Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Anthony has covered the National Geographic Northern Hemisphere temperature graph here. This is the graph under discussion.
Figure 1. Graph from November 1976 National Geographic article
Then I graphed it against the GISS Northern Hemisphere data. Here is that graph:
Figure 2. (Upper) Data from November 1976 National Geographic article, and GISS temperature data. Both datasets are for the Northern Hemisphere. (Lower) Difference between the two datasets (right scale).
A few notes, in no particular order.
1. Most of the ~ 0.2°C difference between the NatGeo and Giss data in the recent record is likely from the 1941 sea surface temperature (SST) adjustment. See here, here, and here for discussion of this adjustment. There is an abrupt jump 1940-1941.
2. For the middle part of the record, they track each other pretty closely.
3. There is another adjustment, again of ~ 0.2°C ,for unknown reasons, in the period from the start of the record to 1906. Again, there is an abrupt drop 1906-1907.
4. The existence of these two adjustments is shown by a discontinuity analysis (described here on page 2845 paragraph 2). This is the result of that analysis:
FIgure 2. Residual Sum of Squares Discontinuity Analysis. The breaks at 1906 and 1941 are clearly shown by this method of analysis.
So we have two major adjustments of ~ 0.2°C, for one of which we likely know the justification, and for the other, I have no idea.
Go figure …
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Bill illis
That was a very interesting composite graph and I do think its significant.
In several of my recent articles I have looked at climate over an extended period and commented on the extraordinary coincidence that caused Hansen to run Giss from 1880. Logically it was not a good date to start as it didn’t give him the coverage in depth he said he wanted. However it did commence from a distinct down turn in temperatures which meant that any subsequent upturn was accentuated because it was coming from a trough.
Jones did the same in as much he also measured from a trough, but in his case I think it was purely because he wanted early coverage, rather than extensive coverage.
Measuring from a peak rather than a trough will considerably change the shape of the subsequent slope and I think several of Hansens competitors pick up the peaks and troughs much beetter than he does.
Personally the further back in time the better as far as I am concerned, looking at say the CET and Uppsala figures for example is quite instructive.
Anyway thanks for the great graph which I have archived
tonyb
Thanks to RACookPE1978 (07:54:36) : for citing CO2 science in response to my earlier comment.
Yes it is very good, but I personally find it very unwieldy and too complex to navigate and also tend to associate it mainly with its excellent work on the MWP which is very focussed. I will give it another go.
tonyb
TonyB wrote about the cyclical Arctic sea ice. So did Klyashtorin and Lyubushinan, and showed on the graph on the pdf page 47 the increasing coverage through the 1970s. (Note the graph is ice-free water to visually match temperatures with an 8 year lag.)
http://alexeylyubushin.narod.ru/Climate_Changes_and_Fish_Productivity.pdf?
Nicola Scafetta on his recent Science and Public Policy review of sceptical science referenced the Russian book.
There is a way to obtain a list of links to articles in particular categories on this site. Click on the “Categories” pop-up scroll-list toward the bottom of the sidebar to see a list of articles relating to about 20-some topics. I suggest that all the categories be visible on the sidebar without requiring a click to view them (if WordPress will allow this), as I suspect that this feature is overlooked by many site visitors — and even regulars.
This site has made a start toward an informal indexing of worthy web-wide articles on one topic: Climategate, under the tab of that name. Perhaps this site could set up a new tab for all other topics, subdivided internally by category, to which regulars here could make contributions.
(PS: The absence of such a web-wide index to useful (mostly skeptical) articles is yet another indicator of the absence of any sort of slick, well-oiled skeptic campaign. If I, or anyone, were cat-herder in chief, it would be one of the top items on my agenda.)
It looks like GISS has about the same slope as the National Geographic data. No conspiracy here.
Enneagram (07:49:31) : wrote
“Are you against Big Oil? ☺.”
Not if they pay enough. Here I am presenting an entirely new way of looking at climate change. The least they could do is pay me a consultant’s fee of ginormous wads.
“The IPCC could buy or generously fund your brand new SST warming theory;”
Them too. I am generous in my acceptance of enormous wads. Prizes. Tropical islands. Floozies. Aston Martins.
however GAIA regulates its temperatures using another mechanism, see FAO pp.50 graphs:
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e08.pdf
You mean someone else has noticed that biology responds to climate? And vice versa. Whatever next?
” The first detergent was developed in Germany and its name is NEKAL:”
Aha. I didn’t know that. So we can blame the Germans. I have a subtheory that it’s all to do with mauve, the waste products of the chemical industry setting off the effect. Germans again, of course. But how were they to know?
I can now cross off ‘save the world’ from my to do list in the pantry. Hoovering next.
JF
Roger Knights
Yes, I am aware of the archiving system here, but again have never found it particularly coherent if you are seeking specific topics. Also, there are many good papers which never get picked up here for one reason or another, so I am talking about a central resource and index for ALL sceptical blogs.
What you say here is VERY pertinent!
“This site has made a start toward an informal indexing of worthy web-wide articles on one topic: Climategate, under the tab of that name. Perhaps this site could set up a new tab for all other topics, subdivided internally by category, to which regulars here could make contributions.
(PS: The absence of such a web-wide index to useful (mostly skeptical) articles is yet another indicator of the absence of any sort of slick, well-oiled skeptic campaign. If I, or anyone, were cat-herder in chief, it would be one of the top items on my agenda.)”
Subdivision of ALL available material would be a good idea, provided the total number of topics was limited to those that were directly relevant to analysing/rebutting the four or five main pillars of AGW which to me are;
*Cause and effect of CO2
*Sea level rise
*Arctic ice levels
*Global temperature record
*Historical precedence
As you rightly say, if the sceptics were as well funded as others think we are we would have an easy to search facility like this already AND be paying sceptics to write articles on topics that followed a master plan which identifed weaknesses in the AGW case.
Sorry, I would appoint myself as Cat herder in Chief- What I could do with just $10 million a year 🙂 You would have to make do with assistant cat herder on only $5 million
Tonyb
TonyB (03:26:44) :
Check the subject index on the Idso’s site for scientific articles grouped by subject. Regarding blog posts, there’s just Google … oh, and the subject index on ClimateAudit.
w.
I will graciously accept the role of vice-assistant chief cat-hearder, since “I” am eminently qualified – having actually heard of cats.
And at only a mere 1.5 million a year!
A C Osborn (06:37:42)
Yeah, I’m thinking of forming the SPCN, or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Numbers …
Bob Tisdale (06:39:27) : edit
Dunno. I give the links to the articles used by NGeo, check them and see what you think. They are not all that specific.
w.
Thanks to RACookPE1978 (12:19:14) for the offer to be my Vacch, but you can’t be any good can you if you will accept such a low wage? I’m afraid to say that I believe you’re in this only for the highly prestigious title 🙂 Next.
Willis; Thanks for your link I will check it out and also thanks for the excellent graphs..
Tonyb
Willis and Robert
I see you have both referenced Co2 science. Yes it is very good, although the breadth and depth of its content is not immediately obvious. Despite using it sometimes for MWP stuff I hadn’t fully explored its other topics. Probably my failing, but not sure the sheer depth and content would be obvious to the casual passer by unless there had been a referral. In that context it seems to position itself as a resource rather than an up front site for scepticism. Nothing wrong with that at all of course
It seems to cover ‘papers’ so the blog posts -which tend to be more current and more accessible to the undecided- still doesn’t have an obvious site anywhere. WUWT seems to be a natural home if it included all relevant material.
Robert-you might be vacch material after all
tonyb
Mr. Eschenbach,
Frank Lansner is probably the one responsible for bringing about the splash of the 0,43C decline displayed in the National Geographic 1976 curve (NGT76). This decline is likely to be spuriously inflated simply by the splicing of the two dataset (Budyko 1969 and Angell-Korshover 1977) used for the NGT76. The coherent Russian NH dataset for the whole time series shows a decline of only 0,28C – just 0,04C more than the 0,24C displayed in GISS.
We had the issue up on our Danish Climate Debate page some weeks ago where Dr. Bo Møllesøe Vinther of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen set the record quite straight in a series of responses.
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/hide-the-decline-hvad-er-det-reelt-man-daekker-over-d12-e1473-s40.php#post_20192
I translate the most relevant of his response below:
“NGT76 shows a decline of about 0.43C in average temperatures between 1935-44 and 1964-73. However, since it consists of two types of temperature observations, the uncertainty is both unknown and potentially large. [How the actual splicing for NGT76 was carried out has never been published] This can be seen from the fact that the data in fig. 8 in Angell and Korshover (1977) show a difference in the mean temperatures for the interval of 1964-68 between the Budyko-Asakura curve and the Angell-Korshover curve, the former being about 0.07C warmer than the latter in this interval. Such a difference has a direct influence on the size of the subsequently calculated decline of the compound curve.
If you want to assess the trend 1940-75 by a Russian dataset, I would recommend the data from State Hydrological Institute i St. Petersbourg, where M.I. Budyko headed the cimate department for many years. The below link is updated until 1993 and has been documented in numerous publications.
Russian NH temperature data 1881-1993:
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_VINNIKOV_GROISMAN_LUGINA.html
I do not agree that anyone has been trying to hide the decline 1940-70. To be sure, uncertainties about the size do exist, but this is not hidden at all and can be readily seen by comparing e.g. GISS, HadCRUT3 and the above mentioned updated Russian NH data:
The decline in HadCRUT3 NH temperature is 0.19C (the difference between average temp. 1936-45 and 1967-76).
The decline in GISS NH temperatur er 0.24C (the difference between average temp. 1937-46 and 1967-76).
The decline in the Russian NH temperature data is 0.28C (the difference between average temp. 1935-44 and 1963-72).
(This is calculated for the warmest decade of the 1930ies/1940ies and the coldest decade of the 1960ies/1970ies for each set of data)”.
With a true difference between NGT76 and GISS of a mere 0,04C, well within uncertainty, there thus appears to be no reason for assuming that any of your putative “0,2C adjustments to the GISS dataset” having taken place at all.
Hope this was of interest.
Christoffer Bugge Harder (14:09:07) :
A Russian series showing about the same warming as other series with known errors is no proof of anything.
The massive adjustment of up 0.4 deg to 1941 was due to an error. Folland argued in (Folland 2001) that in 1941 measurements had swiched suddenly from buckets to intakes. This was a false assumption.
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/sstbucket.gif
Having found this error, it would be up to you or others to correct this series, find the errors in the then not matching Russian series and search for additional errors.
However, with current knowledge, Northern hemisphere data is inflated of up to 0.4 deg against around 1940.
Christoffer Bugge Harder (14:09:07)
I fear I can’t be responsible for what Mr. Lansner says. However, your claim that
simply doesn’t pass the most obvious of tests. As I demonstrate mathematically above, there were two discontinuities in the dataset compared to GISS, one in 1906 and one in 1941. Both of these were before the 1959 splice, and there is no discontinuity at the splice, so your claim fails on even a cursory examination.
First, you say “How the actual splicing for NGT76 was carried out has never been published”. However, it is very easy to determine by looking at the three datasets.
Next, Dr. Vinther highlights a difference between the “Budyko-Asakura curve and the Angell-Korshover curve, the former being about 0.07C warmer than the latter in this interval [1964-68].” Since the Budyko data used by NGeo stops in 1960, how is this relevant?
OK, here’s the analysis of the Russian data cited by Christoffer Harder above vs. the NatGeo and GISS data. First, the NatGeo and Russian data:
As you can see, the Russian/NatGeo data is not too far from the GISS/NatGeo data. It does not, however, contain the discontinuity in 1906. How close is the Russian data to the GISS data? As usual, a picture is worth a thousand words …
As you can see, the Russian and GISS data agree well except in the period 1942-1964. There is a discontinuity between the Russian and GISS data in 1942. The Russian decline 1939-1964 is -0.08C/decade, while the GISS decline 1938-1964 is -0.05C/decade. However, they come back together in 1976, and are almost identical from then on.
What does all this mean? It means that the Russians have adjusted their data as well, but in a slightly different way than GISS. Go figure …
Christoffer Bugge Harder, you write:
“This decline is likely to be spuriously inflated simply by the splicing of the two dataset (Budyko 1969 and Angell-Korshover 1977) used for the NGT76”
“It is likely” is not enough.
We are talking about a stitch carried out by the Japanese Meteorolgical institute, and I have argued here why i do not find it “likely” that the stitch by JMI appears to be justifiable:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/decline-temperature-decline-1940-78-the-cold-data-war-170.php
So i need to know exactly why it is “likely” that the JMI is significantly wrong to answer your things.
Next, in Hansens later graph, theres nothing that indicates that it should be the stitch around 1959 thats the basic issue. Hansens temperatures dives STRONGLY after 1960. So the real dissagrement for example Hansen vs. Matthes occurs in trends starting around 1967.
From 1967 Hansen goes UP and this is the epicentre for the diffences, not 1960:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Temperature%20decline%20cold%20war/14.jpg
So Hansen trend from 1967 goes UP in the middle of the period 1958-75 where Korshover and the others incl Raobcore shows solid down trend.
THIS IS THE EPICENTRE of differences, not the stich around 1958 that you find “likely” should be done significantly differently for some reason.
In fact, if there was no “Budyko” , no “Mathews 76” but just the 4 series:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Temperature%20decline%20cold%20war/8.jpg
and the raobcore:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Temperature%20decline%20cold%20war/9.jpg
We still have the problem core: CRU, GISS Goes UP 1958-1975 while peerrev original data from the real world goes DOWN!
This is the main issue, so any claims about stitch 1958 is less rellevant (and not well supported).
All sources agree on temperature fall 1940-58 , the “new” thing is that 1958-75 also falls significant in temperature, unlike GISS, CRU.
correction:
“and I have argued here why i do not find it “likely” that the stitch by JMI appears to be INjustifiable:”
Manfred (08:29:11): You wrote, “This makes the massive pre-1941 downward correction invalid. ”
The “massive pre-1941” correction was upward, not downward, reducing the trend, not increasing it. Take a look: the COADS data is the raw data used to create the NCDC and Hadley Centre SST datasets. The COADS data has not been corrected, while the HADISST data has in the following comparison graph of Northern Hemisphere SST anomalies:
http://i44.tinypic.com/15oc83p.png
I’m thinking about an independant third party test to see what was what.
We could try near time clamatology by digging out some clams from the location of the disputed raobcores.
Or we could get some coral (Sr/Ca proxy) to figure out the sst.
Alright That’s all I have.
Bob Tisdale (17:34:23) :
agreed, however, as measurements were predominantly made with buckets until at least the 1970s and intakes became the dominant method only in the 1990s, this upwards corrections should continue until the 1970s and taper off in the 1980s, 1990s.
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/sstbucket.gif
Apply this to the COADS curve:
http://i44.tinypic.com/15oc83p.png
and you will get the maximum in the early 1940s and 60 years of cooling since then.
ICOADS datasets include adjusted, quality controlled, and infill data.
Why, when the modern data sets are way more complete than in the 70s, with better understanding of problems, is some old graph patched together by a magazine, seen as a serious thing to compare to current records?
Are we not trying to meet science with science here? And has anyone taken it upon themselves to audit the old graph? Or is there something special about it that makes it rise above scrutiny?
barry (21:21:47)
Why am I comparing the 1970’s Budyko and Angell datasets to current datasets? Because the modern datasets have been altered by devotees of the AGW hypothesis. They are not data, they are that oxymoronic item, “adjusted data”.
The older datasets are valuable because they allow us to see just where and how the modern datasets were adjusted.
The old data shown above was not “patched together by a magazine”. It represented the best science of the time. I have given the references to the original studies in the head post. Take a read of them, they are very interesting.
Do we understand the problems better now as you claim? Perhaps … and perhaps not. Given that the keeper of one of the three major global temperature datasets just had to step down from his job at the CRU because of his scientific malfeasance (conspiring to avoid releasing his data) and his inability to properly keep and maintain records, we certainly can’t assume that he understands the problem better than Budyko and Angell did in 1976.
The difficulty is that the basic datasets of climate science, the global temperature databases, are controlled by people with an agenda. Their agenda is to convince the world that we need to act right now to prevent some imaginary disaster in fifty years … so you’ll forgive me if I don’t accept their adjustments as gospel.