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.
So hiding the decline in the 60’s & 70’s accomplished what for the warmers? It just makes the temperature rise over the last 30 years less. Ay cooling, and nobody denies there was cooling (this is the first I heard there was mild warming), is attributed to increased aerosols in that period anyway. With cleaner air over much of the NH (excluding Asia), the cooling effect is removed, and warming takes over due to rising CO2. Thats the argument anyways.
But it does highlight the dangers of adjusted data. There should be a rule that all data should be presented in its raw form as well as it’s adjusted form, so we can see the magnitude of the adjustments.
Jeremy (10:51:16) :
… seeing the historical results from a publicly funded scientist progressively alter to demonstrate a warming the further into the future we get… well that I didn’t expect.
No one expects the Hansen modification 🙂
I certainly didn’t. We have a record of his gradualism; his slight-of-hand.
Antonio San (11:00:18) :
Comment from the blog you linked by ‘mspelto’:
‘If a scientist just wanted to make money is it more prudent to join the tens of thousands pursuing climate change science and finding reinforcing data on AGW or would it be easier to make a name and a buck, from the press, speaking engagements or grants by being one of the handful of skeptics?’
Says it all really doesn’t it?
Ibrahim (12:39:47) :
Effect of Exclusion of Anomalous Tropical Stations on Temperature Trends from a 63-Station Radiosonde Network, and Comparison with Other Analyses
James K. Angell
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?SESSID=02a2ec8386ab1c5dfa6e4e6a60f5ddc9&request=get-document&doi=10.1175%2F2763.1 (hope this works – comment sections have a bad habit of erasing my emphasis’ at random)
You ever go fishing for some specific technical paper in the google scholar? Almost always you get a referal to the abstract, and maybe if you are extreemly lucky a pdf that will open.
But the vast majority of searches will end at the abstract unless you buy the thing or present your academic affiliation code.
In the information age there really is a caste system, you are either, a part of the team, rich enough to pay for the studies that your tax money made possible, or you are f***ed.
It’s just notable that this Angell paper from Allenpress opens so nice an easy like that. How quickly will we return to the caste system?
Try and click on some of the studies cited within the paper.
James Sexton (11:35:21) :
I wish there would be more commentary about those subs. It seems to me, if they were near the north pole when they surfaced (and I know they were), then the melting/flooding argument of the alarmists is invalidated.
Some people do still worry about “melting/flooding” but as regards ice on the Arctic Ocean this is not an issue – now the issues mentioned involve albedo/heating/cooling and the like. If non-floating ice melts that is a different thing. So, let’s forget that part of your comment.
About the Arctic ice and its historic variation try this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/
About subs surfacing at the North Pole:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08664.htm
and this one is a good source:
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
This John Daly post has other interesting photos of subs at the NP on different dates, along with other images. An interesting read.
Watts:
John F. Hultquist:
TonyB:
Is Hubert Lamb our man?
Wouldn’t it be nice to sit down and talk data sets with the founder of CRU right now!
While keen to find evidence of global climate change on a human-life time scale, Hubert Lamb, to the end of his life in 1997, remained a sceptic of the new theory of AGW.
Was Lamb the creator of the first comprehensive global climate data sets?
An Independent Obituary to Lamb by Trevor Davies in 1997 says:
This suggests that his magnum opus Climate: Present, Past and Future. (1972&77) might be a good start in finding any hints of the original data and its earlier interpretation.
And someone might end up digging into the UEA HH Lamb Archive, which is said to contain “correspondence and MSS of reports and papers. The contents focus on North Sea storms; climate history including the ice age; long-range weather forecasts; rainfall studies; specific weather phenomena; climatic effect of volcanic dust; and CRU’s administration.”
http://www.uea.ac.uk/is/archives#H.H.Lamb
Here are some of Lambs papers listed in the AIP Climate Science bib:
1959 Hubert H. Lamb, “Our Changing Climate, Past and Present (Address to BAAS).” Weather, Oct., pp. 299-318 (reprinted in Lamb, Changing Climate, pp. 1-20).
1966 Hubert H. Lamb, The Changing Climate: Selected Papers. London.
1966 Hubert H. Lamb, “Britain’s Climate in the Past, Address to BAAS, 1964.” In The Changing Climate. Selected Papers pp. 170-95. London.
1969 Hubert H. Lamb, “Climatic Fluctuations.” In General Climatology, edited by H. Flohn, World Survey of Climatology, Vol. 2, pp. 173-247. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Who knows this stuff?
Has this history been written? I have only glanced at pro-AWG histories, and, as far as I recall, Lamb’s role in the history of global climatology is not emphasised.
For example, none of his papers are listed here:
http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/PALE:ClassicArticles/GlobalWarming
In my ignorance I had presumed that CRU was set up in the wake of AWG alarmism – not so! Rather, the generational shift seems to be remarkably distinct. And so there might just be another side to the history of climate research, where the first generational global climate change push (coming through with concern over evident cooling) are obscured behind the baby-boomer alarmist push coming through, not just in a warming period, but also in the wake of Population Bomb-type alarmism. Schneider, with his early cooling alarmism, might be the exception that proves this rule of a generational revolution – which at CRU is symbolised in Tom Wigley taking over from Lamb in 1978.
Wow.
This explains why I remember winters being so bitterly cold on a daily basis and deep snow drifts as a child living in Canada through those years.
Those decades were actually colder than usual !
My mom was right when she said that the 60’s (my childhood) was colder than her childhood in the 40’s… bitter gusting winds, more frequent blizzards, way more snow to shovel.
This also explains why there was the “coming ice age” claims in the 70’s as well. And now those same scientists are denying the drop in temps during that time period ?! Did they think historical records, science articles/studies, newspapers, magazines, documentaries, etc. would all disappear without a trace ?!
For shame.
””’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?”. ””’
Wren,
Nice question you pose. The ‘why’ question is intriging. I would extend your question to;
Given that Dr Hansen is quite intelligent and resourceful and that there were many scenarios/options/methodologies he could use to adjust the temp records to suit his goals on the AGW agenda, why did he choose the one he did?
Based on my observations, he chose the method and sequence (over years) of adjustments that would be the most difficult for people like M & M to audit.
I think he quickly learned from the difficulties of Mann & Jones with M & M. I think Hansen also had better & more resources than Jones or Mann.
I think he adapted to the threats he perceived, whereas Jones did not adapt. Mostly Jones just resisted.
John
From the Angell 2003 paper:
‘In this paper, nine tropical radiosonde stations in this network are identified as anomalous based on unrepresentatively large standard-error-of-regression
values for 300–100-mb trends for the period 1958–2000.’
Can anyone explain that to a non-statistician? There is no further exposition of the method in the paper. The naughty ones are pretty much all in the tropics.
Whoops! Delete last sentence – it says that in the extract!
What is a radiosonde anyhow?
http://www.ua.nws.noaa.gov/factsheet.htm
The radiosonde is a small, expendable instrument package that is suspended 25 meters (about 80 feet) or more below a large balloon inflated with hydrogen or helium gas. As the radiosonde rises at about 300 meters/minute (about 1,000 feet/minute), sensors on the radiosonde measure profiles of pressure, temperature, and relative humidity. These sensors are linked to a battery powered, 300 milliwatt or less radio transmitter that sends the sensor measurements to a sensitive ground tracking antenna on a radio frequency typically ranging from 1675 to 1685 MHz. By tracking the position of the radiosonde in flight using GPS or a radio direction finding antenna, data on wind speed and direction aloft are also obtained (observations where winds aloft are also obtained from radiosondes are called “rawinsonde” observations). The radio signals received by the tracking antenna are converted to meteorological values and from these data significant levels are selected by a computer, put into a special code form, and then transmitted to data users. High vertical resolution flight data, among other data, are also archived and sent to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.
Wow. How much bad luck would it take for 9 specific tropical stations to receive the bad batch of radiosondes from 1958 onward? Incredible amount of bad fortune.
The current radiosonde tracking systems are 1950’s vintage and the data processing computer is a 1980’s IBM PC/XT. These systems are obsolete and are increasingly difficult to maintain. NWS has begun a program to replace the ground systems at all NWS stations with a new GPS radiosonde system. The program has four objectives:
They all use pretty much the same systems Bad luck about those nine in the tropics.
DirkH (10:00:11) :
Let the adjustment apologists now enter the arena.
Shame on you, sir. It is improper to call carrot eater (et al?) an apologist, as near as I can tell he/she/it can find no errors thus there is nothing to apologize for.
http://www.climate-movie.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Slide71.jpg
There’s a post at climate skeptic that suggests another line of evidence to persue. Crops like long warm growing seasons. What were the wheat yeilds in Nebraska like back between 1965 -80? Were there any famines? Alberta Canada is a big ag state if it’s not too cold. I bet they kept records.
Don’t be misled by the fact of nuclear submarines surfacing at the North Pole. The sea ice commonly develops cracks between fractured ice. Wind and currents cause the cracks to open at intervals of time for distances of meters to hundreds of kilometers. You can see them in satellite photos. Its nothing to get too excited about regardless of the prevailing climate.
Never read all the comments, (too few hours in a day).
My take, seeing as everyone looks at the same graphs & seems to see different things.
My take is local, not global.
I am seeing nothing unusual! in the ’50s we had warm years; then came cool years, ending late ’70s early ’80s.
Not ‘quite’ old enough to remember the ’40s but people I do know say it was at least as warm.
No problem.
The graphs are wrong or my part of the Earth is somehow a totally separate entity.
We know sweet Fanny Adams!!
DaveE.
Re: Northern Exposure (Mar 18 17:38),
Your Mom was right – it was colder in the ’60s in N America. It just wasn’t cold everywhere. This isn’t a hidden fact. Go to the GISS site, and you’ll see this plot for the US. Note the big dip in the late ’60s? No-one’s saying you imagined it.
Frank Lansner (13:22:18) :
Frank,
I’m guessing you’ve already seen this, but here it is just in case you haven’t:
Version History
10 January 2006 RAOBCORE_T_1.0 homogeneity adjustments have been made publicly available. They cover the period 1958-2004. It is recommended to use version 1.1
13 February 2006 RAOBCORE_T_1.1 is the version used for preparing a mauscript submitted to J. Climate.
02 August 2006 RAOBCORE_T_1.2 is the version actually used for Haimberger, 2006 J. Climate.
02 August 2006 RAOBCORE_T_1.3 refers to the NOBGC experiment in Haimberger, 2007 J. Climate.
30 January 2007 RAOBCORE_T_1.4 is an update of Haimberger, 2007 J. Climate, reaching up to December 2006 and with more conservative ERA-40 bg modification.
http://www.univie.ac.at/theoret-met/research/raobcore/
I compared the difference between the highest and lowest points of the smoothed
line in Budyko 1969
http://onramp.nsdl.org/eserv/onramp:17358/n11.Budyko1969.pdf
with the version used in IPCC 4AR
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/figure1-3-l.png
Budyko 1969 temp diff. 0.60 C (+/- 0.01 C)
IPCC (BUD 69) temp diff 0.68 C (+/- 0.01 C)
papertiger (18:30:40) :
There’s a post at climate skeptic that suggests another line of evidence to persue. Crops like long warm growing seasons. What were the wheat yeilds in Nebraska like back between 1965 -80? Alberta Canada is a big ag state if it’s not too cold. I bet they kept records.>>>
Well its a province not a state 🙂
I dont have the link handy but government of Saskatchewan (next one to right of Alberta) has a web site that lets you look at crop yield by municipality and crop type. I don’t think you can glean much from the numbers though. Crops are very sensitive to moisture, the specific variations change over time, as do agricultural practices ranging from herbicide and fertilizer use to crop rotation.
TonyB,
Here is what I wrote about Mandia: “Mandia is a vocal advocate of AGW, physics professor in some community college, graduated with a MSc. degree from Penn State University, the home of Michael Mann…”
He may be a nice guy with his kids but from the virulent stuff he posts in deepclimate, climateprogress, realclimate… to put it mildly it doesn’t shine through.
Billy liar,
over $400,000 of NASA grant and this guy is part of it. He may not get rich -and really why should he?- but it doesn’t change the fact it’s brainwashing at taxpayers expense.
Lookie here what I found in Angell’s anomalous tropical stations paper.
5. Comparison with other radiosonde and MSU trends
Santer et al. (2000b) showed in their Fig. 7 that the global low-stratospheric cooling trends obtained from the full 63-station network were about a factor of 2 greater than the trends obtained by others, including from reanalyses, for 1979–93. Figure 8 compares the trends obtained from the 54-station network (trends with confidence intervals, and connected by solid lines) with other radiosonde and MSU trends for a slightly longer period. Based on a painstaking analysis of temperature data from 87 globally distributed radiosonde stations, the solid triangles show the tropical, hemispheric, and global temperature trends for 1959–97 and 1979–97 obtained by Lanzante et al. (2003) through the use of several procedures, some subjective, for identifying discontinuities in the individual radiosonde temperature records and adjusting for them. The agreement between the two datasets is generally good, the triangles falling within the 54-station confidence intervals except in the 100–50-mb layer of the Southern Hemisphere for both periods, and the 300–100-mb layer of the Southern Hemisphere and globe for the longer period (Lanzante et al. finding less cooling in all cases). This would be expected due to the distribution of stations in the 54-station network, in which both south temperate and south polar zones are represented by 6 stations (see Fig. 2 ). This gives too much weight to the south polar zone with its large stratospheric cooling associated with the Antarctic ozone hole. Note that for the 1958–2000 period there is usually worse agreement between the trends of Lanzante et al. and those for the full 63-station network (small circles in Fig. 8 ), than between Lanzante et al. and the 54-station network, particularly in the case of the 300–100-mb layer. This is evidence that exclusion of the anomalous stations indeed results in more representative estimates of the temperature trend.
Didn’t the warmers just spend a year and a half trying to erase global cooling/prove global warming over Antarctica? In this paper they claim a cool bias because of global warming over Antarctica that they also claim never existed.
Inconsistent testimony gives me pause.
Gareth (13:02:52) :
Wren said: “Why is Hansen trying to make it look like the warming after 1970 wasn’t as great as it actually was?”
To remove the earlier cooling that does not correlate with the measured carbon dioxide trend, perhaps.
======
Woops! My Mistake. According to those graphs, he made the 196O’s cooler in 1987 than he had them in 1980. He added some cooling there instead of removing it.
18 March: Reuters Alert: ‘Pervasive, wide-ranging’ climate impacts in US, White House task force finds
by Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council
Climate change is already having “pervasive, wide-ranging” effects on “nearly every aspect of our society,” a task force representing more than 20 federal agencies reported Tuesday. ..
Indeed, climate change has begun to affect the ability of government agencies to fulfill their missions, reports the White House Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.
The group is led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It is made up of representatives from more than 20 federal agencies, departments and offices, including the Department of Commerce, the National Intelligence Council, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Pentagon. That’s diverse – and it’s definitive. …
http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/63671/2010/02/18-112703-1.htm
Oerlemans(2005), a glacier study featured in IPCC reports:
http://sub0.cjb.net/rec/oerlemans_2005.png
Some of the curves show clear decline after mid 1900’s. The only proper hockeystick is SH, but data for the whole southern hemisphere consist of just 12 (of 169) glaciers. Nevertheless this has been referred as “confirming the hockeystick”…
NH in 2 parts, http://sub0.cjb.net/rec/oerlemans_2005_nh.png
Smith et al. (2006), speleothems from three sites around the NH, http://sub0.cjb.net/rec/smith_2006.png show decline after 1960’s.
Das et al. (2009), http://sub0.cjb.net/rec/das_2009.png , Greenland. Only one measurement site without divergence problem!
Here’s another striking bit of luck in the Angell paper. Way down in the conclusions
Comparison with MSU and other radiosonde analyses shows that, after the exclusions
1. All datasets agree that in the Tropics the troposphere warmed more than the surface during 1958–2000, but during 1979–2000 the surface warmed more than the troposphere except in the dataset of Lanzante et al.
WOW
A fundamental change in the physical properties of the atmosphere associated with the year 1979 !
It’s nothing short of a miracle. Haleluja.
What could have brought on a miracle in 1979. – Let see
The year Reagan ran for President. Might have seemed like a miracle for the Iranian hostages but…
The year Nasa started recording temp data with satellite? – Could that be the miracle that change the air as we know it?