Jo Nova has more from Frank Lansner on what older records, this time from weather balloons, tell us about recent adjustments to the temperature record. WUWT readers may recall Rewriting the decline where the graph from National Geographic below raises some questions about temperature graphs today.
Above: Matthews 1976, National Geographic, Temperatures 1880-1976
Frank Lansner has done some excellent follow-up on the missing “decline” in temperatures from 1940 to 1975, and things get even more interesting. Recall that the original “hide the decline” statement comes from the ClimateGate emails and refers to “hiding” the tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures after 1960. It’s known as the “divergence problem” because tree rings diverge from the measured temperatures. But Frank shows that the peer reviewed data supports the original graphs and that measured temperature did decline from 1960 onwards, sharply. But in the GISS version of that time-period, temperatures from the cold 1970’s period were repeatedly “adjusted” years after the event, and progressively got warmer.
The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline that was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later that was reduced so far it became a mild warming, against the detailed corroborating evidence from rabocore data.
Raobcore measurements are balloon measures. They started in 1958, twenty years before satellites. But when satellites began, the two different methods tie together very neatly–telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools.
You can see how similar the data from both methods is:
So what do the raobcores tell us about the period before satellites started recording temperatures? They make it clear that temperatures fell quickly from 1960-1970.
The decline in the original graph in National Geographic in 1976 is apparently backed up by highly accurate balloon data, and was based on peer reviewed data: Budyko 1969 and Angell and Korshover (1975). These two sets overlap from 1958 to 1960, and correlate well, so stitching them together is reasonable thing to do and it doesn’t make much difference which year is chosen from the overlap period (indeed any other choice makes the decline slightly steeper).
What’s thought provoking is that the raobcore data above is for 30N-30S, covering all the tropics on both sides of the equator, and yet still shows the decline. That begs the question of whether the Southern Hemisphere data has been adjusted too. It would be good to see the raobcore sets further up towards the arctic. It would also be good to look at the Southern Hemisphere. Where are the data sets and peer reviewed papers on temperature from 1965 to 1980? I’d like to follow that up.
Three decades of adjustments
When did the “funny business” begin? By 1980 Hansen and GISS had already produced graphs which were starting to neutralize the decline. His graphs of 1987 and then 2007 further reduced the decline, until the cooling from 1960 to 1975 was completely lost.
(Click to see a larger image).
Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 rising (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).
Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s
Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s
And in 1974, there was the fore-runner of the “It’s worse than we thought” message.
…
Frank has more information and details on his blog Hide the decline.
If 1958 temperatures were similar to the 1990’s, it rewrites the entire claim of all the unprecedented warming of late. Lansner also remind us of the photos taken in the arctic by submarines that surfaced around the north pole.
Why was the trend adjusted? Look at the original paper and find out.
“These include the use of additional observations, the development of comprehensive uncertainty estimates, and technical improvements that enable, for instance, the production of gridded fields at arbitrary resolution.”
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf
I considered comparing Hansen to Blondlot, but decided against it as Blondlot was simply mistaken. Perhaps a better comparison would be Kellerman, Cook, or Bellesiles? Or some of the racists “scientists”, pre WWII?
“Ideology first”.
Nick Stokes,
Sure the graphs are of different methods from different times and places.
The point is that the different methods, times and places show pretty much the same thing: It was warmer then it got colder then it got warmer.
If you trust these snapshots from an era when science was a little less political (never apolitical), and a little less conflicted by grant money (never unconflicted), a reasonable doubt must be considered.
Having served in the aviation part of the Navy for 24 years and watched weather balloons get launched from Bermuda I would believe that in the archives of all NAS’s (Naval Air Stations) there rests historical records as far back as anyone would care to go.
I see that we have a wise man amongst us who knows the reasons for the adjustments done to past temperature records.
Nick Stokes, maybe you can explain to me why the adjustments to a given moment in the past of the GISS temperature series are done again and again, each time levelling the differences more and each time making the decline mentioned by Frank smaller?
I never quite understood that.
Anthony, Can we get the discussion focused on the issues Nick Stokes raised and Frank has responded to. It strikes me that this analysis is potentially significant and therefore deserves to be fully checked out. Any chance of getting some of CA folks involved?
Randy (09:15:39) :
Great work!
Thanks for the digging into other temperature data sets.
I hope other people will get to see this data and begin to see more clearly the manipulations that are being done in the name of science.
Great job!
Just spread the word! Give others a link to WUWT for a site seeking some real truth.
MaxL could you get in touch with me directly via my blog….Canadian reconstructions are always of interest.
“James Sexton (13:09:31) :
Wren (12:23:18) :
Why is Hansen trying to make it look like the warming after 1970 wasn’t as great as it actually was?”
No, the temperature rise 1979-today is in fact tied to the UAH and RSS measurements.
In other words, temperature rise after 1979 is a “constant”. You cant have GISS raising double as fast as UAH.
So, a big decline of 0,4 K after 1940 means that todays temperatures are much more compareble with 1940 temperatures, the “A” version:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Temperature%20decline%20cold%20war/1.jpg
Re: Frank Lansner (Mar 18 13:22),
“So why not use raobcore NH? Well as i explained in my original article at hidethedecline.eu , I had trouble finding Raobcore data NH back from 1958 easy available on the net.”
Well, if you can’t find it, that’s that. It’s no excuse to substitute a quite different set and then complain about discrepancies. And TLT is lower troposphere – it’s not even surface data.
“No Budyko and Korshover and thus “mathews 76″ is Northern hemisphere – this is what the peer reviewed scientific writings states.”
Well, it’s not what Matthews states – he doesn’t seem to say what his plot is the temperature of. But it looks very like current GISS US plots. Budyko’s data stops in 1960, and his Fig 1 shows no notable decline in the 50’s. And Angell (1975) completely denies your claim of a NH decline (as opposed to US) in the 60’s and 70’s. His Table 1 surface figs for NH are:
1959-65 -0,22
1965-71 0.01
1971-74 0.01
This is actually a greater increase than your CRU plot (previous post) shows.
Greenleaves (13:37:35)
The production of gridded fields will only reflect the robustness of the adjustments.
Here are examples of the CRU algorithm adjusting not one station but two in the same location downwards by the best part of a fair bit and discarding all the data from 1900 – 1945 and cheery picking the 1890’s.
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/gerojones1999line.jpg
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/kaljones1999line.jpg
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/hcjones1999.jpg
Then there is another adjustment on the one station where I compared with the six closest stations by checking the RSQ correlation over 11 year periods to .
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/meekajones1999line.jpg
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/meekarsq.jpg
That one minor adjustment appears non robust to me.
Everyone should visit http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=510 , download the data and work out what stations CRU used and what they did to them in your neck of the woods.
“Greenleaves (13:37:35) :
Why was the trend adjusted? Look at the original paper and find out”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to explain the revisions to GISStemp as the paper is by Jones et.al. and talks about HadCRUT.
Climate Kate (13:14:21) :
“Unfortunatelly at moment (2010) the UAH data show a much bigger temperature increase than the GISS data”
We’re in a very big el Nino, like the 1998 event. Similar spike in troposphere temperature proxy to 1998. I think we’re all waiting with interest to see what will happen after the el Nino dissipates.
As an avid denier of AGW I proudly announce that yes 2010 seems to be one of the warmest years of satellite records for the first 3 months anyway (similar to 2005)
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
and it means absolutely nothIng in climatic terms. If it was the coldest would say same. LOL All assuming their is no satellite drift of course but i trust AMSU 100%
previous just go to amsu and check all boxes to compare at 600 mb
“18 03 2010 mkelly (13:57:24):Having served in the aviation part of the Navy for 24 years”
Oh, yeah. “mkelly” is right. Cecil Field in Florida, at least, also had a cloud cover altitude measuring device.
I think most military bases had weather recording stations on them. Good for tracking trends, and usually placed right for recording.
Good luck trying to find the records, though.
Oh, from the Jones paper cited by greenleaves:
“If it is working well, variance adjustment
should reduce the random noise in the temperature
values introduced by having only
a limited number of observations, but leave
the real underlying temperature variations unchanged.”
So the decline mentioned by Frank must have been noise, successfully reduced to leave the real underlying temperature variations unchanged. I see.
Maybe Hansen uses the same algorithm in GIStemp, in that case the 0.3 decline would be noise for him as well. And with each revision of GIStemp he got better at reducing the noise while at the same time leaving the real underlying temperature variations unchanged.
They tested the method with synthetic datasets. How did they generate the synthetic datasets?
“A synthetic dataset was constructed using
an all forcings run [Tett et al., 2006] of the
HadCM3 [Gordon et al., 2000] GCM.”
That’s interesting. They have found a way to make their GCM models influence and manipulate, oh excuse me, adjust is the word, adjust the historical track record. By proving that their adjustment method works well on synthetic data they justify running it on real world data. Hmmm… i don’t think the synthetic data can look very much like real world data so i’m very suspicious here. They use some statistical criteria to prove that it’s all fine but i’d love to see a real statistician have a look at that.
So at least i know this “trick” now, thanks greenleaves.
Weather balloon data backs up missing decline
Then hide it. Tha’s what a real climatologist would do. That is ‘standard practice’.
Didn’t you know that? I thought this was a science blog.
One more thing:
…not to my surprise, the Jones document describing the adjustment method doesn’t contain the substrings “spectrum”, “Fourier”, “Laplace” or “Nyquist”…
They describe using a 21-term binomial filter for smoothing AFTER ADJUSTMENT. Hmm. So they just don’t care for any spectral distortion their adjustment method does it seems, only using things like covariance as criteria, so, very simple statistical criteria. This looks like a very botched way to treat your measurement data.
I recall some years back the weather balloon data being dismissed as unreliable. Could this be why? I bought that then, as I didn’t realise how corrupt climate science had become.
Steve Goddard 10:49:13—-Alabama update
Played golf near Orange beach(coast of Al) and I know it was only weather, but I had a miserable time because it was so cold for us Southerners. Never got out of the fifties and a cold wind-much colder than normal. My golf game suffered too! I heading for Buffalo Wy. next month and the Big Horn mountains and maybe to Thermopolis for a dip in their hot mineral springs. And,– Maybe a wee dram of scotch too!
It only dawns now on me that the paper by Jones cited by Greenleaves is just one of their latest adjustment methods – this one must be younger than 2004 as they mention von Storch’s pseudo-proxy method (nice one, we have pseudo proxies now!).
So we’re up against full time employees who invent a new number-fudging algorithm to distort the past every now and again, get it greenlighted by “peer-review” by one of their pals, rewriting history again and again to their liking. Everything that doesn’t fit is noise and gets erased.
Under these circumstances, it plainly makes no more sense at all to even talk about the past as whatever you say now about a given year in the past will be wrong after a few months.
The biggest evil here is the fact that they benchmark their adjustment algorithm inventions with another of their inventions, the GCM du jour plus a random number generator. This way everything gets tainted, and after they have spoiled their measurement data enough they will probably benchmark the next version of the GCM against the spoiled measurement data. I guess you can remove yourself from reality pretty quick with such a spiralling data dependency.
Good riddance.
It is time to RESET all university, epa, nasa and other co-opted organizations public funding to zero.
Then appoint a blue-ribbon panel to review each project before another dime is spent.
We need to put the make-believe “scientists” in an asylum to protect us from them and vice-versa.
1.The Budyko(1976) temperature data which appears to have been used in the National Geographic article was for the *northern hemisphere* only. The Hansen graphs you then compare them with are *global*. You are not comparing like with like.
If you wanted to do a fair comparison you could look at the GISS Northern Hemisphere data here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.B.lrg.gif
Here you will see that (surprise, surprise) the 70s come out cooler than the 1955-65 period. No conspiracy.
2.The RAOB core data that you plotted showing the data from the late-50s onwards is for the *tropics only* -again you are not comparing like with like. I’m not quite sure what your point was with that.
3.You comparison, supposedly showing changes to the data after the fact is far from convincing. Obviously, new studies using different selections of station data and different analysis techniques will give different numbers. The position of your blue line is very sensitive to the short, sharp dip around 1965. You can pick points from the series which change both ways.
For example, in your 3 Hansen plots figure, look at the peak around 1940 and compare this with the red line.
Cooling between 1940 peak and 1955-1965:
1980 paper = -0.10C
1987 paper = -0.15C
2007 paper = -0.15C
Why don’t you accuse Hansen of introducing artificial cooling into the global temperature time series?
4.”If 1958 temperatures were similar to the 1990’s, this rewrites the entire claim of unprecedented recent warming.”
Which data that you’ve shown has allowed you to conclude that 1958 temperatures were similar to the 1990s? The “National Geographic” northern hemisphere data only go up to 1975. The RAOB data are for the tropics only and incidently match very closely to tropics data in the GISS data (linked in (1) above). The global GISS data show the 1990s to be considerably warmer than 1958.
5.As you suddenly have such huge faith in the observational records provided by satellites and RAOBCORE (“both accurate, reliable tools” apparently), I would like to point out that both of these (in your figure) independently confirm a global warming trend of approx 0.2K/decade (1979-2008).
Hmmm, perhaps Hansen took the data and scaled everything to doughnuts…
http://i47.tinypic.com/oaccd0.gif
Heh….