests and their 9-figure cult leader, Al Gore. And their billion dollar multinational churches of Greenpeace, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Foundation, etc.
Mike – you shouldn’t have had it in the first place.
Perhaps you will enjoy this if you haven’t already seen it?
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/badwater.htm
( link courtesy of http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/11/18/ushcn-in-the-ass-end-of-nowhere/ )