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 proof is incremental and as such you can hang onto it’s happened before & natural, for decades, centuries, millenia? Plus millions of years to shift the goal posts?
My bad — I misread. Your rebuttal actually is that it isn’t *fair* to use past temperatures, because they kept changing over the millennia.
I need to clarify a point. It is true that the adiabatic temperature gradient dominates the temperature profile – but this would not occur without the greenhouse effect.
If greenhouse gases did not exist, the atmosphere would remain nearly uniformly cold and would not convect. Without convection, the adiabatic lapse rate would be zero.
davidklein40 says:
July 24, 2010 at 1:30 am
Richard M says:
July 23, 2010 at 11:56 am
davidklein40, you keep asking for proofs. Where are yours? Prove to us that all the adjustments are valid. Don’t spare any details.
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There’s a thing called Google. Look up all the sites, both affirmative and contrary, read them with an open mind, don’t cherry pick and suspend your scepticism. That would be a good start.
Translation: David has no idea how to prove what he appear to believe. So, he tries to deflect … an obvious and very poor response. Sorry David, get back to me with a proof just like you’ve been asking for … otherwise, I find you are nothing more than a troll.
Pascvaks: July 24, 2010 at 5:40 am
When you take the “Human Contribution” variable out of the picture, what has Mother Nature been doing, and is likely still doing to the weather and the climate? AGW doesn’t appear to focus on the BIG question, just a few campfires in the wilderness.
More like a few butane lighters held aloft at a “Save Teh Planet” concert…
To David Klien and others:
These posts are not standalone. There are years of posts pointing out upward bias in temperature measurement and adjustment. Y’all troll in here without that context and complain the article is not a standalone peer-reviewed all-encompassing argument. This article is just a reminder of the many times this particular subject has been discussed. Probably, because of all the new people visiting the site.
Without explained good Reason altering history is corrupt, also I thought CO2 was named a greenhouse gas as it is added to greenhouses to up the growth o the plants!
“EthicallyCivil says:
July 23, 2010 at 7:53 am
Mike,
I believe the justification (in brief form) was that there is (in the raw data) a growing divergence in the anomaly data between rural and urban sites — with urban sites reporting warmer anomalies.. Homogenization algorithms were developed to adjust the temperature record such that the anomalies were eliminated. Given the consensus climate science position that there is no significant Urban Heat Island affect, the only choice for the algorithm was one that effectively lowers past rural temperatures in order to remove the divergence.
That’s what my old grad adviser called “jumping from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion with no intervening steps.”
So Mike, are you comfortable with that adjustment?”
Not sure if you’ll see this, Ethically Civil, but I just thought you might want to know that you’ve misremembered, here. I looked up both the 1999 and 2001 Hansen et al. papers concerning the adjustments being discussed here, and quoting directly from the 1999 paper (bottom of page seven through the beginning of page eight):
“We take advantage of the metadata accompanying the GHCN records, which includes
classification of each station as rural (population less than 10,000), small town (10,000 to 50,000), and urban (more than 50,000), to calculate a bilinear adjustment for urban stations. The adjustment is based on the assumption that human effects are smaller in rural locations. We retain the unadjusted record and make available results for both adjusted and unadjusted time series (section 10). The homogeneity adjustment for a given city is defined to change linearly with time between 1950 and the final year of data and to change linearly with a possibly different slope between 1950 and the beginning of the record. The slopes of the two straight line segments are chosen to minimize the weighted-mean root-mean-square difference of the urban station time series with the time series of nearby rural stations. An adjusted urban record is defined only if there are at least three rural neighbors for at least two thirds of the period being adjusted. All rural stations within 1000 km are used to calculate the adjustment, with a weight that decreases linearly to zero at distance 1000 km. The function of the urban adjustment is to allow the local urban measurements to define short-term variations of the adjusted temperature while rural neighbors define the long-term change. The break in the adjustment line at 1950 allows some time dependence in the rate of growth of the urban
influence.
The measured and adjusted temperature records for Tokyo, Japan, and for Phoenix, Arizona, are shown in Figure 3. These are among the most extreme examples of urban warming, but they illustrate a human influence that can be expected to exist to some degree in all population centers. Tokyo warmed relative to its rural neighbors in both the first and the second halves of the century. The true nonclimatic warming in Tokyo may be even somewhat larger than suggested by Figure 3, because some “urban” effect is known to occur even in small towns and rural locations [Mitchell, 1953; Landsburg, 1981]. The urban effect in Phoenix occurs mainly in the second half of the century. The urban-adjusted Phoenix record shows little long-term temperature change.”
(http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_etal.pdf)
Note that rural temperatures aren’t being adjusted to match urban temperatures; quite the opposite. Rural temperatures are treated as the most reliable values, and urban temperatures are adjusted for the effects of city growth, etc. There’s little to no sign of bias, here; in fact, the authors acknowledge that the false warming signal may actually be stronger than they’ve estimated in certain areas.
Thought you might want to know.
davidklein40 says:
July 24, 2010 at 4:26 am
What I wonder, a hot water bottle?
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That’s your response?
Sean Peake: July 25, 2010 at 8:31 pm
davidklein40 says:
July 24, 2010 at 4:26 am
What I wonder, a hot water bottle?
=======
That’s your response?
Based on empirical observations conducted over an extended three-day timeline, with a smoothed trendline indicating neutral, the shoulda-coulda-woulda-maybe-might response to that is “yes”…
stevengoddard :
At July 24, 2010 at 6:10 am you assert:
“If greenhouse gases did not exist, the atmosphere would remain nearly uniformly cold and would not convect. Without convection, the adiabatic lapse rate would be zero.”
Sorry, but No!
You are exagerating the effect of greenhouse gases.
There would be a non-zero lapse rate.
The Ideal Gas Equation defines that the pressure gradient of an atmosphere in a gravity field ensures there will be a temperature gradient up through the atmosphere when there is no energy input and output by greenhouse gases (GHGs).
In other words, atmospheric pressure changes with altitude so the lapse rate in the absence of GHGs is a distribution of heat per unit mass that is approximately indicated by
PV/T=k
Richard
Richard,
If there is no heat in the gas, the pressure and temperature approach zero. The volume remains fixed after it condenses to a liquid or solid. There are three degrees of freedom in the ideal gas law.
stevengoddard:
At July 26, 2010 at 11:16 am you say to me:
“If there is no heat in the gas, the pressure and temperature approach zero. The volume remains fixed after it condenses to a liquid or solid. There are three degrees of freedom in the ideal gas law.”
But there is “heat in the gas” in the case being discussed.
(The only way there could not be “heat in the gas” is if it were at absolute zero Kelvin).
Importantly, your original assertion (at July 24, 2010 at 6:10 am) was
“If greenhouse gases did not exist, the atmosphere would remain nearly uniformly cold and would not convect. Without convection, the adiabatic lapse rate would be zero.”
By “the atmosphere” I understand you to mean the atmosphere of the Earth that is heated by the Sun. The surface of the Earth is warmed on the day side by the Sun and loses heat by radiation from the night side. So, the atmosphere will be heated by conduction from the Earth’s day side surface in the presence or the absence of greenhouse gases.
Hence, it is impossible for “the atmosphere” to not contain “heat in the gas”.
And, in the absence of GHGs, the atmosphere will
(a) be warmed at the surface by conduction on the day side
and
(b) be cooled at the surface on the night side.
This differential heating and cooling will induce convection currents.
So, there is not “nearly uniformly cold” whether or not GHGs are present.
In other words, you were plain wrong when you asserted,
“If greenhouse gases did not exist, the atmosphere would remain nearly uniformly cold and would not convect”.
You were wrong because your assertions are physical impossibilities.
Then, there is the added complexity that the Earth rotates each ~24 hours so it drags the atmosphere and this causes atmospheric patterns and turbulence.
But the essential point is that your original assertions were based on your mistaken idea that “the atmosphere would not convect” if there were no GHGs. And convection leads to the creation of a lapse rate.
So, as I said at July 26, 2010 at 2:35 am
“You are exagerating the effect of greenhouse gases.
There would be a non-zero lapse rate.
The Ideal Gas Equation defines that the pressure gradient of an atmosphere in a gravity field ensures there will be a temperature gradient up
through the atmosphere when there is no energy input and output by greenhouse gases (GHGs).
In other words, atmospheric pressure changes with altitude so the lapse rate in the absence of GHGs is a distribution of heat per unit mass that is approximately indicated by
PV/T=k”
Richard
stevengoddard:
As an addendum to my previous post, I point out that an effect of any atmosphere is to reduce temperature extremes across the surface of a planet whether or not the atmosphere contains GHGs. This is because the atmosphere transports heat from hottest surface regions to cooler surface regions.
And this effect is important because the net effect is to raise mean global temperature.
Energy is radiated in proportion to the fourth power of temperature (T^4). So, a small lowering of maximum temperature of a hot region lowers its thermal output a lot. A similar raising of minimum temperature from a similar but cooler region increases its thermal output relatively little.
Hence, the presence of an atmosphere that does NOT contain GHGs raises mean global temperature above the temperature that would exist in the absence of an atmosphere (because of radiative balance between the input and output of energy to the planet).
Also, it is also important to note that on the real Earth the tropics have a maximum sea surface temperature of 305K. Hence, small changes to the area of the region(s) of maximum surface temperature have a disproportionate effect on mean global temperature.
I pointed out these facts in my peer review for IPCC AR4, but the IPCC – like you – had the mistaken idea that ONLY GHGs induce an atmosphere to have a lapse rate and to affect average surface temperature. And they ignored my comments.
Richard