GISScapades

Great article Willis Eschenbach. Thank you very much.

I noticed that anomly of T-surf for DJF 2010 is compared to the average from 1951-1980. Isn’t that comparing Arctic temperatures this past winter to a time-period where Arctic temperatures were anomalously cold? Is this 30-year period an adequate era to define this as “average” Arctic temperature? I don’t think so; that would always skew anomalies to “look” positive.

Just goes to show that if you’re not careful (or don’t care about your integrity) you can probably find what you’re looking for. I think confirmation bias is the proper term for it, right?
Nice work as always Darth Willis the Merciless!
– From one of your loyal Henchpersons ; )

I got two words for CO2 is AGW…Atmospheric contraction
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7794834.stm the point of this first link is the supposition that the ionosphere results as the product of solar energy releases beating up the magnetosphere. When solar flux declines the influence of the magnetosphere grows.
andy adkins (21:27:25) :
(clarifying-emending- the thought experiment)
Examining the climatic record in accordance with the Galactic travels of the earth paint the recent Multi-decadal Temperature changes of the Pacific Ocean as being very erratic and thus symptomatic of a Galactic cold signal.
2. It is a travesty that modern surface temperature records have become political tools that devalue their weather forecasting utility. The curious can find plentiful evidence supporting the conclusion that the most recent warm PDO obscured the ongoing trend to cold. If so there is every reason to expect global temperatures to quickly exceed the cold variances recorded as the peak of the 1940s -70s cold PDO/ cold AMO because the ERBE cold trends will flip the Atlantic’s Multidecadal Oscillation much sooner than previously recorded events (those watching..KNOW that water temperatures in the Atlantic are definitely signaling a capacity for a quick turn).
3. On ERBE: I interpret the temperature analysis work of Spencer and Christy to be an excellent marker of (a) the changes to Earth’s Radiative Budget (1) higher temperatures of the troposphere and stratosphere ar primarily indicators of greater radiative forcing
(b) the water vapor/ precipitation/ cloud cover potentials of the atmosphere summate the atmosphere’s capacity to cool the earth through the processes determining the earth’s radiative budget.
(c) As a response to the increasing gravitational effect had by the sun as an entailment of it retaining more energy during low sunspot cycles (heavier chemical makeup of its core and energy conveyors), High Latitude Volcanic activity increases the density potential of the magnetosphere thereby increasing radiative forcing and the temperature of the stratosphere. To accomplish similar effect, mid and lower latitude volcanic eruptions must (a) be more numerous and frequent (b) be of proportionately greater magnitude
Without going in to detail for those smart enough to have figured it out, understand why the Carrington Event is only a reflex action potential occurrence and why its in process modern sunspot maximum was a joke.
andy adkins (12:37:13) :
P oleward A ccumulating L ava E vents always begin after the winter solstice and follow longitudinal lapping directions toward the new latitudinal summer (oops)
Dear Anu,
When you write
“Similarly, the periodic forcings of the tiny Sun variations in TSI have no longterm effect. Only the inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere have a non-pulse, non-periodic effect on the planets temperature in the 100 to 500 year time frame of interest.” you are being patently ridiculous.
The most important earth bound conditions affecting temperatures are the heights of atmospheric layers. The taller atmospheric layers are then the smaller the rate that radiation is released into space. Contrarily, the shorter that the atmospheric layers are then the higher the rate that radiation is released into space (actually suck the heat right off the earth: You should be scared. Lindzen and Choi proved it). This is as fundament to accounting for why Lindzen and Choi obtained their results as higher latitude volcanic activity -induced by a Heavier Sun- is to increasing the density of the magnetosphere and thus the increasing radiative releases marked by the higher stratospheric temperatures recorded by Christy and Spencer. (If the upper levels of our atmosphere were not warming-increasing energy transfer to space, then the earth would be in a true period of global warming) (Insiders will be mad about me sharing this secret, but when the AGW community use atmospheric warming to justify their conclusions there is a big collective laugh)
As a matter of the simple fact of physics, the warmer temperatures are on earth then the higher the concentration of particular atmospheric gases can be. These physical processes also explain why their is a feedback lag of 800 years between the onset of cold and a fall of in CO2. While oceans are cooling they are still releasing water vapor and this slows the filtering of CO2. (the vikings were chased from Greenland ~ 700 years ago….During the 20th century we clogged our oceans with junk that trawlers can clean up and this detritus is interfering with the absorption of CO2 by the Oceans)
It will surprise the CO2 is AGW community to know that during tall atmospheric conditions (true global warming) CO2 is much less likely to be found near the top…It is just too heavy.
Niels Bohr….CO2 is not a black body…entropy will change the radiation and it will be released and directed in all directions by atmospheric currents and subjected to Earth’s Radiative Budget.
Bad science will kill billions if truth continues to be suppressed.

The thing that struck me was the map- Fig 1. Look at Greenland. It looks like the -.5 European anomaly directly borders the +6 Arctic Ocean anomaly – a direct jump of 6 degrees. That’s the nonsense Hansen’s method results in.

Hmm, isn’t a common correlation coefficient R-squared? Obviously, this can’t go negative…just between zero and one. Are they using R or R-squared here? If R-squared, then the sentence about correlation going down to -1 needs to be changed.
-Scott

I don’t think you have adequately dealt with inverse correlation. Your explanation sounded funky to me.

Willis,
Are those Alaska temps NASA GISS “value added” trends or are they raw data trends? If they are raw data trends, has Alaska really been on such a continuous warming trend?

Dear Willis,
As usual a very sharp observation. But I think you can show the mess more adequately by making the 250 mile circles 1200 mile circles. Then you can show that you can pick nice cherries from a long range of stations, all projecting into the void of the arctic. And I eat my boot if this is not what actually happened. Starts looking for well digestible boots.

Lazy bureaucrats + sloppy logic = garbage in = garbage out

Everywhere warm except places where people who might have any contact with reality actually live. It certainly seems as if they rigged the data so that they could declare that the earth warmed, even though exactly none of western civilization participated in the warming. Incredible audacity.

vboring (14:50:54) :
Why not infill using the satellite data?

Why not just use satellite data?

Fascinating as ever Willis. If this is NASA’s idea of accurate data, perhaps it is just as well that they cancelled the moon landing programme.

It’s even more disgusting using the polar plot view:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_1200km_Anom1203_2010_2010_1951_1980/GHCN_GISS_1200km_Anom1203_2010_2010_1951_1980.POL.pdf

Temperature alone is a stupid metric anyway.
BTW. by the GISTemp method. Aberdeen can influence the northern Med and Central Sweden.
DaveE.

Hansen’s approach to science: “No data available? No problem, just build in some high temperatures …”
In high school science classes we learned how important REAL DATA is in science. Hansen would fail those classes had he suggested doing what he has published in papers: the fabrication of data.

?? I don’t get it. Fig. 1 shows the anomaly, not trends. Isn’t the problem simply that the 1200 km “weighting” is not representative?

Again, this shows that the notion of a global temperature is not credible.
I think we should look at at the average of trends of all stations for which we have reliable (unadjusted or UHI-adjusted) data over time rather than look at the trend of a global temperature for which we have much inconsistent, adjusted or interpolated data over time.

Doug Badgero,
That’s a helluva point… Do they homogenize the temps they extrapolate across the entire arctic?

Wanna know a secret? Governments don’t really give a rat’s fat hairy behind about CO2, AGW or the rest of that bs. If they did, they wouldn’t play games like this: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/03/25/russia.uk.intercepts/index.html?hpt=C1
How much CO2 do two TU160’s, and two Tornado’s emit whilst chasing each other around the sky for a couple hours? And why is it that the USA seems to bear the brunt of criticism for AGW, etc. ? Let’s get real, and understand this AGW BS is an entertaining sideshow for public consumption, and bears no relation to what’s really going on. Same old song, same old dance.
“Britain’s Ministry of Defence released images it said were taken earlier this month of two Russian Tu-160 bombers — known as Blackjacks by NATO forces — as they entered UK airspace near the Outer Hebrides islands off Scotland’s northwest coast.
It said the March 10 incident, which resulted in crystal clear images of the planes against clear blue skies and a dramatic sunset, was one of many intercepts carried out by British Royal Air Force crews in just over 12 months.
“This is not an unusual incident, and many people may be surprised to know that our crews have successfully scrambled to intercept Russian aircraft on more than 20 occasions since the start of 2009,” Wing Cdr. Mark Gorringe, of the RAF’s 111 Squadron, said in a statement.
The RAF said two of its Tornado fighter jets from its base at Leuchars, on Scotland’s east coast, were dispatched to tail the Russian Blackjacks as they approached the western Isle of Lewis.”

Great article Willis …
That arctic hotspot is quite impressive!
But wait a second, aren’t all the global temperature analyses done based on 5×5 grid cells?
And isn’t it true that the farther from the equator one goes, the smaller the physical area of each grid cell becomes?
And then, if you fill in some high temperature numbers in some high latitude cells, those numbers will be over-represented in the subsequent summation process?
Shouldn’t each grid cell be weighted by latitude?
Using the actual width of the middle of the cell versus the width at the equator would be a reasonable approximation.
Perhaps this is being done somewhere in the code, but I have never heard mention of it.

Doug Badgero (15:29:06)
“Are those Alaska temps NASA GISS “value added” trends or are they raw data trends? If they are raw data trends, has Alaska really been on such a continuous warming trend?”
In short, no.
there was a step change between 1974 and 1979 of 5 degrees warming. The rest of the world at the time was worried about the ‘coming ice age’. Strangely enough it peaked in 2004 and has dropped backed to the 60 year mean.
The Analysis done by the Alaska Climate Research Center
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
“It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates large increase in 1976. The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2009, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations. The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase.”

At this point assuming Dr. James Hansen were to be a reputable scientist he would say, oh, that’s interesting… you are right, I bow down and salute you for refuting a key method that underpins the entire GISS dataset. We will immediately forthwith cease using this technique and we will review all past data sets fabricated by Nasa GISS or that are derived thereof from our work and alert all scientists who have written papers based upon our work and warn the to make corrections to their science accordingly.
I’m listening… James?

Huh. The post is about GISS, GISTemp is used, yet E.M. Smith has not yet expertly commented, nor has carrot eater proclaimed the divine infallibility of Hansen’s work as confirmed by the genius of St. Tamino which incontrovertibly shows that E.M.S. is an incompetent ignorant buffoon (to use the language I’ve seen used on Tamino’s site).
Thus this thread is too young. I’ll check back later.

Regardless of the validity of their extrapolations, GISS more or less correctly shows much of the Arctic and most of the Antarctic cooling over the last 80 years in their trend maps. The red area over Russia is probably incorrect.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_1200km_Trnd02_1930_2010/GHCN_GISS_1200km_Trnd02_1930_2010.gif
The areas around the Pacific warmed a lot during the PDO shift in 1977, and this is reflected by red colors in Canada and Alaska.
The big problem is with the GISS baseline period, which was largely a period of unusual cold, so the anomaly maps always look warm.

In response James Hansen says,”what you talkin bout Willis?”

Look at all the grey in the maps over ocean areas. GREY???? Grey isn’t on the scale. What does grey mean? I can only suppose that it is supposed to represent areas of insufficient data.
But … but …. you see the issue don’t you.
Why has the Arctic been filled in while these other ocean areas of insufficient data have not. Wouldn’t it have been more honest to leave the arctic grey as well?

subtlety.leads.to.confusion (16:44:35) :
[quote]But wait a second, aren’t all the global temperature analyses done based on 5×5 grid cells?
And isn’t it true that the farther from the equator one goes, the smaller the physical area of each grid cell becomes?
And then, if you fill in some high temperature numbers in some high latitude cells, those numbers will be over-represented in the subsequent summation process?
Shouldn’t each grid cell be weighted by latitude[/quote]
Not to mention the huge scaling bias using such a map to present such ‘results.’

Scott (15:20:17)
R^2 is the coefficient of determination, and roughly translates as the amount of variation explained by the model (0 to 1). So using data with 0.5 R results in using data where one independent variable (the temperature at one station) could explain at most 0.25 or 25% of the other variable’s (other station’s) variation. While this may be useful somehow, this, as Willis explains, says nothing of the trend differences, magnitude of correlation slope, intercept, etc.
The best way to eliminate this in an experiment is to MEASURE more stuff!

Willis: The following is a comparison graph of the GISTEMP (LST+SST) annual zonal mean trends from 1880 to 2009 with 250km and 1200km smoothing. (For some reason, EXCEL didn’t like the data and refused to plot both datasets, so I had to rely on another spreadsheet, one that I’m not familiar with.) The GISTEMP zonal mean trend data shows that the trends correlate well between 55S and 55N. Poleward of those latitudes, the 250km and 1200km smoothed data diverge. In fact, at high latitudes, the zonal mean data with the 1200km smoothing can rise with latitude while the zonal mean data with the 250km smoothing drops. Interesting effect.
http://i42.tinypic.com/21abja0.png
And here’s a gif animation of the two corresponding maps:
http://i41.tinypic.com/2d2j1if.gif

From the arctic research center at the University of Alaska. No ‘slow steady warming’…a huge step in 1975.
[image]http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/graphics/temp_dep49-09_F_sm.jpg[/image]

OT – congrats!
“A small group of dedicated people coming from a diverse range of positions and perspectives but working together as a loose federation held together by shared values and beliefs succeeded in accomplishing the most impressive PR coup of the 21st century.”
http://www.profero.com/unsimplify/index.html
[Profero]
“So how did this group of bloggers succeed in bringing the climate establishment to its knees…”
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/towards_rebuilding_trust.html
[Judith Curry]
Quick sip of Champaign and back to work!
These fools thought they would push through a get rich quick scheme / pay the mortgage in quick time etc., but it’s unravelling fast now.

“So how did this group of bloggers succeed in bringing the climate establishment to its knees…”
Answer: by persistantly presenting contrary evidence despite MASSIVE public funding of their detractors. The ‘truth’ always wins out in the end.
If the facts change I’ll change my mind. Until then I remain a former believer and now a sceptic.

@Dave Springer (16:46:32) :
I think Pielke is right on the money in this article:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/21/soot-and-the-arctic-ice-%E2%80%93-a-win-win-policy-based-on-chinese-coal-fired-power-plants%E2%80%9D/
No source of black soot can make it to the south pole which handily explains why the antarctic interior isn’t warming.
This is an interesting consideration when you realize that sea ice “strength” depends greatly on chemical composition. In fact, the salinity tends to turn sea ice into a less-than-solid-and-easily-broken-up mush as compared to ice on frozen freshwater sources. I’m beginning to wonder if any chemical analysis of typical sea ice has been done to rule out possible changes in chemistry from pollution sources as a contributing cause of the arctic sea ice decline.
Refer to: http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/notzdirk/Notz_2009_JGR.pdf

Frankly, the conclusion seems obvious: given the exceedingly sparse temperature data sets for the Arctic, the construction of forecasts based on this data can only be regarded (at best) as being ‘unreliable’.
The more reasonable position to take would be: “on the basis of data that we currently have, we do not know what the recent temperature trends in the Arctic have been. Nor can we say much about what they will be.”
In the absence of real data to examine, argumentation must rely upon anecdote, hubris, and blind faith.

I’m just beginning to read the comments, so the following matter may already have been covered, but….. In the following sentence, I believe that the average should be 0.75, not .075.
“Glad you asked … here are nineteen fifty-year long temperature datasets from Alaska. All of them have a correlation with Anchorage greater than 0.5 (max 0.94, min 0.51, avg .075)”
IanM

Willis:
Others may have already got this but the way I see what you have shown is as follows:
Let’s assume that X11 is the temperature at station 1 at time 1 and X21 is the temperature at station 2 at time 1. Let Y11 be the unknown temperature at a location 1200 KM from station 1 and Y21 the unknown temperature at a location 1200 KM from station 2.
Lets grant that all possible pairs are highly correlated, i.e., Corr( X1,X2), Corr (X1,Y1), Corr(X2,Y2) , Corr(X1, Y2), Corr(X2,Y1) and Corr(Y1, Y2) are all greater than 0.9 .
Since we know the actual temperatures at X1 and X2, we can then say that
X1 = bX2 , where b is the empirically determined coefficient that allows us to determine the temperature at X1 for any temperature at X2 and is equivalent to the slope of the line between pairs of station temperatures.
In other words if a temperature at X1 was missing we could accurately estimate the missing temperature if we knew X2. All this is great. However when we come to write the equations for Y1 and Y2 we can say Y1 = cX1 and Y2 = dX2. BUT in order to fix the anomaly temperatures for Y1 and Y2 you must know the values of c and d. The trend lines you show suggest that there is no reason to believe that b = c = d and that somehow Hansen must come up with values for b and c in order to actually fix the temperatures at Y1 and Y2.
You have neatly reminded everybody that Hansen et al have no basis for determining the actual temperatures at Y1 and Y2 by demonstrating that “b” is not a constant across pairs of Arctic stations. A high correlation actually only tells you the level of accuracy you can have in predicting Y from X not the actual level of Y for a change in X.
For Hansen to infill he must have some basis for determining “c” and “d” which as you show could vary widely. I see no way that he can do this.

“extrapolating trends out to 1200 km from a given temperature station”
and
“The big problem is with the GISS baseline period, which was largely a period of unusual cold, so the anomaly maps always look warm.”
This is one of many instances of questionable data handling that makes many people skeptical of the theory of AGW. As a prior commenter said, to the casual observer, all of that red infill on the map creates the strong impression of warmth and warming. “Look at all of that red at the Arctic! They must be right about the planet warming.”
The other item that contributes to scepticism is an even bigger problem: the theory has already been disproven. The theory of AGW had predicted that the global temperature should have risen by 3.8 degrees F by now; it has only risen by 1.4 degrees F.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100119112050.htm

What does ‘The Reference Frame’ think about p = 0.05 ?
A leader is needed to bring all the ‘balls’ together; politically neutral but scientifically literate.Someone one can trust.
Step forward Prof. Richard Lindzen
At the very least, demand (somehow) a debate on MS tv.
A rally of 10,000 voices at the Albert Hall, London.
Serious damage is about to be inflicted on US and European economies.
Time is short.
Come on all you pro. bloggers on both sides of the pond.
Communicate and lead. (I feel like John the Baptist).
It reads a bit extreme but I’m quite serious.

Why use the words “Temperature co-relation” when there are perfectly good four letter Anglo-Saxon words that better describe it.

Eisenbach: “Dr. Hansen is an impartial scientist”
It’s always Marcia Marcia: “On what planet would this be believed?”
You missed the sarcasm. Willis meant it as such….
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

My basic stats book said to be wary of any linear correlations less that 0.8. Isn’t 0.5 basically a coin-toss as to the degree of association?

This whole issue raises several points, not the least of which is again, the near uselessness of a global average temperature and the problems with expressing it as an anomaly number. Grossly dependent on and subject to manipulation of the base period, and not really a useful metric anyway. There are to many widely different temp distributions that can come up with the same average, even when done in smaller spacial cells.
Which brings up another point. Even without any manipulation to support a desired outcome (higher temps), either deliberate or inadvertent (selection bias) this is a prime example of what happens when mathematics is divorced from the underlying physical reality at hand. If you draw a line between two points separated by a distance, and say one end of this line has temp A, and the other temp B, what is the temp halfway between? Why, just do a simple interpolation! Mathematically that is valid, but not when the numbers are associated with underlying physical reality and not just isolated scalar metrics. If A is on the top of a high mountain, B is on the ocean, and the point in between is in the middle of a steamy jungle, obviously the situation is a lot more complex and doesn’t yield to simple analysis or interpolation.
It is a bad practice just on the basis of rigor, let alone when it can be manipulated in ways to support a predetermined outcome. Too much possibility of gross error, but I get the impression too many scientists don’t understand the difference between pure mathematics and math constrained by real world processes and such.

24 March: UK Daily Mail: Will Stewart: Russia’s top weatherman’s blow to climate change lobby as he says winter in Siberia may be COLDEST on record
‘The winter of 2009-10 was one of the most severe in European part of Russia for more than 30 years, and in Siberia it was perhaps the record breaking coldest ever,’ said Dr Alexander Frolov, head of state meteorological service Rosgidromet. ..
Climate change adherents say the planet is warming due to man-made factors but Russian expert Professor Arkady Tishkov said yesterday that Siberia and the world are in fact getting colder.
‘From a scientific point of view, talk about increasing average temperatures on earth of several degrees are absurd,’ he said.
‘Of course we can’t say that global warming is a myth and falsification. In many regions of planet the temperature is higher than expected because of human impact.
‘But the climate system of the planet is changing according to different cycles – from several years to thousand of years.
‘From the scientific point of view, in terms of large scale climate cycles, we are in a period of cooling.
‘The last three years of low temperatures in Siberia, the Arctic and number of Russia mountainous regions prove that, as does the recovery of ice in the Arctic Ocean and the absence of warming signs in Siberia.’
Mr Tishkov, deputy head of the Geography Institute at Russian Academy of Science, said: ‘What we have been watching recently is comparatively fast changes of climate to warming, but within the framework of an overall long-term period of cooling. This is a proven scientific fact.
‘The recent warming – and we are talking tenths of a degree at most – is caused by human activity, like forest elimination, the changing of landscapes.
‘The greenhouse gases so much discussed now do not in fact play big role. We have to remember that all the impact of industrial enterprises in Russia cannot be compared with one volcano eruption on our planet.’….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1260132/Russian-weatherman-strikes-blow-climate-change-lobby-announcing-winter-Siberia-coldest-record.html

Drifting buoys usually freeze up in the winter, however they do send good Arctic info when not frozen. Does GISS use this stuff?
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shiplocations.phtml?lat=88.62838836211&lon=39.796694558758&radius=500
To claim that there are not any thermometers- well at least some of the time.

@Willis Eschenbach (17:25:18) :
We’ve been over this several times. GISS does not do this now for the Arctic Ocean, for two reasons. The satellites don’t go that far north. The satellites don’t measure ice temperatures.
The satellites cover up to 82.5 °N.
http://www.discoveringthearctic.org.uk/images/8b_ahdr.jpg
That’s the halfway point between the very inner circle, and the 80 °N latitude circle.
The satellites Microwave Sounding Units measure the intensity of upwelling microwave radiation from atmospheric oxygen. They do not measure “temperatures” directly – the data must be mathematically inverted to deduce the temperature of the lower troposphere. This math is rather detailed and difficult – UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) got it wrong for decades.
I gave you links to detailed analysis of NOAA satellite data in the Arctic – I have no desire to become an expert on the intricacies of how summer melt ponds on top of sea ice affects satellite SST measurements by MSU’s, for instance, but perhaps you are as interested as you seem. Good luck.
Additionally, the GISS temperature trends are given from a base period of 1951-1980. If you have satellite temperature measurements of the arctic ocean for that period, please cite them …
They have satellite measurements from 1979. But even those have that 82.5 °N limitation that bugs purists. I myself wish they had 90 °N inclination satellites measuring the entire planet, for the last 5 decades. But 20 decades ago they were still working out the basics of geology, for comparison…
I see you are not happy with the various methods for guesstimating Arctic temperatures in areas that are not directly measured – I guess you’ll have to throw out that entire dataset you showed me from 1875 to 1979.

Cement a friend (18:51:18) :
However, I thought that a correlation was only significant if greater than 0.9 (or less than -0.9)
Not true. A correlation could be significant with a very small R value. You can pick any significance (confidence) level you would like to consider whether such a small R is relevant to you or not.
For example, imagine several thousand pairs of data points where the measured data has a huge spread around an upward sloping trend line, like measuring a very noisy signal over time. Suppose it has an R^2 value of of 0.04. The R then is 0.2. It could still be quite apparent that this signal is increasing over time, and with increasing N, it will become more and more significant. At some point it will be determined that it is unlikely such a trend could develop in the data by chance alone, and once this threshold is crossed (your confidence interval), you can be confident that it is significant (not by chance at your chosen confidence).
The correlation R or determination R^2 describes how well it is possible to predict the next data point based on the model (in this case with increasing time). You will not be able to predict with any accuracy where the next few data points will lie due to the fact of so much unexplained variance. Your model only explains 4% of the variation. So a low R means an inability to predict the next outcome with confidence based on a given input value. But this does not mean your model is wrong, it just means you don’t have enough variables included in your model to explain the variation you see. If it turns out that your model is correct, and that it holds true beyond the measured range (dangerous territory to predict here), you will be able to predict the general direction of a collection of many outcomes based on the independent value, but not of a single value. The noise will remain until you improve your understanding / measurements / model to reduce unexplained variation.
Where so many climate studies fall apart is that very noisy data is taken over a very short time frame, these linear trends are then projected forward to predict a future outcome (generally with the independent variable being the all-evil CO2 molecule). But the underlying data is in-fact cyclical when a longer time frame is considered, superimposed on an even warming trend since the LIA. Meaning the proposed model only worked over the time frame when the slope of natural and reasonably predictable temperature cycles happened to coincide with sharply increased CO2 emissions.
This is no mistake. The only way to build an alarming story is to purposely ignore previous cyclical events, or “off them” as the hockey stick attempted to do. Once we have chosen to ignore obvious natural cycles, this opens the door for a higher correlation with high linear slope during the time since WWII. The really nice part is, if we only use this time, the better statistics also indicate higher predictive ability, meaning our model is much, much better (and we’re smarter too since we’ve greatly reduced unexplained variation – a real win-win situation). Well, since CO2 alone cannot be responsible for that much warming over such a short period using even the most aggressive greenhouse gas calculations, the only way to explain this is to over inflate effect of CO2 by surmising positive feedback effects that amplify the small warming effect that CO2 is presumed to have. Effects which have never been demonstrated. Now you have a model you can project into the future that can really scare people. YAAAY!
All of this, of course, develops while researchers also fail to study natural negative feedbacks due to clouds and thunderstorms which strongly counteract warming, by whatever cause. Ignoring the past in this case is much like predicting it will be 3600° outside by September because the temperature increased 1°F from 10:00 to 11:00 this morning.
So we’ve developed insane models based on the coincidence of a few sine waves added together plus a new variable which has little practical effect on temperature, we focused on the highest slope area we could find to improve our predictive ability and reduce noise, amplified it, then projected it as far as the eye can see. Which is why it’s falling apart before our eyes. Such a model has no chance of success in practical terms since it fails to consider the cyclical and chaotic nature of climate. In political terms, it just needs to hang on by a thread for a little longer for the anthrophobes to succeed.
I still think this is the best demo I’ve seen yet of how dangerous the last sharp warming trend was (that ended in 1995)…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/12/historical-video-perspective-our-current-unprecedented-global-warming-in-the-context-of-scale/#more-14034

Ah, another carefully crafted comment moderated away.
That means I can’t comment here again for 24 hours – too bad, Willis had a good topic and some interesting points.
Cheers.
REPLY: you can comment on topic, just leave tobacco out of the discussion – Anthony

Steve Koch (20:52:38) :
Maybe the solution is to take climate science out of NASA.
That would require taking Washington out of NASA.
In the 60’s there was a glorious push by Washington to put a man on the Moon. NASA was an arm of Washington to accomplish that. Now there is an inglorious push by Washington for Cap N Trade from ‘global warming’. Again NASA is an arm of Washington to accomplish that. NASA goes where Washington wants it to go.
I hate it because I we’re supposed to be seeing accomplishments as awesome as landing on the Moon coming from NASA. But if you have inglorious leaders you have the inglorious goals they set.
All we have now is James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt. 🙁
We are like Charlie Brown on Halloween always getting a rock!

St Paul’s dictum comes to mind:
“As in a mirror , darkly” anomalies say something about temperature which temperature is a proxy for heat and heat content is what signifies cooling or heating.
Anomalies are a third level proxy, and as I have said often enough, on the earth, due to the several heat transport mechanisms existing in the atmosphere and the oceans, anomalies may have as much connection to reality as a mirage in the desert to the oasis.

John,
Thanks for the link. In regards to it, and Bart’s comments below… there is one comment from VS that I think is worth highlighting because its applicability to climate science is absolutely profound (paraphrased):
Many observed, solid microeconomic relationships do not translate to real world observations at the macro level.
For climate science this could (assuming the data aren’t crap and VS and the other econometricians that have said the same thing are running the tests right) mean that the CO2 behavior in the lab is valid (which no one disputes anyway) but it is nothing but noise in the context of the climate.
That is a profound thought. Personally, I would like to see what happens if VS checked trends in pavement and temperature for correlation ; )

I think we should be counting up how many different ways the climate science community are going to redisscover the EXTREMELY well know concepts of:
stationarity and cointegtration.

The first thing you learn when interpolating (or whatever) data is that the software you use has a blanking function. Otherwise people will soon ask you why you show values where there are no data.

Anomoly of -6Celsius in Northern Russia and +6Celsius in the Artic next door. Hmmmm, something a little odd about that….

Help!!
I am not a warmist and I really want to understand this. Looking at Figure 4, in what meaningful sense is the steepest and most curvy purple Ps 5 (purple) deemed to have a better ‘correlation’ (0.97) to the almost flat-line red Ps 2, than does the in-between orange Ps 3 (0.91)? Genuine assistance will be appreciated.

They didn’t want to use my thermometer readings because I had it in the fridge, once I moved it to the oven NASA where more than happy to use my readings.

What do the Russians and Canadians say about Herr Hansen’s Crystal Ball extrapolations?
NASA is no different than any other large, old organization. They all tend to get weaker and die of cancer. Their current Administrator wants to put them on a NEW and much less demanding track; one up to their current and projected capabilities.
When the US no longer has a AAA Credit Rating, should we drop the N from NASA, NOAA, NSA, NCIS, NCAA, etc.?
(I know; NCIS was a joke:-)
PS: Half serious now, I wonder if most of the ice at the poles isn’t mixed with a lot of plastic. Perhaps that’s why is doesn’t seem to be any good any more.

Aren’t the anomalies based on 1951-1980 data? This would mean using satellite data would compare to a period that did not exist in the satellite record.

This should be reasonably easy to prove.
It would be a publishable paper and could cause Hansen to abandon the 1200 km smoothing.
Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 did look at the issue and showed the correlation falls off to around 0.5 at 1200 kms for the Arctic (and around 0.4 to 0.3 for the southern hemisphere).
But they were using data only up to 1985. With more years to look at and the idea that longer-term trends should also be looked at more closely, one could show the 1200 km smoothing algorithm is not “robust” (especially in the time period after 1985 when the records were “adjusted” more).

@ anu: I am curious to hear more about the point you may be making about tobacco companies compared to fossil fuel companies. Where should I go to see this articulated in some detail? [just leave a comment at my site]
Thanks

Willis Eschenbach (17:40:17) :
“Missing. Not “average global anomaly”. Missing.”
What does it look like, if you plot the Artic temps using a smaller grid (250 km, say), leaving the missing areas grey?
(Sorry if I missed something here).

(“Correlation” is a mathematical measure of the similarity of two datasets
That’s the same as throwing two deck of cards on a table and see the coincidences among them. That was called SINCRONICITY by the psychatrist C.G.Jung
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
and it was VERY POPULAR among NEW AGE fans in the 1960’s.

Willis,
Thank you for continuing to explain to people that Anomalies are not the enemy:
“In other words, an anomaly is just like a regular temperature, it just has a different baseline than the triple point of water or than absolute zero. This does not make it somehow second rate or not useful.”

Re: Willis Eschenbach (Mar 26 03:22),

We use anomalies all of the time, without noticing it. Why? Because the base of the anomalies is zero, which seems “natural” to us. Consider two temperatures, say 20° Celsius (C), and 293.15 Kelvins (K). In fact, these two are exactly the same temperature.
The only difference between the two is that they are anomalies from a different baseline. The Kelvin scale has a baseline of absolute zero, and the Celsius scale has a baseline of 273.15K (the freezing point of water).
Wrong example.
All temperature scales differ by specific mathematic formulas, because they all depend on the hard definition of : the boiling point of water at 1 atmosphere, and ice/water temperature at the triple point again at 1 atmosphere. It does not matter what sort of scale you use, it is a physical measure and each measurement can be derived from the others.
Anomalies as used by by climatologists work this way:
Each thermometer in different locations gives a temperature, a time interval is defined and for each thermometer the average of that is taken as a basis and the time variation of the temperature minus this average is called an anomaly.
The hypothesis is that given one thermometer on top of a mountain and the other in the valley and the next by the sea, the temperatures will be different, but the variation from the average will be correlated and the same.
This presupposes that there is only one heat source that creates these temperatures. When there are more than one heat source/sink as is the case with climate where there is convection, evaporation, precipitation etc, heat/energy can be going every which way and the thermometers will be following a different drummer.
I have given the following gedanken experiment. Tell me where it is wrong:
Take an insulated room and put a heat source in one corner with time varying output, and several thermometers all over the place. Take the first ten measurements for each thermometer and call it the average. From then on compute anomalies. Yes, they will be correlated reflecting the variations of the source.
Then put a randomly moving heat source in the room ( on one of those robots that change direction when they hit a wall) and do the same. i.e take the first ten measurements of each thermometer as the average and use that average from then on to compute an anomaly.
My claim is that the the anomaly of these thermometers will not be correlated with either source in a detectable form. They will be plus or minus depending on the vicinity of the moving heat source.
This is the situation in the atmosphere and the oceans, where huge masses of water and air are moved around carrying energy and modifying with various mechanisms the heat content of the atmosphere where the anomalies are measured at 2 meters.
Tell me where the gedanken experiment is wrong.
In other words, an anomaly is just like a regular temperature, it just has a different baseline than the triple point of water or than absolute zero. This does not make it somehow second rate or not useful.
No, it is not. It is taken over a varying baseline and when there are more than one heat sources/sinks, it makes no physical sense.

Willis, I wonder if arctic UHI effects have been included in these calculations. Per the Barrow, Alaska study, an admittedly rural town (4600) showed up with an average of 3C effect within a 150 KM circle. http://www.geography.uc.edu/~kenhinke/uhi/
Seems the effect was mostly in the winter and corresponding to power/gas inputs to the town. How many of the other sites could have the same problem?

Well a lot of babies are born in the spring time; which in the case of humans is nine months after the winter +/- a few months. It’s actually the same for other species; but who cares.
Since winters tend to be colder than Spring, does this prove that cold causes pregnancy ?
I would commend to the reader’s attention; a classic “Farside” Cartoon of Gary Larson. Which I can’t show you here because it is copyrighted; and there is NO legal way for anyone to show, use, or display ANY Farside cartoon; but you can buy any of them for your own personal use. So ANY public display of any Farside cartoon is prima facie evidence of copyright infringement.
So the panel in question, is officially titled “What’s in my Front Yard ?” The lady on the phone is asking her neighbor across the street to describe what is in her front yard. She can’t determine that herself, because her entire living room front window is completely blocked by a ginormous eye.
To me that cartoon panel is a perfect demonstration of violation of the Nyquist Sampling Theorem. It’s the same principle as the blind man feeling around an elephant, and trying to determine what it is; having never seen or even heard of such a creature.
Comparing one thermometer with itself at some different time, isn’t going to yield an accurate value for the mean global temperature of the earth.
When was the last time you actually saw on ANY official weather station report; the total surface area to which that specific location temperature or anomaly actually applies.
You can’t get a global average from a set of data points; none of which have an attached area element which applies to that temperature (or anomaly).
And even if you could determine the correct global mean surface temperature (you can’t), it has absolutely no scientifc meaning at all, since thermal processes all over the world are not uniquely characterized by the local temperature.
Arid tropical deserts react differently from ocean , or from arboreal forests.
So mean global surface (or lower troposphere) temperature has about as much scientific meaning as the mean of all the telephone numbers in the Manhattan phone directory; namely, none at all. Unless of course it happens to be your phone number, in which case you will get a lot of calls.
Well it’s like tornado frequency; hardly relevent; unless it happens to be your house that gets hit.

Still no comment from E.M. Smith?
I checked The Chiefio’s site, he has a post dated yesterday showing his excellent work doing a detailed regional analysis of the temperature record and showing the interesting revealed trends. Brilliant stuff that should well be highlighted here on WUWT (IMHO). He’s currently waist-deep in it and appears very busy finishing it up.
Could someone please stop ’round his place and make sure he’s alright? With all the great work he’s currently doing, I’m worried he might have collapsed from exhaustion!

Willis Eschenbach (02:11:19) :
The correlation at 1200km was average of .5 for northern latitudes.
The spread was something like .2 to .8.
With GISS code up an running EMS could actual do a sensitivity on this parameter. Or god forbid you could actually make it a function of the demonstrated correlation for the region. Clearly for some regions you have good correlations at long distances and for others you have crappy figures.
And clearly if you are blindly mushing together an inland site with one on the coast ( which is more correlated with the changes in SST ) you will end up with mush. and if you blend over a region that changes from Ocean to Ice depending on the season you are also asking for trouble.
Hansen’s method is just a meat grinder approach.

Phil. (20:36:29) :
Keith G (18:32:14) :
“In that case where do you suppose the data for the DMI Arctic temperature linked to on this site come from? Willis shows 3 stations on the edge of the 80ºN parallel”
Re DMI: Three stations are likely to give fair results on such an icy plain with no topographic or cultural confounders but still this would give a maximum temperature on average I would think given that there may not have been a correction for latitude. Certainly DMI is more reliable than 1200km extrapolations from land, with icy and watery coasts. Also, although the ring of stations, which are all near the same latitude 70-80 might be expected to have significant correlations laterally but not in the N-S direction. For example, 1200km south of Longyearbyen, Svalbard is Reykjavik Iceland and even the Baltic Sea, Both significantly different in temperatures and in different weather regimes- on opposite sides of the jet stream for many months and the effects of the Gulf stream and return Arctic currents. Anyone know what adjustments are made with the data in terms of latitude?

I previously asked a question regarding Figure 4. In what meaningful sense is the steepest and most curvy purple Ps 5 deemed to have a better ‘correlation’ (0.97) to the almost flat-line red Ps 2, than does the in-between orange Ps 3 (0.91)?
What the numbers are saying is that the steep purple Ps 5 better represents the flat-line red Ps 2 than does the less steep orange Ps 3. In what sense is this so, if the statistical meaning for ‘correlation’ is to have any correlation to the usual definition?
Specifically, what I am asking, is what there is about Ps 5 that gives it a better technical ‘correlation’ to Ps 2.
Please realise that I am not rebutting; I am asking. I seriously doubt that I am the only one who wouldn’t understand this and without that understanding, Figure 4 is unhelpful.

Willis,
We are cosntantly reminded how good an insulator ice is. So it is no wonder that satellite measurments of atmospheric data above the ice give little information on SSTs as you point out.
Certainly for areas of the arctic where sea ice coverage is more or less total, that would seem to be a given.

Why not infill using the satellite data?
We’d get a warm trend in the Arctic greater than any other large-scale region on the planet.
North Pole trend – 0.45/dec.
UAH data
Their figure roughly corroborates Hansen’s – even though satellite coverage is also poor for the region. I request a post on why we shouldn’t trust Spencer and Christy.

Anu (22:01:02) :
Ah, another carefully crafted comment moderated away.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Anu,
I am sure someone in your position does have to carefully craft what they say. That’s all I’ll say about that.

Re: Willis Eschenbach (Mar 26 15:53),
So in locations where there is more than 90% ice, the SST is quite reasonably set to the freezing temperature of sea water, -1.8°C. That’s fine.
But above the ice, the freezing polar winds can be twenty, thirty, forty degrees below zero … and the SST doesn’t reflect that reality, which is the one we are trying to get at. So the satellites don’t help us in the slightest where there is ice.
This harks back to another bone of mine, that it is surface ground temperatures that are important for a radiation budget using black body formulae.
SST is the reality as far as energy balance goes. Air surface temperatures at 2 meters used for the radiation budget in this case would give tens of watts off the true radiation budget of the solid.

Willis, I’m not disputing there’s a difference. I said that UAH show a large warming trend over the Arctic – larger than any other region on Earth, just as GISS do. And I said that in response to the question upthread, which I quoted, not to your article.
I am also aware that:
1) The UAH record and record-keepers are held in some esteem here, while surface records and their producers are routinely maligned. The UAH record is seen as a reference point with which to check the validity of surface records.
2) Temp-recording satellites are not able to cover the poles adequately.
The GISS record is here rebutted because of insufficient coverage and assumptions re correlation and trends. With these things in mind, and while I was answering the question upthread, I added my request to make a small point.
As many people contribute articles here, my request was not addressed to you specifically. The point behind my request is that skepticism is not equally applied.
While there has been talk of it in comments sections, I may have missed the WUWT article in the past where Spencer and Christy have been taken to task for producing polar temp records – anomalies and trends – when there is so little satellite coverage for the poles. If I am mistaken, I would appreciate a pointer (from anyone).

Geiger is fantastic.

What I do not understand: why has no one dropped a couple of weather station onto the ice cap? Sure, it might not live more than a few months, but the cost would be trivial compared to the value of the data.

Richard Telford
Richard, years ago, I wrote a lot of code for modelling coal seams and mineral deposits (mainly coal seams, though) from borehole logs. The process was started by creating a polygon of influence around all the boreholes simultaneously, with due allowance for known faults etc and then triangulating the polygons. By definition they are all convex so that is a trivial process that can be done in k * log(n) time. I think the problem here is not susceptible to that process because of the very large distances across the “empty” polar region compared with the relatively small distances between the actual stations. An exploration company would, I think, do “infill drilling” above 80N in such a situation.
Pending getting the station data and performing some reasonableness checks against the empty region, I think the best that could be done would start with some kind of trend analysis – crudely, it must tend to get colder to closer one approaches the pole.
What do you think?

DMI calculates area-unweighted temperature with 5-degree grid using ECMWF data. So there is more measurement points per area unit when it is moved towards the pole and thus their temperature is not 80N-90N mean temperature. However, for example DMI January 2010 anomaly is about 5.7 degrees C colder than GISS anomaly, when compared to base period 1958-2002. Also February 2010 has several degrees difference to the same direction.
Different weighting methods should not to lead such a big differences. It is quite sure that GISS has too warm in 80N-90N. According to DMI data responsibles, they are coming to convert their data to true mean temperature in near future. By then, real comparison with GISS can be made (and the result is quite obvious).
When comparing to HadCRUT, GISS has much warmer global anomalies in January and February 2010 when same base period is used. This difference come from grey areas which are not included in HadCRUT.

Correction to earlier reply: DMI uses 0.5 degrees grid, NOT 5 degrees.

Amino Acids in Meteorites (20:31:11) :
It was only your line of comment on cigarette smoke that was snipped. Anyone could see that.
You comments related to this thread are still there. Even though you do not agree with the writer of this thread you were not deleted for it.
———-
You are missing two completely deleted comments:
Willis Eschenbach (17:18:35) :
Anu (20:46:33) :
These comments followed directly from the line, which is still retained in this guest post:
The Director of GISS is Dr. James Hansen. Dr. Hansen is an impartial scientist who thinks people who don’t believe in his apocalyptic visions of the future should be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity”.
I pointed out that Dr. Hansen was referring only to the CEO’s of large fossil fuel companies, and the comments followed from that, and the comparison to the large tobacco companies lawsuit.
Public relations and the public perception of science is a topic interesting to me, but I can see why it might be considered “off topic”.
Enough said.
Yes, I believe Willis would not delete a comment of mine just because we disagree. We have disagreed in the past, but his anger makes him argue better, not dirtier.
———-
This would not be the case at RealClimate. Comments that are not in agreement with the writers there are customarily deleted even though they are on topic.
It would be hard to know what has been deleted, unless it was your comment deleted, or you happen to see it before the Moderator gets it (which I’ve seen on The Guardian, for instance).
I think almost all opinions should be allowed on the Web – it’s not like its a waste of paper, such as Letters to the Editor in a newspaper. Obvious distractions, like Viagra ads or psychotic rants should be deleted, but there are other ways to handle “unpopular” comments, such as show/hide on YouTube.
If RealClimate does as you say (I’ve only seen a few articles there, and never commented), I’m against the practice. I would treat them as I do all sites:
first Moderator deletion – 1 day ban from commenting
second deletion – 1 week ban
third deletion – 1 month ban
fourth deletion – 1 year ban (effectively, lifetime ban, since I’ve never gone back)