Willis: Reply to the Economist

Anthony,
would a PDF be available ?

Anthony something is amiss here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/darwin_zero7.png
compared to the giss plots:
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/1061/darwinrawhomgenisedgiss.png
In no way do the plots from Giss match those in the article.

The Hathaway prediction Graphic has been updated for December 2009.
The predicted maximum height remains the same but the predicted maximum timing has been shifted forward a few months :
http://picasion.com/pic15/07d489691ef74786dc651436c22bbcec.gif

hi, first timer here, Watts as in the Reagan era, use it up before our dating of all datage the apocallous dote.
‘The’ climate(change)? The world, the supremacy? All hogwash
how bout changing your microclimate one 5 story familytreehousing foundation, fun and funding package at a time (also known as seed, funny moneylike).
i gather you gather a lot of negativity here (from a 40 sec look, connectivity rationed to punish yall for too little support, mind you, have yet to write a will to make up for not dribbling this and thataways already).
anyhoo, just to save myself fruitless searching and frust:
(check the discuss. page too)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_D._Hamaker

I believe what we need to do now is to start a surfacestation type project that is focused on finding the raw daily data for the actual surfacestations around the world. Since we can not trust the data anymore, and we cant trust the custodians of the data, lets build an open source, station by station database of the RAW daily data.
A rebuilding of the US records data base with the original data is necessary. a PDF of the original data for each station with a txt file holding the same raw data, with a google map location for the station.
While some of the stations are available for free, some of them are behind government paywalls. That is not an issue for someone with a .gov email addy. I have one of those available, if we know which stations we want.
This would allow us to build a public wiki type project around the raw data. If we can get auditors for Australia and N.Z. locations to show what the known fudges are there. We can make this a global audit of public data base of raw temps.
I would suggest that any time a station is moved, we treat it like a new station. That is, each data series run is left to itself and designated as such. This way we can see what the *REAL* raw trend is.
Its time to FREE the DATA, MAKE it PUBLIC, and than we can argue about WHAT steps are applied to it.

Perhaps related, perhaps not. ‘.. something odd about Australia and New Zealand. …’
Early analysis of data released by UK Met Office from here
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/problems-to-watch-for-in-met-office.html
via
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/12/8/met-office-data.html

I’m sure this has already been answered before, so apologies for being a n00b.
Is there some stated algorithmic, reproducible method for deriving an “adjustment curve” from the data to apply to the data, or is it officially acknowledged as being done “by eye”? That is, is it purely judgement calls we’re looking at here, or is there an algorithm that any suitably skilled person could apply to derive an adjustment curve?

OT: The MET office release of a subset of the HADCRU3 data at the following link:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html
From the Q&A:
“1. Are the data that you are providing the “value-added” or the “underlying” data?
The data that we are providing is the database used to produce the global temperature series. Some of these data are the original underlying observations and some are observations adjusted to account for non climatic influences, for example changes in observations methods.
2. What about the underlying data?
Underlying data are held by the national meterological services and other data providers and such data have in many cases been released for research purposes under specific licences that govern their usage and distribution.
3. Why is there no comprehensive copy of the underlying data?
The data set of temperatures back to 1850 was largely compiled in the 1980s when it was technically difficult and expensive to keep multiple copies of the database.”
This is not the end – looks like this is only the start of the homogenising debate.

“they’ve been completely above board and objective in what they have carried out…”
“there’s no definitive evidence, is there, for global warming?”
“By the time we get definitive evidence, I think it will be much too late…”
The sleazy politician, pseudo-scientist, Pachauri, gives more than enough cause to defund the IPCC and pursue charges for malfeasance in office.
An example of intellectual stupity: There is no definitve evidence (scientific fact), but that is beside the point.
Peter Liss competes with Pachuri, by saying to the skeptics: Prove that global warming/climate change is not caused by man-made Carbon Dioxide emission.
These guys are practicing criminal science.
————————————————————-
IPCC chief Dr Rajendra Pachauri tells CNN’s Becky Anderson controversial climate e-mails were just colleagues “letting off steam”
Climate chief dismisses ‘climategate’
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/12/07/pachauri.ipcc.anderson.intv.cnn

L Gardy LaRoche (09:59:25) :
Anthony,
would a PDF be available ?
http://www.google.se/search?hl=en&as_q=html+to+pdf&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images

Wow, today even the coolest web page with news from computer HW and SW industry covered ClimateGate. The Inquirer is surely most witty, well written and technically superior web page that tells you what’s hot in Silicon Valley. Please read the post by PaulW. “I’ve seen the code”
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1565081/hackers-target-climate-science-boffins
“You don’t get a hockey stick when you 1) don’t use faked data, 2) include all the data (no cherry picking allowed, don’t use 5 outliers trees as your sole data points for the present, as they did! and they hid it for years!) 3) don’t use some data upside down, which they did, or 4) splice in thermometer data at the end of proxy data. I could go on…”

At last, playing in the right ball-park.
——————————–
What Is — and What Isn’t — Evidence of Global Warming
William M. Briggs
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/what-is-%e2%80%94-and-what-isnt-%e2%80%94-evidence-of-global-warming/?print=1
“Climategate” has everybody rethinking global warming. Many are wondering — if leading scientists were tempted to finagle their data, is the evidence for catastrophic climate change weaker than previously thought?
Actually, the evidence was never even evidence.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding — shared by nearly everybody about the nature of anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) — over exactly what constitutes evidence for that theory and what does not.
Remember when we heard that the icebergs were melting, that polar bears were decreasing in number, that some places were drier than usual and that others were wetter, that the ocean was growing saltier here and fresher there, and that hurricanes were becoming more terrifying? Remember the hundreds of reports on what happens when it gets hot outside?
All of those observations might have been true, but absolutely none of them were evidence of AGW.
Diminishing glaciers did not prove AGW; they were instead a verification that ice melts when it gets hot. Fewer polar bears did not count in favor of AGW; it instead perhaps meant that maybe adult bears prefer a chill to get in the mood. People sidling up to microphones and trumpeting “It’s bad out there, worse than we thought!” was not evidence of AGW; it was evidence of how easily certain people could work themselves into a lather.
No observation of what happened to any particular thing when the air was warm was direct evidence of AGW. None of it.
Every breathless report you heard did nothing more than state the obvious: Some creatures and some geophysical processes act or behave differently when it is hot than when it is cold. Only this, and nothing more.
Can you recall where you were when you heard that global warming was going to cause an increase in kidney stones, more suicides in Italy, larger grape harvests in France, and smaller grape harvests in France? How about when you heard that people in one country would grow apathetic, that those in another would grow belligerent, and — my favorite [1] — that prostitutes would be on the rise in the Philippines? That the world would come to a heated end, and that women and minorities would be hardest hit?
Not a single one of these predictions was ever evidence of AGW.
For years, it was as if there was a contest for the most outlandish claim of what might happen if AGW were true. But no statement of what might happen if AGW is true is evidence for AGW. Those prognostications were only evidence of the capacity for fanciful speculation. Merely this and nothing more.
So if observations of what happens when it’s hot outside don’t verify AGW, and if predictions of what might happen given AGW were true do not verify AGW, what does? Why did people get so excited?
In the late 1990s, some places on Earth were hotter than they were in the late 1980s. These observations were indirect — and not direct — evidence of AGW. The Earth’s climate has never been static; temperatures sometimes rise and sometimes fall. So just because we see rising temperatures at one point does not prove AGW is true. After all, temperatures have been falling [2] over the last decade, and AGW supporters still say their theory is true. Rising — or falling — temperatures are thus consistent with many theories of climate, not just AGW.
Climate scientists then built AGW models, incorporating the observed temperatures. They worked hard at fitting those models so that the models could reproduce the rising temperatures of the 1990s, while at the same time fitting the falling temperatures of the 1970s, etc. They had to twist and tweak — and with the CRU emails [3], it now appears they twiddled. They had to cram those observations into the models and, by God, make them fit, like a woman trying on her favorite jeans after Thanksgiving.
They then announced to the world that AGW was true — because their models said it was.
But a model fitting old data is not direct evidence that the theory behind the model is true. Many alternate models can fit that data equally well. It is a necessary requirement for any model, were it true, to fit the data, but because it happens to is not a proof that the model is valid.
For a model to be believable it must make skillful predictions of independent data. It must, that is, make accurate forecasts of the future. The AGW models have not yet done so. There is, therefore, no direct evidence for AGW.
The models predicted warmer temperatures, but it got cooler. One of the revealed CRU emails found one prominent gentlemen saying, “We can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
It is. But only if you were concerned that the AGW theory will be nevermore.

I’ll try that again, hopefully the link to JoNova will show:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/smoking-guns-across-australia-wheres-the-warming/#more-5172.

Sorry for the OT. Very Interesting from Newsbusters.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/terry-trippany/2009/12/08/met-global-warming-u-s-csv-data-dump-erroneous
Major Media Spread Erroneous U.K. Temperature Data
By Terry Trippany (Bio | Archive)
December 8, 2009 – 15:12 ET
If you go to Google today and search on the phrase “warmest decade” you will get a result set with thousands of breathless articles claiming that 2000 to 2009 is the warmest decade on record. This is on the cusp of an announcement from the UN climate talks in Copenhagen where world leaders are desperate to speed past Climategate and refocus the world’s attention on their apocalyptic global warming agenda.
The media that couldn’t bring themselves to report on the growing scandal surrounding falsified data is all on board with reporting this latest news. Yet it is clear that the Huffington Post, CBS News, the New York Times and others didn’t even bother to check the data that was released from the the UK MET (UK Government Department of Climate and Weather Change). If they had they would have immediately discovered what I found, that the US csv (comma delimited) data dump from 1851 to 2009 is erroneous in its compilation. The January column for each year shows period information instead of temperature records and the latitude appears transposed as well. It appears that they incorrectly shifted the column headers when compling the dump. (Load the raw file into Excel and compare it with the UK csv data to see the erroneous data columns side by side. Data provided by the Guardian UK.)
This data was provided as a means to “dampen the row over the hacked climate science emails”.
The Met Office also released the raw data from around 1,500 global monitoring stations in an effort to satisfy critics who have demanded that researchers be more transparent with their data in the wake of the email hacking row at the University of East Anglia. (UK Guardian, Met Office figures confirm noughties as warmest decade in recorded history)
Don’t jump to any conclusions that this is some sort of conspiracy or that the data itself is incorrect. That can not be surmised without extra information. It is just another indication of the desperation by a group of scientists, policy makers and scare mongers that are too sloppy to check their own facts and figures; even before releasing it to the whole world as proof to counter valid questions concerning the validity of their data.
With full unquestioning faith we are expected to buy into this sloppy sort of science as a foundation toward making public policy that will affect nations of the world’s people for generations to come. If they can’t even get the release of the simplest of data sets correct then what are we to wonder about what it is that they got wrong?

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray…
“The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.”
Wait till they figure out the whole reduced food thingy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text

Is Google censoring? Now I only show 8 mill hits for climategate. This am it was 34 mill, which is also low in my opinion. Now it auto suggests “climategate-Copenhagen” and the articles in the lead are all pro GW? Seems suspicious to me.

So what was the temperature yesterday in Darwin?
What I mean by that is when my weather forcaster tells me what the high and low was are they telling me the raw data or the value added data?

Hysteria (10:15:01) :
good – but will the author address the criticisms leveled in the comments – The most obvious being the rebuttal to his point about the absence of stations within 500km……. It is a great analysis – but let’s make sure it is right eh?

His article clearly stated that he was referring to other stations in 1941. I checked the Australian Bureau of Meterology website and all of the stations you listed as being within 500km have data starting after 1941.
The other issue, that was raised in the other thread, is that the ‘station zero’ data isn’t an actual station, but is the spliced data from two different stations (the Darwin Post Office, which was destroyed in 1941, and the Darwin Airport that has records starting from 1941). That’s not identified in the raw data he’s using.

The Jo Nova link is an excellent one – following through on Darwin Smoking Gun by looking at nearby stations.
Anthony might consider this report deserves a follow-on post of its own.
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/12/smoking-guns-across-australia-wheres-the-warming/

Regarding Darwin temperature data and the recently officially released HADCRU data subset I found this link on Climate Audit. It’s a rather interesting find:
http://www.di2.nu/200912/08a.htm

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/weather-data.shtml
Alice Springs: Station # 015590 23.7 S, 133.88 E
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
I get a slope difference that is really different for different months.
Are these the same stations; or is the difference between the town and airport 10 km away?
This is a nice area to do UHI.

“Some prefatory comments about adjustments to the temperature records are in order. The aim of adjustments is to make the temperature record more homogeneous,” i.e., a record in which the temperature change is due only to local weather and climate. However, caution is required in making adjustments, as it is possible to make the long-term change less realistic even in the process of eliminating an unrealistic short-term discontinuity.
Indeed, if the objective is to obtain the best estimate of long-term change, it might be argued that in the absence of metadata defining all changes, it is better not to adjust discontinuities.”
A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change
Hansen et al., 2001

Bret Baier on Climategate, American Physical Society Members Dispute 12-08-09

“”” View from the Solent (11:04:32) :
Perhaps related, perhaps not. ‘.. something odd about Australia and New Zealand. …’ “””
Watch your language there; we Colonials from the crusty side of the pizza, take a dim view of being described as odd; specially by folks on the cheesy side of the pizza. Yes we pull each other’s legs a lot; but we stick together when either one is being attacked. So we don’t have as many thermometers as you folks up topside have; but then we don’t care about it as much as you do. All we have to do is go outside to see that the climate is just fine and dandy.
And yes Wellington does put Chicago to shame when it comes to wind; I was there for Christmas 2006 (we don’t have a winter holiday at year’s end like Y’alls does up here) so we call it Christmas instead. Our rental car almost got blown from the downtown motel parking lot onto the Ferry boat. Funny thing was once we got out of the harbour, Cook Strait was as calm as a millpond; which can’t be relied on to happen a whole lot.

further to my previous post re gilham’s west australian met office figures for august, i just found that august is one of the months WMO is using for australia:
ABC: UN report singles out Australian weather
The WMO report said the heatwaves happened in January/February, when the hot
weather contributed to the disastrous Victorian bushfires, in August and
again in November..
The report is based on data from NASA and the US Government’s National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with data from the UK’s Hadley
Centre and the University of East Anglia, the university at the centre of a
scandal involving leaked emails from climate researchers.
The data is preliminary as 2009 has not yet ended. It will be revised early
next year.
Mr Jarraud said the WMO issued its 2009 summary early so it could be
factored into discussions at Copenhagen on global warming.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/un-report-singles-out-australian-weather-20091208-khtd.html

Sorry, can you delete these? The radio report had it wrong!

Ok, so I have some questions. We talk about temperature, raw, adjusted or homogenized. When a temperature is recorded from a thermometer at an airport or wherever, what is it? I am a BSME so my experience with thermodynamics relates to HVAC and combustion.
From a heating ventilation and air-conditioning viewpoint, temperature consists of two components, sensible heat and latent heat. We are generally concerned with changing a condition from one state to another and we use a change in an intrinsic property called enthalpy to do so. Enthalpy is basically the internal energy plus a pressure-volume term of a system whose units are kJ/Kg. The zero point for enthalpy is arbitrary, but a change in enthalpy is the change in internal energy (heat because we neglect work).
To change the temperature in a system we must reduce the sensible heat, which is measured by the temperature of the dry air mass. This is easy to do because it only requires a change of about 1 kJ/kg per degree C to do so; however, we cannot reduce the sensible heat until we reduce the latent heat. The latent heat is the energy tied up in the water vapor in the dry air and changing that can require several times the energy of dry air depending on the relative humidity.
For example, roughly estimating from a psychometric chart, the enthalpy of 40 degree C air at 20% relative humidity is the same as 25 degrees C air at 80% RH.
So my question is; are the temperatures recorded adjusted for RH and barometric pressure? If not, has anyone done so, because it is a rather simple calculation? My final question: Am I totally missing something where none of this matters?

I’ve often wondered whether i am worthy to post on you blogs anthony – with my limited knowledge of the science – and for that reason I have too often shirked away. Sadly, from my perspective, I am not highly educated in this field but I have known for a long time that there is definately something fishy going on – and climategate just confirms this. I notice you are far more willing recently (unsurprisingly) to put yourself in the conspiracy camp following the recent developments. Let me openly say that AGW is not the only conspiracy i believe in – and when will we have the courage to admit to ourselves, and to others, that that this misinformation is taking place across all aspects of the mainstream media. It was only a few months ago that you were mocking comments made on a subject to do with contrails/chemtrails. Lets think about this: with all the billions thrown left right and centre at proving unprecedented manmade warming, when there franlkly is’nt any, what’s to stop the orchestrators of this conspiracy to investigate highly sophisticated and covert means of manipulating the atmosphere to achieve the warming they so crave. This is really the greatest of all ironies – There’s nothing the alarmists want more than the reality of a runaway global warming catastrophe! What if military aviation programs are seeding cirrus clouds to trap heat, particularly to melt the arctic ice? Chemtrails cannot be ignored – nor can the many other conspiracies! Copenhagen will go ahead as planned and there’s nothing we can do about it – starting to have doubts yet?

yonason (15:23:02) :
I repeat (a comment I made on another thread about Darwin), go to Wolfram Alpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Enter the search terms darwin airport uk temperature
Then, from the popdown menu, select “All” to see that Darwin’s avg., temp has been a very constant 80DegC for the last 50 years.
well, it’s damn hot, but 80C? I hope that is 80F or they’re going to need a lot more beer…..

Can anyone point me to an instance where raw data was homogenized downward to account for increased urbanization at a site? I would have thought that would have been the most common form of homogenization process, but I’ve never actually seen one in action.
If so, we could check to see if any “steps to hell” emerge that would be the mirror of the “pyramid to heaven.” If they dont appear I’d think that would be pretty conclusive proof that what was going on was fraud, and not just an innocent result of regular corrections.

I was curious about the effects of the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) on Climate. The link to the graph follows the periods of Global warming and Cooling nicely. I also read they are not sure of the cause yet, some ideas but no solid proof.
http://digitaldiatribes.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/amoraw200811.jpg

JER0ME (17:28:48) :
yonason (15:23:02) :
LOL! Ooops, that WAS a typo. Yes, it was supposed to be “F,” not “C.” Thanks for catching that.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/weather-data.shtml
Alice Springs: Station # 015590 23.7 S, 133.88 E
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
I get a slope difference that is really different for different months.
Are these the same stations; or is the difference between the town and airport 10 km away?
This is a nice area to do UHI.

Make sure you’re comparing the same things. The BOM site has separate charts for mean maximum and mean minimum temperatures. The GISS site is graphing mean temperature, which I take to be the average of the maximum and minimum.
I took the two sets of data from the BOM site, averaged the annual figures and plotted a graph. It matched to the GISS graph pretty well for most of it, but for the last decade or so, the GISS data varied slightly. Most of the time it was less than the BOM data. That could be the quick and dirty way I did the calculation, though.

best post i have ever read anthony well done
brought tears to my eyes

Graeme W (18:30:40) :
I did the average max/min and I also saw that GISS was less than BOM. The really odd thing to do is plot JunBOM vs JunGISS and compare with DecBOM vs DecGISS
June gives me 0.8578x + 1.1415 and Dec gives me 0.6259x + 10.712.
I swear that the winter months have a different processing than the summer ones.
The GISS has about twice the temperature increase as the BOM; 0.0149x vs. 0.0086x.
Very very odd.

Willis Eschenbach (19:17:39) :
Jack in Oregon (11:03:34) :
“Since we can not trust the data anymore, and we cant trust the custodians of the data, lets build an open source, station by station database of the RAW daily data.”
This gives me a creepy sick feeling.
Thanks for your post Willis, very well done.

Mr. Willis Eschenbach
I want to let you know I thank you for putting in the time and effort to get the actual temps from Darwin and show how the data has been changed.
Have you contacted the Group that put in the changes to learn why they did this?
If you go on RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt does give some explanations. When I complained about temperature adjustments he sent me to a link explaining why they did this in the U.S. I did not find the reasons valid and it does not seem there are valid reasons for what you find.
But when I read RealClimate and the posts it does not seem like the players are involved in a deliberate hoax. From my own experience on this web page, it seems everyone is quite serious and actually afraid of the runaway Greenhouse that will kill off most species currently alive.

Willis Eschenbach (18:51:25)
Sorry to add to your workload but some of the most important charts flow off the righ side of the page in the pdf that I downloaded.

I am seeing this correction more and more.
It starts as level, followed by a small drop and then level again, then a sharp rise. When I wrote the bit on the AGW Virus I did not expect that it would actually appear to be so prevalent world-wide. Seriously, many sites appear to have applied the same trick so that their corrections would all be in line with each other. It is a virus that has infected climate science.
The question in my mind is how much of climate science, and how many research papers can actually be traced back to those three lines of code.
Anthropogenic Global Warming Virus Alert.
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103

Queenslander! (20:42:57) :
GISS has a Yamba record from 1900.
The Yamba Lighthouse was built in 1880 but was demolished in 1955 and replaced with an automatic lighthouse.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501945890000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

E.M.Smith (16:20:23) “So you have to watch both hands at all times to see which data ended up where… Care to play again? Ok, the data is going under this walnut shell in the middle, now, watch closely and place your bets….”
The homogenization I’ve looked at is a serious mess. Sorting it out will be very time-consuming.

Willis Eschenbach (21:58:01) notes that Yamba only started in 1944. The other interesting thing (as an Australian) is that the three stations are thousands of kilometres apart. Darwin is tropical, Alice Springs is desert and Yamba is temperate. How you can even average these disparate locations and come up with a single figure that represents Australia is beyond me. Darwin’s records run from 10.4C to 38.9C (28.5C range), Alice Springs’ from -7.5C to 45.2C (53C range).
Also when you look at the GHCN categorisation for each of these locations, they are pretty much meaningless. I assume that these land types are fed into their temperate adjustment generators. Darwin is listed as Sea, whatever that means. It is in fact one of the biggest (in land area) military/civilian airports in Australia.

David (22:32:35) :
Maybe this is not related, but maybe it is. Why not just take the daily temperature range (Tmax, Tmin) and plot that instead? Then you have a range instead of a point, which would be more useful. Wouldn’t the effect of CO2 be much more pronounced on Tmin than Tmax?
These, and other similar analysis show that there is no meaning in a global temperature and in a global temperature anomaly.
The physics is shaky all over and according to George E.Smith the statistics is absolutely inadequate too.(Nimquist or so).
Temperature measurements are inextricably attached to the location through the gray body radiation which varies from geographical spot to geographical spot. Temperature changes because of radiation, i.e. changes in energy input output ( and convection and evaporation and precipitation), but there is no algorithm to go simply from temperature to energy changes and vice verso, and it is the energy that is important and a constant of the equations and can be summed and averaged the world over.
The only use is as maps of temperature and maps of anomalies, that show heating and cooling quantitatively. Integrating over the globe is nonsense.
The effect of greenhouse gases and clouds shows at the low temperatures. Humid nights are warmer than dry ones. It would be interesting to see the high and lows of dry deserts . That is where the effect of CO2 could be untangled from the effect of water vapor, but I do not know of temperature sensors in deserts. Maybe could be done with the satellite records.

Recent Solar Indices have been updated by NOAA:
2009 11 7.7 4.2 0.55 -1.0 -1.0 73.6 -1.0 3 -1.0
Ap yet again at 3!
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/RecentIndices.txt

Having seen the current edition of the Economist (“Stopping climate change”), I sent this letter :
“Sir,
A front page headline which reminds us of King Canute.
A leader, a 14-page special report. Several articles: Asia: back to basics, emissions trading row; Science and technology: what lies beneath, more climate change; Business and technology: Chinese wind, carbon management software, shale gas.
In all of this, no analysis of the CRU/Penn State etc. revelations. No analysis of the FOIA.zip file. No analysis of the e-mails (the “tiny scraps”). No analysis of the Fortran code (“fudge factor”??). No analysis of the data. No mention of the “Harry_read_me.txt” file.
No journalism. No more “severe contest”. Just “unworthy, timid ignorance”.
Shame on you.
Richard Barnes
Luxembourg”
I received the following reply :
“Dear Mr Barnes,
We ran a leader and a lead piece in our Science section on the CRU story the week before my special report. Nothing further had happened on the story, other than Rajendra Pachauri saying that the IPCC took it seriously, so there was no reason to return to it.
Best wishes,
Emma Duncan
Deputy Editor
The Economist
25 St James’s Street
London SW1A 1HG
020 7830 7046”
How reassuring to know that Mr Rajendra Pachauri is taking this “seriously”. His speech on the 7th of December suggests that Ms Duncan’s remark is correct.
Note that Ms Duncan says “my special report.” The Economist is put to bed on a Thursday, so the dates between which “nothing further had happened” are the 26th November to the 3rd December.
Please feel free to contact Ms Duncan on the number provided, or by email ( emmaduncan@economist.com ) if you are aware of any issues that arose between those dates.

Have already sent links to the BBC’s newsnight programmed pointing to the smoking gun, have also successfully had a letter published in the local paper and have complained to the PCC regarding the Sun newspapers useage of disinformation ( a polar bear with a dead half eaten cub in its mouth) and requested the RAW data from the met office amongst other things.
I advise all others to do the same and start to apply pressure, otherwise theyll think they can just sweep this under the carpet

I took a look at the data for Ross-on-Wye from the GHCN database. I took this one because Ross is an old town with long records, untroubled by very heavy traffic and therefore any Stevenson screen there is unlikely to have been tainted by “adjustments”. This was the first station I looked at – NO GLOBAL WARMING!
I would give you a link but the GHCN database is down. What a curious coincidence….
Anyway, I’m looking in detail at the statistics for Stornoway now. A small island in the far north. Had hoped that the data would be untainted but it seems the Stevenson screen is next to an airport – bet that wasn’t there in the 30’s! Oh, and it now has electronic thermometers for remote reading – bet they didn’t have those in the 30’s either!
Anyway, the means for the annual distribution show a 0.35Celsius increase in the last 10 years compared to the first 10 years. Problem is the averaged monthly show a variation ranging from -0.03 to +1.0 Celsius taken over the same period. That tells you that you can’t rely on the annual means because they don’t necessarily reflect the means of the underlying distributions. Furthermore even in the monthly averages you can see a variation of 6Celsius over each January from 1931 to 2008. This is due to what is commonly referred to as weather. So the Climate change signal is 0.35Celsius hidden in a weather signal of 0.35Celsius. Is that statistically significant? I don’t think so.

The BIG business behind global warming/climate change is this:
1.-They (the beneficiaries of this swindle) will pay CARBON CREDITS US$3.- per hectare of third world forest.
2.-As each hectare of forest captures 5500 tons of CO2…
3.-They will sell to carbon polluters each forest / hectare at US$137500 (US$25/ton of CO2-reference EU price now-)
-They, of course, won´t care for the conservation or whatever of the forests.
-The big “spread”makes possible the bribing of any “objections” in between.
–It´s the perfect financial bubble ever conceived.
Now…my bet is that this “business” will fail before it really begins.
The best advice, is investment in land property. That makes people independent from the financial system, i.e. from them.

anna v (23:15:14) :
The effect of greenhouse gases and clouds shows at the low temperatures. Humid nights are warmer than dry ones. It would be interesting to see the high and lows of dry deserts . That is where the effect of CO2 could be untangled from the effect of water vapor, but I do not know of temperature sensors in deserts. Maybe could be done with the satellite records.
I shall be looking at the Oz datasets soon (see my comment on the original post regarding how easily it can be done). I think Oz has more desert, or at least v low humidity, weather stations than any other country, even the US. I may be wrong, but as about 75% of Oz is very, very dry, I suspect not.

Incredibly OT but I just went back over the code I was writing this morning (php, so not exactly rocket science) and noticed that I’d written a comment over a particularly hacky bit of code that said “Harry thinks this is a TERRIBLE HACK”. I don’t work with anyone called Harry – or anyone at all since I’m freelance. I think I may have been tired.
Makes me wonder if other developers have started referring to Harry in their code.

Here’s a letter to the editor from the Calgary’s The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, Dec 8, 2009. I have not edited this in any way.
As a scientist, I have never doubted that the carefully contrived natural balance developed over millenniums is being seriously impacted by the ceaseless activity of humans.
Exponential population growth is leading to an impasse and each individual’s footprint, be it carbon or waste, is depleting the delicate buffers of nature’s systems. Watching the debate, I am reminded of the fatal human flaw, the power of denial.
– Carolyn Inch, Ottawa

Cold air drifting down from the North, that can’t be accurate? The ice is melting on the poles as well as on Greenland, surely that must be warm air drifting down now, causing the recent snow storms in the western and central US of A?
i am confused

A great lead story on this site and a challenge for Canadians capable of sorting thru’ this stuff
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/

On the basis of these data, we’re supposed to reduce our food intake, and consumption (thus our carbon footprint) to an amount, in order to reach it, that will reduce our caloric intake down under 1100 calories a day, we’d have to sit in the dark, without heat, and we would not be able to travel by any means save on foot, we cannot eat meat, and most plants are off the menu, meanwhile reducing our population growth and existing population…
On the grounds that millions yet unborn may be harmed?
So we’re supposed to kill millions (or billions) currently living to save millions yet unborn that *may* be harmed in 50 years time, while reducing the population so they are not ever born?
Makes perfect sense to this total idiot…

A total idiot (08:22:45) :
Don’t worry, they won’t do that, that will diminish global markets.( their golden calf ) It is all about global power in their hands, global economy. Fossil fuels consumption will not change, price of fossil fuels will increase of course. Life as we know it will not change a bit..owners will change, and freedom…forget it!
However…they do not govern the universe, though they may have thought they do.
There is always a beginning and an end for everything…you know…what goes up must come down…
He who laughs the last laughs the better!…☺

I was intrigued by this infamous 1960 – Hide the decline and if NOAA was also part of it. Well, this would need to be checked with other “corrected” temperature at different sites but from their own page, I find it quite odd that the corrected data depart from a certain slope to a steeper slope right about 1960…
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif

I have never heard of any “proof” that homogenization can be done accurately. Couldn’t a reasonable test be devised for the purpose?
I would think that just plain common sense would lead one to assume that any temperature “adjustments” that don’t take into account such things for example as frontal passages, down-slope winds, precipitation, clouds and a few other things are absolutely ridiculous.

Not sure if it was intentional, but I laughed at the title’s reference to an original Battlestar Galactica episode “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero”. Kudos to Willis. Now to crawl back in my nerd cave 🙂

REPLY: and the article on WUWT in fact credits Mr. Daly. Some people just can’t read. – A

Well, it was in the ‘Further reading’ section; if elsewhere, I missed it. Sue me. /Mr Lynn

anna v (23:15:14) “[…] Humid nights are warmer than dry ones. It would be interesting to see the high and lows of dry deserts . That is where the effect of CO2 could be untangled from the effect of water vapor […]”
Please let us know if you find anything further regarding this approach to untangling (i.e. for non-UHI sites!)

I’ve been suggesting a transactional form of record for temperatures, following well-established accounting systems structures, to make the components of every temperature value (raw data, UHI/location/altitude/etc adjustments, overall adjustments etc) visible.
But reading Steve Mosher’s post above, a bleedingly obvious thought has occurred.
What if the major temperature data series are already stored in this form?
What’s made public is the single figure for Tmin and Tmax per day. Could it be that the components of each are actually available anyway?
After all, a lot of the confusion about the temperature data is caused because that single figure is what is ‘disclosed’. But if, under that single figure, lies the sort of transactional series that I’m urging for any open-source replacement, we could all save a great deal of work.
Because one of the amazing things to be deduced from the harry_readme file, is that the CRU have simply no clue about data archiving or versioning, source code control, or in fact any of the things that capability maturity models have been banging on about for over a decade.
Harry was working with a plethora of text outputs, and this is what’s publicly disclosed every time an FOIA or similar request is lodged. But that doesn’t mean to say that, tucked away right at the base of the entire edifice, isn’t a proper transactional data structure.
Seems to me that a bit of digging under the FOIA or equivalent, to establish the core data structures used by the major series, would be very worthwhile indeed.

I bring AGW demotivational posters to share with AGW fanatics during these difficult times. Feel free to copy!
http://agwdemotivated.blogspot.com/

This is well worth a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZW-BF70TsI
“Criminal Fraudsters” … they can’t “hide the decline” any longer, they either have to put up their data to real peer review in front of a jury, or shut up and effectively admit they were committing fraud!
And that will bring down the whole Global Warming sham!

Professor Bob Carter uses the scientific method on the popular theory with global warming being linked to CO2 levels. He examnines the hypothesis and it fails the test. Inconvenient Truth author Al Gore would find his presentation contradicted by this presentation? Will kyoto`s greenhouse reduction goals be in vain?
AGW-RELIGION RULE ONE
NEVER discuss the science.
Attack the man.
Repeat the mantra
Climate Change – Is CO2 the cause? – Pt 1 of 4

Climate change – Is CO2 the cause? – Pt 2 of 4

Climate Change – Is CO2 the cause? – pt 3 of 4

Climate Change – Is CO2 the cause?- pt 4 of 4

Nick Stokes (14:16:26) :
[“Tenuc (13:42:05) :
Great piece of work, Willis, and now at last it seems we’re getting down to the nuts and bolts of why CRU/GISS/IPCC took great pains to stop access to the raw data. This deception has been exposed in all it’s despicable glory.”]
“This is totally muddled. Willis has queried GHCN adjustments to Darwin’s raw data (which have been available for years). CRU and GISS have published their data for Darwin, and it shows no significant adjustment to the raw GHCN data that Willis used. The IPCC used CRU data, not GHCN adjusted.”
CRU/GISS/IPCC scientist are the ones who lead the deception – I’m sure GHCN have to fall into line and ‘follow the consensus’.

Great piece of work, Willis, and now at last it seems we’re getting down to the nuts and bolts of why CRU/GISS/IPCC took great pains to stop access to the raw data. This deception has been exposed in all it’s despicable glory.

As I predicted (and probably most here) this ain’t gonna go away. Its what we call positive feedback. I’d venture to suggest… say that in 2 weeks time AGW might in fact be stone dead… or at least that the 36% that believes its caused by humans in the USA will have reached maybe 15% and so on and on. At this stage the polticians will give it up by simply “forgettin bout it” LOL so will the newspapers and maybe even this site will slowly fade away as it will no longer be a subject of interest… AGW that is…

A contemporary question: Will Steve McIntyre’s FOI requests to NASA be honored and Mann-made global warming be thereby verified?

has anyone posted this:
Spectator: The smoking iceberg
by Melanie Phillips
So how did the Met Office/WMO pull off this particular ‘trick’ (to coin a phrase)?
At least part of the answer would appear to be provided by an amazing set of disclosures by Willis Eschenbach at the Watts Up With That blog….ETC
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5620571/the-smoking-iceberg.thtml

Just did a major scan of all MSM in NA and ma finding very little prominent stories on Cope 15. Ant theories on this lack of coverage of what is supposed to be a major conference? Maybe I am missing something?

Sorry, I meant to delete ‘an entire’ in front of ‘an entire years’. I mean that it would take loads of actual hourly observations, noting all circumstances relevant to radiative forcing, to really determine whether or not radiative forcing plays an integral part in climate fluctuation. I may be wrong, but I would like to know how.

re previous SH v NH Ice (should have added temps as well sorry). I have observed this time map (days)
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a.fnl.anim.html
regularly and have noticed that invariably/repeatedly, when “cold in SH pole”, “Hot in NH pole” then a flip/flop occurs “Hot in SH Pole and Cold in NH Pole”. Anyone noticed as well?. Probably described already.. Is this a mechanism of earth temp control to within ~14oC?

Da Capo:
. Is there a meaning to temperature measurements and predictions?
Absolutely yes for the locality. From airport conditions to planting conditions to dressing conditions, our lives improve by knowing the temperature,wind, humidity etc, and the predictions for the locality. When I go to my vacation cottage I do not look at the weather in New York, but at Corinth, Greecce.
. Is there a meaning in trends of temperature?
Yes. Except they are not reliable for more than a few days presently. Almanacs (distilled folk wisdom from previous experiences?) have a use though, and farmers seem to rely on them.
. Is there a meaning in averaging all temperature trends globally and projecting for a century?
A qualitative, yes. Qualitative because we do not know the underlying physics/mathematics/statistics to the detail needed for a rigorous summing and averaging to get one number. Qualitative also because the meaning is fuzzy: it might tell us that a little ice age is arriving , it might tell us a medieval maximum is coming, but not more.
There is no way to get from these numbers watts/meter^2 in a one to one fashion with reasonable errors. The equations needed are an enormous number and depend on constants that have not been measured, like the gray body constants that differ in microlocalities and make the microclimate , the wind turbulances, the evaporation sublimation, photsynthesis water use etc.etc. . This makes the problem intractable by even envisaged computer power for the future.
What the GCMs do is whitewash over the physics problems with approximations and assumptions that cannot hold water in a rigorous physics/statistics/mathematics analysis. This is evident from the weather predictions, that are given by programs with similar mathematics/assumptions/logic. The predictions fail after a few days.
At best, GCMs are models of an ideal world with ideal black body behavior that allows them to connect temperatures to watts/meter^2. This cannot apply to the real world, to the accuracy of 1watt/meter^2 that is claimed to boot. It is a video game after a few iterations.
In this whole mess how can the CO2 contribution be untangled except with handwaving by using the GCM virtual world as if it represents the real world? And the western world is asked to commit hara kiri on the basis of these video games.
This is an inherent problem that cannot be overcome with more computing power, as others have analyzed. The system is chaotic, it has deterministic equations but they have to be applied in too many three dimensional and fractal ( think of forests, think of craggy mountains, wavy oceans) localities and times to be able to process in a digital computer.
The only future for climate modeling lies in chaos and complexity techniques, which is a vigorous new field in all sciences growing by leaps and bounds. Tsonis et al have made a start, but it is only a start.

David thanks for explanation on SH NH Ice etc… The point in general too is I think that no one here is/was particularly interested in denying AGW. I certainly believed it when I saw the old hadcrut graphs on wikipedia etc..> After looking into it more carefully ie Svensmarks theory, SM analysis on tree ring data ect we started to look into and looking even at the cooked data it does not stand up. This affair climategate has now confirmed it further. I think this will sink in to the majority of people and scientists as they realize that since their childhood the climate has not changed.

I start to think that this kind of blog science is actually destructive. My guess is that a year from now hundreds of posts have been produced alluding fraud and incompetence, thousands of cheering comments have been written praising the free thinking scientist at WUWT, but in the end the sum of the nitpicks (some legit and some not) will probably have an impact on the global trend that is a full order of magnitude less than the decadal trends in the official record, that is, instead of being a nail in the coffin for the official record it will be an affirmation of the robustness of the official record. The problem is that no one will take a step back and contemplate this fact. The lasting impression will be that climate scientist are all frauds while the actual results of the blogposts add up to confirm the exact opposite. It’s kind of absurd and in my opinion destructive.

steven mosher (23:49:41) :
I think if you look back at the FOI requests CRU very early on said that the free data was already available at GISS / GHCN. It’s just that no one believed them

Its seems that CA has shut down…or hes sleeping… We are all watching as it unfolds….No need for more auditing its (AGW) collapsing on its own…

Anthony, This chart is what liberals are using to say “the science is settled”.
Someone needs to construct a similar graph that represents the unmanipulated change in temperatures.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/a-picture-thats-worth-a-thousand-stolen-emails/

You need a sticky for the one by the sixth-grader, too, just in case any talking heads or info-babes do a drive by of this site. It’s probably still way over their heads, but they might be able to get something out of it.

Great work Anthony. I’m seeing links to your research all over the web.
I’m also noticing folk talking more about CO2’s effect on ‘Ocean Acidification’, shifting the pH down from around 8.2. Lots of discussion on effects on plankton, shellfish, food chain, etc. My intitial research seems to indicate that ocean pH was probably about the same as many years ago when CO2 concentrations were much higher.
The key concern seems to be (relatively) big pH changes in the last 30 years (naturally, caused by man-made CO2) that may not allow sea life to adapt quickly enough. I get that life ALWAYS adapts, but perhaps not a great idea if we lose a big chunk of our food supply in the transition period.
As always, I’m skeptical of big headline threats and would appreciate if anyone could point me in the direction of the scientific equivalent of ‘non-homogenised’ ocean CO2 research.

looks like “climategate” autosuggest completely taken off google news now. You have to type the whole word. Its obvious google is involved in suppresiing its further dissemination

You need only one to wreck everything!
from the Times
“One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said. “

Cassandra King:
“Your logic escapes me completely, if blogs like this did not exist there would be far less awareness of the fraud and fakery within the climate science cabal.”
There is a post right now about Peter and his dad; they’ve found a huge UHI signal. This signal is due to a bug in peter and his dad’s spreadsheet. When this bug is fixed the result from the spreadsheet will be probably be in line with the scientific consensus: UHI has a minor impact. I mean, think about it, such a huge signal would have been picked up a long time ago by the math savvy people at climate audit if nothing else.
The problem is that an endless stream of accusations of fraud will be produced here about the official temp record. My guess is that the sum of the legit points will have about 0 impact on the actual records, and the majority of the accusations will have as much merit as the you tube film by Peter and his dad. So, we will have 100 accusations of fraud, and 0 impact on the official record. What would be a sensible conclusion? Well, maybe that there was no fraud to begin with, but It seems that no one here will ever reach that conclusion, instead they will look at the 100 accusation and conclude that the official record is falsified 100 times, while the truth of the matter is that the official record has been vindicated 100 times. That is a huge problem.

Fredrick wrote: There is a post right now about Peter and his dad; they’ve found a huge UHI signal. This signal is due to a bug in peter and his dad’s spreadsheet. When this bug is fixed the result from the spreadsheet will be probably be in line with the scientific consensus: UHI has a minor impact. I mean, think about it, such a huge signal would have been picked up a long time ago by the math savvy people at climate audit if nothing else.
——————————————
If you chose a specific location, say, a street corner in London, and had a temperature reading from say, Dec. 10th, 1880 and another one from this morning, how would you correlate them? How can you possibly say that conditions today would require a 1 or 2 or 3 degree adjustment with any level of certainty? And the same goes for the countryside where forests may have been cleared for development.
How can you possibly do this with any sense of certitude? Given that uncertainty, how can you possibly predict what temperature will be in fifty or a hundred years with any confidence whatsoever?
And, on the subject of “bugs,” what about the “bugs” noted by hapless Harry
in CRU’s code?
As for your “guess,” until all these issues are adequately explained, it’s as worthless as any 100 year prediction of imminent catastrophe.
Has temperature risen? Probably, although not even that is adequately proven given all the secrecy surrounding the data and code. Has it risen because of CO2 emissions? Correlation is not causation.
Given some of the monstrous solutions to solve a problem that has not adequately been identified, skepticism is the only wholly defensible position at this point in the debate.