Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
According to an article in the Hindustan Times by someone for whom English is a second language, I find:
Senior scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG) has rejected the Global Warming Theory and told that the Himalayas are quite safer zone on earth, where Global Warming has no role in controlling the conditions.
In an exclusive chat with HT, Director WIHG Dr AK Dubey has said that the conditions of Himalayas are controlled by the winter snowfall rather than external factors like much hyped Global Warming. He told that for a concrete result, at least 30 years of continuous research with steady outcome is needed to confirm the actual impact.
“According to a data for over 140 years available with a British weather observatory situated in Mukteswar (2311m) in Almora has actually revealed that temperature in that region witnessed a dip of .4 degrees,” he said.
So, as is my wont, I figured I’d go take a look. To distinguish urban from rural sites, GISS uses a “brightness index” which shows how much light comes from around the site as seen from a satellite. GISS lists Mukteshwar Ku as having a brightness index of zero, so they treat it as a rural station. Here’s the location per the GISS data, at 29.47°N, 79.65°E. It definitely appears to be a rural site.
Figure 1. Aerial View of the Mukteshwar Ku Surface Station locality.
Having seen the problems that occurred in Matanuska due to the application of a computer algorithm without quality control and checking, I next went to look at the record. Here is the GISS record for Mukteshwar Ku, before it has been subjected to the “homogeneity adjustment”:
Figure 2. GISS record of the temperature at Mukteshwar Ku before homogeneity adjustment
There’s a couple of oddities here. First, Dr. Dubey said that there were 140 years of temperature records from the station, but the GISS data covers 1897 to the present, or 113 years including the missing years.
In addition, it is clear that there has been some kind of serious change in the station. It is missing data from about 1993 to 1998, and when it starts up again the temperatures are much warmer than when it left off. (I can’t say exactly what years are missing, because curiously, the GISS server comes up with a “404 Not Found” when I ask it for the actual data.)
Seeing such an obvious problem with the data, I looked at the graph showing the temperature after homogenization to see how they had dealt with the problem … foolish me. I forgot that it was a rural station (brightness = 0), so it wasn’t adjusted at all. Sad to say, that’s the data that they used.
I’m used to not finding the data where I expect it to be, so to continue my analysis I just digitized the GISS graph so I could look at the effect of their leaving the data uncorrected. The gap was as I estimated, 1993-1998. Here’s that result:
Figure 3. Final GISS record of the temperature at Mukteshwar Ku. Note the difference in the trends when the recent data is included. Photo is of Nanda Devi Peak from Mukteshwar Ku.
As I said in my article about Matanuska cited above, the problem is that you can’t just devise a method for computer adjusting temperature data, apply it to all of the world’s stations, and call the job done. You need to look at and consider each and every station, as they are as individual as human beings. This is called “quality control”, and it is sadly lacking in all three of the major global temperature records (GISS, CRU, and GHCN).
Does this invalidate the GISS global temperature record? No. However, it does mean that they are not doing their job. They haven’t removed an obvious inconsistency in this case. How common is this type of problem? I don’t know.
But until they start over and do it right, it does mean that, like the baseball records of players who are known to have used steroids, the GISS global temperature has to be entered in the record books “with an asterisk” to indicate that lingering questions still remain.
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Surprise, surprise. Much the same happening in Australia. I’m working my way through Queensland sites and it’s not pretty… but at least we can check with BOM data online. So far 5 out of 8 urban sites have warming trends more than doubled by homogenisation, and most are double or more the trend of nearby rural stations. They lie, they lie. (Shameless plug for latest effort)
http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/
By the way GISS data can be downlaoded in text from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
Willis,
You speak of QC. What do you think GISS should have done with that dataset?
A friendlier version (full width text file) is here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp.207421470003.1.1/station.txt
REPLY: FYI that is only a temporary link, it will expire- A
jorgekafkazar (21:45:36) notes that WaPo is now linking CAGW sceptics to anti-evolutionists. Gosh, the sceptic conspiracy – or should that be heresy? – has tentacles everywhere – nazism (‘denialists’ with its holocaust-suppressing overtones), Big Oil (STILL haven’t paid me), tobacco (I have not now, nor at any other time, used this cursed substance), and now it’s the creationists. I am a practising protestant but not a creationist, and query CAGW solely on empirical grounds. I have churchgoing friends who are creationists but believe in CAGW. WaPo’s shotgun contribution is only proving how unempirical and addicted to demonising of dissenters they themselves are.
Talking about golf courses. Had the privilege of seeing (too much snow to play) Gulmarg Golf Course in Kashmir, claimed to be the highest golf club in the world (although there are other claims):
http://www.travelmasti.com/domestic/jk/gulmarg.html
It is also claimed to be the oldest golf club in the world outside Great Britain with records going back hundreds of years. Would be interesting to view these records as there are many conflicting reports about how the climate is changing and the snow disappearing in Kashmir.
9
03
2010
Ken Stewart (22:30:47) :
Surprise, surprise. Much the same happening in Australia. I’m working my way through Queensland sites and it’s not pretty… but at least we can check with BOM data online. So far 5 out of 8 urban sites have warming trends more than doubled by homogenisation, and most are double or more the trend of nearby rural stations. They lie, they lie. (Shameless plug for latest effort)
http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/
By the way GISS data can be downlaoded in text from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
======
An alleged lie is not the same as a lie.
I don’t doubt errors in station data exist, but I imagine they are offsetting. If there was a systematic effort to bias surface records in favor of higher temperatures, GISS and UAH trends would diverge over the 1978-2009 period, but they don’t.
Nick Stokes (22:49:23)
Excellent question, Nick.
My vote would be to first get in touch with whoever has the historical station records for the place. I’d have them get photos of the current layout of the station, you know, normal surfacestations.org stuff. I’d get a history of the station so I could find out what happened to the missing data, and find out what Dr. Dubey means by “140 years of data”. I’d get every scrap of info I could get about Mukteshwar Ku.
Then, and only then, would I make a decision.
On the other hand if I had to make a decision today, without any further information about the station, since the new data is so wildly different both in absolute value and variance from the first hundred years of data, I’d junk the new stuff.
But if I were planning to bet a billion dollars on this and other records, I sure wouldn’t just gin up some whiz-bang computer program, turn it loose on the data, and report the results without quality control … in fact, I wouldn’t do that even if I were just doing it for sport. Unfortunately, James Hansen and his team spend time on public relations rather than quality control.
And now that they’ve noticed that people aren’t believing them, their brilliant solution is … more and better public relations …
NickB. (19:56:27) :
and J.Peden (21:46:57) :
Drug research has unfortunate similarities to climate research. Start with “we don’t know how it works, but we think this is it.” Then they move forward as if that mechanism was fact, release the next generation drug with the same disclaimer… They keep adding to the chain, getting more confident that everything before must really be facts, they keep finding stuff that works good enough… Then they find out something basic at the beginning was wrong, and no one wants to invalidate the chain and rework it with the correct info.
It’s been a few years since I read the article about it, I think this was the sequence. The new bone-building drugs were to function by encouraging the building of new bone. Lab work was finally conclusively done, and they discovered the drugs are actually inhibiting the removal of old bone as part of our bodies’ natural skeleton-recycling process.
Then on tonight’s world news, it was reported that people taking Fosamax, including generic form, were getting severe leg fractures. The drug is well recommended for preventing hip fractures, and people were getting femur fractures that suddenly “just happened.” It was reported people had both legs break.
Could interference with the body’s normal bone recycling be at fault? Was there “bad bone” left behind that should have been reformed?
Plus people taking the drugs are to take calcium supplements to make sure there are high enough blood levels of calcium for the drugs to work with, on the theory that more bone than normal (for that age) will be getting built. Well, medical problems can crop up that interfere with getting enough calcium intake. And there are currently drugs with monthly and now yearly dosing. Can they be purged from the body if needed? My mother was on Fosamax with large daily calcium doses. And ended up needing vascular work because an abdominal artery was nearly closed off from calcium buildup.
I really wish they would do all the medical research and actually know what the mechanisms are first, and then be able to know what a drug actually does, rather than push these things with a “This is only a guess, but a good one you can trust!” attitude. However, it could be worse…
What’s the difference between drug makers and climatologists? Capitalism, with competition to defeat and profits that must be earned! The drug makers can’t allow themselves to claim stuff as facts without solid research and a very thorough understanding of the underlying processes, because if they were proven wrong they would be eaten alive. Imagine if climatologists faced that level of scrutiny. How well would the IPCC reports have been received if anything they published had to have a readable unhidden disclaimer, “We don’t know what the processes really are, but this work is based on our best guesses”?
Looking at data link Anthony Watts (19:03:45) supplied, holding mouse pointer on data address allowed me to go to NASA website with data.
Imported data to Excel, cleared 999.9 data items.
Treating the date before and after the 1994-1997 as two separate groups, I averaged the monthly data (also quarterly and annual) data for each group and compared between each group.
JAN 1.956
FEB 1.499
MAR 1.086
APR 1.184
MAY -0.142
JUN 0.277
JUL 0.498
AUG 0.716
SEP 0.660
OCT 1.071
NOV 1.782
DEC 1.546
Looks like after the change of the station, the colder months readings changed more than the hotter months.
Is the data at the giss.nasa.gov site really raw data?
Wren (23:18:18)
GISS trend 1978-2009 = 1.6°C/century
UAH trend 1978-2009 = 1.3°C/century
Difference, GISS – UAH = 0.3°C/century
GISS 20th century warming = 0.55°C/century
Since the difference between them is more than half the last century warming, I would hardly say that GISS and UAH “don’t diverge”.
Re: Willis Eschenbach (Mar 9 23:30),
“But if I were planning to bet a billion dollars on this… “
OK, you’ve described a pretty time-consuming procedure for one station. There are over 7000 stations, and over 1200 currently reporting. Would you support funding that activity?
FUN WITH IPCC NUMBERS
OK, sensitivity 2°C to 4.5°C, best estimate 3°C per doubling of CO2 …
They also say that the forcing since 1850 from all sources is likely to be in the range 0.7 W/m2 to 2.5 W/m2 with a best estimate of about 1.7 W/m2. Note that their figure includes aerosols, solar changes, greenhouse gases, and all other known forcings.
OK, forcing change 0.7 W/m2 to 2.5 W/m2, best estimate 1.7 W/m2 …
Next, the forcing for a doubling of CO2 is given by the IPCC as 3.7 W/m2.
Finally, we have the warming in the HadCRUT3 global temperature dataset, which is 0.55°C since 1850.
SO …
If the forcing was at the high end of the IPCC estimates, the climate sensitivity is 0.55 °C divided by 2.5 W/m2 times 3.7 W/m2 per doubling = 2.8°C per doubling.
If the forcing is at the low end, the sensitivity is 0.8°/doubling.
And if it is at the best estimate, the sensitivity is 1.2°/doubling.
So instead of the IPCC estimated range of climate sensitivity of 2°/3°/4.5° per doubling, using IPCC forcing numbers plus observations we get 0.8°/1.2°/2.8° per doubling. I note in this regard their claim that climate sensitivity is “very unlikely” to be less than 1.5°/doubling …
Like the mathematician said … go figure …
Nick Stokes (23:57:21) :
You’re right, it would just cost too much to gather the accurate data. If only someone had it all already!
Of course, given that possession of the station hasn’t changed (that can be determined, anyway), what justification is there for such poor record keeping when it obviously has some effect? Maybe we should just spend trillions on the alternative to the data being wrong?
It sounds like you picked the wrong argument, Mr. Stokes.
Nick Stokes (23:57:21)
Another good and to-the-point question.
People always make this molehill into a mountain. Since each and every one of these stations has an observer in residence at the station, I don’t see that it would cost much to collect the information. We’re only talking a few photos and a few pieces of paper for each station, are you claiming that’s a big job? Even if we had to buy one camera per station, cheap digital cameras are $50, twelve hundred of them is sixty thousand bucks, and the US stations are already photographed …
And if Gavin Schmidt and Grant Foster (“Tamino”) and a few other folks quit blogging during working hours, they could do the examination of the data quite quickly. A dozen people doing only two stations per day could do it in six months. I mean really, this level of effort is undertaken by thousands of businesses every year.
Since folks are using that information to justify huge changes in the economic system that would cost us billions and billions of dollars … would you not support funding that activity? Phil Jones has personally gotten six million dollars in grants over the last decade, and has nothing to show for it, the data is lost, the computer program is a joke … that six million would have funded the whole project with five million to spare.
OK, you’ve described a pretty time-consuming procedure for one station. There are over 7000 stations, and over 1200 currently reporting. Would you support funding that activity?
.
Sure . Especially as we already do . All this climate “research” is done with our money . Taxpayers finance everything .
I’d estimate the budget at 5 – 10 M$ .
But of course as this field is already overfunded , it is out of question to increase the global budget even more .
Now there are more than 20 large (and redundant) teams running very expensive computer models .
Scratch 5 of them (f.ex fire Schmidt and his team , close RC , trash the GIEC workshops and associated travels to exotic places while doing only numerical “experiments” etc) , reallocate the budget to QC and the funding for this much more important work is more than sufficient .
The beauty of it is that this QC work on existing data has only to be done ONCE .
After that only maintenance stays .
It’s amazing that only this particular “research” field keeps neglecting the most fundamental scientific basis – integrity and quality of the data .
Would you support funding that activity?
Like we’re not already funding the job to be done badly? If we are going to do it, at least do it well.
The AGW guys won’t like it though. They really don’t want their pretty data all cleaned up. Then they won’t own it.
So they’ll fight it all the way. And that will show their bias. Because if they were really interested in the full truth they should love nothing better than a totally clean overall.
Willis Eschenbach (23:42:49) :
Wren (23:18:18)
I don’t doubt errors in station data exist, but I imagine they are offsetting. If there was a systematic effort to bias surface records in favor of higher temperatures, GISS and UAH trends would diverge over the 1978-2009 period, but they don’t.
GISS trend 1978-2009 = 1.6°C/century
UAH trend 1978-2009 = 1.3°C/century
Difference, GISS – UAH = 0.3°C/century
GISS 20th century warming = 0.55°C/century
Since the difference between them is more than half the last century warming, I would hardly say that GISS and UAH “don’t diverge”.
=======
Well, I don’t know exactly what you did to come up with those numbers, but regardless, I agree you can make a small difference look bigger if you enlarge it.
I can look at the linked graph and see there is hardly any difference in the 1978-2009 paths for UAH and GiSS, the only period for which both are available. Unfortunately, a century of comparison doesn’t exist.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/last:360/offset:-0.146/mean:12/plot/uah/last:360/mean:12/plot/rss/last:360/m
“Willis Eschenbach (00:42:03) :
Phil Jones has personally gotten six million dollars in grants over the last decade,..”
It’s more like 13 million pounds sterling, quite a bit more that six million dollars US (And for some strange reason I keep thinking of Steve Austin).
Bang on, Willis. Our small business (45 people) has an internal audit function that reviews more information than this every year, and calls us out if there are errors. They do it on 2 staff, for an overall budget of about £150,000 max. The answer to Nick’s original question (if the data do not miraculously reappear) is that a manual adjustment has to be made based on the nearest station, if the available records correlate strongly enough, or if not, the data junked. Either way it must be meticulously documented.
BTW in our business, blogging for an allegedly unrelated entity in working hours would be called gross misconduct and would result in summary dismissal.
Wren (01:20:39)
What I “did to come up with those numbers” is called mathematics.
I went and got the GISS and the UAH data. Click the links, you can download the data yourself. I calculated the per-century trends in each one. I did not “enlarge” anything as you fatuously claim. You can do the math yourself … or perhaps not, I don’t know.
But that, as Jack Webb used to say, is “Just the facts, ma’am”. The difference in the GISS and UAH trends is about a third of a degree per century. Don’t like it? Sorry … math is either right or wrong, it doesn’t depend on your dislikes. If you can show my math is wrong, go for it. If not, live with it.
w.
Nick Stokes says:
March 9, 2010 at 11:57 pm
Better to spend a fraction of a billion dollars wisely than billions unwisely.
Patrick Davis (01:53:24)
You are correct, he and others have gotten 13 million pounds. Dividing each grant by the number of people for that grant, I calculate that for him personally its about six million bucks.
“Willis Eschenbach (02:26:06) : ”
I still think Steve Austin gave us a bigger bang for our buck even though it was a ficticious (Hummm…ficticious, homogenised, false, made up, sounds familiar somehow) ’70’s TV show.
“Willis Eschenbach (02:26:06) :
You are correct, he and others have gotten 13 million pounds. Dividing each grant by the number of people for that grant, I calculate that for him personally its about six million bucks.”
Sorry, to add, I am sure he paid his tax on that “income”, just like the richest person on Earth, HRH QE2.
Re: Ken Stewart (Mar 9 22:30),
No shame at all. you’re doing a great job. keep it up.