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
Sponsored IT training links:
Pass 1z0-051 exam fast to save best on your investment. Join today for complete set of 642-972 dumps and 650-251 practice exam.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
This has been done before. Well, in a smaller scale;
The conclusion makes sense to me, however, I’d like to see this get into a peer reviewed journal, so it is taken more seriously.
NASA GISS, 1934 warmest year!
A new leaderboard at the US Open
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/08/a-new-leaderboard-at-the-us-open/
As others have noted, the underlying truth of the Dr. Long’s article are not news to readers here. That doesn’t detract from its value though as the timing of the article is as or more important than its content.
The weaknesses of the paper are the lack of random sampling and that it has been published outside of the peer review literature. While these are not fatal flaws, they will be used by the AGW movement to try and dismiss the paper.
We still have not seen “Dr.” Anthony’s paper, which I assume is still being held up by the establishment “peer” reviewers at the journal where it was submitted. I was hoping to see that paper before either the EPA “finding” or Nopenhagen, but that is the nature of system as it exists. It does seem a little long though.
“why does it begin in around 1965?”
In 1965, cities such as San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Campbell, and Los Gatos in California were mostly orchards. There were orchards on both sides of Stevens Creek Blvd. where there are now car dealerships. Much of Anaheim was berry fields. Most of Riverside was orange groves, even in the city limits. In the late 1970’s you could drive between Santa Clara and Sunnyvale and tell when you left one town and entered the other. There was fields in between and Great America amusement park was in the middle of nothing. It is now in the middle of an urban area. I don’t think people appreciate the amount of growth that happened after 1965.
1965 was when the boomers started entering the housing market. There was literally a housing explosion starting at about that time.
Basil, I graduated from high school in Florida in the early 1970’s and remember that we got our first window air conditioner in the mid 1960’s — but then it gets awfully hot in Florida without an air conditioner.
Adding to what Basil (08:25:55) said, don’t forget that as well as all the heat generated by power sinks such as ACUs and heaters, the additional power has to be generated. Since power generation is not very efficient, then for every watt consumed there is likely to be a watt or two of waste heat produced at the generating station, and by the distribution grid.
>>rc (04:14:19) :
>>If the first graph correctly shows the UHI effects in urban
>>vs rural stations, why does it begin in around 1965?
Central heating, air conditioning, office blocks, bigger cities, more densely populated, cars, electronics, computers. Our use of all types of energy in cities has rocketed since 1965.
We had coal fires in our London house until the mid ’60s. These were only lit in the evening and went out at night, and we only ever had one lit in the living room. We always had ice on the inside of windows on winter mornings. Compare that with todays energy usage.
.
Obviously the important point is the upward adjustment of rural stations, which should be independant of any cherry picking.
Steveta’s bit was the wittiest thing I have ever seen on this blog. Some of you guys are thicker than two short planks.
Sean Peake – ROFLMAO.
The population of the rural environment in the US is aging rapidly, as the kids move to the cities. Therefore, I suspect that rural areas are warming and have been since the advent of Viagra.
JonesII (05:06:33) :
What happened in 1965, when curves began diverging?
Ah-ha! The trees have been vindicated! Well, not completely yet, but follow the reasoning anyway.
The tree ring data (Briffa etc) started diverging in the 1960’s, resulting in using “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” as mentioned in the emails. The trees, which are rural, showed no warming and perhaps cooling from the 1960’s onward, which did not agree with the temperature record.
But as shown here, the rural data was adjusted upwards to match the urban data.
So the trees were not matching the temperature data, because the trees were honestly reporting the rural temperature, thus they could not match the artificial warming trend shown in the mis-adjusted temperature data.
The divergence problem with the tree ring data is actually non-existent, because the premise is based on comparing it to the “bad” temperature data.
Someone with better skills and more access to the data than I should do a better comparison of tree ring divergence to temperature record adjustments to see how well things match up, but offhand it certainly looks like that is what has occurred, and further investigation is warranted.
I’m surprised at some the criticisms of this paper. A look at the hihgly correlated squiggles large and small in the two curves is as good a measue of the legitimacy of the station seletions as any. Indeed, it is a visual proof that the official manipulation of the data I illigitimate and unnecessary..
Anthony,
How would the graph you posted as an “update” explain the first graph, which is the one I think we’re discussing which shows the divergence that begins in the 1960’s. The first graph, if labeled correction, is a comparison of rural and urban raw data, without any adjustments. The “updated” graph is raw v. final, with no breakout between rural and urban. In effect, rather than explaining anything, I see the two as just different versions of the same thing. I.e., the reason the “update” takes off in the 1960’s is because of what is shown in the first graph: urban temps take off in the 1960’s, and the adjustments between raw and final in the second graph reflects the perverse nature of the adjustments (instead of “cooling” the urban centers, the rural stations are being “warmed”).
Both graphs beg the question: why? And I think the answer lies in demographic and life style changes that have taken place since the 1960’s. At least that’s a plausible hypothesis that deserves more serious consideration than it has been given in the peer/pal reviewed literature.
“Richard Wakefield (05:52:21) :
Thus the Arctic trend and the lower lattitude trends are converging to a single temp. It’s 27C by 2016 when the two meet.
This begs the question, then what?”
doesn’t matter – the world ends in 2012!
The use of one station per contiguous state seems kind of odd; it doesn’t seem to randomize the selection. Instead it means more stations from the eastern US, especially New England and the upper mid-Atlantic states. Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, etc. One gets 13 states (the 13 original colonies, minus New Hampshire, plus Maine) on the Atlantic coast, versus only three states on the Pacific coast. Too bad the paper isn’t online, I wonder how Long addresses the issue.
I’ve been visually comparing Long’s graph of ll-year-average urban-vs.-rural raw data above with Jeff Id’s urban-versus-rural graphs of Global Historical Climatology Network data back on Jan. 5, 2010. He says that the urban data “temp rise since 1978 is about 1.2C.” Meanwhile “the Rural stations show about 0.7C of warming since 1978.” The difference between urban and rural gridded data from stations with at least 100 years of records shows a notable spike around 1965 or 1966. An upward trend in the urban-rurual difference looks to me like it becomes established during the following decades, especially after a 1981 dip. (Compare with the 1965 fork in Long’s graph of ll-year-average urban-vs.-rural raw data. If it weren’t averaged over 11 years, would it look still more like Jeff Id’s result? And the converse?)
This is a very interesting report and makes a lot of sense but I still believe in global warming. /sarc
Actually, this is great. Anyone know how we can get our hands on the data?
Hansen openly states that he believes UHI is a net negative effect. This may be due to him participating in too many icy cold global warming protests in major cities.
Am I reading that right? Was the UHI routine was used to warm the rural record?
How is that possible? I’m guessing there wasn’t a ton of de-urbanization going on….
Carrick (00:20:36) :
What matters from the perspective of AGW is the temperature trend since 1980. The fact that the adjusted rural data gives almost the same value as the urban is surprising. I think this may be another way of stating, as I have sometimes seen, that the UHI correction overcorrects for urbanization.
You are so silly. You know what homoginization does. It increases rural sites to match nearby urban sites to smooth things out. So presto, they are close.
My guess is that the divergence starting in 1965 was related to emissions controls beginning to be put in place in the USA. The amount of particulates in US urban areas in the 1950’s and 1960’s was unbelievable. I remember driving with my family down the Jersey Turnpike in the mid-1960’s and it was like visiting Mordor, the sun was actually blotted out by the smoke. Even nearby suburban areas were quite different: driving from 25 miles north of Boston into the city those days and you could taste the sulfur in the air once you reached the city. All of that has since been substantially cleaned up. The visible problem probably peaked in the USA about 1965 leading to adoption of countermeasures (the EPA was created in 1970, for example). Local urban particulates might have been suppressing insolation sufficient to mask UHI. I believe some of the climate models assuem this masking on a global level, but from personal experience, for what it’s worth, there was a *lot* of urban pollution in the 1960’s in the USA.
Along with all the other anecdotal evidence about how things began to change in the 1960, here’s another dimension to the story.
Up until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s electric utility engineers could project energy usage by plotting historical usage on semi-log paper. As electric utility rates began to rise in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the process became much more difficult. I remember doing electric utility load forecasting using economic and end-use demand models (I’m an economist) in that time frame, and arguing with utility engineers still trying to plot linear curves drawing lines through the data on semi-log paper with a straight edge ruler. It was comical, really, but the world was changing fast, and some of the old guard were slow to catch on.
Someone else above made the connection to the baby boom. The mid-1960’s were when the baby boomers began to come of age. From that point on, we’ve had 40 years of that generation adding to all the different life style changes that make the years prior to the mid-1960’s seem so bucolic.
I’m sure similar kinds of changes can be charted in countries all around the world. I lived in Taiwan in the early 1960’s. If I went back today, I wouldn’t recognize it. Japan is becoming, quite likely, one huge UHI, even in the literal sense of the word. And so on and so forth.
Bob (Sceptical Redcoat) (08:16:38) :
All urban weather stations (i.e. towns with pop > 15,000) should be removed from the raw average temperature data sets. Remember, these are local weather stations, that were never intended to be used for estimating world climate. By employing stations located in “hot spots”, we are not measuring climate change at all. Future climate monitoring should be based on satelite measurements of atmospheric heat levels directly – after all, we actually want to know: “is it getting hotter!
—————————
I agree with you, Bob: but will not satellites also ‘homogenize’ the UHI with the natural signal? How high up does the UHI extend? So if the satellites also detect warming, how will the sources of this warming be distinguished?
Peter Plail (09:06:54) :
Excellent point. I followed on with a description of my experience forecasting electric utility demand in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I overlooked what you are pointing out, that electric utility production in an extremely inefficient process, with two thirds of the heat content of the energy produced being wasted. However, most utility plants are located in rural areas, so that waste heat probably wouldn’t add directly to the UHI effect. But it might understate it, in the sense that it might raise rural temps that went up because of increasing demand to service urban areas. If there were a way to quantify that, it would make the net effect of all the changes we’re discussing even greater.
In my opinion, that first graph blows the CO2 induced CAGW theory completely out of the water. The only questions that remain are;
-Were the staions cherry picked?
-Are there legitimate corrections that should be made, for time of observation and type of equipment?
-Where can we find enough prison space for all the crooks who were perpetrating this CO2 fraud on the people?
PS If you further correct the rural station data by using only CRN 1 and 2 stations what happens to the .13C per century warming trend?
Is it not obvious?
The final graph of the difference and final USHCN data sets forms A PERFECT HOCKEY STICK.
Say no more!!!!