Jones et al 1986 methodical insertion of warming bias
by Warwick Hughes
Jones et al 1986 looked at 86 Australian stations and rejected 46 (25 Short term – 21 long term). Of the 40 they used 27 were short term and 13 long term. Of the long term there were 5 large cities.
The 27 short term stations were mostly only quoted from 1951 onward – regardless of what data was available. It just so happens that the years just post WWII were not prominently warm in Australia so an “automatic” warming trend was reinforced into the CRU Australian component.
Here are 11 examples where Jones et al systematically truncated pre-1951 data or ignored more rural data around many small town Australian stations. These graphics and text have been extracted from a 1992 vintage Word doc that somehow survived the decades and how many HDD’s.
Port Hedland
The aerodrome records 1951-80 shows a clear warming trend. Marble Bar, 150 kms south east, shows a similar trend over that period but a flat trend over 80 odd years.
Longreach
For the period 1951-80 this trend is sharply upward, yet if the Longreach Post Office record is spliced to the aerodrome record (post 1940s) the trend becomes markedly flatter. When Longreach is compared to Isisford, a much smaller rural centre 80 kms south, the trend is closer to neutral over about 70 years.
Mackay
The A.M.O. record 1951-80 shows a clearly steeper warming trend for Mackay when compared with St Lawrence and Pine Islet Lighthouse.
Rockhampton
Compared to Bustard Head Lighthouse and St. Lawrence, Rockhampton shows a warming trend of about 0.5°C over 70 years. Rockhampton data was used only for the period 1951-1970. The two nearby more rural sites show a similar temperature pattern but a negligible temperature change over 70 years.
Meekathara
The Aerodrome record 1951-80 shows a clear strong warming trend. The small centre of Cue, 120 kms south west however has a flat trend over 90 years.
Charleville
The trend for this station 1951-80 also shows a strong warming trend. Cunnamulla, a smaller centre approximately 170 kms south, shows a much flatter trend over about 80 years.
Kalgoorlie
The aerodrome record 1941-80 shows a well defined warming. However, when Post Office records are spliced on, the trend is much closer to zero over 90 years. Looking at Southern Cross, a continuous Post Office record, approximately 200 kms west, the trend is very similar, flat over some 90 years.
www.warwickhughes.com/cru86/tr027/kalgoorlie.gif
Forrest
This station 1951-80, shows a steeper warming trend than the nearby Rawlinna, where records go back to 1926.
Ceduna
A warming trend is seen over the 1951-80 period, yet the longer term and more remote Streaky Bay, where records are available back to 1925, shows a flatter trend.
Woomera
Once again, this record shows the 1951-80 warming. Broken Hill, the nearest long term station in a similar climate, shows a cooling trend over a hundred year time span.
Mt. Gambier
From 1951-80 this aerodrome station shows a strong warming trend. When the Post Office records are spliced on the trend 1860s to 1990, it is close to neutral.
It gets better, in Warwick’s blog comments, Warwick points this out:
The situation for Jones 1986 Sth Hem compilation – is that Sydney and Melbourne aside, there is not one station, long or short term, between Brisbane and Mt. Gambier. This area includes all of NSW and Victoria and contains the greatest concentration of long term recording stations in Australia. Must be one of the great and complete exclusions in the history of science.
He adds in another comment:
I have never been able to discover which stations contribute to their gridded data.
Maybe that will change now.
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Scouse Pete (09:05:52) :
Yes, and it’s probably weighted towards the younger generation, some of who may be hearing this for the first time. Continued suicidal tendencies from the (former) mainstream media in ignoring it.
An interesting web site that was posted ages ago on a Joanne Nova thread that I still remember and managed to hunt down says:
Chris Gillham:
April 12th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
If anybody is interested in temperature trends across Western Australia from the 1800s to the present day … http://www.waclimate.net
A lot of the stations show very little warming over their record. Some at that site are also in Warwick Hughes’s post.
Excerpts from the header:
Below is an approximate 100 year comparison of average annual mean minimum and maximum temperatures at 32 different locations across Western Australia, including weather in the capital city of Perth.
The temperature averages have been extracted from the database publicly available at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website for Western Australia, and from the first ever climate study conducted in the colony of Western Australia before 1900.
This page is designed to provide a simple, convenient tool for people to observe temperature trends since weather records began in Western Australia, particularly in the context of perceived climate change.
Frankenstein graph, each segment is made of different data, in some cases make up your own. And viola, you get your creature global warming hockey stick.
Sorry I can’ t keep up – now 7,220,000 since the past hour! Another half million viewers! :=O 10m by end of today anyone?
Pajamas media
In an October 14 email to fellow alarmist Tom Wigley, Trenberth plaintively writes:
“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Many thanks for your work over the years, Anthony, et. al. I am deeply grateful for the exchange of information and views this site has made possible!
May I suggest that a needed step among climate non-alarmists in the months and years ahead is to press toward a deeper understanding of the philosophy and history of science. The drama we are witnessing calls for a breadth and depth of analysis of the sort that lay behind Thomas Kuhn’s classic _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_.
We must, for example, develop the means to explain why climate alarmism is both more than a hoax and less than a hoax, and how it has elements of conspiracy but it is not a conspiracy. It is more like what Kuhn called a paradigm, with all the enormous complexity and many-tentacled vastness that Kuhn signified when he used that term.
In my mind it is imperative that we acknowledge the reasons for the appeal of the climate alarmist paradigm. We must admit that it is not a fluke or will ‘o the wisp but a highly evolved system that fulfills (however artificially) a variety of social, psychological, political, and YES, _scientific_ needs.
Intellectual historians often develop deep admiration for systems (often discarded in history’s dustbin) that they do not regard as true in any empirical sense, yet which marvellously captivated the imagination of generations, shaping societies and marking the destiny of countless individuals. Examples are Perry Millers works on the Puritans and Ronald Numbers’ works on creationism.
I fear that in our intense desire to “stop the bastards” (Numbers’ summary of what his academic colleagues falsely thought was the goal of his research), we will resort to oversimplification and we will impoverish our own understanding. Along with whatever polemics we feel called to engage in, we should strive to develop a more sophisticated understanding of this fascinating phenomena we are dealing with. And we need to be reminded that decency and kindness are core values that will ultimately compliment empirical truth.
I am convinced–partly because of what I have learned in the last two years from this website–that in the long run (which could mean a year or a generation), CAGW dogma will not stand. My fondest hope is that its collapse would lead to a more constructive period in scientific thought, and that looking back we could say that the human enterprise has, collectively, been advanced in truly beneficial ways becase of the trauma of this difficult time.
Thanksgiving blessings to you all. You are appreciated.
Ken in North Dakota
Anyone knows, which stations are used for CET record and whether they are adjusted for UHI?
Hopefully this will not be considered too far off-topic but here’s a copy of a post I made to Paul Hudson’s blog on the BBC earlier today –
“We have seen the difficulties that “Harry” encountered when trying to build a ‘gridded’ dataset from the raw data. We have seen the ‘corrections’ that needed to be made to the raw data before this dataset could be produced and the fact that the raw data itself is riddled with errors and omissions.
We can also see that the calibration of the proxy dataset (tree rings) does not seem to hold for measurements taken in the recent past. One might have expected this to force a review of the methodology and initial calibration of this dataset but, and this is truly unforgiveable, this anomaly seems to have been ‘hidden’.
My question is – does the meteorological community consider these datasets to have authoritative status? Are they something like that platinum bar at NPL from which all other measurements of length are derived? Are they the ‘primary standard’ for global meteorological data? Are there other ‘primary standards’ and do these too have similar issues?
I’m sure it’s obvious where I’m going with this…”
Unsurprisingly this did not generate much of a response and the one chap who did respond (by suggesting that I cite peer reviewed papers (Yawn), and suggesting that I might be “very, very silly”) didn’t find “where I’m going with this” at all obvious.
I’m posting it again here in the hope of a more useful response and I’ll try to offer a clearer description of “where I’m going”.
If we are to believe, as seems increasingly likely, that the dataset derived by CRU has been adjusted, massaged or cherry-picked (opinions do vary!) then are there any serious implications for research subsequently carried out using this dataset?
Given that there are perhaps only three such datasets available in the western world are the algorithms used to generate them truly independant?
Let me be clear that I’m talking about the measurements, the base observations that drive climate research. Everyone starts with the same raw data from the observing stations – does everyone adjust, massage or cherry-pick it in the same way?
I want to get away from the emails (that’s just way too easy) but if the measurements/observations are themselves questionable does that not make a fair amount of the subsequent hard work worthless.
To me the most important point about HARRY_READ_ME.txt file is what the file represents.
What we have here is a documented THREE year (2006-2009) effort by a CRU programmer, who had access to all the data, access to all the code, access to all the people who developed the code and the models and still HE could still NOT duplicate CRU’s OWN results. If he can’t it simply means the CRU’s results cannot be reproduced even by themselves and so there is no point anyone else even trying — CRU themselves have proven it’s a waste of time and so they themselves have proven their own results are plain rubbish. That means any “peer reviewed” document CRU produced along with any other papers that cited the CRU papers are based on data the CRU themselves can’t verify.
However, as we’ve seen in the spin from Phil et al in the few statements that have been issued so far, is that the CRU data-set is one of 4 temprature data sets and all 4 are consistent with each other. Given that we now know CRU’s is essentially doctored rubbish, it is self-evident the others must be too as it seems the all the custodians are a very small clique who are directly or indirectly related to the hockey team.
Therefore it seems to me that the data from these other organizations needs to be outed also and unless there are similar FOI requests pending (or stalled — which would indicate something to hide again) at the US institutions, we’re going to find the spin “we’re only one of 4 data-sets and we’re all consistent with each other” win over the public. Because it is a reasonable explanation absent evidence (read leaked data) to the contrary from the other organizations.
Luboš Motl (08:58:02) :
So now we know they are doing this sort of thing for sure – how does the scientific community deal with it?
A gutter journalist when found out costs his employer dearly – who holds these people to account and how?
I noticed a few comments wrt the high number of airfields used as weather stations.
I’m not sure what the development has been in the US but in the UK the national weather service was established around 1850 as a service to seamen, accurate weather reports being a requirement for safety at sea.
After the first world war most of the job was officially given to the Air Ministry (now part of the Ministry of Defence) with the Royal Navy retaining a small portion. Due to mission critical data being required for aviation in a timely manner, most weather stations in the UK were relocated within RAF airbases (making access impossible to civilians).
One important point here is that until around 1945-50 airfields used grass landing strips but, with the dawn of the jet age, these were replaced with concrete or tarmac and dimensions were dramatically increased.
Might explain post 1950’s warming trends?
In all of the discussion of the various flaws with the surface temperature averaging, why aren’t more of you focused on the directly observable flaw…
Temperature is quadratically related to kinetic energy. And worse…latent heat energy in moist parcels distort the energy budget of planet Earth even further away from the globally average surface temperature record. We need to *NOT* measure surface temperature, but average surface ENERGY. The vast majority of the warming is occurring in the extreme northern latitudes but the vast VAST majority of the earth’s energy is in the TROPICS…where dewpoints are in the 80s and total energies are an order of magnitude larger than they are at the poles. Notice…the temperatures in the tropics are no warmer now than they’ve ever been. So the total energy budget of the planet cannot be much different.
Ken Smith:
I recommend that you and anyone else interested in the history of how environmentalism went from being a reasonable cause to becoming a religion to read Alston Chase’s “In A Dark Wood” (1996, 2001). This is an eye-opening account of how the environmental extremists gained the upper hand in the United States both in terms of public morality and politically through litigation. Chase is a former philosophy prof who has turned his attention to environmental matters and his account is very even-handed. Perhaps a little long, but riveting nonetheless, and it will answer your question about how global warming became an “accepted paradigm” by explaining the emergence of the environmental, earth-first agenda.
I’d have thought Woomera would have been a lot
warmer in the 1950s and 60s with all those rocket tests
and the Quatermass Experiment starting there.
Again, I quote Dr. Pierre Latour, in his letter to editor of January 2009 to Hydrocarbon Processing: “I recall HP Editor Les Kane publicly emphasizing the pillar of the HPI (hydrocarbon processing industry) instrumentation industry since the 1970s: if you can’t measure it, you can’t control it. ”
Once again, it is demonstrated that no one knows the global average temperature of the earth at any point in time, nor does anyone know how the average changes over time. Certainly not sufficiently well to attempt to control that average temperature.
see This link
Henry chance (08:38:39) :
Maybe Jones and his “CRU” are like ACORN and are, you know, “climate organizers”.
Here is one columnist who “gets it”.
He is fighting a campaign against the AGW tripe along with a few others here in Canada who are giving it ‘their all’.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2009/11/26/11929676-sun.html
O/T, with apologies
Here is another trend from Australia that is of real concern:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/
😉
SABR Matt (11:55:25) :”We need to *NOT* measure surface temperature, but average surface ENERGY”.
Right!, and measured before dawn, when the minimum temperature is reached. (“net income” :->)
Was the Melbourne weather data one of the 5 large cities included? Normally these roads wear a wall to wall carpet of cars and trucks.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Melbourne+Australia&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Melbourne+VIC,+Australia&ll=-37.807586,144.970082&spn=0.000182,0.000406&t=h&z=21
How about looking at the paper,its methods and its conclusions before considering speculation about the selection of a small part of its data? Is that reasonable?
I’m from Mt Gambier, and lived there for 30 odd years (some of them decidedly odd). I went back there for a look about a year ago. I can assert first hand that the weather there now is just as lousy as it was in the 50s. No warming at all.
Juraj V. (11:08:28) :
“Anyone knows, which stations are used for CET record and whether they are adjusted for UHI?”
The Met Office mean HadCET diagnostics page is here:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
Note the plot of the three supposed reference stations for the CET at the lower right of the page.
The full-size image is available here:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/graphs/stations2mean_2009.gif
Note that all three stations have been flatlined throughout the latter half of the year. I wonder where they actually do get their data from? Could I be forgiven for believing that they make the data up?
I wonder if Anthony could comment?
IPCC’s Siberian temperatures show some interesting features in addition to the grids showing more warming than surrounding grids, despite having no weather stations.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part2_GlobalTempMeasure.htm
Grid Lat 65-70 Long 110-115 shows strong warming. It contains Zhigansk and Dzardzan stations but neither of these stations show any warming.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/findstation.py?datatype=gistemp&data_set=1&name=&world_map.x=601&world_map.y=46
Bob,
The climate station for Melbourne temperatures is apparently at Laverton Air Force Base http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&q=Lat%3A%20-37.86%20%20Lon%3A%20144.76&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl somewhere. However, they do quote the Melbourne station in all their records and breathless reports on how hot it is in the middle of a traffic choked intersection.