Contiguous U.S. GISTEMP Linear Trends: Before and After
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
Many of us have seen gif animations and blink comparators of the older version of Contiguous U.S. GISTEMP data versus the newer version, and here’s yet another one. The presentation is clearer than most.
http://i44.tinypic.com/29dwsj7.gif
It is based on the John Daly archived data:
http://www.john-daly.com/usatemps.006
and the current Contiguous U.S. surface temperature anomaly data from GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
In their presentations, most people have been concerned with which decade had the highest U.S. surface temperature anomaly: the 1940s or the 1990s. But I couldn’t recall having ever seen a trend comparison, so I snipped off the last 9 years from current data and let EXCEL plot the trends:
http://i44.tinypic.com/295sp37.gif
Before the post-1999 GISS adjustments to the Contiguous U.S. GISTEMP data, the linear trend for the period of 1880 to 1999 was 0.035 deg C/decade. After the adjustments, the linear trend rose to 0.044 deg C/decade.
Thanks to Anthony Watts who provided the link to the older GISTEMP data archived at John Daly’s website in his post here:
NOTE: Bob, The credit really should go to Michael Hammer, who wrote that post, but I’m happy to have a role as facilitator. – Anthony
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Richard III I don’t think they can anymore.. The Scandinavians have decided not to follow the charade anymore…..
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Perhaps the reason that the pre-1900 temperatures went up was so that the average temperature of those days would remain the same. 1880-1920, or 1860-1940, the average temperatures are likely well publicized so have been adhered to.
Just make sure the Republicans in the Senate know what has been going on with the temperature records.
How long have they been doing this? i.e. – when did they start monkeying with the historical records.
Are there archived sets of individual stations that are preserved?
I hope someone has taken notice and placed the original data in a safe place.
Such records will be vital once the climate has turned hard against the AGW agenda if the current minimum continues to drag on.
The nightmare will be if they have destroyed all the real data, and we end up needing it to plan out crop countermeasures.
looks like m. mann methods.
you smooth the variations in times said to be influenced by natural forcings (1880 f goes up, 1920-1940 goes down), and you push up the last years to bring the records high away from the 1930ies. if i would be an alarmist, i ll try to do the same.
Hansen is our new Piltdown Man, for now on we should call him Piltdown James…
OT: Financial Times sees Obama Weak on Cap and Trade !!!
“The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty. Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself.
It proposes safety valves that will ease the cap if it threatens to have a noticeable effect on energy prices. It relies heavily on offsets – theoretical carbon reductions bought from other countries or other industries – so that big US emitters will not need to try so hard. It gives emission permits away, and tells utilities to rebate the windfall to consumers, so their electricity bills do not go up. It creates a vastly complicated apparatus, a playground for special interests and rent-seekers, a minefield of unintended consequences – and the bottom line for all that is business as usual……”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/706bbcde-640d-11de-a818-00144feabdc0.html
Ever wondered how much energy is involved in global warming? Glaciers lost approximately 6,000 km3 since the 70ies, which makes 6×10^18 g. Given that the enthalpy of fusion of ice is 333 J/g, we get approximately 2×10^21 J.
That’s 2 billion terajoules. Hiroshima bomb was 63 TJ. The amount of energy that was necessary to melt all this ice was thus more or less the equivalent of 31 million Hiroshima bombs.
The heat we get in the atmosphere is what has not been used to melt this ice or (with some delay) to warm the seas. Not counting the melting of the Arctic. In other words, it is more a collateral damage than the main issue, in my opinion. We should focus more on what happens to the overall glacier thickness and sea levels.
OT: Big Oil’s Reaction to Cap and Trade is “Import More” Gasoline !!!
June 26 (Bloomberg) — America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports.
Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.
“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity. ……”.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=avLVPogS6lh0
George: You asked, “Why is the last decade of data not included? Did I miss the reasoning there?”
The earlier dataset ended in 1999, so to provide a trend comparison for the same period of time, 1880 to 1999, I deleted the last nine years of the more current data.
braddles (22:03:14) : “Perhaps we need a new word for this. ‘Fraud’ does not quite suit.”
How adout: “eqavf”?
I adjusted the first two leters down 1, left the middle one as it was, adjusted the 4th letter up 1 and the last letter up 2.
George: You wrote, “There is still substantial warming in both cases. In one, the slope is 0.0044, the other 0.0035. ”
Substantial? They equate to linear trends of 0.044 deg C/decade and 0.035 deg C/decade. That’s 0.44 deg C/century and 0.35 deg C/century. Substantial? To put it into terms used by a good friend, “That’s chump change.”
NASA is a government funded organisation, it must have somwhere in its systems a methodology for any adjustments it has made to historical temperature records. These should be publically available.
Has NASA given any reason for the adjustments ?
Or is this some sort of internal political game being played?
rbateman (01:11:05) :
Re: crops and data
Yes, it may be that we will need to adjust approaches to primary industry, due to the sudden onset of global cooling. I do not think the important data that would help with planning is actually lost. Many new interpretations of existing data have been presented, by those promoting AGW and solar scientists avoiding questions they never expected to be asked. This equates only to “muddying the waters”, there is enough data recorded before AGW politics came into popularity to help with agriculture planning for a solar minimum and a cooling planet. All we need to do is trash recent reinterpretations and adjustments.
I could see this coming last year after the whole Douglass versus Santer debate on CA. The current thinking is climate = trend + noise and a whole lot of autocorrelation assumptions stuck in to deal with ‘noise’. My issue is that at some point you have to recognise that you are ignoring the persistence signal and sticking to fitting linear trends. It’s still all about the linear trends. Now some of that thinking works but its only temporary and I believe that when the models first started some people thought this idea was temporary. Nature just isn’t that simple and in the long run with dedicated investigation you see that.
And yet a bad case of blinkering and not enough DISREGARD is still going on. Add to that the constant ‘corrections’ and it all looks a bit less settled and a lot more like Alastair Darling’s budget forecasts.
I think its about time the debating stance against the AGW crowd should be ‘okay that’s interesting so far but now can you model El Nino and tell me how it changes the picture?’ And I don’t need to be an expert in climate science to ask that plainly obvious question.
They can’t just keep adjusting upwards in the future. The problem is that its to late with all the new bills passing.
Frankly, I don´t understand adjustments at all.
If you measure the temperature with a calibrated thermometer, one of those that reads 0º C when you dip it in water-ice mixture and it reads 100º C when you dip it in boiling water, I don´t know why you have to modify the readings.
You may argue that it is because the thermometer is now placed in a location that is warmer that the surroundings, or so. But, Do we know how the quality of the locations in the 1930s or in the 1900s?
Seems to me that all depends on weightings. And you may complain about the quality of the surface stations in the USA. My impression is that the rest of the world may be even worse. Every time I heard about the record temperatures of the day in Europe, the winner is almost always a thermometer located at an airport, Like the Honolulu fiasco, but on a daily basis.
Hmmmm?
Squidly/Ohioholic, et al;-)
Thing is, & I have no desire to play devil’s advocate here, but I can see the “get out of jail free card”! One simply claims that a discrepancy was found in data input/retrieval/complitation/processing/refining/adjustment/filtering, pick any combination of the aforementioned plus “it was the best available data at the time”, etc., is always good for rear covering. Quids in guys, no flies on them. However I must I always thought “refining” &”filtering” was what one does when wants to remove something one does not want! :-0
As an engineer, I have to be squeaky clean, & genuinely believe I am doing the right thing, working the best way, & know my stuff, but even then I am still standing with a bullseye on my back if someone is so inclined. How lucky to work for GISS, or any other government department, where no responsibility appears to be aportioned or taken for the output! Perhaps I am being too harsh, after all it is only taxpayers money they’re spending so it needs no justification or rashionale?
Keen on Thursday’s weather over London, contesting forecasts from Met Office + a private company, who will be right I wonder?
I have to assume that NASA has legitimate reasons, at least from their own perspective, for all their adjustments. I am a bit suprised that a description of the adjustments has not been consolidated and made readily available for scrutiny. Perhaps they lack the foresight to see what will happen should the earth not warm and billions or trillions of dollars have been spent. There will be few politicians out there stating that “we” were wrong. There will be many out there saying “we” were lied to and demanding congressional investigations of the individuals involved. Sunlight is not only the best disinfectant it is also the best defense.
No, it is not fraud. That requires a deliberate act. What we are dealing with here is another well-known phenomenon, “experimenter bias”. See:
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Experimenter_bias
“Observer effects are rooted in the universal human tendency to interpret data in a manner consistent with one’s expectations.”
It can, however, be argued that there is an element of dishonesty. Any responsible scientist will recognise that there is always a possibility of results being tainted by bias.
Some of these are highly techical and difficult to recognise, and are often unintended – introduced either by the experiment design or at a subconscious level. Thus, it is incumbent on any worker to test their own results for the possibility of bias and to eliminate it where possible.
That these results are not put through that filter can be dishonest but, as Anthony avers, it could also be incompetence. Equally, it can be culpable self-deception. The phenomenon is ignored because it will reveal findings that are contrary to those desired.
Damn it, all those years of wasted study…
I should have studied Political Science instead so I could have aligned to the logic behind todays “Real Climate”, along with the adjusted temperature data sets !
It seems to me that, rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead, the problem has been an epidemic of that old bugaboo, the “Mind Projection Fallacy”. The scary part is that it seems to have also infested the various GCM’s, which then leads to a reinforcing output into the beliefs of people. It’s common for folks to believe that if it comes out of a computer program (especially a scientific one ) it must be true. Feedback loops are just as common in belief systems as they are in physical/natural systems.
Hello together Translate by Yahoo My article does not stand in connection with the editorial. My English is very bad. I have noticed that it a very extensive knowledge over the climate to have. My question. Do they know the book of Dr. walter Russel – Atomic Suicide? It describes the connection between climate warming and the distribution on scientific basis of radioactive one substances in the environment. Are responsible for climate warming. I expect a founded answer. thank you. Anton – Swiss Zentral Europa.
Bob,
I know the trend is not much, but the difference between corrected and not corrected is not much either (20-30%?).
Plus, if you continue that trend for a few centuries, you might see some actual changes…
BTW, some glacier records run 250 years. I guess we had AGW 250 years ago, since they all seem to have a negative trend for the last couple of centuries…
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol308/issue5722/images/large/308_675_F1.jpeg
“Never ascribe conspiracy or fraud, when simple incompetence will do nicely – Anthony”
Never ascribe conspiracy or simple incompetence when ulterior-motives will do even more nicely – Peter
This may be a naive question, but isn’t it time to ask the NASA GISS people to respond to the charges here and explain what they have done, and why?
And if they don’t respond, how about a FOIA request/lawsuit?
/Mr Lynn
Lindsay H: You asked, “Has NASA given any reason for the adjustments ?”
Steve McIntyre discussed the adjustments to the U.S. temperature record at his website ClimateAudit a couple of years ago. The links he provided above are:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1142
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1139
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1891
Regards