Well, the Kerry Lieberman cap and trade fiasco has brought Tom Karl to give a Senate briefing last week. Predictably, they couldn’t wait to spring more adjustments du jour on the hapless Senators, claiming once again, everything analysis-wise the government does is ‘robust’ (used several times). But ‘robustness’ just isn’t convincing enough anymore. The new catch phrase is shown below:
What’s the most interesting thing about this PowerPoint? It reads like a skeptics refutation handbook. NCDC reacted. I’ve highlighted a few slides of interest, including one refuting me and the surfacestations project. Because, well, as readers of DeSmog blog and Romm’s fairy tales know, I’d never want anyone to see that.
The key word above is “adjusted”. Comparing adjusted data to adjusted data will almost guarantee an agreement.
I’m sure Karl (or Peterson) was thinking “Better not make those graphs too big”. Surely he didn’t mention that he and Menne et al ‘borrowed’ my incomplete surfacestations rating data against my protests. Dr. Pielke Sr. and I, plus others on the surfacestations data analysis teams (two independent analyses have been done) see an entirely different picture, now that we have nearly 90% of USHCN surveyed. NCDC used data at 43%, and even though I told them they’d see little or nothing in the way of a signal then, they forged ahead anyway. Assuming we aren’t blocked by journal politics, we’ll have the surfacestations analysis results in public view soon. If we are blocked by journal politics, we’ll have other ways.
What’s humorous about this PowerPoint (besides the claims) is that after Peterson previously authored a rushed and ghost written “Talking Points Memo” critical of the surfacestations project, attributable to nobody, but who got caught in the PDF document properties:
…they now show this for the author, heh.
After NCDC’s unethical borrowing of my data and denying my right of first publication, don’t ask to see the surfacestations analysis results here. I learned my lesson not to trust Karl et al the first time. Full disclosure comes in an SI with journal publication, not before.
Here’s some other slides of interest.
The urbanization signal, easily dispensed with thanks to homogenization. 
This slide above is part of the “nothing matters and we can adjust for everything” meme. Now they are using Hansen’s night lights method. Heh. The rural trend they present is different than what I’ve seen.
Above: New and improved! Gotta show progress for the senators! Thanks to GHCN3, it’s now even hotter, faster.
Look for new pronouncements of “unprecedented” and “it’s worse than we thought” when they publish GHCN3. Robust times two. Gosh.
Of course, airports don’t matter. Naw. Never, even when they don’t bother to remove the base measurement errors at airports, even when pointed out. Like movie directors, I’m sure they are thinking: “we can fix that in post production”.
Yes, I’m being sarcastic here. Yes, I think most of this shown to the Senate is based on self fulfilling adjustments and a need to keep bureaucracy alive.
You can download the entire powerpoint here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/download/Global%20Warming%20is%20Unequivocal%20TKarl%20May%206.ppt
Do it fast before it gets “disappeared”.
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UPDATE 5/21: Backup file locations (since the one above seems to have gone dysfunctional) as PowerPoint and PDF are below:
Global Warming is Unequivocal TKarl May 6 (PPT)
Global_Warming_is_Unequivocal_TKarl_050610 (PDF)
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In related news. I’ve been made privy to a new surface data set, one that doesn’t have the problem of NCDC’s need to show additional warming to keep the cap and trade dream alive. This surface data set uses an entirely different methodology to fix the errors, deal with dropouts, and separate good records from bad. I’ve seen the methodology. I won’t insult everyone’s intelligence by calling it “robust”. Instead, I’ll call it properly engineered.
The best part is, it was never designed with global warming in mind. So there’s no built in confirmation bias.
And to Mr. Karl, Dr. Menne, Dr. Petersen, and Dr. Easterling (who I know will read this): stay tuned.
Oh, and another team sends word today and that’s not the only surprise to come. But, that’s another story for another day.
h/t to Steve Mosher, who is the new inspector Columbo.
Rob M says:
May 19, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Let me get this straight.The ‘warmist’ crowd use Mr Watts’ work in an incomplete state,against his wishes,yet, when research by a government sponsored body kept secret in defiance of a FOI act gets out into the wild,they cry “theft”?
The hypocrisy of these people is breathtaking in it’s arrogance.
I hope you do not mean watts is hypocritical!
\harry
Karen writes:
“Greenland is rising b/c of so much ice melt is taking weight off the continent.” Blah, blah, blah, etc.
Karen, dear, what you have written has nothing to do with science. What you are doing is looking for a smoking gun and the really sad part is that you and the Climategater morons believe that is how science is conducted. Permit me to explain how science is conducted.
What I mean by science is best seen in the progression from Ptolemy, through Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to Newton. Kepler was the first to do away with a whirligig model of planetary movement and replace it with a set of empirical hypotheses that enabled prediction not only of planetary motions but relative speed and distance from the sun. As with all empirical hypotheses, they were formulated as univeral generalizations. For example, Kepler’s Second Law states that a planet’s speed in its orbit is directly proportional to the area swept by a line from the Sun to the planet. Newton benefitted directly from Kepler’s work and deduced Kepler’s Third Law, about the size of orbits, from his Theory of Gravitation. Bringing together Kepler and Galileo, Newton explained that the same laws governed projectile motion on Earth and the regular motion of the planets. He explained that given a tall enough mountain and a powerful enough cannon, he could launch a satelite into orbit around the Earth. The point of this story about the history of astronomy is that, at some point, empirical science emerges from whirligig models and qualitative hypotheses grow over the decades into quantitative hypotheses that synthesize earlier results into higher level hypotheses. I do not see that climate science has gone beyond the whirligig stage. Of course, there are generalizations about the CO2 molecule, but everyone agrees that a random distribution of CO2 molecues in the atmosphere cannot produce more than one degree of warming. The fearsome warming has to come from the forcings. But the forcings can be known only if there are empirical hypotheses about them. I have used every opportunity to ask climate scientists for these desired hypotheses, as I am now asking you, and I have received worse than silence as a response. Are there empirical hyptheses about forcings? If so, what are they? If not, then why do climate scientists deny that they are in a pre-empirical, whirligig stage of climate science? Climate scientists have hunches about the melting of glaciers, the melting of arctic sea ice, the role of cloud cover in temperature, as do you, but none of these hunches can be relevant to the others so long as there is not a set of empirical hypotheses that ties them together, as Newton tied together Kepler and Galileo. So, please tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?
Global Warming is unequivocally false. You may quote me.
Stephen Skinner says:
May 19, 2010 at 3:54 pm
u.k.(us) says:
May 19, 2010 at 2:58 pm
“Lets not forget the exponential increase in the size of airports since the late 60′s, and particularly since, what, the middle 80′s. As we all know.”
If this were the case I would expect to be able to pick out all the airports in those IR images of Earth. Instead the IR images show urban areas quite clearly with the greatest heat where you would expect it, in the urban centres. And no, airports have not grown exponentially in comparison to urban and infrastructure expansion. In fact in the case of somewhere like Las Vegas the international airport is within the urban area when in the middle 80′s it was outside.
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Not sure where you are coming from:
What I’m saying is the thermometer is located at airports with ever increasing UHI effects do expansion of runways, additions of buildings, jet exhaust, etc. Combine this with your increasing urban sprawl, and the UHI effect keeps rising.
I.E. a false warming signature at airports.
I think the folks in DC need a new theme song. Here’s my nomination
@ur momisugly John Robertson
That’s pretty neat!! My place of birth………in the middle of the breadbasket of the world.
linear trend: -0.054 deg F/y+-0.024 deg F/y (-19 yr/deg F)
low: -17 deg F 1989 average high: 102 deg F average low: -1 deg F high: 112 deg F 1954
Yeh,……just local.
Confarnation is akin to ‘infernal contraption’… Perhaps meaning the ‘combination of bases that react to produce an inflated exponent in it’s reaction….
I beat the world to the definition…
The trends in Slide 21 are bogus:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/05/tom-karls-trends-are-wrong-at-least-in.html
OMG, it is worse than we thought.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12782
See the blurry free text of the National Academy of Science’s report!
It just turns my stomach. My word, they are still showing a Mann hockey stick and talking about the impact of 1 meter sea level rises by the next century.
I fear they will try and push this disastrous cap and trade nonsense through.
-Jay
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=05192010
Here is the summary of the NAS reports with links to the text.
@ur momisugly Theo Goodwin
I thought Karen was being facetious…???….??? Please permit me, if you will………
I believe a better response would have been……….. crap, I forgot how damned dumb people can be. lol, So, our continents are floating to the top???? Maybe islands capsizing isn’t such a strange idea….hahahahaha.
I think she’d probably relate to that response better. Just a thought.
Regards.
Karen: Just between us girls – no one responded to you because you’re a twit and an embarrassment. But that’s OK – everything’s OK now.
@Dave Wendt
That’s a hoot, I’ve used part of that song as one of my favorite sayings. When observing something obviously stupid, I’ll sing the words, “If I only had a brain.”…..or when describing somebody doing something stupid, I’ll state they were doing “the scarecrow”. I usually get strange looks, but it’s a hoot for me!!!
Jay Cech says:
“I fear they will try and push this disastrous cap and trade nonsense through.”
I’ve been wrong before, but I don’t think there’s any political will to fight that fight. I believe in the near future, our Prez will be preoccupied with explaining why he chose to mouth a state of the union in front of a foreign dignitary(an absolute outrage). Last night’s primary shows the electorate has had enough of the status quo. No dem is safe, no repub is safe, and they won’t tolerate a dem/repub. Buh bye Arlen, you middle of the road, stand for nothing, no sense of loyalty, political hack.
Capn Jack says:
“Politics no matter how convoluted and hysterical always has to take a back seat to reality sometime.”
Orwell disagrees. “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”…..”1984″
Edmund Burke attached a condition…..”All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Cheers
Jimmie, me matey, Politics like science has reversals at times.
I am not that dumb that I would not put the rider, sometime. We are currently in a dark age, it’s been happening since 1994, at least in my observation. Orwell was out by about 10 years.
But Orwell never saw the internet coming either.
Free speech always sets people free. Me I done me some insurgency in me time. The deadliest weapon is the real truth not the perception.
Aaargh, he he. (manly pirate giggle not quite a guffaw).
The senators are hardly hapless.
Unindicted co-conspirators is perhaps more accurate.
Capn Jack
heh, but it’s not like they’re going after the internet either, is it? What with the net neutrality act, fairness doctrine and equal time rule……I’m reminded of an American General who once said……”Don’t be ridiculous, they couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist……..”
But you are correct about the free speech. We should endeavor to keep it.
george smith. you can just google radiometry. start with the ACRIM and then hunt around google. Or you can search for papers that already document what you want. from measuring it in space to on the ground. nothing there as far as the skeptic agenda goes.
Phil Clarke says:
Yes, I did make a mistake about that mail. I first became aware of that mistake over on Kloor’s site what a month back or so,where I corrected it. Be aware of the timelines.
I also made a mistake in one statement I made about Steve McIntyre in the book. Based on a climategate mail from a scientist, which I took at face value, I wrote that Mcintyre had done a press release about one of his papers. This was false. To my knowledge those are the only two substantial errors: One where I read Jones’ Joke as a serious request. The other where I believed a climate scientist who said something negative about McIntyre. You can of course make anything you want out of those errors. I offer no excuse. I take full responsibility. I could of course mount a series of bogus defenses and claim that people were sending me hate mail and claim that I have been driven to the point of suicide over it, but I prefer to simply say I was wrong.
Next.
James, In Australia, there has been an attempt at suppression on free speech.
I was watching a debate on mandatory internet Government filtering. The left was most interesting in the debate, most vehement and strident about protecting free speech and liberarianism and so on yet blaming the opposition for what would be done instead of the current left wing government attempting to pass the policy.
My take on the debate, is that the internet is like Adams said when describing the universe, it’s a really big place. It is also really difficult to suppress a lot of human activity or dare I dare I say interest. Curiosity is a human condition.
I am loathe to admit it but I have done some minor work in privacy and security a long time ago (a major faux pas I admit by one in the piracy trade), the work was based in trust issues, more to do with business and finance.
The problem with trust as a baseline, is that once you lose it you lose it forever.
So a government that seeks democratic re election, tampers with fire in an attempt to silence free speech no matter how well intentioned.
Take for instance in this debate AGW v true science. True science is outgunned financially, is outgunned from a media point of view and out gunned politically.
Yet true science won the debate where it matters, in the polity itself the public.
Unfortunately we expect the losers to go quietly into the night or extinction, it may take a decade.
Once again, I do not think Global Warming per se is the real issue and perhaps the positing this question as such may be an attempt to force any opposition into an untenable false position of denial.
I believe the real issue revolves around whether this process is primarily caused by human activity and whether we must mandate a global human behavior change to halt this in-progress anthropogenic climate change that will have all the disastrous consequences proclaimed by many scientists and a former Vice President of the United States.
As far as I can tell, there has been no solid proof presented that those climate changes that we have seen are actually outside the range of normal climatic variability or that a massive reduction of human activity will guarantee a more benign climate.
Anthony,
You are definitely getting under their skin.
My advice to them would be to simply ignore you. But perhaps it is becoming apparent there are some in authority who are expressing skepticism and citing you as a source. Have to do something about that…so…we set up another ‘authoritative source’, which is themselves, demonstrating how wrong you are.
This is getting fun.
In any event, cap and trade are dead. The entire complexion of congress is changing in November. With a dearth of advocates, the environmental movement won’t be able to pass gas, let alone a cap and trade deal.
I don’t need any weather stations to tell me it’s been getting warmer recently. All you have to do is look to Mother Nature to see that.
Actually when I look at Nature I see no warming.
My area is flat over the last 40 years in average temperatures. Neither farmers nor gardeners report any changes to what grows and when it grows. The frosts are as bad as ever, and this year the fog is the worst in ages.
The only warming is when I am told about somewhere else. And even then using adjusted measurements.
Of course I know it has been warming very slowly for 300 years, but that isn’t due to CO2.
Interestingly, the cited rates of heating, at less than one degree Celcius per century, as cited by the NOAA is never going to get the politicians in Apocolypse mode. Seriously, what person is going to go into crisis mode about a threat that small? Most of the US will be better off for such a small rise.
This posting prompts me to resend a message to the surfacestations site.
I’ve been very constrained with a family medical problem and so have not kept track of this. I’ve a report regarding the Cle Elum, WA weather station.