NOTE: An update to the compendium has been posted. Now has bookmarks. Please download again.
I have a new paper out with Joe D’Aleo.
First I want to say that without E.M. Smith, aka “Chiefio” and his astounding work with GISS process analysis, this paper would be far less interesting and insightful. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude. I ask WUWT readers to visit his blog “Musings from the Chiefio” and click the widget in the right sidebar that says “buy me a beer”. Trust me when I say he can really use a few hits in the tip jar more than he needs beer.
The report is over 100 pages, so if you are on a slow connection, it may take awhile.
For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here or the image above.
As many readers know, there have been a number of interesting analysis posts on surface data that have been on various blogs in the past couple of months. But, they’ve been widely scattered. This document was created to pull that collective body of work together.
Of course there will be those who say “but it is not peer reviewed” as some scientific papers are. But the sections in it have been reviewed by thousands before being combined into this new document. We welcome constructive feedback on this compendium.
Oh and I should mention, the word “robust” only appears once, on page 89, and it’s use is somewhat in jest.
The short read: The surface record is a mess.
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Thanks Anthony, Joseph D’Aleo and E. M. Smith.
Even the Dutch Minister Kramer now is asking questions!
Keep up the pressure.
Great work.
Anthony, I just did a brief overview of the paper, and I must warn you have made a lot of well-known mistakes in the paper. It appears that you and D’ Aleo are out of the loop when it comes to understanding how the data for the temperature anomalies are collected and analyzed. I have been reading about the “missing station” reports, and this claim has been debunked.
The report needs substantial revision, and all 15 of your conclusions are inaccurate, and are clear distortions of the current published science papers. The climate scientists are going to slice and dice this report.
Tom Graney, you are correct. Contrary to what is asserted in the report, the impacts of AGW on higher latitude temperature anomalies is greater than lower latitude anomalies. This is just one of myriad of easily spotted mistakes in this report.
As a science professional myself, I have witnessed many times that it takes a HECK of a lot more work for someone to try to fake up a ‘defensible’ set of data, than it does to do the diligent work to generate a good data set to begin with.
All that effort just to try and fool the world about a laughable 3 ppm of carbon dioxide plant food. And people were actually buying it?? Unbelievable.
Very nice work. Very readable. Thank you. You should be proud of this work.
MJK (08:59:27),
This should get you started: click
As with some other commenters, I’ve just read Gavin’s typically haughty response to the paper over at RC. I’m guessing that Roger Pielke Snr would have something very interesting to say about Gavin’s assertions concerning the homogenisation of temperature records from different locations.
Perhaps at last we can really start to get back to science-based ecology ie: forget about meaningless global temperature trends which are both completely beyond our scope to quantify whist at the same time being utterly useless to us in terms of our local micro-environments….and focus on how local climate variations, UHI and genuinely dangerous atmospheric pollutants can be tackled in practical ways that might actually affect our everyday lives.
For instance, here in Australia we’re all set to re-debate the failed “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” next week, despite everything that’s happened in recent times – at the same time, kids in Mount Isa (a remote Queensland Mining Town) are still breathing in air polluted with lead levels which are way above safe levels….trouble is they just don’t seem to rate a mention when faced with the behemoth of AGW. And that is truly a tragedy, one I suspect is being repeated around the globe.
Like everyone else, I’ve been drawn into this almost Orwellian debate about reason versus fundamentalism……hopefully, Guys like messrs Watts, D’Aleo and Pielke (s) can at last nudge the debate back into an area that actually means something real.
Smokey (09:27:51) :
The trend line you provide relates to 1998 to 2009–not 2001 to 2009. try again.
This is the laymans version of the Nick Stokes anomaly argument, from the SkepicalScience site.
You still don’t get it, do you?
A thermometer could be placed in a frying pan and yet as long as it has dynamic range available it’ll still be able to register a trend in temperature and that trend will be separable from the frying pan component.
I doubt a thermometer at 160C in a pot of fying oil would respond to change in temp in the surrounding room going from 16C to 17C. Even if it did it still does not cover the point that if the oil was an AC unit then that would only operate for part of the year, or may not have existed at that site in say 1975 and on its introduction would generate a large jump upwards.
Great job Anthony, after reading you are right it’s a mess — and to ask people to give trillions in tax money for this shaky science is a complete joke.
Thanks to all involved, now we need to follow up until we have the complete picture and can reduce it down to a few short lines … For now, ‘it’s a mess’ will have to do.
Seek the truth …
The scientific debate aside, ‘anomaly’ is a beautiful word, IMHO.
I haven’t made it through the entire report, but the handling of Russian data seems to be an area ripe for research because only 25% of station data submitted was used by Hadley. It would interesting to see a temperature reconstruction based on 100% of the available data. Is the raw data available? Any known work on that type of project?
Steve Mosher’s “CRUtape Letters” just arrived in the mail and now D’Aleo and Watts’ have released their long-awaited work. Congratulations to you all (and the Chiefio of course)! Between these books and keeping up with breaking news on WUWT the rest of my week is gone… Good thing I’m on sabbatical this year but keeping up with Climategate and the IPCC scam revelations has really hurt my productivity. I am sure many readers here are as awed as I am by your total dedication to unearthing the truth and helping us to understand both the science and pseudoscience of climate change.
Things are beginning to unravel.
Way to tug on that string Joe, Anthony, and E.M.
Keep pulling!
John H- Not being familiar with the Nick Stokes argument, I can’t tell if you are agreeing or disagreeing with what I said.
I would also like to point out the the UHI and hotspot effects are going to be one time effects so they cannot really contribute to a long term upward trend the the global temperature anomaly. The influence of a barbecue grill or a parking lot will show a temperature effect only for the year it was built, but itself will not have a long term trend affect. This is not the case if existing sites are continually gaining heat sources, but that could only go on so long and then the effect on the trend disappears.
I point this out as someone who constantly wishes for the alarmists to fall flat on their face.
Congrats to all.
I’m getting ready for a job interview and don’t have time to even start it. Could someone take Nick Stokes comment containing the criticisms he asserts, and make a bullet point rebuttal of each. E. M. Smith sort of did it, but it would be nice to have something that shows the rebuttal line by line.
Have to go iron now….. WOW! I’m actually ironing!!! 🙂
“This response shows some ignorance. It doesn’t matter whether the reduction was “deliberate” or not. If the reduction creates bias then there is a problem.”
This matters because E. M. Smith and others are accusing NASA/NOAA of fraud.
Paul K2 (09:24:03) :
And what makes AGW in the 80’s-2000 any different than the Coming Ice Age in the 40’s to 1970’s, the Global Warming in the 20’s-1930’s and the New Ice Age the 1880′-1910’s?
End of the Worlders: Serving you since 1884. Billions served with nightmares.
I should ask: How many are going back to church with Gore?
Big Al has seen the Light. According to him, environmentalism can co-exist with religious belief systems.
The science of AGW building has settled: Termite wood (that’s holy wood) was used in the walls, floor and roof.
Re
MJK (08:59:27) :
Try reading the Threads, it has been answered.
Steve in SC got me going.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Dw60SVXQ4&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Tom Graney (10:11:57),
You might be forgetting the fact that most temperature stations have been eliminated: click
The majority of those eliminated stations are rural. Gradually removing the rural stations produces an artificial upward bias. More info here: click
Here is a good discussion that summarizes D’ Aleo’s work and much of the information in this report:
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2010/01/kusi-noaa-nasa/
Key conclusion:
A San Diego TV station’s mid-January one-hour broadcast reporting that two key federal climate research centers deliberately manipulated temperature data appears to have been based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the key climatology network used in calculating global temperatures.
Independent TV news station KUSI in San Diego aired a story challenging current scientific understanding of climate science and offering “breaking news” of government wrongdoing based on work of Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E.M. Smith, a computer programmer.
* MJK (08:59:27) Still no reponse to my post (MJK 6:26:30) reagrding your failure to provide a supportinf reference for the assertion in your report that there has been cooling since 2001….Could I kindly suggest you retract this incorrect statement from your report wherever it appears or point to evidence in the RSS and UAH data sets that supports your claim the globe has cooled since 2001*
What an insistance…there indeed was a response to you ( Juraj V. (07:01:11))
So, again, just for you MJK, and with trends from 2001 only – as you wish – and adding the comparison with GISTEMP:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2001/plot/uah/from:2001/trend/plot/rss/from:2001/plot/rss/from:2001/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001/plot/gistemp/from:2001/trend
(also note the .2°C+ absolute values difference and of course the divergence of the UAH+RSS vs. GISTEMP trends to opposite direction)
Now, could you kindly retract your claims to Anthony?
@Smokey;
I agree that a rural station is less likely to have extraneous heat effects, and if you shift away from stations with no heat effects to a population of sites that is gradually gaining heat effects then this will cause the system to exhibit an upward bias in temperature over time. But, the heat effects are not cumulative; a parking lot, once constructed, is not going to continue to influence the trend so over time the impact of these heat affected sites is going to peter out.
I just printed it out and skimmed over it. Looks impressive!
A great resource to have.
MJK (09:36:38) :
“The trend line you provide relates to 1998 to 2009–not 2001 to 2009. try again.”
OK: click. Sorry that it doesn’t go to 2009. But you get the idea.
Here are a couple more: click1, click2.
Here’s a century of unremarkable temperatures: click
Here’s the thirty year global temp record: click. And another: click. One more: click. Those all cover 2001 — plus the twenty prior years.
And how good are the climate models? They suck: click
Paul K2 (10:34:39),
I guess you’re new here. That Yale blog has been discussed numerous times. It is funded by the Grantham Foundation, which has a heavy pro-AGW agenda. In fact, in one comment Zeke Hausfather claimed he didn’t know about Grantham’s funding – even though on the blog’s home page it says:
Unlike Hausfather and the Yale blog, Joe D’Aleo and Mike Smith are not paid for their work here.
Grantham funds the Yale blog — and he who pays the piper calls the tune. Keep those things in mind when trying to decide who to believe.