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?
Looks to me like 2 points in the blinking graphs do not change.
1 is the low in 1918. The second is the low in 1968. Everything else is bent upwards or downwards. The ends are bent upwards. The middle bow is bent downwards.
Nice way to alter your data to support your theory…. general rise in temps on a steep slope.
Re : George E. Smith (12:31:54) :
Mr. Smith,
Please, take a deep breath.
Now, exhale. 😀
I don’t want to loose your contribution to this forum.
Thank You.
Perhaps we need to define a new term ACDC – Anthropogenic Climate Data Change.
This is the real word we are living in:
It’s not only about manipulating data, it’s about manipulating business, politics and scientists.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24876451-7583,00.html
After this publication, the man was fired only because he stated his scientific opinion.
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/01/bond-university-dismisses-climate-change-sceptic/
It’s a disgrace and we should fight it.
wattsupwiththat (11:18:30) :
Tim L – working on it.
So why then is he still puttering around trying to adjust an obviously corrupted (at the measurement level) surface temperature data set when he thinks satellite data is of particular interest?
answer: there is no way to futz around with the data, and
we may indeed be warming a bit from the LIA. (no sat data back 100years)
OT… but this much more scary than the MSM is telling.
I go in to pay my electric bill. a conference is going on in the side room,
well, I listen in, LOL, this is what I hear, ” we must cut out 1millon kilowatts from our grid, we use 3 to 3.5 mil-kilos per day, or about 20-25% reduction. our biggest problem is we connect new services every week and this adds more load”
We are out of time to reverse this near sighted farse that is coming to a head.
My asthma will kill me if I have to cook with wood!!!!!
2nd week of june is when air condioning starts to kick in as well as water pumping for lawns etc. it is then that the grid takes a hit. ???june 14th???.
oh well.
“The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
Perhaps he is talking about the difficulty of persuading the government to launch the statellites with the instrumentation to get the best possible data on climate change. There have been many ongoing delays in launching satellites with instrumentation designed to obtain better climate data.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5134022.stm
Is this a conspiracy by governments trying to avoid collecting info that would show AGW alarmism false and so miss out on carbon tax (if so why build the satellite in the first place). Is it a conspiracy to prevent the launch of a satellite that will confirm climate change and put a hole in big oil interests? Or is it just arbritrary budget setting and beaurocracy making things 5 times more difficult than they otherwise might be?
While most of you are focusing in on the word “influence”, the thing that jumps out of the page for me is the predefined assumption that human activity has an affect on climate. He states that twice in his paragraph.
In essense .. he is working to prove that human’s influence climate, not that that would appear as any revelation to anyone who is familiar with Hansen and his critics.
As we all know, if one sets out to prove something where no hard empiric evidence exists, one will always create a confirming story, with creative statistics and all.
Took a look at that statement that got him fired.
Noticed the text of “Warmaholics” below it.
Like the Joker might say on a Batman flick: “Wait till they get a dose of global colding”.
Politically correct is a fad type of thing: It just takes a scandal to bring the house down.
By this time next year, the ice will have hit the fan, and there ain’t nothing going on right now that will lift us far enough out of Solar Coma to stop it.
The best ramps I can find take the better part of a year to pull out of Lodi.
Oh my, have they ever painted themselves into a corner.
“The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained ”
If I may, I would like to hansenize this statement to read:
“The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of obtaining the measurements”
That seems to fit better.
Freudian slip?
[snip, sorry, I appreciate the humor, but it’s really not an appropriate comparison – Anthony]
I think many are over-interpeting Hansen’s words. By this time nobody should be surprised by Hansen’s position on this topic. Our abiding hope has to be in the integrity of the data and the transparency and replicability of its analysis. This is one reason why I strongly support Anthony’s efforts to check out the accessible surface stations.
==“The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”==
Never thought I would find myself defending Hansen, but…
Anyone who is responsible for analyzing data that others collect, especially when others own the instruments or write the data collection protocols, knows exactly what he is talking about. A statistician trying to analyze a clinical trial for example, when others have more direct authority over the clinical trial protocol, and MDs collect the data at the investigative site, often have to struggle through their inability to “influence the nature of the measurements obtained.”
On the wrong track with this one I think.
These are NOT the comments of a scientist:
“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.”
A more correct concept would be ‘…trying to understand the climate changes on earth and whether or not anthropogenic changes influence those changes.’
” The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
INFLUENCE the nature of the measurements? There is no way to interpret this other than it sounds. It does not mean ‘determine’, it does not mean ‘understand.’ It does mean manipulate or affect.
This article and the pdf ready for download provides the most correct and extensive response to this article from Anthony:
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/01/hansens-junk-data.html
I think, after reading the complete PDF, this subject is closed.
Ed (a simple old carpenter) (12:47:26) :
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.
Strange you should say that… While I haven’t done a detail review of it, in a cursory pass in the later steps I notice in the data adjustment sections a variable named ‘knee’… Made me think…
A grep of gisstemp sources, step*/*
grep knee */*
STEP2/PApars:echo ‘CCdStationID slope-l slope-r knee Yknee slope Ymid RMS RMSl 3-rur+urb ext.range flag’ > $fl
STEP2/PApars.f:C**** line (with a variable “knee”) to that difference series are found.
STEP2/flags.f: * cc,id,sl1,sl2,knee,yk,sl,ylin,rms,rms0,iy1,iy2,iy1e,iy2e
STEP2/flags.f: if(knee.lt.iy1+lshort.or.knee.gt.iy2-lshort) iflag=iflag+1
STEP2/flags.f: if(knee.lt.iy1+lshort.or.knee.gt.iy2-lshort) nshort=nshort+1
STEP2/padjust.f: * cc,IDc,sl1,sl2,knee,sl0,iy1,iy2,iy1e,iy2e,iflag
STEP2/padjust.f: call adj(info,idato,sl1,sl2,knee,sl0,iy1e,iy2e,iy1,iy2,iflag,
STEP2/padjust.f: * end=100) cc,IDc,sl1,sl2,knee,sl0,iy1,iy2,iy1e,iy2e,iflag
STEP2/padjust.f: call adj(info,idata,sl1,sl2,knee,sl0,iy1e,iy2e,iy1,iy2,iflag,
STEP2/padjust.f: * end=35) cc,IDc,sl1,sl2,knee,sl0,iy1,iy2,iy1e,iy2e,iflag
STEP2/padjust.f: subroutine adj(info,idata,sl1,sl2,knee,sl0,iy1,iy2,iy1a,iy2a,
STEP2/padjust.f: if(iy.gt.knee) sl=sl2
I agree with those who view Hansen’s statement as influencing the measurements so the data he is looking for is available. However, he let’s the cat out the bag with his usage of “will” and “are”. His intent is clearly to get more data that can be manipulated to his liking.
“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.”
So, after a decade of contemplation it seems our man has to spend the rest of his life explaining how our species is changing the atmosphere.
By this admission he is hardly the unbiased observer or a genuine curiosity driven scientist. He is a crusader for his cause and this alone is reason to doubt his data.
It is a very good thing that we have UAH and RSS now.
I can’t imagine what would have happened to the 1990-on temps without the independent agencies monitoring the temp record.
I think we need to get Frank Lansner’s chart (from 13:25) into the blink comparator.
Going by the net adjustments made to date and the inconsistencies with the satellite data since 1980, it appears as though the historic temperature trend has been artificially/unneccessarily increased by about 0.3C or so (compared to the 0.7C quoted today).
Ever notice how those on the “progressive” side always reveal their hand.
For those who believe it’s not all about the money: click
BTW, anyone else wanting to download the GISSTEMP source code can go to:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/
and click on the download link. They say to unpack the archive and read the documentation, but it’s a bit thin… a file at the top level of the directory structure, gistemp.txt, that gives a general idea of what’s going on but says little about algorithms. Variables and files are poorly documented (you have to hunt through the code and figure them out…) but the code isn’t very fancy. It’s about 4.5Mb unpacked and that includes some of the data files that they left in directories.
The module ‘step1’ is in python, that I’ve never written, so if a python person wanted to go through that bit it would make life easier for me 8-}
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!?
How about a sheep since he seems to be a follower and not a leader. Maurice Strong seems to be behind much of this http://www.freedom-force.org/pdf/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf
If Hansen has not been “retired” by the March “climate conference”, I hope there is a concerted effort to see that he is removed. Taxpayers, citizens, and scientists deserve unadulterated, reliably gathered raw data from which to create hypotheses, formulate theories, and draw conclusions. The whole process must be transparent and there must be full accountability.
It cannot be any clearer how much the books have been cooked and Hansen even confesses: “The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
Unfortunately, the former scientist, the man, is ill.
Give Hanson a break. He’s fanally trying to be honest about his manipulating facts. Sure.