Many readers here marvel at the scope of adjustments that NASA GISS performs on weather station data.
Along those lines, Michelle at Read N Say points out something interesting in Jim Hansen’s NASA page.
Below is an excerpt from her post:
This is his background copied from the official NASA GISS web page:
Research Interests:
As a college student in Iowa, I was attracted to science and research by James Van Allen’s space science program in the physics and astronomy department. Since then, it only took me a decade or so to realize that the most exciting planetary research involves trying to understand the climate change on earth that will result from anthropogenic changes of the atmospheric composition.
One of my research interests is radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, especially interpreting remote sounding of the earth’s atmosphere and surface from satellites. Such data, appropriately analyzed, may provide one of our most effective ways to monitor and study global change on the earth. The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.
I am also interested in the development and application of global numerical models for the purpose of understanding current climate trends and projecting humans’ potential impacts on climate. The scientific excitement in comparing theory with data, and developing some understanding of global changes that are occurring, is what makes all the other stuff worth it.
He actually says, in the second paragraph, “The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
To me this sounds like spin for “The hardest part is making the numbers show what I want them to”. Let’s see how long it takes for that sentence in the NASA GISS website to get changed.
The above in italics is from Michelle’s post.
In Hansen’s defense, perhaps what he meant was something along the lines of trying to extract useful information from a noisy signal.
On the other hand, with a plethora of issues with GISS data, including adjustments to pristine data, failing to catch obviously corrupted data, significant errors in splicing and reporting pointed out by bloggers, and pronouncements from the man himself that such people are “jesters” and that vandals in England should be defended and energy company executives should be put on trial, one wonders if Hansen really wasn’t just speaking his mind.
Blink comparator of GISS USA temperature anomaly – h/t to Zapruder
UPDATE 1/26 Lucia at The Blackboard wrote to Jim Hansen to get his take on it. Surprisingly, he emailed back.
Lucia,
This sentence refers to satellite measurements. You could look at the report “Long-Term Monitoring of Global Climate Forcings and Feedbacks”, which is available from my office — but you could also find several papers that I wrote in the early 1990s if you go to www.giss.nasa.gov, then Publications, Authors, my name.
Jim Hansen
But now a new question arises. Why doesn’t then GISS embrace satellite measurements?
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Sam the Skeptic says:
Well, I think that there is a good evidence that humans have had an effect on the composition of the atmosphere … however, in my opinion, there is no good evidence that our effect on the composition of the atmosphere has changed the climate in ways that are distinguishable from normal climate change.
I was about to ask the same thing. I remember seeing the blink a while back, and showing it to my wife, saying “How can it just have gotten COLDER at a given spot in 1930. You can’t DO THAT!”
Of course, then I read the whole BBC thing, and as it turns out?…I guess you CAN do that.
JimB
Steven Wilde,
I don’t it’s unusual for a scientist to start out with a hypothesis such as
“climate change on earth that WILL result from anthropogenic changes of the atmospheric composition”. I don’t see anything wrong there in itself.
But, what is wrong is the act of changing the data so that it does support your hypotheisis. Indeed a mentally sound scientist would change his hypothesis, and not change the data.
Overall, your points are interesting and you are certainly on the right track.
Psychologically, the man appears to have a rigid agenda, and a problem with reality.
Stephen Wilde says:
Perhaps you are reading too much into it. The climate changes all the time on different time scales. Perhaps that is what he was referring to.
Scott R:
Bingo!! In addition, he might also be taking a bit of a swipe at the Bush Administration for blocking the launch of an instrument that would have been crucial for better determining the earth’s energy balance, among other things:
(from http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN06/wn021706.html ) Now, why the Bush Administration has wanted to block an observatory that could provide crucial scientific information on global warming…perhaps that is a good subject for a future post here!!
It’s sad that we will all be impoverished to implement “solutions” for imaginary problems, but even sadder that these poor souls are involved in what Dante called “complex fraud”.
Those who willingly participate in “complex frauds” doom themselves to an eternal fate deep within Hades’ lower circles.
When we see blatant distortions of truth in order to increase funding to those willing to do or say anything for more money, as catholicfundamentalism.com reminds us, we should pray that they repent while they still have time.
I’m with Scott R. Irregardless of the statistical lacunae that have been found in his methodology, statistics etc, the statement he makes seems to me to be fairly straight forward – the raw data from satellites MUST be processed in various ways before it can be used for anything. Jim Hansen is excited by that task – so would I be!
I think it is enough to concentrate on a man’s actual errors; it is unnecessary to pile on at every utterance. Who amongst us does not make ambiguous statements every now and then?
Well, I am not one for jumping in and flat out accusing “scientists” of falsifying data. Yes I might chide one for “making up data where none exists.”
but at the same time, I can’t get too het up, when something like the recent WU Antarctica paper comes out. There can’t be anything more vexing to a scientist, than having a though about something; and not having any or enough data to process the idea.
So trying to obtain ANY clue form a dearth of data, is ok; so long as you don’t try to reqad too much into it.
So what is the Budget of Hansen’s department (of NASA). I though I saw $180M somewhere; and it seems as if for that we get a number once a year ofr that year’s GISStemp anomaly. Well yes monthly numbers are available too. But the next thing Hansen does, is toss out that $180M number, and hide it inside a 5 year running average, which looks “smoother”.
You gain no information by taking an average; you are throwing information away. The original monthly numbers are the most information you will ever have, unless you have all the original raw numbers form all the weather station sites.
When a lot of this GISStemp stuff, and UHI stuff was discussed fairly openly on on Rvkins NYT blog, a lot of AGWers wanted to ask which of the Hansen sites one wanted to eliminate; presumably for UHI reasons.
The problem with GISStemp,is NOT that there is too much information; there isn’t nearly enough information, and the haphazard (spatial) way it is gathered makes it almost useless.
Even if it were possible to correctly determine the true average temperature of the earth’s surface, or some level in the lower troposphere (it isn’t); that informatyion has no more scientific validity or usefulness, than calculating the average telephone number in your local telephone directory. It is simply applying mathematical processes to a set of numbers; the result of which serves no purpose.
Hansen’s very latest GISStemp number gives zero information relating to the fundamental question: “Is planet earth radiating the correct amount of energy back out into space to keep its near surface temperature range within liveable ranges.
Every different type of surface material or morphology, has a different spectral emiisivity or emittance, different specific heat, thermal capacity , thermal conductivity etc.
So there is NO simple relationship between any average surcae temperature, and any energy flux in and out of the earth.
Personally, I place almost no credibility, in anything other than an anecdotal fashion, to ANY temperature data that predates IGY in 1957/58. The space age began about that time and meaningful satellite temperature data only became available about 1979. Almost simultaneous with that time, was the first placments of oceanic buoys out in the ocean to simultaneously record near surface water and air temperatures. The results of those buoy data reported in Jan 2001 (I think it was Geophysical Research Letters) showed that for that 20year or so period, and those specific ocean locations; the air temperature increases were only about 60% of the water temperature increases (I’m reporting from memory here, so look it up if you want accurate numbers).
So that means all the previous global temperature measurements for 73% of the surface that is ocean were suspect. The IMPORTANT result of that paer, though was that the ocean water and near surface air temperatures ARE NOT CORRELATED. Why would you expect them to be, when air currents are usually much faster than water currents, so the air and water never remain in contact long enough to equilibrate. Also ocean current meanderings, mean you can return to the same GPS co-ordinates; but you won’t be in the same water, that you were in before. So to me that means all global temperature data prior to around 1979-80, is worthless, since you cannot recover the near surface air temperatures from the near suface water temperatures.
The other recent pqaper that I find crucial is the Wentz et al paper reported in Nature July 2007; “How Much More Rain will Global Warming bring?”
The crux of their paper is: a 1 deg C rise in global surface temperature, results in 7% increase in global evaporation; a 7% increase in Total atmospheric moisture, and a 7% increase in total global evaporation.
So you turn on the water into your bath tub, and you pull the plug. The water will rise until the rate of outflow exactly equals the rate of inflow (precipitation and evaporation). The water level will stop rising at that point. If you torn on the tap some more to increase the inflow (evaporation), the water level will rise again (total water content) and eventually the outflow (precipitation) will again equal the inflow due to the increased drive pressure from the higher water level, and the water again stops rising.
So this isn’t even 8th grade sience class; this is grade school stuff.
So what about the GCM predictions for this scenario (global circulation models: Global climate Models; I don’t care which.
Wentz reported that the GCMs AGREE with the 7% increase in evaporation and total atmospheric water content. Hooray; we’ve finally got some agreement.
BUT !! the GCMs predict (according to Wentz et al) that the total global precipitation only increases by from 1% to 3%; not 7% !!
Excuse me earth to GCM; the INFLOW is from 2 1/3 to 7 times the OUTFLOW but the WATER LEVEL IN THE BATH remains the same.
Now quite apart from the fact that the GCMs can’t predict the outcome to better than their customary 3:1 fudge factor; they can’t even satisfy elementary continuity criteria.
If the INFLOW and the OUTFLOW don’t return to equality, the TOTAL ATMOSPHERIC WATER CONTENT must keep changing; and in this case it must keep increasing; evidently the oceans will end up in the sky !
So to me, that reduces the credibility of the GCMs to zero. I don’t need any more information and no more quipment than a stick on a desert island sandy beach to put a stake through that piece of nonsense.
The other piece of nonsense is that the earth’s albedo, and the amount of cloud cover do not change. Well the people with the cloud cover satellite say they don’t.
Lt me see now; we can actually observe a 7% increase in total global precipitation as a result of a one deg C mean surface temperature rise; but not another molecule of additional cloud cover appears; we 7% more rain from no more cloud; no more cloud density; no more cloud persistence time; no more combination of those three.
“”Rubbish !!”” that’s my comment on that.
Wentz et al made no mention of increased cloud cover; and they didn’t deny any either; well I just said they din’t mention it; but I did; I think it went up; and I think the combination of precipitable cloud area, cloud density, and cloud persistence time, wnet up about 7%; well lets say between 4.04 and 12.1%. That’s the 3:1 mandatory climatology model fudge factor.
So do I think climatology science is in trouble; well I think it has nearly as much credibility as astrology does.
But I believe some good people are working to try and rectify that situation; and restore some credibility to what has a similar stigma to Economic science.
George; who’s just expressing his humble opinion.
Colin,
I think the blink chart is okay. Put your mouse on the chart at about 1965. Right around there the chart pivots, Hanson made temps before that cooler and temps after that hotter. In this way he makes current temps seem hotter when compated to past temps.
United States & Global Data Integrity Issues
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
January 27, 2009
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/DAleo-DC_Brief.pdf
Issues with the United States and especially the global data bases make them inadequate to use for trend analysis and thus any important policy decisions based on climate change. These issues include inadequate adjustments for urban data, bad instrument siting, use of instruments with proven biases that are not adjusted for, major global station dropout., an increase in missing monthly data and questionable adjustment practices.
Anthony Watts started a volunteer effort to document siting issues with all 1221 stations in US. He and his team is now through over 600 stations.
An audit by researcher Steve McIntyre reveals that NASA has made urban adjustments of temperature data in its GISS temperature record in the wrong direction. The urban adjustment is supposed to remove the effects of urbanization, but the NASA negative adjustments increases the urbanization effects. The result is that the surface temperature trend utilized by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is exaggerated …
The net warming in the UHI adjusted GISS US data set from the peak around 1930 to the peak near 2000 was a meager 0.15C. It may be assumed the same would be true for the world if we could make a similar needed UHI adjustment.
Colin
Huh?
That’s not what the blink chart does for me. Clearly Hansen makes the past colder and the recent past warmer and hay presto a significant warming trend appears.
Anthony
Do we really need to see Mr Hansen’s smug face peering out at us at the top of your page? Please please put another photo there of anything, or quickly put up another thread so its displaced!?
Collected temperatures data, as we have seen from number of the recent posts, is frequently corrupted by human activities near the measuring stations an it is going to be used for initiating costly governmental programs (from our taxes), and taking, for humanity, far reaching decisions. If reliable data are to be collected then a number of buoys should be positioned at selected locations (Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, as well in the Arctic and Antarctica) linked with satellite communications. Data then could be received by anyone with a suitable equipment. This way experts around the world could have access to reliable information, make assessment and than governments can take appropriate actions.
I was thinking along the lines of Scott R. The statement is ambiguous and subject to interpretations.
Possibly, he meant that the satellites are up there — he didn’t put them there — but, he would like to have a “say” in what phenomena they measured. That is, to “influence” how the satellites are used — not how to corrupt their data to his purposes.
On the other hand, I genuinely think GISS over “massages” the available temperature data — in an unproven way that makes their temperature reconstructions almost certainly inaccurate and unworthy of extensive analysis.
Amusing though this is, I basically agree with Scott. There are a number of perfectly innocent meanings of this comment. For example, any experimentalist knows that any measurement is inevitably contaminated, and one seeks to maximise the sensitivity to the quantity of interest (the signal) while minimising the sensitivity to everything else (the systematic and random noise).
More generally this is indicative of something I have frequently noticed at RealClimate, which is a remarkable lack of political sensitivity to how their statements will be perceived by readers. While I agree that they are playing political games, I disagree with the common view that they are master manipulators: they are in fact remarkably inept.
Hansens statement certainly infers he is fiddling the figures and this appears to be born out by the charts underneath the article.
From memory the data set used to show rapidly climbing figs for the 90’s but now appears to show then tailing off.
However the figs for the new millenium show then climbing in a simailar manner to old figs fo the 90’s…..but we are clearly living in cooler times.
Something is amiss.
I think what is very telling is that Mr. Hansen doesn’t seem to even realize that his comments on adjusting the data could be interpreted as injecting his bias into the data. He just assumes that everyone that reads what he writes will have have no problem with his comments. It’s this casual attitude he presents, which even if he is not consciously manipulating the data, suggests that he is not taking the necessary precautions with the data to prevent his personal bias from creeping in.
I was going to mention the same thing Smokey. You seem to have found one that has historic temperatures cooler after adjustment. Why the present is not adjusted down for obvious UHI effects in populated areas, instead of adjusting the past up when on average, less adjustment would be needed there a long time ago for UHI has always been a mystery to me.
If this is not done carefully, you might end up with artificially biased heating in the adjusted dataset. Then you might draw inappropriate conclusions that might not really be there.
Oh. er, um, yeah. Nevermind.
I meant “warmer after adjustment”. So rare it confused me.
Smokey, in the single example you linked to (Racine), did you try downloading the data and comparing the linear slope before and after the adjustments? I did, and the effect of the adjustments is a 44% decrease in the rate of warming.
Hansen must be slipping 😉
In this Hansen doc: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_etal.pdf
There is a graph a few months earlier than the graph used in the gif 1999/2008 in this writing above.
For Hansen a few months can do a difference, on the graf im talking about:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/hansen99.jpg
you can see that the trendcurve is 0,05-0,1 K lower for the last 10 years of the 20 century than one can see in Hansens curve above made a few motnhs later in 1999. And very interestingly, see on the older Hansen curve the year 1934…. It has a positive anomaly of almost +1,5 K.
This huge anomaly has been removed within these few months in 1999… – a HUGE change done 65 years after measurements where taken, Hansen You impress me… and the other tops of the 1930´ies was not changed likewise.. it just happened to be the one year that was too inconvenient that had to go.
K.R. Frank
David S (11:34:38) :
That blink comparator is interesting. At first I thought the recent high temperatures were simply shifting the average up which would have the effect of making the anomoly go downward in earlier years. But the 1880 to 1890 timeframe shows an upward change between the 1999 graph and the 2008 graph. Does Hansen actually detail his adjustment methodolgy anywhere?
In a word David – no. Climateaudit.org details the efforts to reconstruct the methodology used. It’s pretty arcane – and frustratingly so as the methods that GISS uses are done so at taxpayer expense, and are a mystery.
I agree, there is something about becoming so engaged in whatever real work that you are doing, that also makes a person less able to communicate well with others. Public relations is a science in itself, and perhaps NASA would do well to hire real PR professionals. Of course if they do that we will have no clue whatsoever about what is really happening.
What was Hansens’ views in 1977?
WOW, if one reads United States & Global Data Integrity Issues
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
It’s really kinda simple at how the earth has heated up so much in the last few years.
The computed mean is shown as 10.87097. Now what is that nonsense? It implies the therometer is measuring temp to +/-0.00001 deg F. Why isn’ the computed mean shown as 11 deg F
You can get part of the way there by oversampling. But I think that calculating to finer than a tenth of a degree/year nationwide is what logicians and historians refer to as “the fallacy of misplaced precision”.