I met Ken while on my Australian tour, he’s been doing some fine work.
Via Andrew Bolt
Retired school principal Kenskingdom was alarmed by this Bureau of Meteorology graph, showing a strong warming trend for Victoria, Australia:
He checked the data from which the trend, and found it had first been adjusted and turned into “high quality” data. As a BOM spokesman assured him:
On the issue of adjustments you find that these have a near zero impact on the all Australian temperature because these tend to be equally positive and negative across the network (as would be expected given they are adjustments for random station changes).
Actually, no, though. You see, Kenskingdom discovered that the adjustments served to exaggerate Victoria’s warming remarkably:
Kenskingdom goes through the individual stations for you and concludes:
There is a distinct warming trend in Victoria since the 1960s, which has been especially marked in the last 15 years.
The first half of the record shows a cooling trend. BOM’s adjustments have attempted to remove this.
2007, not 2009, was the warmest year in the past 100 years.
Three stations identified as urban in 1996 have been included.
Many stations’ data have been arbitrarily adjusted to cool earlier years
Only one station has had its trend reduced. Two are essentially unchanged.
Ten of Victoria’s 13 stations have been adjusted to increase the warming trend, to the extent that there is a warming bias of at least 133%, more likely 143%.
These adjustments, and the Australian temperature record to which they contribute, are plainly not to be trusted.
The big lie:
If this were true then there’s no need to homogenize the data. Why bother making the adjustments if they have “near zero impact”?
I think the truth is that anthropogenic global warming of a tenth of a degree per decade is “near zero” in and of itself. So the “impact” can be said to be near zero or, in other words, within a tenth of a degree per decade of zero.
rbateman
“If the adjustments cancel out globally, then what is the justification for adjusting?”
You didn’t necessarily know this would be the case, before you started going about doing the adjustments. You just knew you had a bunch of data with station moves, instrument changes, etc, etc. If the changes due to these were truly random, you could not bother making the adjustments, if all you cared about was the global mean. But it made sense for somebody to start doing adjustments, to check.
Also, it can matter on the regional scale, and it certainly matters on the scale of the individual station. When it’s interesting to look at an individual station like that above, to get an idea of the record of a very particular location, you might as well somehow correct for things like station moves. Then, in some regions, it may be possible that the disruptions weren’t random; this is the case in the United States. A whole bunch of stations all changed their observation time and instrument type over a decade, so a lot of stations have a change in the same direction at the same time. Those won’t cancel out.
Is this “warming” just in Victoria? Friends living near Sydney are complaining that this winter is the coldest since a cold spell in the 1960s, and another cold spell in the 1930s.
Looks exactly as Swiss homogenized temperatures. All raw trends have been exaggerated. Raw data fits nicely with rural stations in nearby countries.
http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/v2zki81.png
Gail
“Why data and methods are not included with submission of articles to “peer reviewed journals” ”
The methods used by both GISS and NOAA are available to all, and have been pretty much since inception. The source data they use have been available to all for years. The code GISS uses has been available to all for some years now; NOAA’s code for the new USHCN is now available, and NOAA’s code for the new GHCN will be available once they launch it.
Instead of talking conspiracy theories or picking out individual stations and complaining you don’t understand an adjustment, one could actually do some analysis, and take the openly available unadjusted data, and see what you get. As I’ve mentioned, Zeke at Lucia’s, among several others, have now done this. And they get results consistent with GISS, NOAA and CRU.
Carrot eater, sure an El-Nino coming… Let’s consider the recent post about La Nina on this blog and the highlighted difference between modelling 6 months earlier and the reality. As I said Gavin is an oracle… a stinguy one! Too bad he never predicted temps would cool down when they did…
If Australia and New Zealand are in the southern hemisphere they are not supposed to follow the same fate as nothern first worlders, unless they do it by imitation.
Sure that they have built many Gaia churches, all of them with a sculpture of “El Gordo” to be kissed and XXX massaged as HE likes to.
This technique is well rehearsed. First, you reduce or even eliminate initial sites, retaining only those with a pronounced cooling bias, thereby depressing the origin of your desired trend. Second, you “adjust” subsequent data upward by various obscurantist means, concentrating on UHI and other temperature-enhancing effects as your spurious time-series nears its end. Interim data may be skewed up or down, subtly favoring a long-term rising tendency.
Having thus constructed an ostensibly plausible but in fact blatantly rigged linear progression, climate hysterics plaster their reports with all manner of extraneous rationales, bleats and squeaks extrapolating from nonsensical particulars such as melting Himalayan glaciers to portend humanity’s literal extinction by c. AD 2100.
From this, nothing will deter junk-science cultists– nothing. Grant monies, in-group power-and-privilege, mask an underlying nihilism that rejects post-Enlightenment industrial/technological civilization in toto. On published record, death-eating Luddite sociopaths such as Paul Ehrlich, John Holder, Keith Farnish seek explicitly to “pastoralize” all modern cultures, regressing modern amenities to pre-medieval times.
Radical extremists uniformly celebrate this depraved worldview, which can only originate in a deep-seated psychological need to Rule or Ruin everything such wreckers touch. The fact that global elites cavalierly endorse such theses, entailing human mega-deaths, bodes ill for optimism as the Western world has known it since the Renaissance.
carrot eater says:
July 1, 2010 at 11:47 am
James Sexton,
“I can’t speak to Australia itself, but when you use unadjusted data from around the globe, you get pretty much the same results as what GISS, CRU and NOAA get using their adjusted figures.
So it’s actually quite true that taken globally, the adjustments cancel out, and have no real bearing on the global trend. …..”
I’ve heard that often. The only problem I have with the statement is, each and every station I’ve ever seen adjusted is always lower in the earlier years or higher in the later years and often both. I’m sure there are exceptions, but to have me believe this doesn’t effect the overall trend is silly. If it doesn’t effect the trend, why do it at all? One could state that this is only one station, but then we’d be ignoring the other stations this web site has brought to our attention. Australia, in fact, seems to be replete with over-adjusted sites. Darwin come to mind for some reason. I also recall a station or 2 in N.Z. that were obviously over-adjusted. You can say this doesn’t effect the overall global trend, but if they can’t get entire continents correct, what cause is there to believe their estimates for the rest of the globe are correct? I’ll list a few issues regarding our trend, you tell me if this lends to their credibility or not. As this case shows and Kenskingdom points out, not only this weather station but many others are in error. This should invalidate Australia’s alleged trend. Africa has so few stations and lack of continuity in the data, no one can say one way or the other that its warmer or cooler with any certainty. We know in the western hemisphere there is only on station north of the arctic circle that gets extrapolated to other parts of the arctic, regardless of currents, both wind and sea and gives us useless trend. Oddly enough, South America has a bit of the same problem in Bolivia as the Arctic has and some of the same problems with data continuity as Africa has, it has the worst of both worlds and again, no one can say whether its warmer or cooler there. Asia? The two largest countries in the largest continent have their own data integrity problems, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. China and their moving stations and Russia with the altered temps to ensure more rations. Now, where were we? Oh yeah, the validity of the overall global trend. Carrot eater, I appreciate your idealism, I really do, but you’re being fed something more than a carrot and it extends beyond the credible.
TomRude says:
July 1, 2010 at 1:15 pm
See this:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
There are some warm left in australian seas. Say good bye to them.
As George Carlin said, “the earth is not going anywhere, we are (in this case YOU), so pack your s*..s up folks”, and brace among yourselves for not to die as frozen penguins!
John Blake:
death-eating Luddite sociopaths such as Paul Ehrlich, John Holder, Keith Farnish seek explicitly to “pastoralize” all modern cultures, regressing modern amenities to pre-medieval times….
Kind of, because those post “modern cultures”will disappear, while leaving no carbon footprint at all, and old cultures, thanks God, will survive.
CE, if the adjustments balance out globally, then where are the downward adjustments located? On WUWT, I’ve seen upwards adjustments in Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. Are there any downward adjustments in populated areas.
carrot eater
This is the graph you must be talking about re; zeke/lucia
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Picture-112.png
The adjusted and unadjusted data are significantly different by up to a few tenths of a degree but probably doesn’t effect the trend. Speaking of the trend, there is none. The mother of all El Nino’s in 1998 sticks out like a sore thumb as a step change but for the 100 years before that there is no trend and once the massive El Nino gets a chance to average out of the picture there won’t be any step change to see either.
Thanks for the link. Essentially no warming trend in in the U.S. from 1900 to 1997 and if it wasn’t for the largest El Nino on record in 1998 and its aftermath there wouldn’t have been any warming in the last 12 years either.
For those asking whether this is just for Victoria, just spend a few minutes at Ken’s site… he has done this for each state and territory and the results are similar.
Carrot Eater: You might not be aware that Australia is an island surrounded by a bit of water infested with a few nasties like sharks (aka the man in the grey suit), crocs and octopii that will kill you as soon as look at you… but I digress.
Given that we are reasonably far removed from all neighbouring countries, what possible justification could you have for suggesting that adjustments to temperature records in Australia are linked to those in the rest of the world?
These records should be quite independent from all neighbouring country records. The fact that Ken has shown that the Aussie records are inexplicably biased with a warming adjustment stands by itself. It is an analysis of the Aussie records… not GISS, CRU or whomever else. He is demonstrating without doubt that there are issues that need to be addressed in Australia by the BoM, which makes statements month after month stating record warm this, or record dry that, in order to support the politicians that put the pay in their pockets.
The other major institution for studying climate science in Australia just appointed a MacQuarie banker with no science background as their chairman:
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/banker-lawyer-sailor–csiro-boss-20100621-yr5v.html
He himself stated:
“I’m staring at a sea of faces who are probably asking: ‘Who is this guy who has no scientific pedigree at all, what’s he going to do with us and what’s he going to do with this organisation?'”, Mr McKeon said.
Gee maybe there is a slight conflict of interests here?
GISS and USHCN v2 redux.
The adjustment code used is publicly available, of course, but not a hint of all the code discarded because it didn’t produce the desired result.
Pure coincidence that in the early 20th Century, people in Australia were misreading their thermometers (or is that thermometres?) in the same direction and by the same amount that people in the States were.
Indisputable proof of Dr Mann’s teleconnection hypothesis, I’d say.
“GISS and USHCN v2 redux.
The adjustment code used is publicly available, of course, but not a hint of all the code discarded because it didn’t produce the desired result.”
The unadjusted data give you the same result, globally.
So it’s actually quite true that taken globally, the adjustments cancel out, and have no real bearing on the global trend.
I think you are running into the conundrum known as Simpson’s Paradox. (Wikipedia explains it pretty well.)
Basically because the bulk of the temperatures are concentrated in a couple of places (especially the US) the straight average of adjustments might be small. They might cancel out if all are weighted equally important.
But the spots of concern, like Victoria, have far greater effects internationally because they “cover” a far greater part of the world.
If you “fix” New Zealand (as NIWA has) then you get to “fix” a huge chunk of the Southern Pacific too.
Tag the ridiculous adjustments onto the ridiculous gridding and you can have an amazing effect on “global temperature”, all while “cancelling out”.
Meanwhile, in this alarmingly warm 2010, the cold is causing problems for the homeless and elderly.
“SOME people fear death the way the homeless fear the cold.
With Sydney’s minimum temperatures dipping towards record lows, cold and death can be pretty much the same thing for many of the thousand or so people estimated to be sleeping rough each night.
The director of the St Vincent’s Hospital Emergency Department, Gordian Fulde, said the cold snap was cutting through the homeless like a silent disease.
Nobody has died on the streets yet, although Associate Professor Fulde said the hospital had been busy since the weekend issuing death certificates for people who had died in their homes, probably from the cold.”
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/golf/elin-la….00701-znea.html
I’m obviously having trouble with the “chain of custody” here.
a) A local weather station (auto or manual) and its local management.
b) A national aggregator (BoM in this instance)
c) BoM to NOAA (GHCN) and likely CRU
d) GISS from GHCN
“adjustments made here by the BoM are not adopted by either NOAA or GISS”
But GISS uses GHCN as its main source and GHCN gets its “raw” data from BoM (in this instance).
“but when you use unadjusted data from around the globe , you get pretty much the same results as what GISS, CRU and NOAA get using their adjusted figures.”
I’m not suggesting here that “the results” are wrong but if the chain outlined above is anywhere near correct then where exactly are you obtaining “raw” data that would back that conclusion? Everybody in the chain bar the local source (one hopes) has “adjusted” the data. Blind adjustments in the case of NOAA and GISS.
Corrected link, although Tiger is certainly getting the cold shoulder from his wife 🙂
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-a-citys-cold-heart-20100701-zqr1.html
Thanks Mooloo and Carrot Eater, think I may of learned something today. One thing I have struggled to get my head around is that when you look at adjustment data there is a clear trend that exaggerates warming when one would expect dampening in order to compensate for UHI, yet when you grid it the final result is negligible. How to resolve this apparent contradiction instead of just selecting the dataset that supports my personal bias on this issue and ignoring the database that doesn’t fit my world view? I asked Anthony about this in Ballarat, Australia, but my understanding of the problem was not deepened by our brief exchange. Simpson’s paradox is very interesting, I wonder if it actually applies in this case. If I had spare time, I’d like to pull the data apart, look at some open-source attempts to reconstruct anomaly data and try and puzzle it out.
carrot eater says:
July 1, 2010 at 4:09 pm
“GISS and USHCN v2 redux.
The adjustment code used is publicly available, of course, but not a hint of all the code discarded because it didn’t produce the desired result.”
The unadjusted data give you the same result, globally.
—…—…—
False. And false. Hansen (GISS) fought for years to avoid releasing ANY data even under repeated FOIA lawsuits. They still hide raw data. They still hide their conversions and their code, but have released “some” code. Under protest. We don’t know how they refuse to release, nor whether what is released is actually used.
False. NOWHERE have even 20% of raw data been adjusted “downwards” – EVERY rural site checked worldwide (US, UK, Canada, NZ, and (here) Australia has reported raw data adjusted upwards (recently) or raw data (original/pre-1970) adjusted downwards in ratios of 8 to 1 to 15 to one. Russia rejects the GISS data completely and reports a cooling trend that continues unabated in their Arctic and Siberia areas.
Ah yes similar to what they did with Brisbane:
http://globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/thread-188-post-3121.html#pid3121
Anything to mislead the masses is code for political action.
Enneagram–
Perhaps an inverse “social Darwinism” (Herbert Spencer) will eventually regress global cultures to their reproductive roots (given developed countries’ birth-rates considerably below the required 21 per 1,000, this had better happen soon), but meantime at what price? Absent objective or even rational constraints, authoritarian Welfare States pursue demeaning, wastrel policies as if there literally were no tomorrow.
Absent the 1,500-year Younger Dryas “cold shock” completed c. BC 7300, our current Holocene Interglacial Epoch would likely have ended about AD 450, coincident with the Fall of Rome. Now as Earth enters on a 70-year “dead sun” Maunder Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715, quite probably preceding a resurgent 102,000-year Pleistocene Ice Time, Climate Cultists’ decades-long sabotage of global energy economies will soon bear very bitter fruit.
In other unrelated news:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/gillard-slashes-mining-super-profits-tax-rate-to-30pc-to-end-war-with-resources-giants/story-e6frgczf-1225886962498
The Australian Government seems to be nearing a compromise on the new controversial mining tax. The number of resource industries to be taxed has been reduced to the following:
Coal, oil, gas and iron ore.
Anyone other than me see something interesting here? Basically the three fossil fuels and iron ore. Effectively the Australian Government is now angling for a direct carbon tax but on industry profits rather than a per tonne basis.