Yesterday I reposted one of Warren Meyers essays on the hilariously flawed GCCI report from NCDC suggesting that the electrical grid is at risk due to increased weather related events affecting electrical systems. The chart looked hinky, turns out it was. One wonders if these guys at NCDC know how to use a telephone, because one phone call is all it took to verify the suspicions Warren had about this graph below being mostly about a change in reporting (baseline) rather than a real trend. His BS detector is very good. Too bad the people at NCDC didn’t do some basic due diligence rather than accept the data at face value.
One private citizen and a phone call undid the entire premise of this graph portrayed by the National Climatic Data Center. We need more people like Warren willing to ask questions.
Related: see my report on why tornado trends in general follow this same pattern that duped NCDC and why. – Anthony
Update on GCCI Post #4: Grid Outage Chart
Yesterday I called into question the interpretation of this chart from the GCCI report where the report used electrical grid outages as a proxy for severe weather frequency:
I hypothesized:
This chart screams one thing at me: Basis change. Somehow, the basis for the data is changing in the period. Either reporting has been increased, or definitions have changed, or there is something about the grid that makes it more sensitive to weather, or whatever (this is a problem in tornado charts, as improving detection technologies seem to create an upward incidence trend in smaller tornadoes where one probably does not exist). But there is NO WAY the weather is changing this fast, and readers should treat this whole report as a pile of garbage if it is written by people who uncritically accept this chart.
I had contacted John Makins of the EIA who owns this data set yesterday, but I was too late to catch him in the office. He was nice enough to call me today.
He said that there may be an underlying upward trend out there (particularly in thunderstorms) but that most of the increase in this chart is from improvements in data gathering. In 1997, the EIA (and Makins himself) took over the compilation of this data, which had previously been haphazard, and made a big push to get all utilities to report as required. They made a second change and push for reporting in 2001, and again in 2007/2008. He told me that most of this slope is due to better reporting, and not necessarily any underlying trend. In fact, he said there still is some under-reporting by smaller utilities he wants to improve so that the graph will likely go higher in the future.
Further, it is important to understand the nature of this data. The vast majority of weather disturbances are not reported to the EIA. If the disturbance or outage remains local with no impact on any of the national grids, then it does not need to be reported. Because of this definitional issue, reported incidents can also change over time due to the nature of the national grid. For example, as usage of the national grid changes or gets closer to capacity, local disturbances might cascade to national issues where they would not have done so 20 years ago. Or vice versa – better grid management technologies might keep problems local that would have cascaded regionally or nationally before. Either of these would drive trends in this data that have no relation to underlying weather patterns.
At the end of the day, this disturbance data is not a good proxy for severe weather. And I am left wondering at this whole “peer-reviewed science” thing, where errors like this pass into publication of major reports — an error that an amateur like myself can identify with one phone call to the guy listed by this data set on the web site. Forget peer review, this isn’t even good basic editorial control (apparently no one who compiled the report called Makins, and he was surprised today at the number of calls he was suddenly getting).
Postscript: Makins was kind enough to suggest some other data bases that might show what he believes to be a real increase in thunderstorm disturbances of electrical distribution grids. He suggested that a number of state PUC’s keep such data, including the California PUC under their reliability section. I will check those out, though it is hard to infer global climate trends from one state.
OT Anthony we have a new report from Hadley Centre plastered all over the news in UK last night. Luckily too many big stories for it to make the front page in today’s papers!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/5566269/800000-homes-face-flood-risk-warns-climate-change-report.html
Actually I could see a trend – it was downwards.
Well, at least the GCCI report isn’t fooling everybody out there. See http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m6d18-More-problems-with-yesterdays-global-warming-report
And to think the warmists accuse realists of being defficient in the grey matter/honesty department.
Shakes head.
Keep taking them down, Mr. Watts. The house of cards they’ve built must surely fall.
The very first rule of data analysis.
Always make sre the data is suitable for the analysis you want to conduct, or the questions you are trying to answer.
This, along with a lot of “weather reporting” type data, is extremely poor for time series analysis due to this basis effect.
Nearly all these types of “studies” and analysis including much of the tropical storm literature sohul go straight to the garbage.
The very first rule of data analysis.
Always make sre the data is suitable for the analysis you want to conduct, or the questions you are trying to answer.
This, along with a lot of “weather reporting” type data, is extremely poor for time series analysis due to this basis effect.
Nearly all these types of “studies” and analysis including much of the tropical storm literature sohul go straight to the garbage.
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
This is exactly how groups like NHTSA produce figures that seem to say “more people died on the roads in the US last year than ever before.” Well, guess what? More people are driving on more roads in the US than ever before. # deaths per 1million miles driven has decreased virtually every year since the automobile was invented. In fact, it has never been safer to drive on a road in the US.
Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure….
OT…it’s only weather and all, but…
In Kabul today we had our high of 28°C at around noon. Then a big thunderstorm blew through (very unusual this time of year) and the temperature dropped to 17°C. We’ve had rain three out of the last four days (20 minutes to an hour or so each time). We had fresh snow on the mountains west of the city last week.
One of my translators, a Pashtun aged 52 who’s lived his whole life in Kabul, claims he’s never seen weather like we are having this year. He was very excited about the June snow last week.
I do not think I would use CA electric as a benchmark for power issues given the extreme strains on their system the last few years just due to under capacity.
But good catch on the change in reporting. There was a small upward trend in the total amount of power interruptions based on weather from 2002 to 2006, but is was much smaller than the increases in reported incidents, and even that small increase may easily have been due to this change in reporting.
In South Florida they’re discussing moving powerlines underground, as some of them are already in some communities here. This protects them from hurricane damage, and from the daily afternoon thunderstorms we get down here in the summer (so well-described in the ‘thermostat’ thread).
If that was done nationally (it won’t, its expensive), and the chart went back down, the cynic in me suggests that the chart would then be dropped from this report.
It’s getting quite clear that as long as the data, no matter how flawed, satifies the template, on the wire it goes. Now that’s how science is done.
Ryan M. (21:32:31) :
Poor Leif, he works so hard to point out all the reasons the Sun doesn’t have the influence some people claim, but little cherries like this keep popping up. They probably feel more like small stones in his hiking boots to him, and I certainly won’t make much of this note, but thank you for this anecdotal observation. 🙂
Also consider that the electrical grid is aging (due to a great extent to deregulation and the churning of electrical utilities whose new owners take a “replace on failure” approach over scheduled replacement). Here in Utah, we have seen a marked increase in power outages due to windstorms and snow because the wooden power poles began to fail en masse and transformers are tired out. Thank you Bonneville Power, Scottish Power, T. Boone Pickens and the Utah Public Service Commission.
I have sympathy for him, but I’m laughing. Yeah, probably some young clerk got the job to find data and it didn’t occur to him to check the characteristics of the data.
Wait — didn’t this report claim that it contained no new research? Are they reporting on someone else’s flawed research, or do they consider attaching an apocalyptic interpretation to a graph as not being new research?
It looks like they are trying to resurrect the hockey stick – it got them such good press for years. May be the trend was undone, but not to the knowledge of the recipients of the report. Does anyone write “minority” reports to counter this fraudulent science. In a post of about a month a go I said to watch for a crescendo of desperate hyperbole from the AGWers as the thermometers slipped down.
Mike D. (00:20:18) :
A little research and I answered my own question. The PR firm who spun this report was Resource Media of San Francisco.
http://www.resource-media.org/
Probably been mentioned elsewhere at WUWT. Sorry for the repetition.
I posted this yesterday. also. This firm is connected with an EMS company and in the circle of related entities, they have been promoters of the apple alar scare
http://www.environmentwriter.org/resources/articles/0803_west.htm
the activist public relations firm behind numerous health scares including Alar in apples, silicone breast implants, and so-called ‘endocrine disrupters.'”
In mental health we study manimulative psychotics. They create fear and promise they can give hope. Rape and then we will not kill you.
Some drug companies do articles in regular magazines like readers digest and household mags and a year or two later introduce a drug solution for example for osteoporosis.
Wouldn’t this report fall under the “Information Quality Guidelines”? Is a correction called for under “correction of information that does not comply with OMB or NOAA applicable guidelines”? There isn’t much on the NOAA (and nothing on NCDC) web site about the quality requirements. No corrections are on their web site (requirement for correction publication). The OMB report to Congress does mention on page 30 a National Assessment on Climate Change correction request which was denied due to the Information Guidelines not being applicable.
Mark, are you serious? Do you believe people didn’t notice a failure when it was induced by the weather before?
“Dan Lee (04:32:46) :
In South Florida they’re discussing moving powerlines underground, as some of them are already in some communities here. This protects them from hurricane damage, and from the daily afternoon thunderstorms we get down here in the summer (so well-described in the ‘thermostat’ thread).
If that was done nationally (it won’t, its expensive), and the chart went back down, the cynic in me suggests that the chart would then be dropped from this report.”
Underground helps a lot for wind and squirrel damage but not so much for flooding. Yes, a squirrel did us in one time by shorting the pole transformer. My new neighborhood has underground utilities but that didn’t help when someone knocked the pole down (with a car) for the lines that fed the neighborhood. We are literally within 300 feet of the substation and only two or three poles that could be hit to take us out and he or she found the right one.
June 18 (Bloomberg) — Polar ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected just two years ago, 10 universities said in a report suggesting that climate change has been underestimated.
“change has been underestimated”
What does that mean?
“Polar ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected ”
Lies, pure and simple!
Flanagan, what part of ‘most of the slope is due to better reporting’ do you not understand? Yes, the local utilities knew about and fixed weather related outages. No, the reporting of data to other agencies was not good. Very large steps were taken in this direction after the 2003 northeastern grid outage.
Flanagan (08:08:41) :
Mark, are you serious? Do you believe people didn’t notice a failure when it was induced by the weather before?
No, but that’s not what I said, either (read up on various red herrings).
Other causes could simply be those that are reported better for a variety of reasons. Maybe the non-weather causes are the ones that automatically get logged for safety reasons, i.e., human caused failures. I don’t know, but unlike you, I don’t automatically assume a specific outcome simply because it fits my pre-conceived beliefs.
Of course, to expect any sort of objective and logic response from you would be… illogical.
Mark
The folks at these government agencies that keep advancing these hysteria laden reports are not real scientists. The real scientists I know are much more cautious, methodical and skeptical of their own work. Particularly with respect to data. The whole climate arena has become perverted by politics and subsidy.
Ric, come now. You have no idea why Phoenix is cooler? Do you know nothing at all about weather pattern variations? Cold fronts? Warm fronts? Jet stream behavior? Pressure gradients? These are all easily studied, followed, and used to predict weather pattern variation. Yes, yes, the Sun provides a steady source of heat when it gets through, but not so much when it is mixed with Earth’s unending variations of its own atmosphere. There is no pebble in my shoe and I am just an amateur at weather pattern variation reasons.
Just another case of grab someone else’s database and shove it into a PC and out comes another science paper.
Boy oh boy, the kind of scientists we have today are so prolific and hasty to come up with significant conclusions for their analysis that I doubt they would have time for a phone call….
Reminds me of the whole Hockey stick thing…data largely based on one person tree ring plugs taken about 30 years ago on a hill top in Denver…
Reminds me of the computerized AGW conmclusions from long term ground based temperature measurements records….nobody ever bothered to take a look at the stations themselves….of course not – they were too busy extrapolating the end of the world in a CO2 induced inferno…
Anyone see a trend here?