By Steve Goddard
From reading the press and some blogs, one would think that the hot week in early July on the middle Atlantic seaboard was a rare or unprecedented event. Some believe that the weather used to be perfect before the invention of the soccer mom.
One of my favorite stories growing up was told by my New York relatives. The reason why movie matinées became very popular during the 1930s was because movie theatres were the only place that was air conditioned. People would go to the theatre just to get out of the oppressive heat. I tend to trust historical accounts from reliable sources, but for those who want data – keep reading.
Prior to being corrupted adjusted in the year 2000, this is what the GISS US temperature graph looked like.
The 1930s was by far the hottest decade. After being “adjusted” in the year 2000, it magically changed shape. The 1990s became much warmer. 1998 added almost half a degree – ex post facto.
The video below shows (in reverse) how the graph was rotated in the year 2000. Older temperatures became colder, and newer temperatures became warmer.
Rewriting history is not a good approach to science. It was very hot during the 1930s, as anyone who lived through it can tell you. Someday Hollywood will make a blockbuster movie about the global warming hysteria of the early 21st century.
the homoginization of rising urban readings with non rising rural reading DOES NOT eleiminate the UHI, it simply spreads it between urban and rural sites …
site A, urban is 2 degrees above site B, rural …
to remove the UHI from site B would require adjusting site A down 2 degrees … instead we get an average where site A and B are blended which causes site A to be reduced 1 degree and site B to raised by 1 degree … we still end up with 2 degrees of UHI between the 2 sites …
In the big picture these adjustments are insignificant. Global climate is
definitely warming, have a look at this synoptic poster:
http://www.igbp.net/images/CCI-composite_bigger.jpg
… add to that further corroborating evidence; permafrost thawing, glaciers,
changing plant and animal distributions.
stevengoddard says:
July 23, 2010 at 10:27 am
jose,
The x and y axes are identical in the two graphs.
GeoFlynx – The first graph you show ends in the year 2000, while the second ends in 2010. Clearly these are NOT the same and this gives a false impression, due to the large increase in temperature in the past decade. Further, in the second graph, the one that ends in 2010, a five year running average will INCLUDE data from years beyond 2000 into the mean of earlier years. Since the temperatures are warmer in the years following 2000, this will bias your slope in the overlay making it appear that the temperatures in the second graph were adjusted higher than they were. This is not an accurate comparison.
My, how the summer makes people forget the winter.
davidklein40, you keep asking for proofs. Where are yours? Prove to us that all the adjustments are valid. Don’t spare any details.
Oh, and after you get done with that, prove that Miskolczi is wrong. Shouldn’t be a problem for someone who loves proofs. Here’s the detail.
http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B74u5vgGLaWoNDFjODAwMWMtNmNmYS00NDhmLWI3NjItMTE0NGMwNWMxYjQ2&hl=en
Mike says:
July 23, 2010 at 6:06 am
OK, I’ll take your bait.
Feb. 16, 2010: Urban adjustment is now based on global nightlights rather than population as discussed in a paper in preparation.
Please Dr. Hansen, show the correlation between nightlights and towns with populations below 5000. then show me the correlation between nightlights, tarmac, air conditioning units, BBQs, and airport traffic (as that is where the stations are located.)his data used to createadjustment
Nov. 14, 2009: USHCN_V2 is now used rather than the older version 1. The only visible effect is a slight increase of the US trend after year 2000 due to the fact that NOAA extended the TOBS and other adjustment to those years.
Look at the graph, the “slight increase” is a change of .04 C/decade to .o75 C/decade. Almost double. So President Clinton, what is the definition of “it” and “slight”.
Why did they extend the TOBS? Weren’t almost all US stations changed 1995-1999? Oh, the paper isn’t out yet. Wait for captain trade to be passed.
Mikael Pihlström: July 23, 2010 at 11:18 am
In the big picture these adjustments are insignificant. Global climate is
definitely warming, have a look at this synoptic poster:
http://www.igbp.net/images/CCI-composite_bigger.jpg
In 2004, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) announced that human beings were responsible for all climate change that had occurred over the previous half-million years. It appears they believe that H. erectus had factories cranking out SUVs…
… add to that further corroborating evidence; permafrost thawing
According to the Russians — who *live* there — permafrost thawing is “exaggerated”:
“We have presented the first experimental evidence that the expansion of deciduous shrubs in the Arctic triggered by climate warming may reduce summer permafrost thaw.”
And that’s from a warmist site.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/03/17/problems-with-the-permafrost/
glaciers
Some are in retreat and some are advancing. It’s what glaciers *do*.
changing plant and animal distributions.
Such as?
Someone tried to tell me the Persian earless toad is threatened by habitat loss in northern Iraq. There are at least ten living under my *porch* over here, and you can’t walk fifty feet in any direction without seeing at least *one* hopping out of your way.
Neither GISS nor NOAA nor Met Office temperatures can be trusted. First of all, they all show that “late twentieth century warming” in the eighties and nineties that does not exist. What does exist is a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for twenty years, until 1998 brings real warming. In four years global average temperature rises by 0.3 degrees and then stabilizes for the next six years – the twenty-first century high. The ups and downs of the eighties and nineties are nothing more than a reflection of the El Nino phenomenon – there are five El Nino peaks separated by La Nina valleys before the super El Nino of 1998 arrives. That one does not belong to ENSO like the others do and was caused by a storm surge in the Indo-Pacific region that dumped much warm water on the equatorial countercurrent near New Guinea. You will not see that stepwise increase of global temperature which started in 1998 in any of these curves because it is wiped out by the imaginary “late twentieth century warming.” This is the biggest distortion but not the only one. I checked out the links Mike gives and found that they consider 1998 and 2005 tied for the warmest year. This is dead wrong – 1998 is without a doubt the warmest and 2005 is just a part of the twenty-first century high. And as pointed out, they are screwed up with the thirties too. What is more, they show a heat wave during World War II which is laughable. If you lived through the war you know that the temperature dropped sharply in the winter of 1940 and stayed down for the duration. The Finnish winter war of of 1939/40 was fought in the bitter cold of minus fifty Celsius. It was cold even after the war and the blizzard of 1947 brought New York City to a standstill. And these continual adjustments they do are nothing more than manipulations to show that warming is serious. All their predictions are now off the charts because there was no warming during that twenty-first century high. It ended with the 2008 La Nina that rattled the CRU workers as Climategate shows. This one signified the return of the oscillating climate that the super El Nino and its aftermath had disturbed. It was followed by the 2010 El Nino which has just peaked and the next La Nina is already on the way. And that anthropogenic global warming? It has never been observed.
Your mention of a/c in theatres reminded me of something.
Several years ago I was in San Fransisco for training and there was an unusual heat wave. This is when one finds out how few places have air conditioners. I remembered reading about a/c and theaters in the old days, so I thought I would go see a movie. But it didn’t work out. The theater didn’t have a/c =(
Bill Tuttle says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:23 pm
According to the Russians — who *live* there — permafrost thawing is “exaggerated”:
“We have presented the first experimental evidence that the expansion of deciduous shrubs in the Arctic triggered by climate warming may reduce summer permafrost thaw.”
And that’s from a warmist site.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/03/17/problems-with-the-permafrost/
——
actually the original article says that the vegetation effect (shrubs) ‘can
partly offset the thawing’, which intuitively seems reasonable since the tundra landscape is a mosaic and shrub increase is very patchy
anyhow, the issue was global warming: the temperature is cited as increasing (+),
driving shrub colonisation (++), and permafrost thawing generally (+++), except
under shrub colonized new patches (-)
glaciers…
indeed, seem to have individual life stories, but taken together
as a whole, I think there is a lot of retreat lately?
plant & animal distributions such as:
http://www.alarmproject.net.ufz.de/index.php?pid=5011
There are hundreds of examples – but, I guess it will take some time before
the material is critically reviewed. There are of course many confounding
factors to think hard about.
In an even bigger picture they’re weighty, because they count against the trustworthiness of the warmist establishment. If it is willing to fiddle with this, what else wouldn’t it fiddle with?
First, it seems pretty clear to me that Hansen bears the burden of proof. His first claim was that the temperatures were X. Then he claimed that temperatures were actually Y and that his earlier claim was wrong. He’s the one making the claims; he has to prove them.
Also, I agree with the other posters — it’s very suspicious that the adjustment just happens to suit Hansen’s agenda.
For other global temperature data sets it’s been shown that the distribution of the adjustments is nicely centred around zero. I.e. raw and adjusted datasets have essentially the same mean temperature trend: up.
Think about that for a second. If the adjustments are “centred around zero” then why make them? You only make them in order to adjust the trend. And sure enough, when we look at the graph, we see that the adjustments severely affect the trend. The adjustments are clearly not neutral in effect.
So that they arithmetically add up to zero is not even remotely relevant if they are not evenly spaced in time and area. (In fact, in order to make adjustments that do not affect the trend I would expect them to not centre on zero. Adding +1 to every number in a graph will not change any trend, but is hardly adding to zero.)
You seem to be saying “the adjustments make no difference” at the same time as knowing they make a huge difference. It’s an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.
It would be interesting to see what the net effect of adjustments are in GISTEMP, but visually comparing data on graphs with different x and y axes is not the way to do it.
Another attempt to justify the unjustifiable. We can quickly alter the axes. The result is no significant change in the matter under discussion.
We can see that. You can see that. Why do you pretend otherwise?
Something that jumps out at me right away… If you look at those two graphs, it looks like the adjusted graph adds about .5C to the unadjusted graph from 2000-2010.
Now think about that for a second. The original numbers were measured using sophisticated modern techniques during those years. For 9 years those were THE numbers. That was THE temperature record. Then (according to Mike above) in 2009 adjustments started to be made. Isn’t this an admission that the original numbers were wrong or misleading? Isn’t this an admission that there is a healthy margin of error in temperature measurements even in the high tech age?
So the question that comes to my mind next is: what does that tell us about all that unadjusted data pre-1980? How were those temps being gathered? What was the coverage? If we could go back in time, what kind of adjustments might we want to make to that data? In short, what is the margin of error on all that old data? If it’s +/- .5C on modern data it’s stands to reason that it’s got be a lot more than that on that old data.
Given that, is it really even meaningful to say that this decade is hotter than another decade 80 years ago? Is the data really accurate enough to say that with any degree of confidence?
The best film they could make – but won’t – is Crichton’s “State of Fear”.
Oops! I just realized the first graph ended in 2000 and the second in 2010. I was looking at 1990-2000 on the first and comparing it 2000-2010 on the second. Doh!
Anyway, my point is that the adjustment seems to me to be an admission that our measurement techniques are far from perfect even if I had the margin of error wrong. I’m still wondering, though, how much confidence do we really have that the older data is correct when we’re still tweaking modern data. Given that the 1930s data is only different from the 2000-2010 data by tenths of a degree, this would seem important to claims of which is the “hottest on record”.
Mikael Pihlström: July 23, 2010 at 1:26 pm
anyhow, the issue was global warming: the temperature is cited as increasing (+),
driving shrub colonisation (++), and permafrost thawing generally (+++), except
under shrub colonized new patches (-)
Permafrost thaws whenever the temperature goes above 0ºC, which is what *happens* every summer in Siberia. Temperatures are still not as high as they were a thousand years ago, and they are nowhere near as high as they were during the Holocene optimum, only 5,000 years ago.
“The unpalatable truth is not a welcome ingredient in the making of myths”
(From Steve Austin’s ABC radio (Australia) interview with Lynette Ramsay Silver the other night)
Mikael Pihlström says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:26 pm
I know I know, this was me a couple of years ago as well. The icecaps are melting, animal changes, my garden dying due to the 15 year drought here in Melbourne, and the temps were clearly hotter during the 90’s and the 00’s. I was really getting fearful that this was the global warming they were talking about, that it was LINEAR and we were ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!
But even looking at The Age weather pages, the “hottest ever for this day” was always way back up to 100 years ago etc. I’ve since (thank you WUWT) learned about solar cycles and the relationship between them and the oceans, and the time lag, and can figure it for myself. You don’t need to add “greenhouse gases” into the mix to explain the warming we’ve seen in the last couple of decades.
But the great news is – it’s NOT LINEAR, even Trenberth has wondered where the heat is lately. It’s coming down off that high after the 1998 el nino. We (in Melb Aus) started getting frequent >40 deg C days during summers in the 90’s. Early 00’s we’d have well over 10 per summer. They’ve tailed off. 1 last summer. And this winter is like my childhood winters of the 70’s. It’s not linear , it doesn’t fit CO2.
davidklein40
I have just visited ‘your’ blog and it looks like you’re a little lonely there. Could this be the reason for you endless comment fights???
1 comment and 0 posting!
You got a long way to go. Get there off your own back and stop using WUWT popularity to launch your sad site.
I guess you should have stayed sceptical. :o)
Small typo:
The science convinced me….
Philip Foster says:
July 23, 2010 at 2:45 pm
The best film they could make – but won’t – is Crichton’s “State of Fear”.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
There are good scripts about politics and/or environmenalism that would show what so many of the people who come to this blog already know about global warming. But Hollywood producers are still making political and environmental movies that are brainchildren of the 60’s. Avatar is a good example of this. There were 60’s stereotypes in it. It did have beautiful and interesting animation. But the script was not worthy of the animation.
The gap between what James Hansen say the temperature is and what people are feeling the temperature is continues to grow. It would be good for the world to see who is behind GISTemp going higher while the world continues having longer harsher winters and milder summers. But I think James Hansen would come to regret having his face attached to NASA temperature data showing hottest years ever, year after year, as the world heads back into a 30 year cooling.
Bring back, oh bring back,
Bring back that Halocene Optimum
To me, to meee!
8-D