Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
This replaced the previous sticky, and I have this comment about the Economist. Bad form and unprofessional to use the word “denialists”. For WUWT readers who wish to complain: letters@economist.com or use their online form here. – Anthony
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ECONOMIST
On Dec 11th, the Economist published an unsigned article attacking both me and my work. This open letter is my reply.
TO: The Person Unwilling to Sign Their Economist Article
Dear Sir or Madam;
Recently, you wrote a scathing article about me in the Economist discussing my post called The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero. Some of it was deserved, but most was undeserved and false. The URL for your unprinicpled attack is http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/12/trust_scientists … trust_scientists? Trust_scientists?? Have you read the CRU emails?
But I digress … you begin by quoting from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, viz:
A change in the type of thermometer shelter used at many Australian observation sites in the early 20th century resulted in a sudden drop in recorded temperatures which is entirely spurious. It is for this reason that these early data are currently not used for monitoring climate change. Other common changes at Australian sites over time include location moves, construction of buildings or growth of vegetation around the observation site and, more recently, the introduction of Automatic Weather Stations.
The impacts of these changes on the data are often comparable in size to real climate variations, so they need to be removed before long-term trends are investigated.
While this is true, it doesn’t apply. None of the GHCN adjustments are from any of those sources. This is because the GHCN does not adjust for location moves. Nor does it adjust for construction of buildings, nor for any of the other items listed. The GHCN uses none of those to make its adjustments. So all of that is totally meaningless.
Next, you say the “explanation for the dramatic change in 1941 is simple”:
As previously advised, the main temperature station moved to the radar station at the newly built Darwin airport in January 1941. The temperature station had previously been at the Darwin Post Office in the middle of the CBD, on the cliff above the port. Thus, there is a likely factor of removal of a slight urban heat island effect from 1941 onwards. However, the main factor appears to be a change in screening. The new station located at Darwin airport from January 1941 used a standard Stevenson screen. However, the previous station at Darwin PO did not have a Stevenson screen. Instead, the instrument was mounted on a horizontal enclosure without a back or sides. The postmaster had to move it during the day so that the direct tropical sun didn’t strike it! Obviously, if he forgot or was too busy, the temperature readings were a hell of a lot hotter than it really was.
This might make sense if there were any “dramatic change in 1941”. But as I clearly stated in my article, <b>there is no such dramatic change</b>. The drop in temperature was gradual and lasted from 1936 to 1940. The change from 1940 to 1941 was quite average. So that claim of yours is nonsense as well. In any case, the change in screening did not coincide with the 1941 move. In my article I cited a reference to a picture of a Stevenson Screen in use in Darwin at the turn of the century. Perhaps you didn’t bother to read that.
So, to sum up your first arguments, changes in the Stevenson Screens and other local conditions cannot be the explanation for any of the GHCN adjustments because 1) the GHCN doesn’t use local conditions to make adjustments and 2) the timing of the screen change is wrong. In addition, there was no “dramatic change in 1941”.Next, you point out two actual mistakes I did make.
First, in my proofreading I did not catch that I that I had written “the 1941 adjustment” when I meant the 1930 adjustment. That should have been obvious to me, because there is no 1941 GHCN adjustment. My bad.
Second, I had said that the Darwin temperature data couldn’t have been adjusted by using the GHCN method. This method requires five neighboring stations to which Darwin can be compared. Why couldn’t the GHCN method be used? I said it was because in the earlier time periods like the 1930s, there were no such stations covering that time period within 500 km of Darwin. I was wrong, it fact there is one such station.
Neither of these errors of mine affect my point, which is that there are not enough neighboring stations to adjust Darwin using the main GHCN method. The GHCN folks mention this possibility, saying:
Also, not all stations could be adjusted. Remote stations for which we could not produce an adequate reference series (the correlation between first-difference station time series and its reference time series must be 0.80 or greater) were not adjusted. The homogeneity-adjusted version of GHCN includes only those stations that were deemed homogeneous and those stations we could reliably adjust to make them homogeneous.
Unfortunately, they adjusted Darwin anyway. Consider the GHCN adjustment in 1920. To find five stations around Darwin covering 1920, you have to go out 1,250 km. Nor is there any guarantee that those stations will be suitable. You need to have five stations with an 80% correlation with the Darwin record … I wish you the best of luck finding those five stations.
So while my statement about stations nearer than Daly Waters was wrong as you point out (there is one nearer station that covers the 1930 adjustment), my point was correct – there are not enough neighboring stations to adjust Darwin using the GHCN method. The first GHCN adjustment to Darwin was a single year adjustment in 1901. To get five “neighboring” stations for that adjustment, you have to go out 1728 km. You fail to deal with that issue at all. Instead, you say:
“So is it reasonable, if the GHCN is using complex statistical tools to adjust the temperature readings at Darwin based on surrounding stations, that they might come up with the figures they came up with? Sure. No. Yes. I have no idea. And neither does Mr Eschenbach. Because in order to judge that, you would have to have a graduate-level understanding of statistical modeling. … I don’t understand that formula. I don’t have the math for it.”
“Surrounding stations”? We’re talking about stations a thousand km away and more, not surrounding stations.
And while I am sorry to hear of the lacunae in your math education, please don’t make the foolish assumption that others are similarly limited. I have no problem with the GHCN math. If you truly have no idea on the question as you say … then why are you excoriating my ideas on the question?
Nor is it inherently a complex question. The question is, should temperatures more than a thousand km away from Darwin be used to arbitrarily adjust Darwin’s temperature by a huge amount? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
Next, as an aside you make the scurrilously false statement that I said that claims of damage due to sea level rise in Tuvalu “stemmed from attempts by locals to blame subsidence problems on the developed world, and cash in on it”. I said no such thing nor do I believe it. The claims stemmed from misguided environmentalists.
Next, you say “He makes it sound as if he’s just happened to stumble across this one site whilst perusing a debate over climate change in northern Australia. But as his link to that conversation from 2000 makes clear, Mr Eschenbach is already aware that climate change denialists have been trumpeting the apparent anomalies at Darwin for nine years.” BZZZZT, poor understanding of the implications of chronology. I looked up the conversation after I stumbled across Darwin. How dare you accuse me of lying? As I said, I went to AIS to see if what Professor Karlen had said was true. I called up a list of all of the stations in Australia that covered 1900-2000. Darwin was the first on the list, so that’s the one I looked at. Try it and see. You accusation is both wrong and totally unfounded.
“[Climate change denialists] do so because of that errant data at Darwin from before 1941, which makes it look as though there was a cooling trend there. The fact that climate-change researchers have to do a particularly strong correction on the data at Darwin, because they moved their dang instruments from the downtown post office to the airport, makes Darwin a perfect place to look for support if you want to claim that climate-change scientists are cooking the data.”
While a correction in Darwin is perhaps necessary, it is cannot be because they “moved their dang instruments” in January of 1941. LOOK AT THE DATA. There is no big change in January of 1941. It occurred gradually over the previous five years. So your theory falls apart upon the simplest examination of the facts.
Next you say: “Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.”
Your understanding of statistics is as poor as your understanding of chronology. The statistics used by GHCN are average college level tools. You are dazzled by the fact that you don’t understand them, so you make the incredibly foolish assumption that no one without “a PhD in a related field” can understand them either. Some of us actually paid attention in class, you know.
Finally, you use your closing arguments to cheerlead for peer review. Curiously, I agree with you in theory … but the peer review system in climate science is badly broken. First, as the CRU emails clearly show, it has been subjected to enormous “old-boy” pressures to pass through bad studies without a second glance, and to deny opposing papers a fair hearing. How do you think we got the Hockeystick and its cousins? Here’s Phil Jones from the emails, talking about keeping peer-reviewed papers out of the IPCC report:
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
And you give your article the URL “trust_scientists”???
Second, the peer-review system is ripe for abuse. This is because the reviewers often know who the author is, while the reviewers (like you) hide in anonymity. This invites malfeasance. The system needs to be changed so that after the review, the [authors] sign their names to the paper as well as reviewers. At present, we have no way of knowing whether the paper was seriously reviewed by inquiring scientists, or simply passed through by the authors friends.
So I, like you, support peer review. I just want a peer review system that works. It must be double blind during the review period, with neither the reviewers nor the author knowing the others’ names. And the reviewers should reveal their names at the end, so that we know it wasn’t just the author’s best mates doing the author a favor.
Since we have an easily manipulated system instead of a real peer review system, I opt for public peer review by putting my work on the web. This lets anyone, even anonymous innumerates like yourself, register your objections.
Finally, the Economist did not contact me before publishing an article full of false accusations, incorrect assumptions and wrong statements … looks like peer review is not the only system in trouble here. I thought journalists were under an obligation to check their facts before making accusations …
Willis Eschenbach
“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
Sorry mods, can you edit my post above with the new Richard Dawkins link:
http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=101888
I mistakenly put up a link to reply to a post there!
Thank you for the sticky! I’d missed this excellent posting in the flood. I’ve added a link to it in my persistent GHCN analysis aggregator link:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/ncdc-ghcn-airports-by-year-by-latitude/
There is another look at the adjusted vs not at:
http://savecapitalism.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/ghcn-database-adjustments/
that has some rather interesting graphs of the differences induced by adjustment.
IMHO, NCDC via GHCN are the START of the “data corruption” chain, then GISS via GIStemp and UEA via HadCRUT, pick it up and put frosting on it.
GHCN / NCDC / NOAA need a great deal more digging…
Couldn’t you ad a list of ‘Favorite posts, worth rereading’ or something like that, i addition to the ‘most recent posts’. And keep the say five best ones available there?
Dang it… The GHCN Analysis aggregator link is :
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/
the other one is a new look at airport bias, not the persistent aggregator…
(Proof read, then hit submit…)
Excellent idea of making this thread a sticky. It has been clear to me, recently, that disputing AGW on establishment-chosen battlefields is wasteful at best.
Too many ‘sceptical’ arguments are rapidly diverted and thus diluted by misdirection.
Take the recent televised SMc debate in which the other ‘sceptical’ contributer allowed himself to be diverted by his opponent.
That simply muddied the debate in favour of the official line.
Meanwhile, SMc stuck to the subject on hand. This is the strategy that will reap the greatest dividends. Chip, chip and chip away at the weakest points. Identify these weak points and focus on them and them alone.
This thread may turn out to be a weak point.
If so, pursue it, publicise it and push it to the public. Sow the seeds of doubt in one area, make sure they germinate and grow then move on.
If this study does, indeed, demonstrate a distortion of reported facts then curiousity will seek other examples.
AGW is a mighty fortress. It cannot be brought down at all if its foundations are ‘robust’. It may not even be brought down, if it’s foundations are shaky, if its besiegers spread their efforts too much.
Chip, chip and chip away but only at the weakest points.
Bret Baier on Climategate, American Physical Society Members Dispute 12-08-09
bill (10:19:42) :
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.
Your “Giss” needs to be identified as to “which GISS”… It looks to me like the “As Combined” but “before homoginization” but you would need to go to their web site to sort it out. They offer 3 different levels of graph corresponding to the output of STEP0 (glue in Antarctica and USHCN), STEP1 (merge disjoint records, throw some out), and STEP2 (final homogenizing and UHI “adjustement” and throw out some more).
Oh, and they periodically change the thing, so you need a datestamp provenance as well. For example, a few weeks ago they finally put the USHCN Version 2 records in, so the USA from 2007 to date will all have changed.
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….
“”” 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.
australia features strongly in the report instantly covered by all MSM to show decade warmest ever and this year 5th warmest:
Decade shapes up as the world’s warmest ever
As the La Nina weather event, linked to cooler and wetter conditions in Australia, turned in June to El Nino, associated with hot and dry weather, Australia was one of the regions to experience “more frequent and intense extreme warm events”, the report said.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/decade-shapes-up-as-the-worlds-warmest-ever/story-e6frg6nf-1225808422879
in the previous ‘darwin’ thread, chris gilham posted something very interesting, which should be looked at by Willis Eschenbach and other capable analysts to see if the ‘value-added’ temps for august in west australia could have provided the basis for the claims 2009 could be one of the warmest on record.
check gilham’s post for all the figures, but this was the reply he got from the met office when he pointed out the august temps had all changed in an upward direction:
‘I’ve questioned the BoM on what happened and received this reply …
“Thanks for pointing this problem out to us. Yes, there was a bug in the Daily Weather Observations (DWO) on the web, when the updated version replaced the old one around mid November. The program rounded temperatures to the nearest degree, resulting in mean maximum/minimum temperature being higher. The bug has been fixed since and the means for August 2009 on the web are corrected.”
I’m still scratching my head, partly because the bug only affected August, not any other month including September or October. There’s been no change to the August data on the BoM website since I pointed out the problem and they’re still the higher temps.’
please look into this, as australian data has seemingly played a part in the today’s alarmist alarm!
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
Anybody else hear that 2009 is the warmest on record?!?
From the WMO?
Sorry, can you delete these? The radio report had it wrong!
Graeme W (15:14:49)
thanks – I guess I need to read things more carefully – but there is just SO much stuff!!!!
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?
apologies for wrongly marking a sydney morning herald (SMH) article as ABC in my second post on gilhams data post for west australia. please correct if possible.
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?
Man is, perhaps, unique of all the Carbon-Based lifeforms on Planet Gaia by having the ability to Lie!
AFAIK, dogs, cats, begonias and, even, trees are stupidly honest. They can’t even spell the word, far less comprehend it’s meaning. Fair dinkums even the stupidest mutt may eventually work out that you’re not going to throw that stick. If you don’t know what that means then you’ve never had a dog as a pet.
But, that iota of canine understanding still precludes old four-legs from coming up with a Ponzi plan!
I think I’m getting a possible scenario for the anger shown by Prof Jones and his buddies. It was born of a frustration that emanated from the swinging sixties!
Trees are notoriously truthfull. To my knowledge no one has ever accused any of our aboreal cousins of untruthfull utterances. Apart from George III that is and, mayhaps, some of his double-helixed descendants.
Perhaps the humble tree may yet turn out to be the ultimate, a-grade thermometric device. The reported UEA divergence that highlighted the schism between human thermometry and tree-ring density et al characteristics may have an unexpected explanation.
It wasn’t that the trees stopped being less accurate proxies for temperature from the roaring forties until 1960, on the contrary. They diverged simply because the trees couldn’t keep up with the mathematical techniques and tricks needed to be part of the peer-reviewed literature.
Briffa and buddies were right all along but they couldn’t tell anyone. Now that’s frustrating!
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…..
robr (17:09:03) :
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?
Very sensible point, and yes – it all matters a lot. I shall have to add it to the list of things that make temperature readings difficult to use. Having said that, we are after trends, so it may not matter much, but is is certainly a factor.
For example, I have long been wary of averages – if the temp is 10C all day apart from 1 hour in the afternoon when the rain stops, sun shines, and it reaches 20C, does that make the average for the day 15C? Of course not. Also, the trend we are measuring is way lower than our error band anyway – how can that be accurate enough?
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.
robr,
The actual completely raw readings from the observer’s forms have enough information to do the corrections you mention – which happen immediately and are part of the “raw” records before they are entered into the databases.
If dealing with wet bulb and dry bulb temperatures was the extend of the adjustments, I think I can safely say we’d all be dancing in delight at this point.
For example If 55% of the value added data is shifted up, vs 45% down, would that not prove that there was a bias in the resulting conclusions?
Well, I can say that US HCN1 adjustments were two thirds up and one third down.
JER0ME (17:35:13) :
Having said that, we are after trends, so it may not matter much, but is is certainly a factor.
If the temperature trends up and the humidity trends down so the enthalpy stays the same, is there a heating trend at all?
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