Which NASA climate data to believe?

Reason? Two Words: James Hansen

Do they have room under the carpet for this?

Where do you get these images from? The NEO ones are far more convincing than the GISS.
It seems “global” warming is currently isolated to Canada. I’m sure that has nothing to do with the additional heat the Canadians are using near surface stations…??
I wonder what one of these images would look like during the MWP.

Absent quality data the meme is “fill ‘er in with red ink, boys”

Gosh, who to believe?
I can believe GISTemp will be different from other data sets from around the world in that it will be warmer than the others.
GISS in not like a box a chocolates because you always know what you’re going to get.

Maybe it is an artifact of that 2008 September/October GISS data foible.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/10/giss-releases-october-2008-data/
Remember that NASA that put men on the moon? This isn’t your daddy’s NASA.

Judith Curry, in comments at Pielke Fils and at Bishop Hill is saying that we need to have a whole new effort made to make a reliable temperature and paleo record. I think she’s had enough of the foolishness.
=====================

REPLY: They have updated the data already
really?
Can anyone tell me, whats going on over there?
Whats up with GISS? I can`t belive.

The problem with this, I think, is that if there is one error like this, there could be many more. I find that worrying, and I simply use Roy Spencer’s data. At least this is way out in the public’s view.

Plus sign (+) … minus sign (-) … those minor little details will getcha every time.

As soon as the missing heat notices that somebody has found it it disappears to hide somewhere else.

Anthony, unless I’m mistaken, Iceland looks very hot in the graphic! We saw where that has recently led…
Could we be seeing potential volcanic eruptions in Europe? I couldn’t find anything on any volcanoes in Finland….then again, Mt. St. Helens was a surprise too!
Maybe Steve Goddard could comment? He’s the only legit volcanologist in this bunch that I know of!

Dear NASA:
We are delighted to inform you that we have found the $$$ to fund your Moon Mission. We’re cutting GISS to the bone, and transferring the proceeds to Space Flight. We are also shutting down major parts of NOAA, handing the local data collection and information system over to individual State Meteorologists. Once again, the funding will pour into NASA Space Flight.
Oh, and all those myriad global warming study troughs: We’ll be pulling the plug on the majority of them, so get ready to put the Can back into Can Do.

“allen (09:58:38) :
just read the FT.com article about ongoing investigations into suspected hiring of Russian hackers by U.S. based climate skeptics. can’t wait until someone’s ass is nailed and would love it if it were you or Marc Morano in tribute to the disinformation you are so devoted to.”
brought to you by
http://www.campaigncc.org/node/384
CACC – Campaign against Climate Change

If CA had not reported it would have been kept there as long as possible. Maybe CA should not be reporting this… so they can be really archived and then hammered in the future.

MattyS (09:27:52) :
No conspiracy re Canadian temperatures. The last two months have been warmer than usual – one of the more pleasant winters I can remember in Southern Ontario, and a few summer-like days already this April. Last night and this morning, however, it felt like winter had returned.

Anthony, great sat. pics. Really illustrates your post on the high winter temps being from the overreaching release of heat from the oceans. Just by eye, it appears that during the day, about 50% of landmass is nuetral/cooling, but by night, it appears to jump to about 70%.
Then on the Giss pic, you can almost see the northern trade wind route, in the cooling/nuetral band.
It just seems to me, that if the globe is going through a prolonged cooling state, which it may be, then for the first few years of this change, we should expect to see higher then “normal” temps/energy release, for how else does a body cool?
It’s the “wobble hypothesis”.

Amino Acids in Meteorites (09:41:22)
Quite right Sir, in the days of moon landings there were thousands of recorded temperatures in the temperature calculations of the day, not a few well chosen hundred with more than half the world an area of no record.
Also in that time there were people who checked the unusual, such a stupid assessment would not have got of the ground.
There are hundreds of surface stations worldwide that have historic records and modern equipment that are not referred to in any global data, if these records were correlated, the scientific community would defiantly have a reference to challenge, WUWT has the ‘manpower’ ( 42 million plus hits, ) to definitely become a reference point, Anthony?

Some Russian guy reported in that article about coldest winter in a long time has been going off the reservation:

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.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1260132/Russian-weatherman-strikes-blow-climate-change-lobby-announcing-winter-Siberia-coldest-record.html#ixzz0lNpHtrNl

AW said: “Actually, it’s not fraud, but common human error.”
Accepted, Anthony. But isn’t it curious that these human errors always seem to be on the side of extra warming. That is except, of course, when the Warmists themselves announce their own errors, and make the necessary adjustments… in favour of more warming. When was the last time an IPCC scientist announced error corrections that showed LESS warming?
AW also said “…their quality control may be non-existent or slipshod…” –
Yes, but only when it suits them. I mean, when the figures are pleasing to them, where’s the incentive to check them? Especially in a culture where ‘scepticism’ is a dirty word. I’d bet my @ss that wherever the figures are not to their satisfaction, they’re checked, and checked, and checked again.

OT:
I have started hitting the ads that post here to drive some bits of revenue to this site.
It is fun since some of the ads, like the Global Warming National Fax In, let you create and directly send letters to all in Congress and all Governors.
Think about how skeptics can be empowered by directly communicating using AGW promotional tools.
And bring in money to skeptics while doing it, to boot.
So my free advice is to help WUWT financially, and to play some of the AGW promoters tools against them. They certainly have no trouble using tax payer money to sell their fear.
Turn about is more than fair play.

The hot spot over Finland is too far to the east. It should be over Iceland… 🙂

It’s just weird that March would be so hot right at the time the Global Warming Hoax bill is introduced in the Senate.
Just random, nothing to see here.

Have a look at the GISS map. All the red “blobs” are adjacent to grey areas (no thermometers).
Is all or much of this alleged warming in reality an artifact of the rather extreme version of interpolation techniques used by GISS (1200km interpolation if I remember correctly) or some other faulty method or software bug?
Has anybody looked into this possibility before?

I wouldn’t call this fraud but I am confident that if a cold spot of similar magnitude had been plotted that NASA would have held up publication while investigating the anomaly.

It is interesting, though that the air temperatures WERE higher in Finland on at least two days in April when the “thickness” [528] line plunged south over Ireland and the UK – THEN MARCHED TOWARDS ITALY AND THEN DOUBLED BACK OVER NORTHERN SCOTLAND and swept north, to put Northern Scandinavia south of the line, and ***therefore, theoretically warmer than South West Ireland and Bristol and the M4 corridor towards London and the South East!*** I wrote to the British Met Office and they confirmed it was ‘unusual’. I HAVE THE SURFACE MAP FOR EARLY APRIL IF ANYONE WOULD LIKE TO SEE IT!
radiospu@gmail.com.

The explanation of the thickness line is here for those of you who require an explanation. The “528” line for instance was well south of us [British Isles] for the very cold days of January and February 3010.
http://weatherfaqs.org.uk/node/152.

allen (09:58:38) :
just read the FT.com article about ongoing investigations into suspected hiring of Russian hackers by U.S. based climate skeptics. can’t wait until someone’s ass is nailed and would love it if it were you or Marc Morano in tribute to the disinformation you are so devoted to.

After a bit of Wikipedia-ing, I found that with the Berber calendar the first of April-equivalent occurred on our (Gregorian) April 14, and since that was posted on April 17 there is still a three day difference.
Anyone know of any other calendars currently used that match up better?

Anthony, you’re a class act.
Just as were running to the barn for pitchforks and pitch-dipped torches,
you rein us back in.
Thank you. (Can I just throw a couple tomatoes or two, though? They’re ripe and I’ve got to toss them anyway . . .;-D

May not be fraud. But do this error over and over again and poof, we have global warming. Remember temps do not vary much in the warm months, they vary the most in winter months. Winter months have the minus signs that are accidentally being left off. And since the controllers of the data want global warming they don’t notice they are making mistakes.
Go check out the data for Charlotte, NC. GISS is missing a recent month. Go get the actual temps for Charlotte for that month. You’ll notice that GISS formula to fill in for that month is horrible. They drastically over estimated how warm it was in Charlotte that month. Wonder how often that ‘accidental’ mistake is made too?

Yes. Goldman Sachs accidentally dropped some minus signs too. Just simple human error. Oops!
On the other hand, just looking at the map generated by this ‘error’, who would not double check such a conspicuous anomaly before using it???
So, if it wasn’t intentional it was incredibly incompetent. So reassuring.

I’m a bit confused here. I though Arctic ice was supposed to be expanding in March? Is there a link between rising temperatures and expanding ice caps that I have missed?

How does the volcanic plume effect the data?

‘it’s not fraud that they plotted this erroneously transmitted data. – Anthony’
lol, so instead of them being evil doctor dooms’ they’re just plain incompetent.
Everyone’s supposed to be able to trust their work!

While it does seem that the CAGW crowd doesn’t catch errors on the warm side without some help from the skeptic community. How many errors to the cold side has the skeptic community caught?
I think that it is natural to look at data and if it fits your preconcieved idea of what it should be then one is less likely to look for errors than if it seems anomolous. That goes for all of us and it is something that good scientist should be watching out for. Not fraud just confirmation bias.

What’s up with the other red areas? NW Africa and the Mid East don’t look any where near as warm in the satt data. And what’s going on in Antarctica? It’s one solid red block in the GISS graph, and some tiny little orange and tiny little blue dots in the satt data.

This GISS picture does not fit at all with the Russians’ claim that this march may have been the coldest ever in Siberia.
How comes?

apparently they mixed up the data sets from Helsinki, New Mexico; Jyväskylä, Florida and Hämeenlinna, Colarado with Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Hämeenlinna in Finland. could happen to anyone.

So will we see a retraction or all those hottest ever stories do ya think?

kim (09:44:52) :
Judith Curry, in comments at Pielke Fils and at Bishop Hill is saying that we need to have a whole new effort made to make a reliable temperature and paleo record. I think she’s had enough of the foolishness.
Yes, at Bishop Hill’s blog her first post at the bottom of page two under the
+++Acton’s Eleven – the response+++ thread is very welcome, as though a barrier had finally come down allowing her to see things much more clearly. She’s speaking the language of how to do Science correctly especially as it concerns the ipcc. [Though I disagree with her when she later opines to the effect that the CRU Climate Science did not “falsify” the science in order to get a desired result, when she considers the matter of scientific malpractice from a technical standpoint.]

Anthony, sorry to raise the “fraud” versus “common human error” issue again, but I want to make the point that, just as surely as we cannot insist that this is fraud, it also cannot be said with any certainty that this is mere incompetence.
Yes, we must always give the benefit of the doubt, but I think the truth lies somewhere between the two. Here’s my best shot:
I don’t think GISS, NASA, etc. are very inclined to flag errors biased toward warming as problematic as much as errors that go the other way. I’m open to evidence to the contrary, but given the vast array of errors that have been enumerated here, at CA and elsewhere, one would expect something close to 50% of the total should indicate erring on the low side. I have the impression that this is not the case.
“Fraud” is a strong word. But I think what we see is a bias in the error detection and correction phase introduced by wishful thinking, paradigm fixation and groupthink. As any scientist knows, we are quicker to have a second look at outcomes that don’t jive with our expectations. Record warmth in Finland? Even as a mere island of highs in an ocean of lows — this only justifies certain people’s expectations, so why expect there to be a problem?
I grant that these folks are honest enough to fix such errors once aware of it, and I see no clear evidence (tempting as it is to say otherwise) that they are only doing so because they’ve been “caught”. But I believe the point must be made that the skeptical community is doing a clear service by being alert to precisely those errors that the AGW community tends to overlook.
When nobody seems to be objective, it helps to have a dynamic of free exchange of ideas among opposing viewpoints. Keeps everyone honest.

Anthony, This comment is not directly concerning the topic of “Which NASA climate data to believe?” but does indirectly and I wanted to post it on a recent thread, so please excuse me.
I have always found your articles very helpful and found no reason to regard you as anything but honourable. I came across a March article “Message to Anthony Watts” (Note 4) on the blog of “Tamino” which I guess relates to E. M. Smith’s 12th Feb. article “NOAA langoliers eat another 1/3 of stations from GHCN database” (Note 5).
“Tamino” said QUOTE: Anthony: It has now been independenly confirmed, by multiple persons, that my results regarding the impact of station dropout on global temperature are correct. Your claims, in your document with Joe D’Aleo for the SPPI, are just plain wrong.
You’ve avoided answering this criticism, claiming that you can’t replicate my results without my code. Yet several others managed to do just that. It’s not that difficult, and you were irresponsible not to investigate this issue before publishing your claims. The posts by E.M. Smith are so incoherent they resemble the ravings of a lunatic more than the results of a qualified analyst. Your only other response has been to call me a coward for blogging under a pseudonym. That’s nothing but a desperate attempt of a scoundrel to deflect attention from his own misdeeds.
Furthermore, your use of false claims to accuse NOAA scientists of deliberate deception was not just mistaken, it was unethical.
If you have any honor at all, you’ll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud.
Are you man enough? UNQUOTE.
Please can you point me to any response that you have made to “Tamino”.
Someone calling himself Justin Ciderbottom (I did find one other comment by a Justin Ciderbottom on The Air Vent “How to Read RC” article – Note 6 – but nothing else so perhaps my first impression of “Justin Ciderbottom” was correct) and one Roger kept trying to get “Tamino” to disclose who he really is. “Justin” also asked QUOTE: Are you willing to debate Mr Watts, tell everyone who you are, and your qualifications? UNQUOTE but all that “Tamino” would say on the subject was things like QUOTE: Anthony Watts used false claims as the basis for accusing NOAA scientists of fraud. If he doesn’t admit his mistake and apologize for the unfounded accusation, he has no honor. None. .. Mr. Watts .. doesn’t admit his mistake and apologize for the unfounded accusation, he has no honor. .. Why do you go over to WUWT and insist that Anthony deal with the issue at hand?] … UNQUOTE.
I posted a comment on Tamino’s thread a couple of times and although it did stay on the thread for a while, as soon as it was moderated it was removed so it looks as though I hit a nerve. Here is what I posted QUOTE:
Justin, perhaps you feel the same as I do about people who hide behind false names – it always makes me suspicious. According to the Bayesian Statistics Blog (Note 1) QUOTE: Tamino, a notorious “climate change” blogger, is alleged to also be a statistician. He certainly seems to know something about time series. (Thanks to this investigation, we know that Tamino is Grant Foster, writer of “blog diatribe”-style climate papers. His affiliation in the linked paper is “Tempo Analytics, Westbrook, Maine”, but I can’t find any other reference to it online) UNQUOTE. This fits in with an impression I came to when reading Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” by J. D. McLean, C. R. de Freitas, and R. M. Carter from G. Foster et al. (Note 2) linked on the “too bad to be believed” blog (Note 3) of Eli Rabett (thought by some to be Joshua Halpern).
UNQUOTE.
As I intimated to “Tamino”, I am suspicious of anyone who hides behind a mask and to me a false name is just as much a mask as a real one. If I have to chose between two people who to trust, one of whom is wearing a mask and the other is not then I’m inclined to trust the latter. I don’t think many of us would choose the former.
As a matter of interest I see that Grant Foster figures in those Climategate E-mails (address tamino_9 – Note 7)) talking with the co-authors of “Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature”.
NOTES:
1) see http://bayesianstats.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/bad-bayes-still-bad/
2) see http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frsgc/research/d5/jdannan/comment_on_mclean.pdf
3) see http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/too-bad-to-be-believed.html
4) see http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/message-to-anthony-watts/#comment-41510
5) see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/12/noaa-drops-another-13-of-stations-from-ghcn-database /
6) see http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/how-to-read-rc/
7) see http://www.climate-gate.com/search.php?tag=345
Best regards, Pete Ridley
REPLY: Hello Pete.
The reasons you cite are exactly why I don’t respond to “Tamino”. He’s complaining about a publication, with both Joe D’Aleo and my name plainly on the cover. Yet in his criticism, he has not the courage to put his own name to his criticism. Science is supposed to operate on a level playing field. If someone publishes a paper in a journal for example, the journal will not accept and publish a criticism from somebody named “Bugs Bunny” anymore than that would from somebody who signs their name as “Tamino”.
“Tamino” wants all the benefits of a public criticsm, but none of the risks himself. Until he puts his name on what he publishes, I have no intention of addressing him anymore than I would address somebody who calls himself “Bugs Bunny”
On that note, there have been other valid criticisms of that publication done by people who have the integrity to sign their names to their work. The recently updated version 2 of the paper (April 13) now available at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/policy_driven_deception.html addresses some of those criticisms. I ask that you read the update and tell me if you think what has been published, in good faith, again with out names attached front and center, is something that we should apologize to an anonymous coward for. Thank you for your consideration. – Anthony Watts