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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climategatestuff (03:55:04) :
“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.”
Willis, I suspect he is salaried. So making statements like that is inflammatory for no purpose whatsoever.
REPLY:
You are probably correct, however the 13 billion DOES translate into honor and prestige at the Uni…followed by increases in salary. The old publish or perish in spades.
Didn’t the head of the MET just get a major increase to a fantastic salary???
There is no accountability within Science nor within the sciences. Everyone is off doing their own “thing”. ‘Publishing’ whatever they want to; and today it is so easy to ‘publish’ because the media isn’t after truth either -their only concern is hype and sensationalism. If you don’t have something believeably ‘sensational’ there’s always the Web to turn to.
(‘Science’ and ‘Nature’ may be difficult for some to ‘publish’ in, but not if you’re one of their ‘right thinking’ psyentists.)
Life’s a beach, always changing, always the same.
(that’s true of people too)
The opiate of the masses today is science and psyence:-(
******************
climategatestuff (03:55:04) :
“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.”
Willis, I suspect he is salaried. So making statements like that is inflammatory for no purpose whatsoever.
*********************
I love it when people pretend bringing in grant money isn’t good for the researcher who attracted it. That person will be very well treated if (s)he brings in millions of dollars in grant money, even if that money does not go directly to his or her salary. It can figure into raises, promotions, and perks. This kind of statement identifies the person as biased.
Asterisk?
Every station should have a rather large question mark next to it.
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).
As C.G.Jung said: “Statistics is that science which shows you that the average weight of a pebble in a pebbles’ beach is 152 grams, but you can search all your life for such a pebble and you will not find it”
Modern man, and more precisely US anthopopithecus species ☺, have considered statistics results as “truths”, and their “books and bibles”=MSM and now the internet, tell the world DAILY about those TRUTHS of theirs.
Fortunately, human beings from a different origin, mostly from old cultures, which are named by them as “underdeveloped or third, even fourth world countries” do not believe in these, for them so dear and cherished ‘truths”, indians among them and, as a result, they try to make their best effort not to die from laughing, and, instead they “opine” about them through turning around and fart at them.
About that brightness index:
Tuscon, AZ doesn’t have any street lights. How does GISS rate Tuscon’s urbanization?
“If I leave out 1936 through 1941, the 1942 temperature is much warmer than when I left off (1935). So what?”
Well because the change in the mean temps in the data before 1993 is 1.5Celsius cooler than the change in the mean temps after 1998. furthermore, the gradient before 1993 suggests cooling, but after beween 1993 and 1998 there is clearly a pronounced jump upward in temperature. This could mean that [a] there was a significant change in the local climate of the area that resulted in a virtually stepwise upward increase in average temperatures over a relatively short period of time or [b] that station suffered some direct change to its circumstances, such as a site change or updating of equipment to remote control. Given the data is missing in the interim, the most likely cause of the upward change is related to [b], but since the homogenisation process does not take this into account the final “corrected” data actually indicates an upward trend in temperature in the area that simply didn’t happen in practice.
It is quite reasonable to suggest that the discontinuity before 1942 suggests a sudden change of some sort – but so what? Measurements sites can easily have changed two times over a 120 year history. What really matters is the gradient of the raw data between obvious sudden discontinuities, because CO2 caused warming will result in gradual increases in average temperature, not sudden discontinuities. So if you blocked out all the areas where there might be a discontinuity and measured the gradient between these discontinuities will you see a gradual warming, as would be expected from CO2, e.g. between 1942 and 1993? I don’t think so – looks like a strong cooling trend to me.
Ryan Stephenson,
You say, “What really matters is the gradient of the raw data between obvious sudden discontinuities, because CO2 caused warming will result in gradual increases in average temperature, not sudden discontinuities.”
What about the famous tipping points and run away cliamte catastrophes we have been promised?
Over at Lucia’s, Zeke has been on a mission to extol the virtues of the surface station network and make the case UHI (and land use change etc.) has little effect on the outcome.
Although I commend him (and Lucia) for performing such hard work, I still fail to see where they have in any way addressed the underlying issue of the data itself on a station by station basis and how homogenization masks these biases. It looks to me all they’ve done is replicated an error by arguing anomalies “fix” the problem.
Willis, have you delved into the discussions at Lucia’s blog?
From Wiki –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukteshwar
“New development
Recently, the town has experienced some construction activity and townships have begun to mushroom in and around Mukteshwar. Many people are buying holiday homes here to escape large chaotic cities”
Townships ‘mushrooming’ in and around Mukteshwar…no UHI there…nothing to see…move along..
US Navy fleet sonarman around the world, collect ocean temperature data for “immediate” use. We “collect” the data by dropping a bathythermograph probe. We “calibrate” the receiving electronic devices to ensure an accurate plot of the temperature data. We “interpret” the results and forward the raw data to others for “historical” use. A retired 30 year sonarman, I have dropped literally thousands of probes.
In all those US Navy collections….errors are made. I know, because we find most of them before ever a report is made. Reports with mistakes are caught by the Fleet Numerical Weather Center…and there are repercussions.
In my career, I would discover periodic incompetence, but never, ever found “adjustments”, “cherry picking”, or other malfeasance with the data. I could reason that it was because we were more ethical or better technically …
But, the real reason was our lives depended on the accuracy of the results. One thing about war, even a cold one…..it focuses everyone’s mind on what’s important…
I think the scientific community needs a bit of adult supervision…..
……as in war, there needs to be repercussions for mistakes.
From the Mukteshwar site:
“There may be multiple (potentially overlapping) series for each station in the data set. In such cases, I averaged the temperatures from multiple series by month to come up with a single series for each WMO station identifier.”
This means that the “raw” data has been averaged and that there may be more than one site contributing to this series. Perhaps the shift represents the dropout of one of the stations. There may only be long-term data from the area and not from any one particular site.
For those based in the UK there is a superb petition to sign demanding that the Prime Minister stops making an arse of himself by referring to those who are properly scientifically sceptical of climate forecasting “science”
“Deniers”.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Deniers/
1600 signatures so far – Well done!
I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I’m sorry…
AVERAGE TEMPERATURES…
Complete, utter, stupid FICTION!
I have X amount of atmosperic energy.
I have Y amount of WATER.
In one area the temperature is 100 Degrees F, the humidity is 15%.
In another area, the temperature is 80 F., the humidity is 80%.
Which area is “hotter”? If we talk ATMOSPHERIC ENERGY…it is the area at 80 F !!!!
Taking temperatures from disparate places around the globe and “averaging them” is MEANINGLESS.
It is a stupid exercise.
THE ONLY THING THAT CAN BE DONE IS TO TAKE TEMPERATURE RECORDS FROM THE SAME PLACE, TAKEN UNDER “AS CLOSE TO IDENTICAL” CONDITIONS OVER TIME AS POSSIBLE.
Then a trend, upward or downward can be established for THAT PLACE.
THEN those trends for the PLACES could perhaps be compared.
BUT this is a mathematic exercise WHICH NO ONE HAS UNDERTAKEN!
Signed: Frustrated Max
Excellent investigative analysis, Willis and Anthony. Thanks.
One comment on the mentions of the ‘money tricks’ – citing total grant monies allocated to Jones, et. al.
It IS somewhat unfair to imply that this money went directly into Dr. Jones’ pocket. While it is quite likely that a portion of the funds either supplied or contributed to the sum which was his drawn salary for his position, the money (hopefully the bulk of it) was to be used to finance the overall efforts that Jones & Co. were in charge of overseeing/running. Things much more mundane than Masseratis, to be sure – office supplies, IT infrastructure, the bills to keep the lights on (and if it’s like many other government activities I’ve seen, the probably is a charade going on of various entities and sub entities sending ‘bills’ to each other to collectively cover overall costs from various ‘pots’ of money), salaries and wages for assistants, clerical support, even the janitor.
The overall point that they received the formidable sum of X amount of taxpayer dollars, and only managed to produce propaganda backed up by the sloppy dreck they’ve offered up as a work product is quite valid and rather outrageous.
That makes them incompetent bumbling buffoons, not thieves.
And a follow-up thought to the buffoons not thieves comment –
While there’s no really glaring reason to believe that Jones, et al have brazenly skimmed of any money for personal gain, given the shoddiness of their other activities with numbers and accountability, an independent third-party audit of their financial books might be a very illuminating and potentially very embarrassing exercise. . .with the results being a lot more useful than speculation and inference.
I agree with Max.
What are the individual stations records indicating, UHI, climate change or not?
We may call that “rural” but if you zoom in on 29.47°N, 79.65°E with Google Maps you can see that the nearby mountains have been extensively terraced. We don’t know when that was done. There should be microclimate differences between scrub plants on steep slopes and water-retaining terraced crops.
Re: kadaka (23:38:03)
@ur momisugly NickB. (19:56:27) and J.Peden (21:46:57) :
The report was on ABC (US, not Aus.). Just now I Googled a new article from them. First four paragraphs:
To summarize, as I have heard things, hormone replacement is not that good, calcium supplements don’t work (beyond minimum metabolic requirements that you can get with diet), and now the bone building drugs are not working all that great.
What does work is weight-bearing exercise, which convinces your body of the need for strong bones. With bone and muscle mass, even brains and cardio-pulmonary fitness, “use it or lose it” is the rule, and the body likes to fight back against attempts to tell it otherwise.
(Note: Although I have included the original links, I have no idea why ABC felt the need to link to a 2003 NYT piece for “bone fractures.”)
Max Hugoson (08:48:10)
What we really should be analyzing is energy. Temperature is just a proxy for this and AFAIK there has been no serious research into how good of a proxy it is for Atmospheric Heat/Energy Content.
I’ve been quite amazed at all the physicists talking about climate this and that, that have never even mentioned it. Every mechanical engineer I know (and most HVAC repairmen for that matter) know how important that is.
AnonyMoose (09:12:05) :
I’d say still rural. It’s not an airport.
John Galt (06:28:40) :
About that brightness index:
Tuscon, AZ doesn’t have any street lights. How does GISS rate Tuscon’s urbanization?
Speaking of, does North Korea have temperature stations?
If people are interested, Zeke and others have started to look at other metadata for rural stations.
As I watch everybody natter around about the UHI issue I don’t see much
in the way of systematic investigation. There are these following Issues.
1. The metadata
2. The data
3. The method
Some headway is being made on #3. Up until recently we only had closed
methods. Now, that’s changing. GISSTEMP ( flawed as it is) can be used.
Zeke has his approach. Grant Foster his. And I suspect JeffId and Roman will
come out with something that has the statistical rigor that will make folks ( like me) who inhabit ClimateAudit happy.
#2. The data. Most of the argument about the data swirls around the issue
of adjustments vs raw. Much of this debate is woefully uninformed. It’s uninformed because no one has done a proper data flow diagram. Where does the data come from. what processes were performed on this data.
I see papers and descriptions, no code ( except menne). because this
hasn’t been done reading debates about raw versus adjusted are just annoying. ok, sometimes they are fun
#1. The metadata. We have a list of stations. we have locations.
Its time to start a community effort to assemble and audit the available
metadata.
Willis, you model of a self regulating earth makes a lot of sense, but it needs to allow for variations due to forcing. The temperature regulating mechanism is in the tropics, but the CO2 driver is in the northern latitudes. This should cause a temporary increase of temperature until the CO2 equilibrates. With a constant CO2 input, the equilibration won’t happen, and you will see a temperature offset related to the rate that CO2 is generated.
This is exactly what is seen when you look at the rate of increase of CO2 and the temperature anomaly. See http://economics.huji.ac.il/facultye/beenstock/Nature_Paper091209.pdf, or my simpler analysis at http://www.2bc3.com/warming.html.
One would expect a higher temperature anomaly when economic activity is robust, and a lower anomaly when the world economies slow down. It is definitely not necessary to show that there is no temperature anomaly at all.
Willis Eschenbach (00:42:03) :
Willis.
Perhaps it’s time to start a meta data audit project. Already at hand we
have various nightlights products, population products, ISA, vegatative
index, photos.
I get kinda tired of having to hunt around for a station index file
and then read a readme if I can find it to figure out what bright = 15
means.