This really is a low, why would anyone mess with kids on something like this? There is madness about. Ecotretas looks at the Beeville, TX station data, and I’ve visited the site personally but deferred the survey to surfacestations volunteer Juan Slayton who surveyed it about the same time. What Ecotretas is observing is the change from USHCN1 to USHCN2 adjustment algoritms. – Anthony
Guest post by Ecotretas
Great interest has developed on the Internet relating to the story about Julisa Castillo’s “Disproving Global Warming” project. It admittedly had received a NSF prize, with Al Gore in the jury. It has now been confirmed as most probably a strange hoax.
While most of the Internet is judging why would Al Gore be in this jury, or if there is such a thing as “National Science Fair” associated with the National Science Foundation (note the same initials), which both set my BS detector very high on Sunday, I was quickly on the run to find out what temperatures were like in Beeville, TX. Checking out the paper’s claims was far more interesting than being skeptic about the news…
First thing to check was for USHCN data. Quick to find it out at the GISS website, and first graph above. Looking at it, I wondered what type of station was this. I went to the surfacestations.org site, and discovered it was a reasonably well located station. But then, the temperature graph, a little more than one year old, was slightly different, as can be seen in the above second graph.
Looks like there was some tweaking going on! But discovering anything more about Beeville seemed pretty difficult. Some interesting information about the station can be found at NOAA. But what really surprised me was the graph uploaded by “Tom in Texas”, referenced in the comments section in a Watts Up With That post. It shows that adjustment data for Beeville is greater than 2ºF for the last 110 years.
While other information might help in settling all these different graphs, it seems like the real news will be about how temperatures are being dealed with in Beeville…
Geoff Sherrington says:
June 8, 2010 at 6:39 pm
“Some international airline pilots report that temperatures measured by their instruments when the aircraft are on the ground, differ from the national met service advice. Given that so many high class stations are now at airports, this discrepancy needs examination. One pilot has reported verbally “Australia is consistently far worse than Zambia”. ”
This comment gave me pause for thought. I know Zambia well; I lived there when it was known as Northern Rhodesia and for quite some time after Independence in 1964. My Mother still lives there, in Luanshya.
The “Wapamwamba”, the self-appointed upper classes might be tainted with corruption (or spontaneous privatisation as the Zambians call it) but there is an army of dedicated civil servants who, through even the most trying of times, have diligently carried out their duties. I have seen the Local Government functionaries recording the data which they have been employed to record in large, old fashioned ledgers, faithfully discharging the duties for which they are being paid. Their pay might be an intermittent pittance and their uniforms might be ragged but their records are kept with diligence.
Zambia has a large number of local Government Offices (known as Bomas) where a weather station was a usual accoutrement to the buildings and, from what I can remember the Stevenson Screen and rain gauge were usually very well sited. The rural Bomas have not been surrounded by urban developments, the total number of airports in Zambia has not increased by very much, if at all, and almost all of them are serviced by small aircraft once or twice a day. There must be some valuable records held in a number of places in Zambia, probably pre-dating WWII in some cases. The Agricultural Station at Mount Makulu and the Game Department Offices at Chilanga (both south of Lusaka, the capital) have records dating back to the early Fifties to my knowledge.
I wonder if some totally untouched, certifiably “unadjusted” temperature and rainfall data might be obtained from such an obscure source?
I shall endeavour to find out.
Would such an endeavour be worthwhile, do the WUWTers consider?
In 1949, the first commercial jet powered aircraft was introduced into service, but it wasn’t until 1958 that commercial jet aircraft service began to be widespread. Since Jet engines are effectively huge blowtorches, I would expect that temperatures at airports went up significantly with the transition from piston powered aircraft to jet powered aircraft. Was an adult back then, watched it happen. Compared with piston engines, jet engines put out very large volumes of very hot exaust.
I was in the USAF 1954 to 1958 . . . Offut AFB, and the transition began much earlier in the military. The differences in air temperature at Air Force bases were quite noticible . . . without benefit of a thermometer.
That is “exhaust”, of course. Would be really nice if this site had a preview function. Still, great site.
kim and James Sexton:
The crux of the issue is not the preservation of the original data or the recreation of the HADCRUT Index, but of the bias introduced into the data by environmental or instrument changes at the stations in the course of the ENTIRE century. After all, all of the station data comes from population centers of some kind, not from pristine natural meadows. Nobody has adressed that inherent bias in a credible way.
Stephen Brown (1:54pm):
ANY reliable raw data from ANYWHERE in the heart of Africa would be very welcome. It’s amazing how little is available for that region via GHCN, and how incompatible the records at Kinshasa and Brazaville–opposite one another on the Congo River–prove to be.
Mark Bowlin says:
June 9, 2010 at 6:40 am
One degree, two degrees….what’s the difference? Beeville’s hot. Man, it’s hot. It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.
Yes, but, Mark: ‘Hot’ is a relative term.
Some people I know say that Texas is ‘hotter than hell’ in the summer, and then turn right around and say that it’s ‘colder than hell’ in the winter!
Gosh, I don’t know what to think anymore!
Bob Kutz says:
June 9, 2010 at 9:30 am
Here’s a thought; this is a terrible way of bringing up a data quality issue.
So in other words, Bob, just sweep it under the carpet and forget the inconvenient truth of things?
Pay no attention to the machinating ‘scientists’ behind the curtain?
Stephen Brown says:
June 9, 2010 at 1:54 pm
[–snip–]
I wonder if some totally untouched, certifiably “unadjusted” temperature and rainfall data might be obtained from such an obscure source?
I shall endeavour to find out.
Would such an endeavour be worthwhile, do the WUWTers consider?
I would suggest with all due haste, less the warmist readers who monitor this site take action to ‘eradicate’ any records which would tend to negate their propaganda and religion!
Official records have a strange way of ‘disappearing’ once the matters of money and power suddenly evince themselves.
LarryOldtimer says:
June 9, 2010 at 2:36 pm
In 1949, the first commercial jet powered aircraft was introduced into service, but it wasn’t until 1958 that commercial jet aircraft service began to be widespread. Since Jet engines are effectively huge blowtorches, I would expect that temperatures at airports went up significantly with the transition from piston powered aircraft to jet powered aircraft. Was an adult back then, watched it happen. Compared with piston engines, jet engines put out very large volumes of very hot exaust.
I was in the USAF 1954 to 1958 . . . Offut AFB, and the transition began much earlier in the military. The differences in air temperature at Air Force bases were quite noticible . . . without benefit of a thermometer.
That’s an interesting thought, but I used to work at the Boeing Everett plant, located at Paine Field, just south of Everett, Washington.
I never noted any accumulation of heat as a result of aircraft operations, even in the haydays of the late 80’s and early 90’s, when 747 series aircraft were taking off and landing daily.
747’s have 4 very large engines and produce significant heat at full thrust.
Maybe it was the still air at your location. In Everett, the air is almost always moving.
Usually it just blew a lot, but it sucked quite a bit too …
;o)
Humans are well adapted, and evolved to handle hot conditions as theis NSF funded research shows.
-Jay
Heat drives human evolution
Some Like it Hot: The Scorching Site of Human Evolution
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-DS-Some-Like-it-Hot-The-Scorching-Site-of-Human-Evolution-060910.aspx
Courtesy of Coyau
If you think summer in your hometown is hot, consider it fortunate that you don’t live in the Turkana Basin of Kenya, where the average daily temperature has reached the mid-90s or higher, year-round, for the past 4 million years. The need to stay cool in that cradle of human evolution may relate, at least in part, to why pre-humans learned to walk upright, lost the fur that covered the bodies of their predecessors and became able to sweat more, Johns Hopkins University earth scientist Benjamin Passey said.
“The ‘take home’ message of our study,” said Passey, whose report appears in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “is that this region, which is one of the key places where fossils have been found documenting human evolution, has been a really hot place for a really long time, even during the period between 3 million years ago and now when the ice ages began and the global climate became cooler.”
Passey, an assistant professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the university’s Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, says that conclusion lends support to the so-called “thermal hypothesis” of human evolution. The hypothesis states that our pre-human ancestors gained an evolutionary advantage in walking upright because doing so was cooler (when it is sunny, the near-surface air is warmer than air a few feet above the ground) and exposed their body mass to less sunlight than did crawling on all fours. The loss of body hair (fur) and the ability to regulate body temperature through perspiration would have been other adaptations helpful for living in a warm climate, according to the hypothesis.
“In order to figure out if (the thermal hypothesis) is possibly true or not, we have to know whether it was actually hot when and where these beings were evolving,” he said. “If it was hot, then that hypothesis is credible. If it was not, then we can throw out the hypothesis.”
Evaluating whether the ancient Turkana Basin climate was, in fact, the same scorching place it is today has been difficult up until now because there are very few direct ways of determining ancient temperature. Efforts to get a handle on temperatures 4 million years ago through analysis of fossil pollen, wood and mammals were only somewhat successful, as they reveal more about plants and rainfall and less about temperature, Passey said.
Passey, however, previously was part of a team at the California Institute of Technology that developed a geochemical approach to the “temperature problem.” The method involves determining the temperatures of carbonate minerals that form naturally in soil (including a sedimentary rock called “caliche” and hard pan, which is a dense layer of soil, usually found below the uppermost topsoil layer) by examining “clumps” of rare isotopes. (Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have different masses due to differences in the number of neutrons they contain.)
In the case of soil carbonates common in the Turkana Basin, the amount of rare carbon-13 bonded directly to rare oxygen-18 provides a record of the temperature during the initial formation of the mineral. It told the team that soil carbonates there formed at average soil temperatures between 86 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to the conclusion that average daytime air temperatures were even higher. In other words, it was hot way back then in what is now northeastern Kenya.
“We already have evidence that habitats in ancient East Africa were becoming more open, which is also hypothetically part of the scenario for the development of bipedalism and other human evolution, but now we have evidence that it was hot,” Passey said. “Thus, we can say that the ‘thermal hypothesis’ is credible.”
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
REPLY: In a perfect world, I’d have time to do this. – Anthony
But it isn’t a perfect world and so, many corrections must be done after the fact.
If a spelling/grammar nazi suggests a correction (and it’s a valid one), why don’t you make the correction, and replace the entire comment with a “Thanks for the suggestion.” message? That way the error isn’t flagged up for everyone else to tut at, the initial post is better, the ad-hoc “editor” has achieved something – and everyone walks away happy.
Gore quoting the Bible: you don’t have to read very far to get to the part where God promises that he will not kill us all off again by a massive flood.
MeToo says:
June 11, 2010 at 9:15 am
Gore quoting the Bible: you don’t have to read very far to get to the part where God promises that he will not kill us all off again by a massive flood.
Albert Gore junior loves money and power more than he loves life itself. And him quoting the Holy Bible? That’s a laugh!
It’s been said that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’
Well, let me take that just a step further and say: An appeal to the Almighty in the name of personal gain is the epitome of charlatanism.
I’m just surprised that it took his wife so long to discover just that. Or maybe it’s just that she finally faced the truth of matters …
I’ve made a similar suggestion, to which the response was that he didn’t want to mess with the author’s work without his permission. I didn’t respond, but if I had I would have said that revising an article’s appearance on this site isn’t messing with the author’s work (his original); that correcting a flat-wrong error isn’t “messing”; and that authors routinely submit to copy-editing in other venues, so why not here?