The great thing about old magazines is that once published, they can’t be adjusted. Jo Nova has a great summary of some recent work from occasional WUWT contributor Frank Lansner who runs the blog “Hide the Decline” and what he found in an old National Geographic, which bears repeating here. – Anthony
Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?
Frank Lansner has found an historical graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from the mid 70’s, and it shows a serious decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1975. It’s a decline so large that it wipes out the gains made in the first half of the century, and brings temperatures right back to what they were circa 1910. The graph was not peer reviewed, but presumably it was based on the best information available at the time. In any case, if all the global records are not available to check, it’s impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is.
The decline apparently recorded was a whopping 0.5°C.
But, three decades later, by the time Brohan and the CRU graphed temperatures in 2006 from the same old time period, the data had been adjusted (surprise), so that what was a fall of 0.5°C had become just a drop of 0.15°C. Seventy percent of the cooling was gone.
Maybe they had good reasons for making these adjustments. But, as usual, the adjustments were in favor of the Big Scare Campaign, and the reasons and the original data are not easy to find.
Above: Matthews 1976, National Geographic, Temperatures 1880-1976
Now compare the 1935-1975 decline for the same area – the entire Northern hemisphere – presented by CRU/Brohan 2006:
Source: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/CR_data/Monthly/HadCRUGNS_3plots.gif
And when the old and the new are overlaid…hey where’s the decline?
Above: The blue line is the adjusted CRU average from 2006, overlaid on the 1976 Nat Geo graph.
If temperature sets across the northern hemisphere were really showing that 1940 was as hot as 2000, that makes it hard to argue that the global warming that occurred from 1975 to 2000 was almost solely due to carbon, since it wasn’t unusual (at least not for half the globe), and didn’t correlate at all with our carbon emissions, the vast majority of which occurred after 1945.
The US records show that the 1930’s were as hot as the 1990’s. And the divergence problem in tree rings is well known. Many tree rings showed a decline after 1960 that didn’t “concur” with the surface records. Perhaps these tree rings agree with the surface records as recorded at the time, rather than as adjusted post hoc? Perhaps the decline in the tree rings that Phil Jones worked to hide was not so much a divergence from reality, but instead was slightly more real than the surface-UHI-cherry-picked-and-poorly-sited records?
Esper – Tree ring widths declined from 1940-1975. Records after 1960 are sometimes ignored because they don’t fit the “temperature record”. (All timeseries were normalized over the 1881–1940 period. RCS, regional curve standardization; TRW, tree-ring width.) Thanks to ClimateAudit. (Link below)
Steven McIntyre discusses the Esper data here.
Frank Lansner also discusses the data from Scandinavia, which originally showed that temperatures were roughly level from mid-century to the end of the century, but that the large decline from 1940 to 1975 was…adjusted out of existence. (My post on that here).
Scandinavian Temperatures: 25 data series combined from The Nordklim database (left), compared to the IPCC’s temperature graph for the area.
Frank points out that while the older graph is not peer reviewed, the modern data sets are also not peer reviewed, so even if the papers they are published in are peer reviewed, it’s meaningless to claim this is significant when the underlying data can be adjusted years after its collection without documentation or review.
The CRU has an FAQ on their datasets, and it includes this comment on the accuracy of the hemispheric records:
In the hemispheric files averages are now given to a precision of three decimal places to enable seasonal values to be calculated to ±0.01°C. The extra precision implies no greater accuracy than two decimal places.
Do I read that correctly? After an adjustment that may be in the order of 0.34°C, the accuracy is ±0.01°C?
At the time when there was a Global Ice Age Scare, this graph appeared in Newsweek.
Newsweek: Global Temperatures 1880-1970 (NCAR)
Either 70% of the decline has been hidden in the years since then, or the climate scientists at the time were exaggerating the decline in order to support the Ice Age Scare (surely not!).
Full references available on Frank Lansner’s & Nicolai Skjoldby’s Blog. Stanley is derived from an NAS document. Mathews from National Geographic.
Thanks to Frank for his good work.
Brohan 2006 is linked here, with a pdf.
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Anthony Scalzi (22:12:17) :
Oddly enough I just happened to find a copy of the National Geographic issue that the article came from. Here’s an interesting line from the caption for the graph Anthony posted:
“Lower temperatures could produce a climate generally wetter and less stable, one marked by storms, floods, and freezes.”
Sound familiar anyone?
It sure does!
I have done a lot of travel in the midwest in the last 14 years and I’ve noticed the really damaging ice storms. These bad ice storms were pretty much confined to the Oklahoma City up to Kansas City area when I began in the late ’90s.
Then they began showing up farther southeast along I-44 Tulsa, Joplin and Springfield, Missouri.
Now they’re beginning to show up all the way from almost McAlester, Oklahoma through southern MO and the northern half of Arkansas to the Ohio/West Virginia line. With a lot of torn up timber (old growth forest) and powerlines along the way.
January 2009 Central Plains and Midwest ice storm – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2009_Central_Plains_and_Midwest_ice_storm
Geckko said
” (or) The data was corrected for issues found on proper examination.
Conclusion – The 0.7 degree c warming over the last 100 years is far from certain.”
It depends on the start point. Giss chose to start their records from 1880 when 1910 would have been more logical from the point of view of wdespread coverage-their intention according to Hansens 1987 paper. 1880 was at the start of a temperature decline. If measured from 1860-the start of a 20 year upturn, the subsequent trends would look rather different.
Similarly CRU started in 1850-at the foot of another decline. A start date from 1830 or 1840 would again show a different trend.
In other words both major temperature datasets started from a trough in the LIA not a peak.
Who would have guessed that temperatures would rise from the depths of the LIA?
Tonyb
FROM AUSTRALIA
I’m sure you’ve heard about the latest CSIRO and BOM relesse “It is very likely that human activities have caused most of the global warming observed since 1950
There is greater than 90% certainty that increases in greenhouse gas emissions have caused most of the global
warming since the mid-20th century. International research shows that it is extremely unlikely that the observed
warming could be explained by natural causes alone. Evidence of human influence has been detected in ocean
warming, sea-level rise, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns. CSIRO
research has shown that higher greenhouse gas levels are likely to have caused about half of the winter rainfall
reduction in south-west Western Australia.”
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20100315.shtml
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20100315a.pdf
I’d like to make a FOI request to both the CSIRO and BOM
there are a number of you who are more expert than I am (my background is legal); what should I ask for so that their data can be checked by enthusiastic amateurs
and if I get anything can I post it so that you guys can help with comments
I thought Wolfwalker’s comment was tongue in cheek. [snip]
Sinclair Davidson (22:51:17) :
“The temperature anomaly nowadays is calculated relative to the average temperature over the period 1960-1990. The temperature anomaly in the 1976 National Geographic would be relative to some other period. In order to make the comparison, the latter period data would have to be rebased to the earlier period. That would be worthwhile doing. But until it has been done, we can’t be sure any manipulation has occurred.”
I am not a scientist nor a mathematician, but as I understand it, an anomaly is the observed temperature minus some artificially chosen fixed datum (eg a temperature average). As this is an average figure I assume it has no trend built in, thus is a flat line. This will only affect the absolute magnitude of the resultant curve, not the overall shape.
It doesn’t change the conclusions at all.
Please enlighten me if my understanding is wrong.
Despite the obvious hype, newspaper reports in the 70s consistently refer to a 0.5°C drop from the 1940s to the 1970s in the NH and must reflect the real concerns of scientists at the time.
That temperature drop has vanished from the record.
Sorry Nick, but you’ve got it quite wrong in certain respects.
In 1975 I was recording the observation on a WBAN Form-10, using a PTP (Paper Tape Punch) to record the observations on a paper tape, and using a PTR (Paper Tape Reader) to automatically transmit the record at 110 Baud by the Automated Weather Network (AWN) to the computers at Carswell AFB. They in turn forwarded the electronic data record through the Global Weather Communications System’s (GWCS) to the NMC. who forwarded the data to the WMO, who transmitted the data to other NMC around the world. I was able to receive the latest weather data and forecasts from weather stations located in virtually every nation and sea of the world on my teletype printers within hours or even minutes of their transmissions. Automated summaries were also available.
By 1976, we transitioned from the old COMETS communications using the antiquated data input/output systems to the latest COMEDS Western Union CRT terminals. We still used the old teletype printers in conjunction with newer printing systems and the CRT terminals. COMEDS is still in use today.
Weather data has been transmitted by telegraph ever since the telegraph was invented in the early 19th Century. As automated telegraphy and ticker tapes came into use in the late 19th Century, weather reports were included alongside the financial and business data in the ticker tapes. By the early 20th Century telegraphy and radio telegraphy came into use with the KSR (Keyboard Send/Receive) teletype machines. Newspapers, radio stations, railroad companies, shipping companies, the U.S. Weather Bureau, Army, Navy, and assorted other domestic and foreign customers used the teletype communications networks to send and receive a variety of governement and commercial weather data products.
During the Second World War, these international teletype communications networks were controlled by the military, and weather data was classified as secret information. One the war had ended, the teletype communications networks were restored, and weather data communications underwent a huge expansion in the United States, Europpe, the Soviet Union, Asia, and the Pacific.
By the 1960s period, mainframe digital computer systems were beginning to be introduced into the weather communications systems. This process was perhaps accelerated by the needs of the aerospace activities of NASA, the military, and commercial organizations. By 1976, we were using CRT terminals to send and receive weather data between stations just about anywhere in the world anyone chose to establish communications to a station. Moscow, USSR and Alice Springs, Australia were among the stations we we received.
However, you must notice that these were not necessarily the stations and/or the observations being used in the USHCN and GHCN dtasets. A large proportion of the reporting stations in those datasets are COOP stations in the U.S. and something about the equivalent in the non-U.S. locations. Furthermore, these datasets do not include the SPECI, hourly, 3-hourly, or 6-hourly data of the non-COOP stations. The COOP stations often mailed their weather records to the NMC, and the delay before they were available for transmission on the weather data communications networks could be 45 days or longer in the U.S. or perhaps never for some COOP type stations reporting to the foreign NMC.
The level of sophistication at any given point in time depends very much on the time, place, and exactly which weather dataset is being discussed. In 1923, it was quite possible to receive weather data in Toulouse, France from a weather station in Buffalo, New York within hours or not minutes. Yet it may still take as long as 45 days for someone in Buffalo, New York to receive weather data from a COOP station also located in the State of New York in the year 2010. Likewise for Australia, a weathe report from an aerodrome in Perth, Western Australia in 1932 could be received in Liverpool, England within hours or minutes of transmission. Yet, it might be many years before someone communicated a local weather station report and dataset beyond the file cabinets of the NMC and put it onto paper tapes, Hollerith cards, digital tape, or other digital media.
Dr A Burns (23:34:23) :
Have a look at Briffa 1998
http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Briffa_et_al_PTRS_98.pdf
Fig 6 shows a strong decline from 1940 to 1970. ” … As yet, the cause (of the apparent decline) is not understood”. They don’t consider the reason for what they consider the apparent falling temperatures, is actually falling temperatures !
Val Majkus (02:12:13) :
FROM AUSTRALIA
I’m sure you’ve heard about the latest CSIRO and BOM relesse “It is very likely that human activities have caused most of the global warming observed since 1950
Reading these two posts next to each other you have to conclude that the Climate Scientists have some twisted logic working through their theories. How can you say on the one hand recent cooling 1940-1970 is unexplainable by them and just leave it unexplained but this somehow morphs into a similar warming MUST be caused by Humans as they cannot find any other cause.
Surely if the current warming is human made then any unexplainable cooling was also human made.
Does the 1976 chart take account of UHI or should it slope down more agressively from 1940 or before?
So… this “analysis” involves a visual comparison between a 2006 graph from CRU, and a graphic in a 1976 copy of National Geographic?
On the basis of analysing no actual data, taking into account no new information in the intervening period such as the retroactive gathering of station data, and just by visually aligning two completely different graphs (one of which is a hugely simplified and non-peer-reviewed graphic with no smoothing or error bars, and the other of which is a smoothed curve with error bars, with different base periods) and making no mention of the absolute temperatures represented, and no indication that the resizing, scaling or realignment of the two graphs has been performed correctly, the author leaps to the conclusions that there has been deliberate manipulation, that there may be no major warming at present, that CO2 is questionable as an influencer of climate, and that theft of private material is justified.
And you accept all of this, while claiming to be “skeptics”…
wolfwalker (20:15:50) :
“There is a simple, obvious explanation: the data from the National Geographic article was collected using older, less accurate instruments. ”
———-
What, like tree rings? Hiding the decline. UHI. Come on now wolfwalker you should know what WUWT is about by now.
Re: E.M.Smith (Mar 17 01:12),
Seems to me they built nuclear bombs 30 years before that, had a nice set of 56 and 64 bit computers
Nuclear bombs were high priority then – temperatures in 1975 not so much. AGW wasn’t in the popular discourse. It was pretty clear to me that in 1979 I was the only person in Australia outside BoM actually looking at those temperatures, and I was working on a PDP-11 (with limited access to a Cyber-76).
It’s all very well to talk of Crays and tapes, but this is a highly distributed set of data, which can only with great difficulty be brought to a central site.
I was under the impression that NCDC “assembled the data” and Hansen’s GIStemp just sucked it in and changed it
Nope – no GHCN in the 80’s. Hansen got data from NCAR, but Jones had to find a whole lot of other sources.
The real victims of AGW are those who believed it in the first place.
Dave,
You are exactly the kind of person I am referring to.
I was reading today the absurd comments by the Met Office on 95% confidence there is a wolf. But reading between the lines, they are clearly laying the foundation for a case for global warming which is not based on temperature data but the other “signs of impending doom” as foretold in the IPCC dodgy dossier.
Using a military analogy, they are clearly aware that the defence line of the instrumentational record is entirely inadequate and about to be overrun, and so a few die-hard fanatics are desparately trying to build up a second line of defence around the “and there’s other things that show it is warming even if the instrumentational record can’t be relied on”.
All in all it reminds me of the game we play on the beech with the kids trying to stop the tide from over-running the defences of the sand castle, and it always amazes me just how quickly the defences of sand crumble after the first wave breaches the week spot in the sand-wall.
And on global warming, I think that week spot is that figure of 90 now 95% confidence, because as far as I can see it has no real basis in science or statistics.
Doug in Seattle: “I think both are in part a result of science too often thinking in too short of a time span and then applying linear trends to the data. We see the same logic applied to the post-1998 trend by some sceptics too.”
There lies the difference between the two sides on global warming. You tell a global warmer that the world has cooled since 2001 and it attacks their core belief about the world and they refuse to believe it (most can’t do basic stats so have to rely on what they are told – and of course their “high priests” like gore and the climategate gang never told their followers the truth about the 21st century cooling). But you tell a sceptic, and most know the basics of science, and so know it doesn’t mean much
…. except it sure does annoy the hell out of the typical scientifically illiterate idiots who believe in global warming who aren’t aware how insignificant it is!
That just doesn’t make any sense with respect to the airways datasets. I was briefing RAAF aircrew using Australian and New Zealand weather data 1974-1978. Why didn’t you use the weather data from the GTS?
The NG graph is not an anomaly graph. It is based on studies by M. I. Budyko of the U.S.S.R. and James K. Angell of the U.S., both prominent researchers back then.
Juraj V:
Try http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/ (not down, but not what I expected, either).
his wiki is alive as well.
Who made the original graph and are they still alive? Can they be contacted?
toyotawhizguy (21:48:43) :
‘hide the decline’ refers to the decline in tree ring density and width, not to temperatures. The CRU scientists are not pulling your leg when they deny it is a decline in temperatures they were speaking about.
The decline in tree rings – when converted to a temperature proxy – diverged from the instrument measured rise in temperatures. Thus, they either spliced in the actual thermometer readings onto the dataset (the ‘trick’) or they just stopped the series in 1960 when the decline started.
The problem most people have with this is that the ‘decline’ tends to say that tree rings make a poor temperature proxy if they are known to diverge from the most accurate instrument measurements available, and there is no explanation available. It could be anything – extra rain, more c02 for the trees to ‘eat’, airborne fertilisers, more sun and less cloudy days -nobody knows. Meaning they probably shouldn’t be used at all. The problems were covered in the much-cited paper ‘hidden in plain sight’ but these concerns had disappeared by the time the hockey stick(s) made it into the IPCC report and ‘An inconvenient truth’.
The climateaudit article on ‘ipcc and the trick’ is most informative on this subject.
Dave (03:02:55),
It looks like that kool-aid is having a bitter taste these days.
BTW, thanks for the insight into your thinking. You obviously have no idea what it takes to be a skeptic. I’ll try to help.
Skeptics tend to look not at any single piece of data, but at the overall collection of data. They look for things that don’t add up. They look at how people react to questions. They look at history. They look for the contradictions. The last thing a skeptic does is accept anything by itself as proof of concept. Essentially, 180 degrees from those like you who accept CAGW and never thought to question the IPCC or the climate scientists involved.
Dave (03:02:55) :
No.
Something that puzzles me.
As I understand paleoclimatology, cores are calibrated against sections of the instrumental temperature record, then validated against other sections.
If the instrumental record is subsequently adjusted, then shouldn’t paleo work be re-done to re-calibrate and re-validate against the new version of the historical instrumental record? If proxy reconstructions pre-date the adjustments, then surely they can’t be considered reliable until they’re redone against the new temperatures.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Walter-Rodgers/2010/0302/War-over-the-Arctic-Global-warming-skeptics-distract-us-from-security-risks
Harsh language against skeptics… does not even consider both sides. Actually was a little surprising coming form CSM.
oyotawhizguy (21:48:43) :
Quote from the article: “Many tree rings showed a decline after 1960 that didn’t “concur” with the surface records.”
CRU apologists have claimed on at least two sites I’ve monitored that “Hide the decline” (in the infamous CRU leaked e-mail) does not refer to temperature. If true, then exactly what does the “decline” refer to if not temperature? They make the denial, but never explain themselves.
It relates to hiding tree ring data in a graph, there is a ton of stuff about it all over the net.