Note: See update below, new graph added.
There’s a new paper out by Dr. Edward Long that does some interesting comparisons to NCDC’s raw data (prior to adjustments) that compares rural and urban station data, both raw and adjusted in the CONUS.
The paper is titled Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets. In it, Dr. Edward Long states:
“The problem would seem to be the methodologies engendered in treatment for a mix of urban and rural locations; that the ‘adjustment’ protocol appears to accent to a warming effect rather than eliminate it. This, if correct, leaves serious doubt for whether the rate of increase in temperature found from the adjusted data is due to natural warming trends or warming because of another reason, such as erroneous consideration of the effects of urban warming.”
Here is the comparison of raw rural and urban data:
And here is the comparison of adjusted rural and urban data:
Note that even adjusted urban data has as much as a 0.2 offset from adjusted rural data.
Dr. Long suggests that NCDC’s adjustments eradicated the difference between rural and urban environments, thus hiding urban heating. The consequence:
“…is a five-fold increase in the rural temperature rate of increase and a slight decrease in the rate of increase of the urban temperature.”
The analysis concludes that NCDC “…has taken liberty to alter the actual rural measured values”.
Thus the adjusted rural values are a systematic increase from the raw values, more and more back into time and a decrease for the more current years. At the same time the urban temperatures were little, or not, adjusted from their raw values. The results is an implication of warming that has not occurred in nature, but indeed has occurred in urban surroundings as people gathered more into cities and cities grew in size and became more industrial in nature. So, in recognizing this aspect, one has to say there has been warming due to man, but it is an urban warming. The temperatures due to nature itself, at least within the Contiguous U. S., have increased at a non-significant rate and do not appear to have any correspondence to the presence or lack of presence of carbon dioxide.
The paper’s summary reads:
Both raw and adjusted data from the NCDC has been examined for a selected Contiguous U. S. set of rural and urban stations, 48 each or one per State. The raw data provides 0.13 and 0.79 oC/century temperature increase for the rural and urban environments. The adjusted data provides 0.64 and 0.77 oC/century respectively. The rates for the raw data appear to correspond to the historical change of rural and urban U. S. populations and indicate warming is due to urban warming. Comparison of the adjusted data for the rural set to that of the raw data shows a systematic treatment that causes the rural adjusted set’s temperature rate of increase to be 5-fold more than that of the raw data. The adjusted urban data set’s and raw urban data set’s rates of temperature increase are the same. This suggests the consequence of the NCDC’s protocol for adjusting the data is to cause historical data to take on the time-line characteristics of urban data. The consequence intended or not, is to report a false rate of temperature increase for the Contiguous U. S.
The full paper may be found here: Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets (PDF) and is freely available for viewing and distribution.
Dr. Long also recently wrote a column for The American Thinker titled: A Pending American Temperaturegate
As he points out in that column, Joe D’Aleo and I raised similar concerns in: Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? (PDF)
UPDATE: A reader asked why divergence started in 1960. Urban growth could be one factor, but given that the paper is about NCDC adjustments, this graph from NOAA is likely germane:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
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Dear Anthony,
I just had a look at the paper, it is worth reading in the original!
He lists the individual stations, do you have them in your database and can you comment on the individual quality?
Also, can you comment on his selection criteria of using “one station” of each per state? It somehow seems to overrepresent the costal area!?
However I think the two figures with the interanual trends are worthy to be included in post article about it. It is true, that the interanual trend for both sets are very similar giving the study a lot of credit!
All the best,
LoN
I’m not so sure on this one. If the adjusted graph is correct, every year since 1990 should’ve been proclaimed hotter than 1934, which still stands as the record even in their own adjusted stats.
””””’Peter of Sydney (00:16:28) :
There’s only one explanation why they persistently adjust the rural readings up to match the less useful urban ones instead of adjusting the urban ones to other way.”””””
Peter,
It is obvious. There no need to say. And it is likely to be the beginning of NCDC’s (NOAA’s) undoing.
Now we look back on the 21 Feb WUWT post by Willis Eschenbach titled “Fudged Fevers in the Frozen North”. We (at least I) were struggling with understanding why GISS/NASA made the counterintuitive temperature adjustments to Anchorage (urban) and Matanuska (rural then recently possibly urban) that they did. The explanation could simply be very similar to the “obvious” explanation of why NCDC/NOAA did the adjustments that were shown in the paper by Dr Edward Long.
First Hadley/CRU dataset has problems, now NCDC/NOAA has problems and GISS/NASA datasheet is being looked at but preliminary signals is they also have problems.
The problems increasingly appear to be intentional AGW biased manipulation of temperature datasets via their adjustment of raw data.
To all three datasets! There is some implication there that I hesitate to go to . . . . .
John
In other news, something astounding has happened: a part of the Arctic shelf broke off and the Scientist in the know said it isn’t directly linked to `climate change’.
I’m shocked, upset and, frankly rather bemused by this turn of events.
Looks like an open and shut case, which no doubt, the MSM will leave in lost luggage.
Good Job the MET office is to re-examine 160 years of global temperature records following the ‘climategate’ scandal…. but wait…
“Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice, at the Met Office, said the new global temperature analyses would not change the trend of global warming.”
…maybe not
This has always been a no brainer. Anyone with a car dashboard thermometer can do this.
In my case, I worked for years in central London at night, and at 3 a.m. in Trafalgar, the temp would be 5C, driving home westwards, it would be 3C at Heathrow, 4c at Slough, 3 at Maidenhead, 2 at Reading, and 0C at Newbury.
This same pattern was common winter or summer.
Quote from author’s American Thinker piece:
We have been repeatedly told (perhaps “lectured” is a better word) the past twenty years that global warming is occurring. With Climategate and subsequent confessions and bailouts by scientists at the CRU, Penn State, Arizona State, IPCC, et al., we are learning that little to none of the factual content in their “peer reviewed” articles is true.
The Medieval Warming Period did occur, and it was warmer than currently; the oceans are not going to flood the plains; and the Arctic Ocean may not be turning into a summer water park. Of course, the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has reported little of this news, and President Obama appears not to be well-informed. But now the global warming story grows more interesting because here in America, we may have our own little “gate.” I will call it ATG, for “American Temperaturegate.”
In case you assumed he might be a partisan observer.
I’ve said it before, the AGW concensus/conspiracy is falling apart in front of our eyes. The trouble will be the true believers – scientists and laypeople who continue believing despite the evidence and agitate for needless changes to be made.
There will be complaints that the 2 subsets of sites were cherry picked. How much extra work is needed to analyse all rural vs all urban raw data? Also look at the 10 fastest and slowest increasing rural sites and the 10 fastest and slowest increasing urban sites, contrast and compare, to see what physical characteristics likely place them in that position if they are significantly different from their cohort growth.
No smoking gun. Nothing definitive. Not global. Small study. Have to do better.
Wow, that’s an impressive fudge-factor! 🙂
Where’s good ol’ Gav to spin this one?
Thank you Dr Long, this awful AGW scam needs very fast closure. The politics need to be stopped dead in their tracks.
The world has enough trouble with out a doomsday scenario. The rational among us can then pursue the perpetrators of this fraud.
When did Dr. Long start reading WUWT and CA? The findings come as no surprise to regulars on this blog.
Anyhoo, Dr. Long’s work can actually be peer reviewed, which is more than can me said for all of those pal reviewed charts that show “WAGTD real soon now.”
I think there is a real problem with his methodology that needs to be overcome. Given the disparity in size between the states (Texas is 174 times the size of Rhode Island) there must be a better way to represent the whole US than to select one rural and one urban station per state. Also Dr Long will be open to attack on the same grounds as Mann, in that he is using a very selective data set. Given that, I suspect his hypothesis is correct, that the algoreithms have adjusted rural temperatures upwards as a novel way of dealing with the UHI, enabling their advocates to argue that Anthony’s findings are false, as rural temperatures apparently rise as fast as urban ones, and neatly dispose of the obviously real UHI effect in similar style to the MWP.
Bang.
So others don’t have to calculate or question the missing factor:
(from: A Pending American Temperaturegate)
Using from the last decade of the 19th century to 2006 from NCDC and reverse-engineering to the “rural+urban” temperature rates implied, you get that they are using 59% as the percent of land covered by cities if using raw data and 50% as the percent of land covered by cities if using adjusted data. This is assuming that city temperature slopes would linearly revert back to the rural rate if all cities didn’t exist at all.
Raw:
Urban = 59%
0.11 * (100%-Urban) + 0.72 * Urban = 0.47 oC/cy
Adjusted:
Urban = 50%
0.58 * (100%-Urban) + 0.72 * Urban = 0.65 oC/cy
Don’t buy it. There is more open, rural land in the U.S. than 41% or 50%, your pick.
Steveta_uk (00:38:35) :
But I really don’t care if it’s a few degrees hotter on your patio, surrounded by streets, houses, your house, your air conditioner, and fences; I care answering the question if the entire globe is getting warmer or not. So far the answer to me is no. When I sit on my patio I’m smart enough to know why it is a few degrees hotter, because it is surrounded by streets, houses, my house, my air conditioner, and fences. Seems you are so worried about your personal square yard that surrounds and follows you around that you would decimate the economies of the world to make it the right temperature in your backyard. You can live in your perspective of a social scientist if you want to, sorry, not me.
I’d like to see this carried out on all Anthony’s surveyed sites, limited to the CN 1 & 2 quality stations; that’ll avoid accusations of cherry picking.
Good work though. I’m still astonished at how dishonest the crimatologists have been; so brazen.
Has to be done to match their climate model predictions I suppose. Blatant fraud really.
Hee HAw, Catlin expedition 2010 soon underway. http://bushynews.com/?p=201
Having looked at 4 Northern Calif. and 2 Southern Oregon rural stations as compared to 2 Northern Calif. urban stations going back beyond 1900, I agree with the findings of this paper.
It’s an exhaustive task to sift through the mountain of data for just one site, which is how they have gotten away with such shennanigans for so long.
If you haven’t spent time there, I highly recommend you visit NCDC’s original document archives.
But it is not “peer-reveived”
The argument against this paper will be a political one: It is not peer- or pal-rewieved, not done by ‘real’ scientists, not published in a “leading scientific” publisher’s house.
Is there somewhere a ranking of publishers? Those with misconducts in publishing (CRU-mails)? Those which demand access to all data and software of all papers? Those which do not? Those which collaborate in hiding declines? ……..
When I first looked at the two graphs I completely missed their significance. It seemed that the second graph showed that they had done a good job. The adjustments had almost eliminated the difference between rural and urban.
But then I realised the awful truth. They had adjusted the rural values *up* to almost match the urban values!
This is so bad that it only leaves one question. Was this due to sheer incompetence? Or fraud? Either way, whoever is responsible should be held to account. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long….
Chris
Instead of adjusting the urban stations down to counteract the artificial heat retention in an urban setting, they instead adjusted the rural stations up.
And it appears they ignore the disparity in total area between urban and rural environments, too. There’s a reason the term “Urban Heat Island” was coined…
Wow…that graph says everything…